Tag: hettie

How Math Became My Favorite Subject, But Not Right Away

I was a good student from the very beginning of school: my mom, Aunt Kima, and Baba Fania would never allow me to be less than that. However, I didn’t have a favorite subject for a while. I loved books and reciting poetry, so I was always the kid who opened the shows, but other than that, I didn’t have any special talents.

We didn’t have science or social studies lessons until the fifth grade, although I read many popular science books. We started to study Russian history in the fourth grade and botany and geography in the fifth. I immediately fell in love with biology, especially because by then, I had read many books about the wonders of nature, the mysteries of cells, endangered species, and so on.

In the fifth grade, I started to attend academic competitions, which were called olympiads. We had school olympiads, and the winners attended district olympiads, and the winners of district olympiads were sent to the city-wide competitions. All of them took place on the weekends, and having that we had school on Saturdays meant no weekends at all.

My first competitions were in biology, and I easily made it to the city-wide olympiad and easily got a second-degree diploma, finishing the fifth person in my grade level. I remember that I did great in microbiology and almost failed zoology (we didn’t have zoology at school yet, and I didn’t read enough by myself). I could not tell the difference between the black grouse and the wood grouse, could not identify the birds by skeletons, and so on. In the end, the examiner asked me what I wanted to talk about, and I told them what I knew about birds’ migration, and somehow got a passing grade in biology. The last subject was ecology and wildlife protection, and I spoke my heart out and got a top grade. I remember that I was very nervous about not remembering the names of the national parks and the dates they were founded, but my examiner said: please, spare me from the dates and name; tell me what you think about protecting endangered species. And I rocked!

My mom became very nervous about my fascination with biology because all of the craziness with genetics and Lysenko was fairly recent, and she didn’t want me to be in trouble. She started to steer me towards math. I liked math, but not even close to how much I loved biology. Besides, there was a new thread on the horizon – I started to be very interested in history.

How we were taught history in school will be a topic for a separate post, and in any case, we didn’t have any history olympiads – I guess it was dangerous to know too much about history. However, we had olympiads in math, physics, chemistry, and literature, and I participated in all of them.

My mom wanted me to focus on math because it was the only safe subject from her perspective. I was not against math, but I didn’t feel strongly about it. In the sixth grade, I started attending a Youth Math School, an after-school activity hosted at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Leningrad State University. Back then, the Department had yet to move to the out-of-the-city campus, and the classes took place in the old building on the 10th linia of Vasilevsky Island, about 15 15-minute tram ride from my home. Most times, I was the only girl in the class, and I always felt stupid. Our teachers were first- or second-year university students, and they rarely had enough pedagogical skills. The boys pretended they understood all that was said, and sometimes, they could solve complicated problems, and I was barely able to keep up with them. Still, I thought it was cool to come to the University once or twice a week, so I kept coming. In the sixth grade, I participated in the district math olympiad but didn’t make it to the city-wide.

I kept attending the Youth Math School in the seventh grade and still didn’t get any diploma at the olympiad, but I quite unexpectedly made it to the city-wide essay competition, got a second-degree diploma, and was interviewed for a radio show. I suspect that made my mom even more alarmed :), especially because my award-winning essay was about Euguene Schwarts’ plays. It’s not like Schwarts was a forbidden writer, but he never praised the Soviet State and the Communist Party, many of his friends and peers were imprisoned, and the officials silently ignored him.

Fortunately for my mom, things changed when I started the eighth grade.
To be continued.

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

My First River Cruise

One thing I am very thankful to my mom for is that since I was ten, she took me on long tourist trips, which would last for three weeks or even more. I tried to start writing about these tours several times, and each time I thought that I needed to find the photos form these trips, otherwise it doesn’t make much sense to write about them.

But realistically thinking, I won’t have time to search for these pictures for a while, let alone to scan them, so I finally decided to start writing about the trips and add the photos later, whenever I have time to find and process them (most likely, after I retire, but who knows!)

Before I start, I want to say a couple of words about vacation-taking in the Soviet Union.

I know that it was different in the beginning of the Soviet state, but by my time, most people had at least one month of vacation (and some had even more!) Vacation time was strictly about “calendar days,” not “workdays,” so if some public holidays were in the middle of your vacation, they were “lost.”

Since vacations were so long and were taken strictly once a year (in most cases, you couldn’t split it into parts), everyone tried to take them in summer. The parents needed this summer vacation to take their kids “to dacha” (as I already mentioned a couple of times), and others just wanted to have time off work. Since it was not sustainable for everyone in a company to take a month’s vacation in summer, there was a perennial nightmare of scheduling vacations in the beginning of the year and hard limits on how often each person could take a vacation in summer.

