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A Sense of Place: Stories from Belarus

Paul Miller, a third generation American, was intrigued by his grandmother's stories about life in the shtetl in what is now newly independent Belarus. He had long wanted to see the place for himself. What finally helped him to decide was when he met his second cousin Arkadi Falevich, a Minsk businessman who came to the States to attend an electrical trade show, and who offered to be his guide.

The stories my grandmother Rose (Rochel Schwartz, nee Knopova) used to tell were more like fairy tales, really, when I think about how they contrasted with my own life. It's not that I didn't believe them or didn't want to believe them, it's just that I had no way of entering her chaotic, poverty stricken East European world other than through my imagination.

So I went to Belarus. This was, mind you, not a spur-of-the-moment decision taken with the knowledge that my grandmother did not have long to live. She didn't, but I had talked about visiting her village of Syalets (which in Belarusian means a small village) near Mahilyow for years. I even hunted down in the National Archives the passenger list of the S.S. Lithuania, which set sail for America on July 16, 1923, with my grandma, Rochel Knopova on board, and who was certified by the immigration authorities as neither a polygamist, nor a communist revolutionary or anarchist infiltrator. (She was, however, a budding capitalist, with three American dollars in her pocket, courtesy of her brother in Chicago.) The idea of going there, of being in that place, had possessed me even before I got to college and learned the difference between the Soviet Union and Russia. Then, in 1986, Chernobyl dealt a major setback. But in 1989, the year I moved a continent closer to start graduate school on the East Coast, big changes were afoot in my grandmother's former part of the world. Though I wouldn't meet Arkadi for another decade, I never stopped promising myself that I would get there someday, somehow.

It's not easy to go to Belarus today, though I can't imagine why would anyone besides a root-seeking Jew or a government official with a lousy posting. You need a visa, and the gatekeeper of visas at the Belarusian embassy in Washington seemed caught between a Soviet power trip and the bureaucratic inefficiency of a new state without any sense of why it exists in the first place. The country's democratically elected autocrat, Alexander Lukashenka, appears adamant on having his young republic rejoin mother Russia. How the embassy came to reside, so shortly after the Cold War, in such a beautiful townhouse on a leafy street near Dupont Circle is anybody's guess. But how they came to hire this visa officer who conveys commissar-like rudeness to Americans who want to visit his country is beyond conjecture. "Why you go to Belarus?" he demanded of me in a rather unpleasant tone of voice. He again shouted this like a mantra the next two times I called about the visa form he had promised, and then failed to fax. "Because it's there," I felt like replying, and I was irresistibly drawn to the new nation's world famous beaches and the decadent lifestyle that had developed around its resort culture. But I didn't dare. "I go to Belarus," I told him, because I have family in Belarus -- my mom's second cousin, of whose existence I had only learned recently. He lives in the capital Minsk, and his son Sasha is my third cousin. But the official's point, if uncouth and inadvertent, was well-taken -- why would anyone want to go to Belarus?

I realize now that my trip really began in this embassy. The visa never did come, and my passport disappeared with it, the same embassy official alleged, in the inefficient U.S. postal system. Three weeks before my flight I got a new passport and, after paying another $150 and being made to wait half a day, I got the visa stamp too. But it wasn't until I arrived in Minsk that I realized how helpless I was in the hands of a government that still used forms marked CCCP (Cyrillic for USSR) and displayed hammer and sickle motifs as if they expected Comrade Stalin to rise from the dead at any moment. Arkadi and his family picked me up from the fully marble tiled airport, whisked me off in their chauffeured two-door Soviet-era jalopy that refused to start more than once, and headed directly for an overcrowded office, where I later learned people were registering for new apartments, and I had to register as a foreign citizen. The rest is a blur. For an entire week I just tagged behind Arkadi, whose breakneck pace through the city matched his remarkable ability to always locate the most important person in any given situation

