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    Reading Pushkin In Siberia
    Reading Pushkin In Siberia
    Reading Pushkin In Siberia
    Ebook127 pages1 hour

    Reading Pushkin In Siberia

    By Celia Ores

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    About this ebook

    In Reading Pushkin in Siberia, Dr. Celia Ores tells her tale of survival during World War II. She fled her hometown of Dubienka, Poland, during the Nazi invasion, only to be sent with her family by the Soviets to a gulag in Siberia.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu Publishing Services
    Release dateMay 27, 2016
    ISBN9781483449456
    Reading Pushkin In Siberia

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      Book preview

      Reading Pushkin In Siberia - Celia Ores

      ORES

      Copyright © 2016 Celia N. Ores.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means---whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic---without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

      Disclaimer:

      This is a memoir. The stories and events recounted stem from my memory and can be somewhat flawed. Please take note of this when questioning the veracity of the dates, historical events, names and other details in the book. Much has been fact-checked, but my story is fully based on my own recollections.

      ISBN: 978-1-4834-4946-3 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4834-4947-0 (hc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4834-4945-6 (e)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 04/29/2016

      Contents

      Foreword by My Grandchildren

      Introduction by Dr. John Schullinger

      Chapter 1 -- Dubienka: Before the War

      Chapter 2 -- The War Begins

      Chapter 3 -- Survival in a Siberian Gulag

      Chapter 4 -- The Deserts of Kazakhstan

      Chapter 5 -- The Aftermath of War

      Chapter 6 -- Freedom in the New World

      Chapter 7 -- Back to Europe

      Chapter 8 -- New York City: Work and Family

      Chapter 9 -- A Career and Family

      Chapter 10 -- Retirement and Family

      Epilogue

      Acknowledgements

      Photos

      About the Author

      To my family who are my joy in life --

      Pauline, Michael, Lia, Marisa, David, Michelle,

      Chip, Adam, Paul & Marc

      map.jpg

      Foreword by My Grandchildren

      By Adam Schorin

      The first time I visited Dubienka, I was nine years old and my grandmother had both her original knees intact. We---Grandma, Mom, my cousin Lia, and I---walked around the town, visited the foundation of the synagogue (now next to a bus stop), spoke with a man who had lived through the war, and ate cherry blintzes (or something that resembled blintzes) at the home of a woman we referred to alternately as Barbara and Gabriela (one was her first name and the other was her middle name and nickname, but we couldn't remember which was which). At some point that day (we were only in Dubienka for a handful of hours), we walked to the banks of the River Bug, which Grandma had been ferried across at night sixty-five years before, fleeing German-occupied Poland to what is now Ukraine.

      In my memory (which has been compromised by years of repeated visits), Grandma and I walk a few minutes down the riverbank and then she stops me. Here, she says, here is where we escaped.

      Even then, in 2004, at age nine, I thought this was the most significant thing that had ever happened to me. When I returned to Dubienka this past summer, in 2015, without my family, I walked behind a group of high school kids carrying pool toys (an inflatable shark, a black and gray tube, a plastic mattress) to play with in the same river. One of them looked back and saw me on one knee focusing my camera, and they walked away.

      I spent this past summer, through a grant from school, researching the Holocaust and retracing, in Poland, Germany, and Russia, parts of my grandparents' journeys through the war. I met with genealogists in Warsaw, sifted through photographs of my grandfather in Krakow, and had Shabbat dinner with the elderly members of the synagogue in Irkutsk, the Siberian city in which my grandmother was transported from train to truck, which carried her some hours north to the gulag. I went to a music festival in western Poland called Woodstock with a Hasidic Jew from Borough Park, and I spoke Hebrew with the granddaughters of a Ukrainian Jew on the Siberian island of Olkhon, in Lake Baikal. I had a beer in the synagogue in Chelm, now converted into the frontier-themed McKenzee Saloon, complete with Oregon Trail wagons and smiling cacti---and located down the street from where my great-grandfather was bar mitzvahed.

      The Dubienka of today hardly resembles the one of my grandmother's stories. It has basketball courts and lottery machines, stop signs and traffic circles. The headstones that were stolen from the Jewish cemetery (and used as building materials, door stops, and, most viscerally, as cutting boards) have been returned, dumped haphazardly back into the cemetery, protected by a newly erected gate. My grandmother's childhood home is now a community center; her bedroom is part of its second-floor library.

      I went back to the riverbank this trip as well, and was surprised to see how short a distance it was to the other side. In my memory, it had been like looking across an ocean, spying on New Jersey from the Upper West Side. Beer cans and cigarette butts littered our sandy, muddy bank, and when I walked back to the car, I slipped in a puddle and almost lost my sandal to the sludge.

      For as long as I can remember, my grandmother has told me stories about her childhood, about fleeing Dubienka, about Siberia and Kazakhstan and her brother's death and the doctor who taught her Russian in the gulag and the officer who took her and her father to see the Soviet National Ballet perform Swan Lake in Alma-Ata in 1944. (The prima ballerina was Galina Ulanova, and she was the most excellent dancer like nothing you have ever seen.) I've heard these stories thousands of times, always with the same pacing, the same inflection: Mr. Kellner was, as my mother would have said, a mensch. In fourth grade I recorded her stories on a series of cassette tapes labeled Dubienka 1-4, and I thought that would be it: I'd have her stories down and they would never be lost.

      But it's not enough to hear them once. Each time I've turned to her stories, I've had more questions, more names and cities and people I want identified. And sometimes Grandma will tell a story I think have heard at least a hundred times before, and I'll be saying the last lines along with her, when all of a sudden she'll add something new, some detail she'd never included before or had just remembered herself. Like a novelist who sheds a little more light on her protagonist's secret past with each chapter, every now and then Grandma pulls back the curtain on her history a little bit further. Just this past summer I learned she spent a few days in a nunnery before her family decided to flee Dubienka.

      What? A nunnery? I said. You've never told me that before.

      I haven't? I only remembered it recently, she said. The sisters taught me how to plant carrots.

      Now we have the stories collected together, written and revised over the past 20 years. From familial memory to accessible history, the stories my siblings and I have told and been told our entire lives: all in one place, ready to be shared with anyone.

      __

      By Paul Schorin

      Heritage is a funny sort of thing. It can be evoked with the incantation of pierogi or Lewandowski, or, perhaps, displayed in a museum. Often, it is kept dormant. Sometimes, it is the subject of a school assignment, the verification for an off-color joke, the way to enter a conversation you may not quite belong in. It can be stitched onto your sleeve. Yet, there is no measure of heritage more important than the stories of those who bear it. Celia Ores, my grandmother, does not have the same name she had at birth and lives thousands of miles from her shtetl of Dubienka in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her Polish has been tinged with the accents of other relocated denizens, her neighbors and friends. She makes her kreplach with her strong and aged hands, and she tells the stories that time and place cannot extract from her. Sure, the details may be blurrier, the events that inspired them more distant, but the woman who tells them does her part in maintaining the most important teaching tradition in human history. And, unlike most lessons, the

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