Their relationship was legalized by the then Civil Registry Office, aka ZAGS, and eight years later my mother, Galina, was born to be followed by her brother, Vadim, and their sister, Lyoudmilla. In recollections of those three, Joseph was very clever. He knew Jewish as well as German languages and was embracing the position of a Regional Trade Auditor in Ukraine. During that period Katerinna had a separate pair of shoes for each of her frocks.
Seven more years passed and, in the late thirties, Joseph got arrested. However, they did not put him before a firing squad to purge away like millions of other enemies to the Soviet people, supposedly, some clever way was found to buy his life back. He was only deported to a very northern, but still European part of Russia. The family joined him in exile and in the early forties, they all returned to Ukraine to settle in the city of Konotop which soon afterward was captured by the German Wehrmacht.
After two years of the Nazi occupation, when German troops retreated driven westward by the Red Army blows, my grandfather disappeared from home one day before the liberation, together with his bicyclerather a valuable item in those times.
The next morning, heavy bombardment made Katerinna and her three children flee as far as the suburban village of Podlipnoye, where a shell fragment cut an apple tree branch right above my mothers head (a telling detail, if not for the odd inches I wouldnt now be composing this letter to you). By noon, the advancing troops of the Red Army liberated both the village and the city. Katerinna came back to Konotop where she brought up, as a single mother, her children Galina, Vadim, and Lyoudmilla
Another ten years passed and Galina, the eldest of the three, thru a postal acquaintance met Nikolai Ogoltsoff, a petty officer in the Order of Combat Red Banner Black Sea Fleet. Postal acquaintance meant the postman delivering a letter which starts, Hello, unknown Galina, and concluded by, Send me your photo, please!
So, on his next year furlough Nikolai, instead of customary visiting his native Ryazan Region in Russia, arrived in the Ukrainian city of Konotop where the width of both his bottom-bell Navy pants and his chest in the deep V-cut demonstrating the striped vest, and the golden-lettered legend The Black Sea Fleet above his forehead in the ribbon around his marine uniform visor-less cap whose 2 black tails ended with imprints (also golden) of anchors (one per a tail) hanging loosely from the back of his head, and one more shining anchor (this time of brass) in his polished belt plate impressed the quiet lanes in the town outskirts where hed been sending his letters in envelopes embellished on behind with the line of his own design, Fly with my greetings, come back with the promise of meetings!.
And three days later my parents, forgetful in the rush to notify my grandmother, registered their marriage in the Konotop ZAGS
(did Regional Trade Auditor Vakimov set up innocent people after his arrest?
Affirmative. The show had to go on. So you signed anything they put before you of your good will or you signed it as a cripple if not killed by the tortures and beating under the name of interrogation.
Did he collaborate with the Nazi occupants?
Knowledge of the language would give him such an opportunity but then you should suppose he did it gratis, without bettering his housing conditions or procuring a new pair of shoes for his wife. The bicycle also a telling clueGermans, still having more than a year of war on their hands, could find room for an able-bodied collaborationist in the bed of a truck heading westward Seems like he was dead scared at the prospect of another round of interrogations when riding his biketrying to cross in a bath-tub the wuthering ocean of War.
Was my missing grandpa Joseph a Jew?.
Being a commissar in the years of the Civil War, proficiency with the language in question, why, the name itself might serve a bunch of circumstantial evidence for the assumption. However, the high percentage of the chosen peoples offspring among the revolutionary leaders of the period does not remove the possibility of exceptions. The language could have been picked up while being an errand-boy and/or shop assistant at a store of some Jew merchant. As for the name, let's not forget that even such a hardened anti-Semite as Comrade Stalin was his namesake Still and all, my mother, when introducing herself, preferred to change her patronymic, taking root from an Old Testament handsome character, into its Russianized rustic form: Osipovna)
Her dark mellow eyes Galina inherited from Katerinna Ivanovna (or Katarzyna Janovna?) whose affinity with the tribes of Israel seems doubtful enough.
Firstly, in the red corner of her kitchen there hung a dark lacquered board with some glum-bearded saint (I cant say of which religion or nationality, could be a Catholic as well). Besides, she fattened a pig in her shed, Masha was her name, for slaughter.
But, again, the icon might have taken root as a camouflaging part of the interior in the time of Nazi occupation, while the restrictions of kosher diet can be overruled with the common Ukrainian proverb Need teaches eating cakes with lard.