What would people do with their vacation month? In most cases, they wanted to get away from the city, and it could be just going to the countryside to visit their relatives or going to a dacha. In many cases, people could use a “trade-union voucher” to go on a tour or to some resort. A local trade union bureau would approve the distribution of the vouchers, selecting “the best workers” and/or “those who needed it most,” and the lucky ones would end up paying 10-20% of the full price.

Unlike most people, my mom usually bought the tours without trade union vouchers, paying the full price because most tours she wanted to go to were not available through the trade union vouchers. She would save money during the whole year to go to new places. For seven summers, from 1973 to 1979, we went on these tours together.

The first one was in the summer of 1973, and it was a relatively short one. We were going to take a “Volgobalt course,” departing from Leningrad and then getting to the Volga River through the system of locks, visiting Yaroslavl – an old city on the Volga River, and then returning back to Leningrad. There were several complications with this trip. First, it started on May 20, which meant my mom had to ask for permission to take me out of school on my summer break ten days earlier (that was not a problem; I was a good student). Second, I was only ten, and and a child had to be eleven to be admitted to the cruise (do not ask, I have no idea why), so my mom had to get permission from the captain of the ship. And the last problem was a force of nature: it was very early in the navigation season, and Lake Ladoga was still covered with ice, so the ship couldn’t get to Leningrad. A couple of days before the departure date, all passengers were given railway tickets to Cheboksary, where our ship was waiting for us.

As far as I remember, there were no organized tours at the stops. We had a full day in Yaroslavl. We disembarked, and my mom and I went to the city and tried to visit as many museums and churches as time permitted. We loved a fairy tale -looking city, and only wished we could stay longer.

I know that I have pictures from this cruise somewhere, and I hope to eventually scan them.

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

Narva-Joesuu

The pine forest was very much like I remembered it, but it looks way healthier now that there are fewer people wandering around.

I also found the house where we rented the rooms for summer! I remembered the address, and I went right there, and I saw the roof of the house from the far, and I couldn’t believe it was that house, but it was! There are just a couple of houses on that street that were not replaced by the new ones sometime within these 50+ years, and that house was one of them!

Continue reading “Narva-Joesuu” →

Mission Accomplished

I didn’t talk much about the main goal of my current trip because it sounded so unrealistic that I didn’t want to jink it. I still can’t believe that I did it! Here is how yesterday went.

We grabbed our brown bag breakfast at reception at 6 AM, went to the railway station, and boarded the 6-46 AM train to Narva. Although I researched in advance what bus we should take and when it was scheduled to depart, we managed to take the wrong bus and ended up in the wrong place. Thankfully, Estonia is small, and you can’t go too far! We were able to hire a private driver who got us to the right place, and shortly after 11 AM, we were at Narva-Joesuu, where I spent three amazing summers when I was a child!

My most important goal was to find the grave of my great-grandfather (the father of Baba Fania, Baba Grunia, and Uncle Misha). He died while vacationing there, and Baba Fania used to take me to his gravesite. I felt like for the past forty years, nobody ever gave a thought to his grave left behind in a foreign country. I mean, I do not feel super-obligated to attend to all the graves of the relatives I never even talked to, but if you care about the ancestors’ graves in general, I would imagine you should be concerned. Anyway, I felt I should at least try. I had nothing but childhood memories of how the place should look like fifty-three years ago, and even though the cemetery is small, it’s not that small – it has been continuously operating, at least since the end of the nineteenth century.

My first walk-thought didn’t yield any result – I remembered the memorial being sort of standing up above the other graves around it. I also remembered it being on the hill and being very light grey. On my second pass, I started almost from the entrance, trying to remember the general direction and adjusting the distances and size to the seven-year-old me. And then I got a feeling. I turned slightly left and back and saw the surrounding chains, and I knew that was it! I was sure the memorial sign didn’t survive – I passed multiple graves with no name on them, but even if there wasn’t a sign, I knew. And then I walked around it, and the sign was there!

Boris waited for me in the main alley, and I ran all across the cemetery to tell him that I found the grave! We walked back together. Unfortunately, there was no service point at the cemetery. I talked to the old couple who were visiting a nearby grave. The husband remembered the last name Levitin, but he said he used to be friends with “a younger guy.” That could be only Uncle Misha, but the name didn’t ring a bell to him. They didn’t share any contact information, so I just asked them to take a look at David Solomonovish’s grave when they came to visit his mother’s grave. Her name sounded somewhat familiar to me as well, but I also can’t put a finger on it. I copied the contact information of the cemetery administration from the board at the entrance, and I will try to arrange some care for the gravesite.

