Tag: history

RIFENSTAHL

I just exited the Siskel Center after watching “RIFENSTAHL.” I missed the first screening (with director-in-person) last week, because I hosted the Prairie Postgres User Group at the same time. Today was my only chance to see it, because I am leaving tomorrow and the last screening will be on September 26, before I return. Well, there will be more screenings later, but I will be travelling again, and also – I didn’t want to wait!

I just saw the movie. For the past several months, I was reading my friend’s blog about Riefenstahl’s memoirs, and I wanted to know more, so I queued a couple of books about her in my future reading list. But let me tell you that: it’s one thing to read what she says about herself, and a different thing to hear it, in her own words, with her facial expressions, with her intonations. To see the immense pleasure on her face when she watched the “Triumph of the Will,” conducting the screen music.

Starting with her cynical phrase: The movie was commissioned by Hitler. If Roosevelt were to commission a movie, I would also try my best. If Stalin were to ask me to make a movie for him, I would do my best as well. And all her screams: no, it’s a lie! What people disappear?! There were no such people around me! We didn’t know! No, I didn’t see! And: I would never make a movie about cripples! And isn’t it in all cultures that we admire beautiful bodies?

Oh, and there is footage of how she was making these pictures of Nuba! How she treated them like animals. I will never buy her albums.

Evil, evil, evil. No shades. No “buts”.

Reifenstahl – And I Can’t Make It

It’s just so not fair: Reifenstahl member-only preview is exactly at the time when I host my Postgres meetup! And the regular run is exactly when I will be out of the country!

I hope they will add more screenings later!

Tallinn: The City Museum

I love that more and more city towers are being restored and used as exhibition spaces. We had already visited many of these new museums, and the next one on our list was the one opened in the Kiek-in-de-Kok (Peek into the kitchen) tower. Museum information can be found here.

There are tons of kids’/family activities offered in this museum, and the museum itself is way more than a fortification museum, although a large portion of it is about war and weapons.

Continue reading “Tallinn: The City Museum” →

Overheard On The CTA Bus On January 16

— My son told me yesterday: I want to study Islam. I said: You want to study something six thousand years old? Do you know what day it is today? Go and find out what happened in 1968 and figure out who you are!

From a man carrying all his possessions in a rolling cart talking to another passenger.

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.

The Pawnbroker

In between the two operas, I watched The Pawnbroker, a 1964 film directed by Sidney Lumet. I learned about this movie from one of the kino-websites advertisements related to Lumet’s 100 anniversary. Then it was my usual movie story: I need to find time; the movie is so captivating that I can’t watch it as a background to anything, etc. Actually, after the first ten minutes of watching, I realized that I won’t be able to hit the stop button….

How many Holocaust movies did I watch? Many! How many books? How many photos? A lot, but still, this movie was unbearable to watch even though it shows very little of actual Nazi atrocities. We do not even know the whole story of Sol Nazerman. We only see flashbacks of past events triggered by something happening in the present. Still, it’s striking evidence of unmendable damage done to a human. When I was watching the movie, I physically felt Mr. Naserman’s suffering. I just do not have the right words to describe how I felt. A naked truth. Immense sorrow.

Back To Tallinn

We returned to Tallinn at 8 PM and had a very late dinner at Pepper Sack:

I took the outside photo the next day, at daylight
Moose meatballs
Apple and raisin cinnamon crepes
Sorbet boat
The Holland-style Townhall photo
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The Last Green Valley by Mark Sullivan

If you wonder when I have time to read with everything going on in my life, the answer is that about 70% is listening to audiobooks, and most times, I listen while doing something, whether it is exercising, cooking, folding the laundry, you name it.

The Last Green Valley took me a long time to read, and that was one of the rare occasions when I did a synced reading/listening. I finished it a couple of days ago, and I am still under a very deep impression.

This book is just brilliant! It’s really impressive that somebody who does not have ethnic roots in Ukraine could present this story of struggle and survival with such compassion and understanding. Not a single false note!

The book was one more eye-opener for me – I never viewed these historical events from the perspective of ethnic Germans trying to escape the advancement of the Red Army. Lots of details were completely unknown to me, yet I can see how they fold into the big picture. The whole story sounds completely unbelievable, and it comes as a surprise at the end when you learn that it was based on a true story of a real family. When I hear stories like this, I feel that my own life is completely dull and uneventful. I know I will be thinking about this story for a long time, and possibly I will write more about that book.

Historic House Walk

I only briefly mentioned the Historic House Walk in which I participated on Sunday, and I wanted to show more pictures and tell more about it.

When I moved to Rogers Park, I saw that the Historical Society was just across the street from my house, but at that time, it seemed to be still “closed for the pandemic.” Then, there were so many things going on in my life that although I was still curious about the Rogers Park history, it was just “yet another thing” that I would get to “at some point.”

Then I visited the Historical Society website and realized that they are already doing many interesting things, and I am missing out. I subscribed to their newsletter and finally started to learn about tours and presentations. Most times, it would turn out that the timing does not work for me, but for the Historic House Walk, it worked! I joined the society and paid the fee for the Walk, and on Sunday at noon, I was there!

This year’s House Walk featured several houses in the Peterson Woods (I forgot to mention that the Historical Society covers both Rogers Park and West Ridge).

All the houses were very interesting and worth seeing, but I liked less the houses where the new owners made a lot of renovations, no matter how awesome these renovations looked. I liked it way more when the owners preserved the old windows and trim, opened the covered stained glass, and restored the original tiles.

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Helsinki Day 4

On Thursday, we went to the museum island Seurasaari. I thought we would spend just a couple of hours there, but the weather was nice, and there were plenty of kids’ activities, so we ended up staying there almost until closing (or rather until it started to rain).

I just realized after checking my June blog entries that I didn’t even had time to post about Sauresaari in June, when I visited the museum with Natasha’s family. In comparison with the June visit, there were more open houses, more activities for children, and more food available in the cafe, so the whole visit was even more fun than I expected. I will add some of my June pictures to that post.

The Museum was opened in 1909, and it hosts old buildings from different parts of FInland which are being carefully moved to the island and rebuilt/restored there. In addition, each house contant s gigantic collection on different household objects from the correspnding region/historical period. Also, I love it when you can climb the rocks and smell the pines.

The boat shed
A farmstand
Continue reading “Helsinki Day 4” →