There were several things about Belarus that I never understood and, eventually, learned to stop trying to have explained: The elegantly coiffed man in the perfectly tailored three-piece suit stationed permanently by the hotel money-changing booth; the frumpy looking women sitting all day at desks on each floor of the hotel; why I never saw the inside (or the outside for that matter) of my relatives? apartment; why Arkadi slipped his friend some money after we played tennis at a private club, and why we still had to change our clothes outside in the cold; or why Arkadi had a full-time driver for such a beat-up old car. I failed to learn why the secretaries in all the companies I visited with my cousin never seemed to work, but had such enormous offices; what Arkadi and a business contact were shouting about at the tops of their lungs in an adjacent room, while the secretary filed her nails and I stared blankly back at her; how people could dress so well and reportedly earn so little; why there was never anyone in the restaurants; how the remnant Jewish population managed to put on such a vibrant music and dance performance for Israel's Independence Day, in the midst of a city that seemed to care for little.

But I had not gone to Minsk to add my own clever observations and confusion about Soviet style bureaucracy and the black market to those who came earlier, and who had taken far greater risks delivering care packages to refuseniks in the 1970s. My mission was a personal rather than public one: I was there to seek out the past -- my past -- rather than altruistically help the needy. It was on the fourth day that Arkadi, I and Sasha with the ubiquitous driver set off for Mahilyow and Syalets; an indescribably anticipatory morning in which I imagined myself the family anthropologist, about to connect Old World identity to our diasporic American homogeneity.

The village of Syalets is not difficult to describe. There is a paved well traveled road, now known as the Cosmonaut Avenue, that heads south from Mahilyow and more or less parallels the Dnieper River to the west. After several miles and two war memorials, one comes to a white sign with black lettering on the side of the road that reads: C... (Syalets). Then there are wooden, peaked-roof houses and barns in various states of weathered disrepair on both sides of the road for about a quarter mile. Soon, there are no more houses and you are out of the village. That's not an entirely fair description, but the village is more like a suburb, albeit one that probably hasn?t grown much since the days when mostly Jews lived there. Back then it had two synagogues and there were mezuzahs on the doors, but I saw no trace of either despite closely inspecting each house for the telltale discoloration of the wooden frames. Only later did I learn that almost every structure had been rebuilt since the Second World War.

That war, which in America exists almost exclusively in Hollywood and the kind of commercial mythmaking that has given us such memorable distortions as "the good war" and "the greatest generation," exists everywhere in Belarus. Not only do monuments, memorials, and museums constitute about the only worthwhile tourist attractions, but the very language of the 1940s is as omnipresent as if the enemy were still lurking in the next primeval forest. While most American college students could not even define 'fascist', let alone date the term, in today's Belarus it is part of everyday discourse: "The fascists did this/the fascists did that; then we defeated the fascists, and banished the fascists, and we still struggle every day to make sure that the fascists never come back." After the war, of course, the fascists became us, or any Western country with a free market. But more than ten years into the as yet unnamed epoch of the post Cold War, Belarusians are still obsessed with fascists. The Great Patriotic War had lived up to its inspired name far better than any of the communist leaders who came up with it in those desperate times could ever have imagined.

It's not hard to remain mired in the past when that past is Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. Belarus lost nearly two million people during the war, a quarter of its total population. This "demographic catastrophe of the first order," explains Holocaust historian Martin Dean, was due to a combination of Soviet deportations, Red Army and partisan warfare, postwar emigration and, of course, the Holocaust. Some 350,000 Belarusian Jews were murdered by the Germans and their collaborators between June 1941 and April 1944. The Nazis even considered building a gassing facility in Minsk as the capital?s ghetto overflowed with German Jews brought there in the fall of 1941.

