Little Facts Paint a Big Picture

**A Soviet propaganda poster extols the virtues of Birobidzhan, the first autonomous Jewish state of the 20th century.**

Throwing around big facts is easy.

In April of 1928, five hundred and four families, and one hundred and fifty single people made the trek out to the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR), located on the border between Russia and China, and advertised as the first independent Jewish state of the 20th century, where they could finally be free of anti-Semitism and violent pogroms, while being free to speak Yiddish, publish Jewish newspapers, and build their own society, under the benevolent watch of Josef Stalin.

By May of 1928, two-thirds of those migrants left to return home.

In 1935, an additional eight thousand people arrived. This time, they were forbidden by law from leaving.

During World War II, the Soviet Union lost over twenty-seven million people, military and civilian. Out of the almost six million prisoners of war from the USSR, more than half died in German POW camps. As the Soviet Union was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention, their prisoners could be treated much more harshly than American and other Western ones. Though they were sometimes housed in the same camps, the Soviet side often had no heat or running water, as well as even more sparse food rations.

Those are the big facts. But when I set out to write My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region—which takes place in both the JAR and a Nazi prisoner of war camp—I knew that it was the little facts that would make the story and, more importantly, the characters who lived it, feel real.

Life in the USSR during the 1930s was an exercise in paranoia and double-speak. Meetings entitled samokritika, literally “self-criticism,” were held so that people could expose sins committed by their neighbors.

Felix announced, “It has been brought to my attention that some members of our community don’t believe we offer them enough food.”
Regina’s head jerked up. Surely, Felix wasn’t referring to her telling him Georgetta, Agneska, and Marta approved of her proposal to plant more because that would mean more to eat? She’d meant it as an example of how complimentary they were. Why was Felix twisting their words into a criticism?
“Would those members care to stand up and identify themselves?”
There wasn’t a mad rush to do so. Regina felt her cheeks turning a brighter and brighter scarlet. Anyone looking her way would be able to tell this was her doing. They’d never believe she hadn’t meant it to happen. Regina didn’t dare look at her roommates. Not if it meant seeing the inevitable betrayal in their eyes.
“It was me.” The voice that spoke up didn’t belong to Marta, Agneska, or Georgetta. It was a voice Regina had never heard before. “I did it.” An elderly woman, her cheeks so sunk in Regina could see the missing teeth along her lower gums, rose with great difficulty.
“You’re dissatisfied with what the state provides for you?” Felix asked, almost politely.
“We’re hungry,” the woman blurted out.
“So why do you not work harder?” He sounded so reasonable, so helpful.
“My husband went to his grave, digging in your fields. How much harder can we work?”
“My fields?” Now, confusion was the order of the day. “These are our fields. The effort we put in is the crop we take out. Are you suggesting the workers of Amerzut are slacking? Are you accusing us of deliberately starving you?”
“There’s never enough to eat,” she insisted stubbornly.
“Because of you!” Felix’s voice unexpectedly jumped two decibels, and Regina’s heart along with it. He’d gone from calm to irate in the blink of an eye. “You are faulting us for your own failure. You are saying we don’t provide for the people, when it is the people’s job to provide. Any lack can be traced back to those who complain of it. If you saw, why did you not step in to fix it? And if you did not step in to fix it, then you are the one who caused it!”
Felix’s turning the accusation back on the person who’d cited it, unleashed a floodgate of pent up emotion from his audience. A half dozen more people leapt from their seats, shouting they’d witnessed the woman deliberately hoarding food for her own use, they’d seen her husband doing the same; he hadn’t died, as she claimed, working in the fields, but sneaking out of town to sell his stolen wares. The chorus of voices was quickly joined by others, pointing their fingers at a new crop of wrongdoers. He was deliberately slowing down work, claiming back pain! She complained about being asked to haul water from the well, using pregnancy, a natural and healthy condition expected of all loyal women, as an excuse! Those children failed a history exam, willfully rejecting the education of the state!

Even science can be turned on its head if it doesn’t fit the current political winds:

Regina waited for Felix to open the floor to new business before she raised her hand and stood up, conscious of being the center of attention, aware she was enjoying it though she knew she shouldn’t. She said, “When I was at University in Moscow,” she put that in to make herself sound important, though she knew she shouldn’t. “We studied the work of Trofim Lysenko. With Comrade Stalin, they have modernized Soviet agriculture along the principles of Marxism. As a Socialist environment shapes a man, it shapes animals and plants. Comrade Lysenko advises we put seeds into freezing water. In this manner, they grow accustomed to the cold and can be planted at any time of the year. Furthermore, seeds produced from that first, cold-resistant crop, retain the memory of their forebears, and don’t need to be treated again in order to continue the successful pattern. Following his philosophies, Comrade Lysenko promises we will soon be able to group any crop anywhere, even oranges in Siberia!”
“Nonsense.” A voice boomed from the back. Regina didn’t need to turn to know who it was. “Such logic is the equivalent of saying stabbing a woman in the eye causes her to give birth to a blind child.”
“Comrade Kramer,” Felix smiled at the interruption. “You are an expert in genetics? You purport to know more than the USSR’s top agronomist?”
“I know what happened when his theories were implemented in the Ukraine.”
The Holodomor, again. Regina remembered what Felix told her months ago about Aaron using lies regarding how that famine came about to discredit any policy he disagreed with.
“So you, like the American scientist, Hermann Mueller, believe our lives are run by utter random, natural selection? You deny the Marxist-Leninist principle of revolutionary biologic development? Mr. Mueller and his fruit flies were graciously invited to defend themselves at the Leningrad Institute of Genetics. He was sent packing in disgrace after Comrade Lysenko proved his Darwinism to be capitalist, imperialist facism. The West deliberately pushes their false theory of gradual change to keep the USSR from out-producing them and demonstrating the superiority of our Soviet system. We know evolution can be manipulated to create a superior result. We can do it with man, we can do it with animal, we can certainly do it with seed.”

“Show not tell” is the maxim every writer lives and dies by. Rather than merely telling about what life was like in the USSR, I opted to show it. And, in order to do that, I needed to include as many small details as possible in order to form a larger picture.

I wrote about the GAZ-A automobile:

Regina had seen similar models in Moscow. Rumors circulated that its design was based on the Americans’ Model A and it was being produced in partnership with the plutocrat Ford Motor Company, using their foreigner-manufactured parts. Pravda had recently reassured readers this was nonsense. The USSR was capable of designing and assembling their own automobiles, made of their own parts. If anything, the resemblance was the result of the criminal Henry Ford looting Soviet blueprints. Soviet technology, developed in the spirit of cooperation, was decades ahead of anything devised through competition. How could progress happen when men worked for their own interests rather than the common good?

About the “blutwurst” Germans served their prisoners, a sausage made of congealed animal blood that had to be eaten cold. Warming it up made it melt into a clotty blob.

And about Order #227, also known as Not One Step Backward, which decreed any Soviet troops who retreated from battle were to be mowed down by blocking detachment units stationed behind their own lines to shoot men acting in a cowardly fashion.

I included details about Geary Street in San Francisco, CA, which, in the 1980s, due to the multitude of Soviet immigrants moving there was nicknamed “Geary-Basovskaya” after a similar street in Odessa, Ukraine, “Dearybasovskaya.”

These are all little things. That, together, I hope, tell a big story.