Embodying Internal Displacement

 

An audio recording with Mira Lvovsky wherein she retells her family's experiences with internal displacement, forced migration, and expulsion within different regions of the Soviet Union, particularly during the Holocaust and during the early rumblings of Soviet dissolution in the late 1970s.

 

Audio ALT Text

 

Ella Mullenex: Tell me about one of your pleasant, happy memories of your childhood.

 

Mira Lvovsky: There aren’t any.

 

Ella: What do you mean? There’s nothing happy that you can remember from your childhood?

 

Mira: Nothing.

 

Ella: How about your grandmother, Rivka?

 

Mira: Oh yes, I forgot about her. She loved me very much. Very, very much. She’d come over once or twice a month and would always bring me something sweet to eat, a candy of some sort and would talk about many interesting things. I’m not sure how well educated she was but she gave me lots of positive things, did many positive things for me. She told stories mostly about our family, about my father. But almost nothing about my mother and my aunt Shura (dad’s sister). Once a week or two weeks I’d go to her house. It was a big house and two families lived there but there was no room for my grandma there. They placed her in a passing-through spot in the house. She would sit me next to her and would bring me a slice of bread spread with something. That was after the War. She would bring me food that was intended for her own consumption. She told me a lot about my father. One day grandma came over, we loved her a lot even though the entire family hated my mother. They thought that my father married below his station. That was my father’s mother. My mother’s mother had been dead a long time by then. Grandma used to tell me riddles, played ‘what if…’ games, always brought something sweet so nobody could see. That’s what I remember. I have no other such kind people in my life.

 

[...] 

 

Mira: My father was born in a village similar to my mother’s but a different one. It wasn’t far from hers. It was somewhat bigger. He was a wonderful person. People like him, I have never met before or since. When he came home from work, it was pure happiness for me. For some reason he detested Romanian people. I’m not sure why, and I didn’t understand it as a young child but now I do. He really deeply disliked Romanians. While my mother was preparing dinner, he would sit down, he had this little transistor radio, he would close all windows, lean as close as possible to the radio so nobody could hear from outside, and would listen to it, to Russian news, not Romanian news. Don’t know why.He used to sit me in his lap, kiss me, and then listen very closely to the news reports. He always took my side whenever my mother chided or criticized me. He would always say ‘but she’s little, you know she doesn’t understand yet’ I remembered all of it. And I loved my mother less than him because he treated me so well. After he met Igor on the battlefield, we never heard anything from him after. He was killed at that battle, most likely. Later we found out, we received an official notice that he died a hero on that battlefield.

 

Ella: I remember you told me that you and your mom used to go to the train station every day to wait for him to come home from the war, like so many other soldiers. Because she thought that he would still come home from the war on the next train.

 

Mira: Yes, we did. For a very long time. But I do remember going there every day and every day she’d come home crying. I remember I was too little to understand so I was asking her if something was hurting, if she was in pain. And she used to tell me ‘yes, I’m in pain because daddy isn’t here’. I didn’t understand what that meant ‘daddy isn’t here’. To me it meant he would come on another train. He cannot ‘not exist’. We saw him when he left and he will come back.