Weekend Memorial Service

This weekend was the funeral service and repast for Lydia Black. Lydia was a local anthropologist who passed away last weekend. She was a grandmother figure to myself and would give me tips on babies, colic, teething, etc... She translated Russian accounts and taught Patrick and locals a great deal about the Russian colonization of Kodiak. Patrick is still chagrined about the time he gave a talk on Alutiiq whaling with Lydia in the audience-she wrote the book on Alutiiq whaling!

Here is a quote from her biography/obituary. (We wanted to put it in italics, but the blogspot won't let us.)


"Lydia was born in 1925 in the Soviet Union. This was a time and place far removed from the American ex-perience. Her family was, before the Revolution, what we Americans would call ‘middle class’ – they were doctors, teachers and engineers. Her “grandmother” wasn’t her biological grandmother – she was, if Lydia-the-child understood correctly, her mother’s fourth cousin; she was the last living member of a branch of the family which had achieved noble rank, and as such, in the Soviet Union, she had nowhere to go but to Lydia’s home. It was Lydia’s grandmother who infused her with stringent standards for personal comport-ment and a respect for the power of knowledge and education. Her grandmother instituted an educational regimen which included two days per week of speaking Russian, two days per week of speaking French and two days per week of speaking German. On Sundays, the family could relax and speak Ukrainian. It was de-creed that Lydia would study English in school. Lydia’s grandmother would take her to the ‘secret church’, hosted by three elderly women – the KGB eventually did arrive to arrest them.

Lydia’s childhood home was maintained by Lydia’s mother Olga, a pedago-gist, who, because of her “bourgeois” credentials, had been assigned work in a hazardous chemical plant. This work entitled the family to one egg, one kilo each of butter and sugar per month. Lydia’s birthday cake was the monthly egg’s yolk beaten to fluffiness with a spoonful of sugar, and even as a successful American academic, her eyes would gleam when she thought of her childhood birthday treat.
Lydia’s father was executed when she was eight years old (the family was never sure if it was because he was a “bourgeois” engineer, the anti-government joke he told at work or his grumbling at a bar about his having “a score to settle” with the government), at which point the Soviet government classified Lydia as an “enemy of the people”. Inadvertently, the Soviet government aided Lydia because by declaring her an enemy of the people, she was forced to maintain straight As from the age of eight on in order to avoid being sent to factory work after the age of 13 – thus, she learned to study assiduously and thoroughly, a handy habit for her adult career.

World War II reached Russia in June, 1941, when Lydia had begun her summer break by staying with her grandfather in the countryside. She made her way back to Kiev, only to have her mother die in a sanato-rium of tuberculosis six months after the invasion. Her grandmother had died several years earlier, and with food hard to come by in the city, Lydia, her aunt and a toddler cousin went into the countryside. Lydia would describe the evening a kindly farmer allowed them to stay in his barn for the night, bringing them each a boiled potato and pickle for supper. Years later, Lydia would laugh and say, “My mouth still waters when I think of a boiled potato and pickle!”


It was in the countryside that Lydia was picked up and conscripted into forced labor for Germany. However, her memories of Germans focused on those Germans who, despite their government’s stated ideology, reached out to help her – the young German soldiers who buried her under their winter field coats when the Gestapo examined papers – she didn’t have any – on the train, the elderly policeman at the train station who, without batting an eyelash, kindly gave her correct directions to reach the safe house address she had been given. She rarely spoke of the drunken German soldier who left three silver dollar-sized scars on her upper arm, the German guard whose displeasure motivated the older women in her labor unit to persuade her to escape in order to save her, and she never spoke of the Germans who conscripted her into forced labor. Her comment on American criticisms of Germans was always, “Americans don’t know what it means to live under dictatorship.”"

Lydia led an amazing life. She came to the US in the 50's, later became professor at Univ. AK Fairbanks.
It is sad to think that Nora and Stuart and I won't be able to go to her house for a visit.