My parents have been doing some spring cleaning lately. And by spring cleaning, I mean my mom called me and said, “We have five boxes of your crap in the attic. Can we throw it out?”  My crap being everything I’ve ever generated artistically or scholastically since first grade.

“Why can’t you keep it,” I asked, distraught. “Because we are trying to clean out the attic,” my mom said. “The Germans did too,” I muttered, “And look what happened to Anne Frank.” “What?” “Nothing.”

“You should take this stuff,” my mom said. “You can keep it in your home.”

I tell everyone we are minimalists because it makes me feel smug, so I said, “I’m a minimalist. I can’t possibly have all this crap along with all the other crap I have lying around.  Even though it’s not crap but my priceless childhood thoughts and dreams. Don’t you care about your only daughter’s priceless childhood thoughts and dreams,” I tried to guilt her.

But, as everyone knows, you can’t guilt a Jewish mom, and the end is result, as you can see from the picture on this post, is that I now have three boxes of crap in my attic that I am going through slowly.  I’ve found at least four of my diaries, all of which show that I was just as neurotic and melodramatic as I am now, only there weren’t blogs to show me that there were people even weirder than me.  Also, Jesus Christ am I glad blogs didn’t exist back then.

Fortunately, in my junior year of high school, I got hit by the Italian bug and started learning Italian. I was super-into making scrapbooks of things, and I found that scrapbook. This Italian which will be very helpful when we go on vacation.

As you can tell, math wasn’t a strong suit. Although LOVE and FATE and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Sure. Oh god, that pun.

I also did a bit of song translation:

How disappointing that YouTube didn’t exist back then. I just watched this song that I translated for the first time ten minutes ago and it all came back to me.

I have reams and reams of paper to prove what a huge nerd and social outcast I was. What will future generations have? Their Tumblrs? Please.

Thanks for the memories, mom.

Whoops. 

Air strike over Moscow.

On the blog: Previous thoughts on Victory Day. Women in the armed forces. WWII Movie, Gift to Stalin.  World War II movies in Russia. Mr. B and I are ready for the siege of Leningrad.

Other links:

I don’t have to round up Instagram now! They do it for me. Very touching cartoon about WWII halfway down the page. Russian optional.Some people just can’t press the learn button on Stalin. Soviet Jewish veterans are left behind. Piiictures. This picture.  Even more pictures (by Jews.) Even more pictures on Pinterest. If you are Pinning WWII Eastern Front on Pinterest, we may have to talk.

Two weeks ago, I made a horrible mistake. I agreed to send my mom the first chapter of the second draft of the novel.

After finishing the first draft a couple months ago, I realized that it sucked, because most first drafts are terrible. So, I put it down for a week.

Then, I read through every single terrible page.  Oh Jesus were there terrible pages.

Then, I started rewriting from the ground up.

I’ve coddled the first chapter, working it, pounding it, agonizing over it, until everything felt right and my character finally started to come to life. It was little like blowing up one of those cheap air mattresses you buy at Target. That took a week.

When I was done, I knew it I finally had a solid foundation. That was when I felt comfortable reading it to Mr. B. I read it aloud to him before bed one night with baited breath.

“How is it,” I asked him.

“It’s pretty good for a second draft,” Mr. B said. I let out my breath. Mr. B is never one to mince words, so I believed him. “Would you be interested in reading what happens next to this guy,” I focus-grouped him. “Yeah,” Mr. B said,smiling, but he might have been asleep at this point.  I chalked it up as a win.

Writing a whole novel and being terrified it’s so bad that you have to axe a year’s worth of work is pretty nervewracking, so I was glad I didn’t have to axe it.

“When can we read your novel,” my mom asked me the next day.

“You can read the first chapter, which is almost done,” I told her. I sent it to her. This is against everything writers do. Hemingway never sent his mom shit.

“YOU CALL ME RIGHT BACK AFTER YOU’VE READ IT,” I said calmly.  I hung up and waited.  I tried to do casual things like eat and watch TV. My phone rang. I lunged for it.

“SO?”

“It was…interesting.”

“WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

“There wasn’t enough to judge. It was a really short chapter.”

“YOU WERE EITHER INTERESTED OR YOU WEREN’T.”

“I..can’t say. I need to read more.”

“SO YOU WERE INTERESTED IN THE MAIN CHARACTER!”

“Hard to say! The chapter was so short! Don’t use me as your main reader! I don’t read English well enough!” (My mom reads over 30 English novels a year.)

“PUT DAD ON THE PHONE.”

My mother is very diplomatic and classy. My father, on the other hand, will tell all of the truth.  Even the truths you don’t want to hear. He will also tell the truth very loudly.

Of late, as of the past five years, he has also been communicating the truth only in English for some reason. The angrier he gets, the more English he speaks. The following conversation is almost verbatim.

“HOW WAS IT?”

“IT SUCKED.”

“Why?”

“IT WAS TOO LONG.”

“Mom said it was too short.”

“THERE’S TOO MUCH DRINKING. AND TOO MUCH SMOKING.” (The first chapter is about a character who’s on a train from Moscow to Siberia and to fill his time, does quite a bit of drinking. He is also, as most people were in the 30s in Russia, a smoker. )

“Are you saying that young men on the train wouldn’t drink to pass the time?”

“NO. TOO MUCH VODKA.”

“Well, what about when you were going to Siberia to serve in the Red Army? And going from Siberia?”

“FROM SIBERIA? I WAS GLAD I WAS ALIVE! (switching to Russian) We drank SO much on the train. We got really rowdy. (Mom’s voice in the background “WHEN WERE YOU DRINKING? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”) I can’t believe I made it back to Yaroslavl in one piece.”