And I found a wild strawberry in the forest by the cemetery – just like I did when I was a child!

To be continued

Helping In The Kitchen

Last week, my granddaughters asked me at what age their mom started to cook and at what age I started to cook. I could not remember when Anna started, although I remember that by the age of nine, both Vlad and Anna were cooking on a regular basis, and we had a schedule of who was making dinner each day.

As for me, the biggest problem was that in order to cook, I had to turn on a gas burner on the stove, and the burners didn’t have ignition. To start the burner, you had to strike a match, turn a gas knob up and move a burning match close to the burner. The scariest part for me was lighting a match. I was scared to scratch the head of the match with a force enough to produce sparkles. My mom was teaching me, and these lessons would end up with me crying and with her yelling at me. I do not remember why and how I overcame this fear, but it was definitely after I turned eight.

Even warming up the food was not that easy because microwaves didn’t exist (at least in our lives), so I needed to use our gas stove to warm up my food after I was back from school. The food would be most often “cutlets” (now I call them “Russian meatballs”) with potatoes or pasta, and I had to warm it up on a skillet, adding some butter so that it wouldn’t get burned and stirring constantly. I remember that for a period of time, my mom left one burner on (on “low”) in the morning so that I could turn it on “high” when I came home from school and warm up my meal. (There were other adults at home, so I do not know what was the deal and why others could not help me). This was supposedly “dinner,” but all this meal naming was a separate story.

Back to cooking. My help in the kitchen while I was limited to some low-skill level tasks. One of the things I was often assigned (and I hated it!) was to “watch the milk.” The unpasteurized milk from the barrel had to be brought to boil, and I had to stay by the stove and watch, and when it started boiling, I had to turn it off. Otherwise, it would “run away.” Of course, I would look aside precisely at the moment when it happened!
Another chore was making mannaya kasha, which pretty much meant stirring non-stop, making sure it was not burned. And another one was potato peeling. It was always done with a knife, and the quality of my work was judged by how cleanly I peeled potatoes and how thin the peel layer was so that the waste would be minimized. More than fifty years later, I am still a potato peeling champion.

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

27

That is another post that I should have written a week ago, and I pretty much wrote it in my head, but that was the day we traveled to Milwaukee, and then life took over.

October 22, 1996, was the day when I (together with Vlad and Anna) came to the US, and our very first day in the US is described here. Last week, Boris and I recalled this day twenty-seven years ago, and I asked him whether he really thought at that time that his life was over. He said that that was the case, which made me wonder for the hundredth time why we were such idiots. Boris disagrees :). He says that we were just uninformed. Possibly, but each time I think about what lies ahead, and each time I think that I’ve planned everything perfectly, I recall how, in the fall of 1996, both Boris and I were so sure that everything important in our lives had happened…

After-School Activities

Thinking about most of my schooling years, I am retrospectively surprised by how little of the cultural events were there. There was almost nothing going on after school. In the third grade, I started to take piano lessons, which our school music teacher was giving. There was one 15-minute lesson a week for the price of 5 rubles (I was giving the money to the teacher at the beginning of each lesson). I neither liked nor disliked it. I thought the girls who played piano were cool, and I wanted to do the same. Nobody forced me to do piano, so it sort of went on until the eighth grade when I didn’t have enough time to do this and stopped. I didn’t play any sports, and I didn’t have any other extracurricular activities until I started to attend theater classes at the nearby House of Culture when I was already in the fifth grade.

I liked reciting poetry, and I was good at it – I still had an excellent memory and didn’t have a problem memorizing long poems and stories, and I enjoyed reciting all these pieces “expressively.” Like many other girls, I wanted to be on stage, but the teacher in the theater class wanted me to do storytelling – he thought I was better at that. Recalling the details, I believe he was a very good teacher, and he took the kids seriously. The core of the class was several extremely talented boys, and it was apparent to me that I was no match, not even close. In contrast to most of the amateur theatrical groups, our’s was constantly looking for talented girls rather than boys, with very intermittent luck.

These classes were no joke. Our teacher spent time with me one-on-one, going through the text. The first time I would start a new story, I had to copy it into my notebook and highlight the most important word in each sentence (and to be ready to explain why this is the most important word). Then, we would go through the text countless times. He said that this stage was not a creative stage but “craftsmanship.” Only after I passed this stage and learned the whole text by heart was I allowed to start adding emotions and other creative elements. I still remember that my best reward was when I saw my teacher laughing after I finished a humorous story at one of the concerts.