But while the worthy heroics of the Red Army are trumpeted from every prominent hill and intersection in Belarus, one could pass through the former Minsk ghetto today without even knowing it. The two most distinctive and inspiring memorials were actually placed there by German citizens of Hamburg and Düsseldorf in 1993 and 1998, respectively. A few mock, toppled tombstones with Hebrew lettering, no doubt buried in snow half the year, seemed to be the only homegrown reminder of what had once been. And in a small plaza that the Nazis found well-suited for shooting Jews, there is a forlorn, though flower-bedecked when I saw it, obelisk-like monument that appeared lost amidst the white Soviet-era high rises. Nearby, so close that I couldn?t keep it out of my camera lens, was an old tire.

In Syalets, however, there is nothing, not even a cracked tombstone fragment where the Jewish cemetery once stood. A shtetl no more, the Syalets of today is a village from the past without a past. It looked no more interesting or familiar to me than any Belarusian village would have, or any village on any planet, for that matter. Despite all the highly touted modernizing reforms of the futuristic Soviet state, Marxist historical inevitability seems to have ensured that this corner of European civilization would inevitably remain a part of history. The main kolkhoz building was a rotting hulk; the plowing was being done by a man walking behind a horse; old women were leading their cows through the street as if they depended on them for their next meal; and the people, the people looked as if they had never been to a doctor in their lives, let alone a dentist. Certainly, the town had electricity now, but the poverty of the place bespoke not only a country that had fallen on hard times; it signaled a different, much earlier time altogether.

The irony of it all is that my grandmother's family had actually been well off in that place once upon a time, at least as these things go for East European Jewry. They had a small farm in this swath of rural poverty bleakly known as the Pale of Settlement, and they could walk to the market in Mahilyow and back in less than a day. They could even see my great-grandfather's grave, on their own land, from the kitchen window at the back of the house. But more striking even than their property ownership and proximate peasant status is that my family maintained two houses, renting the smaller one across the street to whomever happened to be passing through. That second house, a sort of pied-á-terre for the itinerant Belarusian multitude, never did fit into my concept of shtetl culture, in which just having a roof over your head -- fiddler or no fiddler -- was its own blessing. But this is what my grandmother told me -- two houses on either side of a street called Chushay. And she even wrote "Chushay" down for me in her third grade English hand, just so that I wouldn't forget how her little street was called.

I took that piece of paper with me into the streets of Syalets and asked everyone if they knew where I could find Chushay Street. They were, for the most part, nice, and hardly suspicious, and sometimes quite generous. Not even the word "Jew" or "Zhid" seemed to cause consternation. The guy working on a truck in the middle of the sidewalk kept a wary eye on us while pretending to go about his business. But Irena, who wore a pink sweater that said "candy's" on the front and was decorated with hearts and teddy bears, practically begged us to come inside for tea. And Veronica, scary as she was with her single front tooth (like all the women in town, she wore a shmata on her head and thick woolen socks with sandals beneath her near ankle length skirt), could not have been more helpful. A middle-aged man who looked far older than he said he was and had at least a year's worth of dirt ground into his skin helped me turn over an enormous rock that I thought, naively enough, might be a Jewish gravestone. The villagers (mostly women), in fact, flocked to us like some caged creatures in a petting zoo, tame and familiar yet somehow exciting and curious. Clearly out of my element (I wasn't sure if chickens could bite, and they were everywhere!), they at least made me, ridiculously attired in jeans and a camel hair jacket, feel rather less uneasy. For that I was grateful.

And yet we were intruders, and felt like intruders; outsiders who had absolutely nothing in common with these people except our own humanity. Arkadi and Sasha could at least communicate with them, but for me standing there as the sun moved in and out of the clouds, the sight was as piteous as it was puzzling. No one knew anything about a Chushay street or the name Knopov or Dolnick, and it didn't help matters that Arkadi in no time met someone who remembered his grandfather Aron Belatzkin. All his life in Minsk, and Arkadi had never even thought to go to our family's village, and now here he was, thanks to an American second cousin once removed, chatting away about his grandfather with an ancient Belarusian peasant. Arkadi was clearly moved. His eyes were moist and he kept looking up at the sky, putting his hand on his chin, and shaking his head in disbelief. I watched the scene unfold with envious anxiety, wanting only to press on, to find even older people who might have some shard of memory of my own direct ancestors.

