Within the first few weeks of coming to site, I asked around as much as I could about the history of my village. Stating the obvious, I wanted to get an idea of where I was living and entertain my interest in local history. I heard that there was a Jewish population here and that almost all had perished in Dubasari except for a few that later moved to Moscow or the States. My landlady told me that there was an old cemetery. Every weekend I take a walk in a new direction. In January and February, I hoped I'd come across the old cemetery on my random excursions. I asked my landlady a couple of times about it, not trying to seem too interested (why is this American girl so interested in this?) She kept on saying it was in the center of town and that she would show me where. The weather finally got a little nicer, and one day after cleaning up her husband's grave at the public cemetery at the top of the hill, she took me home by the path that crosses the old cemetery.
This is it? I'd passed here a dozen times and it never struck me as anything significant. Maybe a house or a church used to stand here, hence the what appeared to look like stone foundations. Since then, what looks like it could be an excellent sledding hill (about 2 acres in size) has been communal poultry prairie and garbage burning space.
When I finally stepped onto the property, I kind of felt like an idiot for not recognizing that the stone blocks were gravestones before. I'd guess that there are roughly three to four hundred of them, of which only five or six have any visible markings or appear anything like they originally were. History is hard on Ukraine. I've noticed this at the regular cemetery too, even gravestones that are only forty years old are well worn.
A tomb now used as a pit for burning garbage.
The best preserved stone.
You can understand why I didn't recognize it at first, right?
Do we have an obligation to cleanup and preserve this space? The American perspective would be a definite yes. I'm sure I could contact a local JCC and get the funds for at least an aesthetic sprucing of the "park." But what is the Ukrainian view? I'm afraid to go into this debate because I'm not sure if I did I'll never come out of it. I will comment on snapshots I've received in the past months.
Ukrainians cherish their lives. Their lives are their memories. I have yet to meet anyone in my village that owns something that came from a previous generation. There are no old pieces of furniture or photographs, at least not from before The Great Patriotic War. To make a terribly flawed argument, what is retained as a family's identity is passed down orally (hence I really want to do an oral history project!!). Another family's history is of no significance to a person who is unrelated. Hence, when one visits a cemetery, it is very easy to tell which of the deceased still have loved ones living. The gravestones that don't have a living relative in close proximity are beaten by the elements and barely recognizable as miniature forests of weeds surround them.
The gravestones that have been untouched for years, just as the Jewish cemetery, are little reminders of once was. In a few generations, they will be completely forgotten and become part of the environment; indistinguishable cycles of nature.
Yes, this is frustrating when you see the process occurring. I want to "save" what is left. I want a monument. The Jewish cemetery is a perfect example of one of the most difficult of paradoxes for me to understand in my little Ukrainian village. For a society that is so obsessed with the past, nostalgic for something that may not have existed; why are such obvious elements left behind or poorly maintained for future generations? For one, there are so many of them. I wish there was a way to quantify how many spaces like this exist in Ukraine. A specific example as to not taking care of the past that only I and my mother would cringe at is that my landlady finally put her family photographs into albums. I loved looking at the photos. I have a pretty good sense of time and era, and when I looked at the photos I guessed that they were from the thirties or forties. Wrong, the photos were from the seventies. They had oxidized. So to much of my horror, my landlady was putting them into albums with glue that just screamed "acidity." And THEN, when she pointed to a family member, she would rub her index finger all over the image, thus spreading oil and further giving me reason to believe that her grandchildren won't get to enjoy the photographs. Okay, looking back on this paragraph I realize how little sense the sequencing makes. Main point: what I've been raised to cherish and preserve is not the same as what my Ukrainian counterparts have been told to believe.
Just like the library books that are near extinction, I've got to let go of what was. I can scan some images here and there. I can take photos of old gravestones. I can't express my dogmatic impulse to freeze the twentieth century. It's not why I'm here.
