DANSING GIRLS

Dear Chloe and Astrid,

Just wanted to tell you about another one of my mementos you will be deciding about when I am gone – whether to keep or do away with. It’s the plate where 8 figures are holding hands in a circle: I call them Dansing Girls.

I got this plate in 1983, when I attended a Peace Conference in Prague, the capital of a country in Eastern Europe then called Czechoslovakia, and now called the Czeck Republic. I was active in the Peace Movement in those days, because the 80s witnessed a nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The period was called ‘The Cold War’ because these two main world superpowers stood for different ideologies: the United States represented Capitalism while the Soviet Union represented Socialism or Communism.

As it happens, my parents had fled from Russia in 1920 as the result of that country’s Communist Revolution of 1917 and subsequent Civil War. The revolutionaries were called the ‘Reds,’ and the counter-revolutionaries were called the ‘Whites.’ Both my parents (my dad and my mom’s dad) had fought on the ‘White’ side of the conflict. Their side lost and they ended up as exiles in Yugoslavia, where they subsequently met, married, and where I was born.

All this to say that as I was growing up, I heard all about the horrors of the Revolution and Civil War. The Russian Empire they had left had become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or Soviet Union. And now that I was an American, my parents’ anti-Communist views were echoed by the constant reference in the media of the Soviet Union as ‘The Evil Empire.’

Just the same, I had experienced World War II in Yugoslavia and Germany, and the threat of a nuclear war worried me. Our family was a member of the Unitarian Church of Staten Island, and they were looking for delegates to an International Peace Conference, which was to take place in Prague, Czechoslovakia. That country, however, was under a Communist regime at the time, and the thought of travelling to a Communist country was pretty scary to me. But I also felt that a mother’s job – and now I had two children – should not be limited to standing over the kitchen stove. Scared or not, I volunteered to be my church’s delegate to the Peace Conference.

My worries were confirmed when our group was not allowed to fly to Prague directly, but had to do so by way of Canada. But we got there safely, and prepared to attend the conference sessions. The first one took place in a large auditorium. I braced myself for boring political speeches I expected to sound like Communist propaganda. Instead, to my surprise, a row of side doors opened up on both sides of the auditorium, and a bunch of kids dressed in Czech national costumes jumped out. To my even greater surprise they sung, IN ENGLISH, “We shall overcome.” That was a peace song I knew very well, and it made me feel at home.

Non-stop sessions on all sorts of topics were organized in smaller rooms in the following days, and I tried to keep up. About 150 countries were represented, and I could understand the speakers in simultaneous translation on my headphones. It was amazing to hear all those people from around the world speak up for peace. I heard women from Scandinavia talk about their trips across the oceans to reach out to people they didn’t know so that we could understand each other instead of fighting. I heard religious people – from all kinds of different religions – insist that spiritual growth could only happen in peace, never in war. I heard an African guy give statistics about military spending: he said that the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, spent more money on making bombs than the income of all of Africa.

Now that I was no longer paralyzed with fear, I even decided to try to talk to some Soviet delegates. After all, I was fluent in Russian, and now was my big chance to use it. I was still nervous about it, given my parents’ Russian history and the ongoing hostilities between our two countries. But the Soviet guys were friendly, and invited me to join their table at dinner time. Some of them, however, seemed cautious – I guess the way I was cautious with them? They ended up joking about it, saying that the only Americans who knew Russian tended to be spies.  ME? A SPY? But the more serious result from our conversations was that they knew that they could not afford the arms race. Didn’t the Americans realize that they could not afford it either? Did they not understand that the money could be better used for human needs?

Time went fast and it was both exhilarating and exhausting to absorb all this new information and new experiences. At some point toward the end of the conference, a French woman I had made friends with and I decided to take a break. To get away from the crowds and the noise we just pushed a door open, and found ourselves in the large auditorium of the big opening session, now empty. We planked ourselves on a seat in the top back row, but after a while realized that we were not alone. All the way down near the elevated platform there was a group of people. Some of them were holding cameras, and one of them was holding a mike. We looked closer, and recognized Yaser Arafat.

Israel and Palestine conflicts dominate our headlines these days, but it was already a hot topic back in the 80s. I had read about Yaser Arafat in our papers as a Palestinian leader and out and out terrorist. I did not know much about the foundation of Israel in 1948 and all the subsequent problems. Maybe that’s why it just struck me as funny at the time that Yaser Arafat was talking into the mike to an empty auditorium.

But all good things come to an end, and it was time to go home. Your grandpa met me at the airport, and later showed me some articles about the conference I had attended. I was shocked. One of the headlines said “Communist-organized so-called Peace Conference.” There had been nothing “so-called” about peace talk at the conference. But the other article he showed me was even worse. It was a photo of Yaser Arafat holding a mike and presented as one of the main speakers at the conference. If I had not just happened to wander into the empty auditorium, I would have assumed, as all the other readers must have done so, that Yasser Arafat was addressing a chock-full auditorium.

And so, my dear Chloe and Astrid, when you hold the plate from Prague in your hands, I hope that the Dansing Girls on it will share their secrets with you: that it is normal to be afraid of the unknown, but that fear can be overcome; that there is a big world out there and people can learn to talk to each other; that you have to figure things out for yourself and question authorities: it turns out that they often lie.