I got my shard at the end of the day in the form of a near ninety year old woman named Sonya Panteleeva. She didn't get around much, so we were invited into her home, where we sat on a patchwork fabric sofa in a kitchen that doubled as the living room. In the unfamiliar surroundings of a peasant hovel in which the ceilings were barely high enough for my 5'9" frame, Sonya confirmed that a man named Pashe Knopov -- my grandmother's oldest brother -- had existed, and that he was a good man. He actually had two homes, she told me to my utter astonishment, and she answered correctly and unhesitatingly when I asked whether they were next to or across the street from each other.

But those affirmations were about as specific as things got with Sonya; and the rest were mere fragments and flashbacks of clouded memory that added color to the picture my grandmother had conveyed to me, but little in the way of a frame of reference. Pashe had hid in Sonya's home and he himself had saved two little girls, but when and where Sonya could not say. Pashe had money and could send the family to Moscow, though whether or not that is what he in fact did with his wife and children (if he had any) during the war was equally unclear. Pashe was generous -- he brought baskets of ripened apples to his neighbors; he gave them matzoh on Pesach, and even money. Yet whether Sonya had known Pashe as a real friend, or simply the Jewish neighbor with whom one got along but kept a certain polite distance, I could not know either. Her eyes and composure betrayed little emotion, as if this was simply a normal part of her youthful memories, with little understanding of the great calamity that had struck the Jewish civilization in the center of which she had grown up. But Sonya was old, and uneducated, and wholly unused to having an American firing off questions in her living room/kitchen. In truth she gave me no reason whatsoever to feel anything but gratitude, and sorrow, for her.

I wanted to stay and survey the surrounding area, perhaps walk to the Dnieper to see where my grandmother might have swum with her older siblings, or at least washed clothes. But Arkadi, the fast-moving pragmatic businessman, himself a direct product of a state that conditioned its people to think only of the glorious socialist future, as opposed to the present and, certainly never, the past, was growing impatient, knowing that I would only be more disappointed. I could picture the layout of my grandmother's village now; understood how the climate and vegetation she grew up with contrasted with the Arizona desert she eventually settled down in; and I could be certain that this precise spot on earth was where all the stories had come from. But in the main my long awaited encounter with Syalets was a little like the name of the street "Chushay" that I had relied on to guide me to the family farm. No one in that tiny village had ever heard of it, and only at the very end of the day, in Sonya Panteleeva?s house, did my cousins realize that I was mispronouncing the Russified French term for road, "chaussée." We had been walking up and down and traversing my family's street all afternoon.

My grandmother died nine days after I stood nearer to her first home, perhaps on the very spot where it had once sheltered her, than anyone in my American family ever has or, likely, will. I was in a café in Germany, of all places, when I got word of her passing via cell phone, and my family beseeched me to finish my trip rather than try to find a flight to Phoenix. I gave in, though not without an argument, and regret, and a lingering sense of guilt. In Syalets I had scooped up a small bag of soil that I was planning to spread over my grandma's coffin, but now I wouldn't even be there to say Mourner's Kaddish. As it turned out, I couldn't find that bag of dirt anywhere when I got home.

Paul Miller is Associate Professor of history at McDaniel College (Maryland) and the International University of Sarajevo, teaching courses in modern European history and Holocaust/genocide. He has published a number of articles on those topics, and is the author of a book entitled: "From Revolutionaries to Citizens: Antimilitarism in France, 1870 -- 1914", published in 2002 by Duke University Press

This article appeared in
Belarusian Review, Vol. 18, No. 2
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Copyright 2006 Belarusian Review
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Paul Miller


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