In Motherland, Julia Ioffe tries to make the case that Soviet women were worse off than Soviet men because they did more housework.
The pesky fact that Soviet men were often unavailable to do housework because the regime murdered them at an enormously higher rate than women doesn’t seem to influence her argument. I’m on Chapter 30 out of 44, and in spite of Ioffe’s last name, I’m beginning to wonder if she’s not very smart. She’s recreating the meme “Men genocided. Women most impacted”, and doesn’t notice the weirdness of her harping on the housework when discussing Soviet genocide.
I guess I picked up on how everybody in the family felt about it, you know? Russian wasn’t anybody’s native language. I couldn’t point to anybody in the family and say, we speak it because it’s grandma’s language or mom’s or great-grandpa’s. One side of the family spoke Ukrainian. The other spoke Yiddish and Ukrainian. My father spoke English to us. And I don’t mean occasionally. He spoke only English. Which, let me tell you, wasn’t only highly unusual and onerous but quite dangerous in the USSR, especially for a Jew.
And so imagine that all of this is going on, the whole family switched to a language that’s new to them, many family members having trouble speaking it, having to look for words, the most intellectual family member just avoiding it altogether in a very pointed way. And nobody is explaining what happened. Clearly, something happened but nobody wants to say.
And at that very same time, I go to school and we are literally persecuted, even as small kids, with how the Russian language is the most beautiful, the most expressive, the most wonderful, with the richest vocabulary on the planet, and so on and on, all day, every day.
At home there were always stories about the Russian people. That they were dirty, uncultured. The aunt who married a Russian dude could never live it down. It was a bit like marrying a convict, nothing to feel proud of. My grandpa once visited the family of the hapless son-in-law in Russia and we never heard the end of it. The grandpa was a Holodomor survivor, which I didn’t know then. We weren’t allowed even to think this word. But I now know what grandpa was really trying to say with his anecdotes about the semi-savage Russian relatives who had never seen a fork and washed once a month.
So what I’m trying to say is, I’m the first generation on my mother’s side and the second on my father’s to speak Russian, and that happened as a result of horrific things. Some of the worst stuff in history. I didn’t know about it as a child but I knew that something was up.
You can’t escape your language. I spent a lifetime trying and it’s still there. We are not blank slates. The weight of history is upon us, and that’s neither good nor bad. It simply is.
I loved this question, thank you. Always eager to answer deep questions like this one.
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