“So what you’re saying is that you didn’t like the chapter because it was too realistic?”

“MAYBE. BUT IT WAS STILL TOO SLOW. AND TOO MUCH DRINKING.”

(Mom’s voice in the background): “Don’t rely on us! We’re not literary critics! Write what you were going to write!”

The end result is that I haven’t been able to break out of writer’s block for the past week, because every time I return to my character on my train, I see my parents sitting there on his bunk with him, dangling their legs over the ledge.

“You’re drinking too much son,” I see my dad saying. “Give me that bottle. Pass it here.”

“YURA,” my mom yells my dad’s name. “Don’t take that bottle,” then she turns to my poor character. “Don’t worry, you’re going to reach Siberia sooner or later. But hopefully sooner. The descriptions of this train are making me bored and sleepy. Although it’s early days yet, so it’s hard to tell! I’m sure you’ll become less boring soon!”

1. Moms, what do you actually want for mother’s day?
2. No, I don’t want a ticket to the women’s luncheon
3. Day jobs of the poets
4. The cost of things in Qatar
5. My foreign mom

-@la_chica_maria, St. Petersburg, 2012

The first of May used to mean military parades and red flags. All I remember is my hair in pigtails and hundreds of red balloons. And the warmth! No more layers and layers of kolgotki.  And ice cream! Eating the unforseen luxury of an ice cream bar! My hands sticky with sugar, holding on to my parents. Crowds of people, walking, laughing. It was  supposed to be a celebration of workers, but I think everyone was just glad we made it, finally, through the winter. The breeze ruffled my dress.   It was sheer joy.

May is in the air, my own semester’s worth of immense, exhausting labor is almost over,  and the world open again.

“Retro car in Moscow on May 1″, @nycastlemmm

“Ice cream goes well with military music.” – @vecherskaya

“Kazakhstan”, @sashasleep

“I’m among the rabbits and the communists” -@pavelmironov51

“I’m protesting” Sweden, – @norrfjard

“I love driving in Moscow during the May holidays” -@artefaq

“May in Helsinki” -@idaamaria

Ukraine,-@notordinarylove

“Balkan style, no vegan”-@martalbc

Tverskaya Street, Moscow -@miulovemiu

“Cruising on May 1 with my sister”, Sweden, @malinmagnuson

Russia, @kseni9519

“Labor,” @xzkto_smr

Previously: The first day of school in Russia.

We were on our way to the grocery store last night.  The sun was shining through the new leaves on the trees and the sunset was a brilliant spring red. The air was warm, redolent with the scent of pollen. The promise of spring was real.

I looked out the window, pensive.

“What are you thinking about,” Mr. B asked gently.

“Did you know,” I said, “that there was a Soviet army regiment that decided the Soviet Union was SO bad, that when they were captured by the Germans, they turned to the Nazi side and fought against the Soviet Union?”

“That’s a winning endorsement,” Mr. B said, wishing he hadn’t asked.

“Yes,” I said, they were calles the Vlasovites.  Their commander was Andrei Vlasov, who was a Soviet general responsible for the defense and liberation of Moscow. He made the front page of all the Soviet papers. He was brilliant military thinker.  Then, he was captured by the Nazis and decided to become a Nazi general.” (full-length Russian documentary that’s good but VERY biased, with English subtitles here.)

I read Mr. B Vlasov’s Wikipedia page.

Vlasov fought the rest of the war with the Nazis. Hitler thought he was enough of a threat that he didn’t let him raise an army until 1944, when all options were on the table. By then, it was too late, but the army fought the rest of the war for Vlasov and the terrifying thought that if they lost, they’d be considered traitors to the Soviet Union and thrown into gulags.

With Vlasov’s amazing foresight, they miraculously made their way to the Western front and surrendered to the Americans, who probably treated them with more mercy than anyone else up to that point. Unfortunately, the Americans turned out to be dicks and decided to export them back to the Soviet Union. Once there, Vlasov, who saved the city of Moscow, was renounced as a traitor to the Fatherland, and spent a year in Lubyanka, where he was hanged. He was one of the last criminals to be killed by hanging. After that it was all rasstrel’- firing squads.

“What a bummer,” Mr. B said.

“Can you imagine?” I asked. “Can you imagine if he had actually been allowed to raise his army earlier, and if they’d been able to turn the tide of history?”

“Yeah,” Mr. B said, staring off into the distance, watching the traffic.

What he was probably imagining in reality was that point in time when I’m no longer thinking about my novel and  every messed up thing that happened in the Soviet Union before 1950.

In my MBA program, there are a couple of places to take night classes, but the one that’s most convenient for me is downtown, because it’s right next to work. Unfortunately, the entrance to Suburban Station, the train station right next to the school that I use to get home,  starts to unravel quickly at night. I mean, it’s already pretty gross during the day, but nighttime brings a special glow.  So, I always think about how  dirty the area surrounding Temple downtown is, and why they can’t use their pull with the city to help fix it.

Conveniently, from time to time, my school sends us surveys to fill out about the quality of our experience, both in the classroom and in the facilities so that we can complain as much as possible.

I’ve always learned both at work and in school that you should never just  come to someone with a problem; you should also have at least a couple possible ways to solve it.  But, this is just for my MBA and everyone knows part-time MBA students are pretty tired and already 100% invested in classes, and also I have NO IDEA how to navigate the sprawling City of Philadelphia political system.

So, here you go, Temple.

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