Читать книгу The Dwelling Place of Wonder - Harry L. Serio - Страница 10

Natalia Grauberger stood with her monogrammed leather luggage in front of Castle Clinton at the foot of Manhattan. She had completed an arduous sea voyage that began in the Black Sea port of Sebastopol after leaving her native Czaritzyn. Across the New York Bay, many of her co-voyagers were being processed through immigration at Ellis Island, but Natalie had traveled first class, enjoyed conversation with the captain, and dined at his table. She stood alone with the bags her father had crafted for her in his leather factory, waiting to begin a new life in a new world. A proud woman, she was grateful that she did not have to undergo the often demeaning process that awaited the steerage passengers on the isle of hope and tears.

She came to America with an offer of marriage from Mr. Ellenberger, from the same Volga-German community in which she had been raised, only to learn that Mr. Ellenberger had tired of waiting and had married another. It did not take long for her to be noticed by another Volga-German, a tall, handsome farmer from Saratov who had found a new occupation as a weaver in this wonderful land of opportunity.

My grandparents, Lucas and Natalie, were descendants of industrious German farmers that Catherine the Great invited to settle in new lands that had been added to the Russian Empire. Catherine wanted to show the Russians how hard work, technological skill, and a strong sense of community could produce abundant crops in the region around the Volga River. It didn’t take much to persuade these Germans to leave their homes in Anhalt, the Palatinate, Hesse, Mannheim, and Schleswig-Holstein. In the two hundred years since the Protestant Reformation, Europe had been devastated by wars. The Seven Years War of 1756–1763 was the last straw. Louis XV had sent his troops into southwestern Germany to lay waste to the land and completely destroy the infrastructure. Poverty, enforced servitude in the military, heavy taxation, and religious persecution made living conditions intolerable. While many of these Palatine Germans found their way to America and joined existing communities, most notably the “Pennsylvania Dutch,” some thirty thousand accepted the Empress’ invitation to move eastward. The carrot at the end of the stick came in the form of large tracts of land available for purchase, freedom from taxation and military conscription, religious freedom and a measure of self-determination, and financial assistance in establishing their communities.

For more than a century these Volga-Germans endured hardships, Cossack raids, burning and pillaging, but they continued to prevail and even to flourish. By the latter part of the nineteenth century their numbers exceeded 1.7 million. Some, like Natalie’s parents, actually managed to rise in the ranks of the upper middle class so that their children could receive a good education and enjoy the fruits of their labors.

However, a “Russification” process had begun under Czar Alexander in 1874, and the emigration of Volga-Germans to the American frontier had begun. The first decade of the twentieth century brought many changes. The dark clouds of unrest began to gather and the four horsemen of the apocalypse were saddling their steeds, ready to bring war, famine, pestilence, and death to Mother Russia and to the rest of Europe. Those who could see these portents and had the resources followed the earlier émigrés to America. Many who had endured the turmoil of previous periods of persecution or depression felt they could weather whatever storm might appear. They would be terribly wrong.

So in 1910 Natalie left her father and mother and her ten brothers and sisters and made the journey down the Volga to the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic.

Lucas and Natalie were married and bought a house on Bremen Street in a German-speaking section of Newark, New Jersey. The two-story, four-room dwelling was one of hundreds built in the 1880s in the “Down Neck” area of the city, later to be called “the Ironbound” because it was surrounded by rail lines. The houses all looked the same, like a lineup of houses on a Monopoly board. In these four small rooms—kitchen, front parlor, and two bedrooms—Lucas and Natalie raised their son and three daughters.

After the death of my grandfather in 1954 and my parents’ divorce, my mother, my two brothers, and I moved into 89½ Marne Street. It was during this time that I heard the stories of life in Imperial Russia.

Natalie had a picture of the imperial family—Nicholas and Alexandra, and their children, Marie, Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, and Alexei. She would bring it out and grieve over their deaths at Ekaterinburg. What a handsome man, she would say of Nicholas, and such beautiful children. I found myself falling in love with Grand Duchess Tatiana and wondering what it would have been like to live in St. Petersburg.

Dreams have a way of distorting reality. They often leave out the dark side, the unpleasantness that mars one’s reverie. St. Petersburg native, Svetlana Boym, refers to nostalgia as a “hypochondria of the heart.” It is a yearning for a time that never was, a false memory that becomes a reality of our own design because we choose not to face the truth.

Natalie had a yearning for her homeland and the family she left behind. She would not speak about the misery of the Russian peasants, virtual slaves of the aristocracy, and the horrors of their menial existence. The massacres of the Jews in the many pogroms that occurred were not part of her consciousness, nor did she speak of the great famine of 1891 that affected the area of the Volga where she lived when she was six years old.

Natalie was upper middle class, a privileged element of Russian society that would lose everything in the coming revolution. She was fluent in seven languages: German, Russian, Ukranian, Polish, Dutch, English, and Farsi. I asked her why she spoke Farsi. “We had Persian servants,” she said. “We had to tell them what to do, and they would teach us their language.”

Her father not only made luggage, but crafted fine footwear. He made ballet slippers for one of the tsar’s daughters and leather boots for the imperial household. She recalled going with her father one day to make a delivery and encountering a strange looking man emerging from the palace. It was none other than the mad monk, Grigori Novykh, known to history as Rasputin.

Natalie said that he was frightening to behold, and she backed away so fast that she nearly stumbled. He stared at her briefly with penetrating eyes that she never forgot. It was a peculiar brush with history. Rasputin had bewitched the tzarina, who had hoped that he might affect a cure for her hemophiliac son, Alexei, but Rasputin simply used the imperial connections to influence Alexandra who ruled in Nicholas’ absence while he was administering the military forces in the Great War.

There are those who regard Rasputin as a mystic and saint, a holy man, a “starets” who put aside the things of this world to concentrate on praying for the salvation of those souls who still lived here.

He was far from a devout servant of Christ. He lived a life of excess and debauchery, engaging in the wildest of carnal delights, using the rationale that salvation can only come through repentance, but before one can repent one must first sin. Even Martin Luther, whose confessor advised him to “sin boldly,” knew that one “must believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly.” Rasputin bestowed his blessings upon those aristocratic noblewomen who acceded to his spiritual distortions, without offering the blessing that comes from the life of faithful devotion to Christ.

Rasputin was reputed to be a psychic, not only in his ability to heal by therapeutic touch, but he was also a seer who predicted his own death. He once said that if he should die at the hands of a Romanov, the entire dynasty would crumble within two years. When he was poisoned, shot, and drowned by Prince Felix Yussoupov, the murder of the imperial family occurred within two months.

Natalie would never forget how close she came to this personification of evil and always referred to him as the one responsible for the fall of Imperial Russia.

Evil has many disguises, but is most dangerous when it comes in the form of one who pretends to be holy. While I have known a few fallen servants of God, those who deliberately cloak themselves in the cloth of the religious to carry out their nefarious aims are the most despicable.

It seemed that Natalie’s encounter with the mad monk had left a very deep impression. It also taught me to be wary of latter day “messiahs” who use religion to attain power, wealth, and influence and often misdirect it for their own personal and political gain.