The black and white photograph was old and tinged with brown. It showed a group of Russians, some seated and some standing in what seemed to be a forest clearing. At the center of them, was a rustic table on which stood a very large samovar, and there were some white ceramic cups, looking almost too delicate, next to it. Some of the standing men casually held long rifles, with the butt ends on the ground, and all the women were dressed in long patterned dresses, some of them with their heads tied in kerchiefs. They all, at least in the photograph, looked healthy and happy, as if they were on a camping trip. In fact, they had been exiled to an uninhabited Siberian island near Vladivostok, as punishment for their revolutionary activities. This was where they lived, in rough cabins, and the rifles were not for sport so much as to kill food that they needed to survive.
Seated on the right side, was a slim young man with glasses and somewhat large ears, and an almost amused and quizzical expression on his face. Standing next to him was a buxom and short young woman, who stared at the camera as if she were challenging the nameless person taking the picture to a duel. These were my grandparents. I had pulled the picture out of my backpack, where I had carefully placed it between the pages of my Norway/Sweden guidebook, and I stared at it now in the early morning mist.
It was a little chilly and my hands were cold holding the picture. The only other person up was Irwin who was seated crossed legged not too far from me, sketching in watercolors. It was quiet – the mist covered the small lake before us, the tall grass was a little wet with dew, and the sky showed up here and there a light blue. Our blue tents spotted the meadow, in a random pattern. Every once in a while, there was a noise from a sleeping reindeer, shaking its tether. The reindeer were lying in the tall grass, only their antlered heads and their shoulders visible. It was cold enough that their breath could be seen in puffs. It seemed magical for the moment to be here above the arctic circle surrounded by reindeer and tents, so far from home – from a home of city noises, skyscrapers, hustle and bustle, black soot and garbage bags left on the street. All that was far away.
I looked at the old photograph again, with a feeling of some satisfaction. How I had loved my grandfather. Impractical always, always with a book in his hand, arrested for passing out revolutionary pamphlets in Kiev, he and my grandmother had endured their banishment for two years, only to escape the island when the winter was particularly cold, and the water had frozen over, and eventually (I really did not know how) make their way to America — past the Statue of Liberty, to Ellis Island, and then the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He had never seemed a man of action to me and yet, look what he had done. In the summers, while my grandmother supported the family with the restaurant that she had created in the Catskills, my grandfather walked among the pine trees there, his hands clasped behind his back, looking around at the beauty of the forest or at the brown pine needles beneath his feet, entirely in his own world. Sometimes he would take me with him, and then he would talk to me in his Old European voice, sometimes teasing me because I was so skinny then, calling me a “skinny marink” and at other times telling me how much the Catskill forest reminded him of his exile in Siberia. He told me how they had to hunt for their own food, how they always tried to have the samovar filled with hot tea in the morning and at night, and how they planted and tended a vegetable garden. He told me how the mummers would come to the island and entertain them in a clearing, how they read Tolstoy and Turgenev to each other on cold winter nights, and how they sang and recited poetry from memory in the darkness. He described how the reindeer that populated the island were almost friendly because they had no previous awareness of people, and how they came near the camp, moving in small herds with a kind of quiet dignity. Most of all, he told me how important it was to dream about the future, and how his dreams had come true when he came to this country, how freedom was so wonderful, and how I, his granddaughter, was part of his dreams even back then.
***** read the rest of the story in the book ****