In Search of Russian Answers
by Grace Welker

I've been taking Russian classes with Natasha at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie for three weeks now. I know how to say, "Is that a book"? "No, it's the male cat."

Last week was the hardest one yet; we were introduced to a sound that doesn't exist in English—or in French, Spanish, or Arabic for that matter. We made our lips move like we were saying cheese, but instead tried to create the sound ooo deep in our throats. Some of us were better at it than others, but none of us sounded like Natasha. Not even close. I figured I would just fake it through the occasional word that actually had this sound. I asked her if it was common. "Oh yes. It's in the word for you, singular and plural, and the word for we, and many others," she answered. I was sunk. Luckily, I'm not taking the classes to actually learn Russian. I'm here because I'm curious about the Russian blood in my ancestry.

Her name was Catherine, maybe Catarazina: my great-grandmother. Born in Minsk, she followed the father of her children across the seas in 1910 to the Lower East Side of Manhattan (I found them in the federal census taken in April of that year). Presumably my grandfather Peter and his brother William came with her on some boat that also brought several hundreds other immigrants—this was the height of the Ellis Island days. But I still haven't found the proof: the passenger manifest that backs up the story with details. What day, exactly, did they arrive? To which port did she make the overland journey from Minsk? And how many months old was my grandfather anyway?

There are other things I want to know. Things that I will not find in that manifest. Did she leave behind any siblings, as a recent letter found among my grandfather's brother's affairs suggest she might have. Was my great-grandfather Jewish, as family lore holds it? (He would desert her and their four boys by 1917.) Were mixed marriages common? Did they actually marry? How did they meet? Did their families approve?

I'm taking Russian because I want to understand Catherine better. I want to hear the world through her ears. When she found herself alone in this new world with four young boys she couldn't look after, how did the words boys' home, education, well taken care of sound to her Belarusian ears? And when she dropped the boys off at that home, and they asked her where she lived and what her job was, how did she pronounce the words Orchard Street and janitoress?

I listen to Natasha and her voice feels like honey. I drink in each phrase, each sentence she models. Each one a momentary visit into a world where my questions will never be fully answered. I am listening closely to the specific sounds she makes, but I am also listening beyond the sounds, for something I might identify as the Russianness—for that place where language and culture overlap, for some aspect of my own identity. What I hear is Natasha saying things like, "I didn't tell you to do it like that" or "You are trying too hard." She speaks in a direct and naturally forceful way. Not unkind, just not American "nice."

I imagine my great-grandmother Catherine on her knees, washing down the tenement stairs first thing in the morning and again at night. She's humming folk songs to herself, or saying a prayer to her Orthodox god. The children of the Ukranian woman on the top floor come running down the stairs. "Don't run like that," she says in a direct and naturally forceful way. She rolls her r.

Natasha is proud of her heritage and is always giving us examples of how the Russian language is so much more precise (its use of cases) or easy (only three tenses) or sophisticated (the nuances of certain words). She clearly loves her country—she goes back every year, and she laments the fact that her grandson is growing up a monolingual American. It makes me wonder whether Catherine was ever homesick. Did she believe deep down that her homeland was superior, even as she knew that her destiny was in this foreign land? Did she encounter English as a playful puzzle or a frustrating barrier?

I have little to go on. Catherine's youngest child was a girl, born Olga, who became my Aunt Elsie. Aunt Elsie was the most smiling, truly happy person you could ever meet, the big-wet-kiss, pinch-the-cheek, "let-me-look-at-you" aunt. In her I think I see a happy Catherine—a woman who, despite the hardships, swatted the behinds of those Ukranian kids as they ran past, smiling and shaking her head "Such children! What to do?"

Growing up, all I knew was that my grandfather and his brothers had gone to the Leake and Watts home in the Bronx and that the home had a summer camp in Tivoli, New York. That was why my grandparents had eventually bought a piece of land in Rhinebeck and eventually retired there. I would picture the Dickensian horrors of this orphanage and see a bedraggled, poverty-stricken Russian woman dropping her four sons off. She didn't look back. In my version of the story, she was not really human enough to care; she was actually somewhat relieved. I grew up in the Long Island suburbs in the 1970s; poor people giving children away was not anything I could relate to or understand.

But my perception was challenged last year by some photographs I stumbled across in my great uncle's affairs. The one that changed everything was taken in 1932, near Tivoli, and shows Catherine, her daughter (Aunt Elsie), all four of the boys plus two of their spouses, and a grandchild. Wow. The reality of this photo invited me to revise my version of our family tale. Suddenly, this terrible immigrant woman with more children than she could manage was a welcome part of a large and growing family—many years after they'd been "dropped off at the school and forgotten about."

This picture told me that whatever the reasons were for doing what she did, one of them was because she had to. It told me that she still remained their mother, that there was an ongoing sense of family that was preserved. A few pages later, I found a picture of her children at her gravestone. More proof to me that they did not hold her abandonment of them against her. I call it abandonment. For all I know, it was considered good fortune for the children of poor immigrant women whose husbands had left (as many as 15 percent according to some statistics) to be taken in by Americans who would teach them the English language and look after their education.

My grandfather and his brothers all said that The Leake, as they called it, was the best thing that ever happened to them, and they all went on to do well in work, love, and life. It only recently dawned on me that when my grandfather first arrived at the home, he spoke Russian. He, like most children, adapted quickly and became a fluent English speaker, losing his native accent entirely although, I am beginning to understand, never losing the Russianness in his heart, passing it on to my mother and through her to me.

Perhaps that is the honey that I feel in Natasha's voice. The voice of a Russian mother, the one who sang songs, whispered goodnights, and on that fated day, said "I love you" as she turned quickly to leave so they wouldn't see her tears: the sound of comfort that those boys heard inside their own heads in those first confusing days and months of life at the boys home. Of course, I will never really know. But I am the one left to tell the story, to weave worlds from a few little facts, a couple of photographs, and a direct and naturally forceful language with 33 letters and no present tense form of the verb to be.

Grace Welker is a writer, yogini, and shamanic practitioner who lives in Gallatin. She currently works as senior editor for Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Her two sisters also live in the Hudson Valley and her mother will retire next year in the home her grandfather built. She can be reached at gracewelker@yahoo.com.