Of course, all these unanswerable questions will arise after the return of your ancestors from their marriage registration at Konotop ZAGS, but we are not to tag on them all that way, we are taking a U-turn so as to trace the line of your grandfathers fathers origin.
~ ~ ~
That line is simple, straight, and down-to-earth. In a word, Mikhail Ogoltsoff was a peasant.
In the depths of the Ryazan land, there is the district center of Sapozhok and at nine or eleven kilometers from it (the distance depends on who you ask the question), lies the village of Kanino. My father liked to brag that in its fat days the village had about four hundred households.
The shallow ravine with a sluggish soundless brook rolling along its bottom splits the village into two halves. Back in the blessed days of yore, the stream banks served the grounds for the long-standing folk amusement Battling Walls, aka collective fist-fight. The men from one half of the village devotedly punched the other-half dwellers, smashing their teeth out to mark some of church holidays or celebrate a mild-weathered Sunday. Yeah, once upon a time folks knew a thing or two about stimulating entertainment
And so it went on for centuries before sinking into oblivion. Only vague memories remained of Alesha the Saddler, the legendary fighter and obedient son. But his Dad was a truly uptight geezer! Where to? would yell he at the scion. Too filthy rich you are, eh? Back to work and no nonsense!
And the mighty three-and-thirty-year-old son would stoop his hefty shoulders over the unfinished horse-collar poking it with his awl while all of him was out there, at the lists by the stream, from where little boys ran panting in with the updates, Oy, Alesha! They are pressing indeed! Ours give in already!
Yet, the warning snort from his father would keep Alesha silent and concentrated on his toil until many a-heck! and plunks! of a dogged retreat in the street reached the hut. At that point, Dad would no longer keep his temper down. Springing up to his feet, he would run to Alesha and deal him a huge box on the ear and yell, Fuck it! Ours bite the dust but this dickhead still sits home!
But Alesha didnt hear the whole oration, he's out already, bypassing the battling Walls thru the village backyard kitchen gardens because the rules forbid attacking the opposite team from behind, a good game deserves fair play.
Aleshas out! And the ours get a second breath right away while the opposite Wall show streaks of wavering. Some weaklings start falling down in advancethe rules do not allow to beat a fighter lying on the ground. And Alesha, deeply concentrated, knocks the standing fighters out one after another; and, mark you, without a single f-f..er..foul word Yep, the village was in the pink then
The Rural Collectivization in the USSR finished off that innocent merry-making and the well-orchestrated Great Hunger, called to solidify the revolutionary changes in the Russian rustic life, knocked Alesha off, and his father, sure enough, also starved to death
My fathers mother, Martha, remembered the life under the Czar because at the break of the Great October Revolution she was a girl of about thirteen. Ten years later she was already married to Mikhail Ogoltsoff to bring forth three children: Kolya, Sehrguey, and Alexandra (respectively).
Mikhail lived thru the collectivization phase but the Great Hunger made him pass on and Martha remained a single mother. She cooked soup of saltbush and less edible herbs. Both she and her children were swelling up from starvation but survived.
Then there arrived the era of hard labor at the collective farm, aka kolkhoz, with its miserly paid workdays. Life kept spinning around those workdays paid in kind with the same products the villagers produced slaving in the kolkhoz fields, and the collective recreation at the kolkhoz club where twice a month they brought Soviet movies "Lenin in October", "Pigwoman and Shepherd" and other suchlike stuff. To make movie-watching possible, the village lads had to hand-pedal the crank of electricity-producing dynamo machine brought for the show together with the projector and cans of film spools.
In the summer of 1941, Comrade Joseph Stalin surprised everybody calling them in his address over the radio dear brothers and sisters. Then he announced the treacherous invasion of the fascist Germany into the Soviet Union, and the village mujiks were driven away to the war.
Germans never reached Kanino though the thunder of the front-line cannonade was rolling in from the horizon. Then in the village came detachments of the Red Army reserve, the mujiks from Siberia with their amazing custom to sit after taking a steam bath in the frosty winter night outside and have a thoughtful smoke in just their pants and undershirts on.
The Siberians left in the direction of the cannonade and soon afterward it ceased to be heard. In the village, pervaded by thick silence, there stayed only women, girls and boys too young to be drafted. Andyes!the collective farm chairman, a one-armed cripple in the military outfit.