All of this, however, was happening in middle school. All the classes were free, and I went to the House of Culture and signed myself up – no parent’s content was required. As for elementary school (from first to third grade), there was nothing for me except for reading after school. Activities like going to museums or theatrical performances were extremely rare. The only “children’s” theaters were two puppet theaters (and it was hard to get tickets for these performances). Museums didn’t have any children’s studios or any kid-centered activities, and things like “children’s museums” didn’t exist. That’s for all this “most cultural nation”…

Most of the weekends (actually, Sundays only, since we had school on Saturdays) included sleeping in, going for some city walks, and almost obligatory visits to my grandfather. As I mentioned earlier, the apartment where my grandfather lived was very far from the city center. It was hard to believe that it was considered to be “within city limits.” The were multiple ways to get there, none straightforward, and all taking about one and a half hours each way. I can’t believe how much time was wasted so reproductively; I didn’t even read on the tram.

My grandfather, with his niece Tamara, who came to visit him from Beslan.

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

Second And Third Grades

It does not look like I have any photos taken during my second grade. It could be partially because my mom was a lot into the home movies at that time. In fact, pretty much all home movies I have were filmed in 1971 – 1973 (See here, here and here).

When I was in the second grade, I started to develop myopia, and for some reason (although everybody in the family wore glasses), it was a world-class tragedy. The ophthalmologist wanted to try some new methods on me. I do not know what was the logic behind these methods, but both of them were essentially building more obstacles :). The first was that when I was reading or writing, I had to wear bifocal glasses, which had “plus” instead of “minus” on the bottom. I believe that the idea was that I would “try harder” and my vision would become better, which obviously just made things worse.

Another torture was of the opposite kind. Three times a week, I had to come to the ophthalmologist’s office and spend twenty or thirty minutes staring at the table for vision checking while wearing more “minus” than I needed. Again, I think that this way, I was supposedly “training” my eyes “to try harder.” It took a lot of time from my life (fortunately for my mom, she didn’t have to take me there; the doctor’s office was on the same street where I lived, but still, I remember how annoyed I was by the fact that I had to waste this time and by the torture itself).

Other than that, my life was pretty dull. I walked to school in the morning, walked back home at 1 PM or 2 PM depending on whether I had English class on that day, warmed up my late lunch, did my homework, which sometimes was very time-consuming and always boing, most times (unless I would forget), I did my chores, which included watering the house plants, dusting the surfaces and sweeping the floor in our room (if you already lost the context, mom and I shared a room in an apartment where my father’s family lived). I also had to shine my boots, because mose of the year, the weather outside required boots.

Whatever free time I had, I spent on reading. During my elementary school years, my mom started to attend different evening classes, and as far as I remember, she had something almost every evening. I remember that one year, she studied French, and another year, she studied German (I do not think she succeeded much in any of these languages, but she tried). Also, she was attending sewing classes and knitting classes. I was quite happy to be left “unattended,” and spent all this time reading. The bulk of my reading was Alexander Dumas, Fenimore Cooper and Walter Scott, with occasional Conan Doyle.

Good books, or just decent books were difficult to get, you could not buy the books you wanted in the bookstores, and you could not get the books you wanted in the library. Since my aunt worked in the publishing house, she had access to the “special” library, which is why I had a chance to read “The Lost World” and “Pippi Longstoking” (do not ask why the latter one was also “a deficit.” )

For a while, we only had one TV set in the apartment, which was placed in the “dining room” (actually, one of two rooms where my aunt and my great aunt lived). Sometime in the early 70s, my mam got a chance to purchase a TV just for us, so we could watch it in the evenings sitting on her sofa. She also got earphones (probably form work), and sometimes she watched something when I was already asleep, or at least was supposed to be asleep).

The radio (combined with the vynil disk player) was located by my mom’s bed, and one of our Sunday morning activities included listening to the “Good Morning!” show while still in bed. I know it is hardly possible to believe that there were times when I would get out of bed way past 9 AM!

A couple of pictures from 1973 that I could find!

Continue reading “Second And Third Grades” →

Elementary School In The Soviet Union, 1

With this post, I am starting a series of “what were the schools like” in the Soviet Union, mostly for my grandchildren’s benefit.

***

Schools in the Soviet Union used to be way more uniform than in the United States. That’s why, although I describe the schools I attended, most things were the same no matter where in the Soviet Union the school was. The situation started to change rapidly during Perestroika, but until then, things remained remarkably unchanged.

