Surviving wolves and warfare: Book recounts Russian elders' optimism
Wednesday, November 03,
2010,
By Michael Chevy Castranova | Special to the
Kalamazoo Gazette
KALAMAZOO -- Marie Thompson Stoline recalls she and her husband, Mike, along with 14 other tourists, were standing in the lobby of their hotel in Kiev in April 1986, during their first visit to Russia. A hotel employee held up a telephone receiver and announced there was a call “for an American.”
“Which American?,” one of the guests asked.
“Any American,” came the reply.
On the other end was a reporter for CBS News, asking what they’d witnessed of the effects from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that had occurred only days before about 110 miles north, and which later came to be considered history’s worst nuke power plant accident.
In those very early days of perestroika and glasnost, the Western Michigan University-sponsored group had not been informed of the accident, Stoline said.
A desire to aid the victims of that accident was the genesis of Stoline’s book, “The Fire and the Gold: Russian Elders Share Their Life Stories.” Part of her self-published book, released in June, recounts local efforts over the years to help that area and, later, Kalamazoo’s sister city of Pushkin, by delivering medical equipment, clothes, blankets, school supplies and food.
It was during one of Stoline’s 10 trips to Russia that she decided to interview the residents of the Home of the Retired Architects, where she’d been staying. Speaking “only a little Russian,” she enlisted an interpreter and a residents to help her find 15 subjects, all of whom had worked as architects or artists.
One common theme among her subjects’ histories was their optimism.
“They all had a survival trait, a resilience. There’s a sense of, ‘We will not be overcome,’” said Stoline, who is a registered nurse in geriatrics.
In the book, one woman tells of finding a frozen body in Leningrad’s streets, and about carrying her grandmother’s body to be dumped into a mass grave. A man remembers being at the front in World War II, and how his family persevered through the food shortages of 1921,1930, the Siege of Leningrad and after the Great Patriotic War.
Her subjects also asked her some questions. One man, who encountered wolves as he walked to school as a child, wanted to know if, “When small children in America walk to school, do they see any wolves?”
“These people survived so many traumatic events of the last century,” Stoline said. Their stories show “how much we have in common … and how diverse our cultures are.
“There’s the old saying, ‘the same fire that melts the wax hardens the gold.’ You and I could go through the same experiences, and it would have a different effect on us.”
KALAMAZOO -- Marie Thompson Stoline recalls she and her husband, Mike, along with 14 other tourists, were standing in the lobby of their hotel in Kiev in April 1986, during their first visit to Russia. A hotel employee held up a telephone receiver and announced there was a call “for an American.”
“Which American?,” one of the guests asked.
“Any American,” came the reply.
On the other end was a reporter for CBS News, asking what they’d witnessed of the effects from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that had occurred only days before about 110 miles north, and which later came to be considered history’s worst nuke power plant accident.
In those very early days of perestroika and glasnost, the Western Michigan University-sponsored group had not been informed of the accident, Stoline said.
A desire to aid the victims of that accident was the genesis of Stoline’s book, “The Fire and the Gold: Russian Elders Share Their Life Stories.” Part of her self-published book, released in June, recounts local efforts over the years to help that area and, later, Kalamazoo’s sister city of Pushkin, by delivering medical equipment, clothes, blankets, school supplies and food.
It was during one of Stoline’s 10 trips to Russia that she decided to interview the residents of the Home of the Retired Architects, where she’d been staying. Speaking “only a little Russian,” she enlisted an interpreter and a residents to help her find 15 subjects, all of whom had worked as architects or artists.
One common theme among her subjects’ histories was their optimism.
“They all had a survival trait, a resilience. There’s a sense of, ‘We will not be overcome,’” said Stoline, who is a registered nurse in geriatrics.
In the book, one woman tells of finding a frozen body in Leningrad’s streets, and about carrying her grandmother’s body to be dumped into a mass grave. A man remembers being at the front in World War II, and how his family persevered through the food shortages of 1921,1930, the Siege of Leningrad and after the Great Patriotic War.
Her subjects also asked her some questions. One man, who encountered wolves as he walked to school as a child, wanted to know if, “When small children in America walk to school, do they see any wolves?”
“These people survived so many traumatic events of the last century,” Stoline said. Their stories show “how much we have in common … and how diverse our cultures are.
“There’s the old saying, ‘the same fire that melts the wax hardens the gold.’ You and I could go through the same experiences, and it would have a different effect on us.”
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