Though the title of this post says “Elementary,” the concept of “elementary” was rather abstract. Except for rural areas and some specialized schools, a school would host all grades from first to tenth, and unless somebody moved (which didn’t often happen in the Soviet Union), you would be together with the same thirty classmates for five to six hours a day six days a week for ten years!

The majority of schools were what is called “zoned” schools in the US, meaning that you have to live within certain boundaries from the school to be able to attend it, and most times, there was no choice.
My situation was slightly different because the school nearest to me was a “specialized school with in-depth learning of English.”

This fact created an interesting disposition because the school had to take all the kids who lived nearby, but also, somehow, the kids who lived further away could get in through an interview. After Perestroika, the entrance exams to elementary school became common, but in the Soviet Union, these were uncommon and, if I get it right, sort of “unofficial.”

Unfortunately, my mom is not a source of reliable information anymore, and she can’t tell how exactly it worked. I remember she took me to an interview several months before school started, and I know she was anxious that they might not take me because I could not pronounce the “r” sound.

I do not remember the questions the interviewing commission asked me, but it was an easy conversation. Once again, I can’t tell why I had to go through the interview. There were several kids from “troubled families” in my class and some from “working-class families” whose parents were unlikely to care about what school their kids were attending.

In the first grade, our curriculum was identical to that of all the first grades n the Soviet Union. We attended school six days a week, and we had four periods each day. Three periods were always the same, reading, writing, and math. And for the fourth period, we had PE twice a week, “labor” (that weird subject included anything done “by hands” mostly crafts; do not ask me why “labor”), art (drawing) once a week, and music (singing) once a week. The order of periods differed each day: all three core subjects were taught by our room teacher, and different teachers taught the other three, so we had to fit into their schedules.

The classes started at 9 AM. Each period was 45 minutes, and the breaks were either ten or twenty minutes (“long breaks”). One of the long breaks was a lunch break. For the first graders, it was from 10-40 to 11 AM. While in elementary school, we didn’t have the option to choose what to have for lunch, and as far as I remember, we didn’t have an option NOT to have lunch. At the same time, lunches were not free. Each of us had to bring one ruble on Monday that covered that week’s lunches. Our teacher would call each of us to her desk in the morning, and each of us had to come up and give her that one ruble, and she would make a note in her list. I remember that once, a student gave her a ruble torn into two pieces, and I remember her yelling at him.

It was always a hot lunch, but the quality of it was relatively poor, as with almost all of the “public catering” in the Soviet Union. Surprisingly to Americans, milk was not a part of that lunch. Middle-schoolers had an option of buying their snack, which included milk and pastry, and we all could not wait for this option to become available. We barely ate this lunch; we would all go home at 1 PM and eat lunch there, so it’s not like it was so necessary.

The school was less than ten minute’s walk from my house, but I had to cross the street (not at the intersection), so my mom was very anxious about it. I even remember how she taught me to ask “an adult” to help me to cross. The short way to get to my school was through the passage yard, and the entrance was almost in front of our building; that’s why I was crossing not at the intersection. To be honest, there was no significant difference since the rules of the road were loosely obeyed by all parties.

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

Elementary School In the Soviet Union: My Notebooks

I plan to write a series of blog posts about school, similar to the series I wrote about the university. I do not have as many pictures from my school years as I would need to illustrate everything I am going to write about, but I have a lot of my school notebooks saved by my mom.

I have two of my very first notebooks in storage, and I will scan them at some point in the future, but I didn’t want to wait until this future came, so here are several others.

All of them are from my first grade. There was no Kindergarten class at school, and I already described our Kindergarten education when I blogged about my detsky sad. What I started in September 1970 was a first grade; whatever was before was not considered school.

The name of this notebook is the Russian language. That’s what “writing” was called. In the first grade, our parents signed our notebooks.

Our notebooks were not at all like nowadays notebooks. The cover was made of thin paper, ad there were only twelve pages in each, We had six notebooks circulating at any given time: two for the Russian language, two for math, and two for penmanship. At the beginning of the lesson, you would turn in your notebook with your homework and pick up your other notebook with your yesterday’s homework graded by your teacher. You would do your classwork in that notebook, then do the homework in the same notebook, and the process would be repeated the next moring.

That’s classwork for May 12. I got “five” for it, which is the equivalent of an A
That’s the homework for May 19. I got “four,” which is equivalent to B. The mark is down because I made one correction.
Continue reading “Elementary School In the Soviet Union: My Notebooks” →