Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Story of a Metal Box

2022; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 96; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2022.0010

1945-8134

Nina Kossman, NL Herzenberg,

National Identity and Symbolism

Story of a Metal Box Nina Kossman (bio) Translated by NL Herzenberg (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution PHOTO PROVIDED BY NINA KOSSMAN A family’s history, Soviet history, and the role of a father’s stamp collection. Do you see this little metal box? It was surely unusual for its time—just look at all these stamps of countries whose names, in the Soviet Union, were synonymous with the forbidden “West.” On the top there is a stamp of the Netherlands, and on the sides are stamps of Italy, Denmark, Sweden, West Germany (Deutsche Bundespost), Repubblica di S. Marino, and so forth. I remember seeing it in my earliest childhood. It came into my parents’ possession after the war, when my father, who had spent his youth in pre–World War II Latvia, became a Soviet citizen by chance. In this case, “by chance” is my way of referring to Latvia’s annexation by the Soviet Union, which certainly wasn’t “chance”—it [End Page 16] was politics, and politics is always someone’s meticulous, even if delusional, plan. But in the life of my father, whose parents took him and his little sister to independent Latvia as they were escaping from revolutionary Moscow in cattle cars, it was “chance” that brought him back to Moscow and that made him a Soviet citizen. He and his sister were the only members of their whole family to survive the Holocaust, simply because they were not there at that time: she had been living in London, and my father had escaped from Riga to Russia a couple of days before the Nazis came. After the war my father started corresponding with his sister, at great risk to himself, because in those years a Soviet citizen was not allowed to have relatives abroad, let alone correspond with them. Later, after Stalin’s death, my English aunt and her husband came to the USSR every year, not so much to visit my father as to be in the land they loved. Not having experienced communism on their own skin, they liked the Soviet way of life so much they referred to themselves as “pink,” that is, almost—but not quite—“red,” as was the fashion among British “fellow travelers” of the time. But to get back to the little metal box with pictures of stamps from those exotic Western countries a Soviet citizen could visit only in his dreams. This box must have come from my English aunt, just as another metal box I remember from my earliest childhood, the one decorated with pictures of equally exotic English sweets. I haven’t seen that other box since our departure from the Soviet Union in June 1972. When I was five, we spent two summer months in Asari, a Baltic resort near Jūrmala, Latvia. My brother and I spent our days at a beach, collecting amber washed onto the shore. We walked barefoot on wet sand and pebbles, and every time we found a small piece of what looked like amber, we put it into that other metal box, the one with pictures of English sweets. By the end of our stay, the English box for exotic sweets was filled with exotic amber. If you held a piece of amber in your hand and looked at it closely, you could see a dark sun playing inside it. Sometimes I wonder if I’m confusing the summer in Asari with the summer in Svetlogorsk—I was five in Asari and four in Svetlogorsk. Both were on the Baltic coast, and perhaps it was in Svetlogorsk that my brother and I were collecting amber on the shore. My father stayed in Moscow, so it was just our mama taking care of the two of us. I remember that every day, at three, she took us to someone’s house, where there was a long table with many people sitting at both sides of it. We ate dinner (Russian obed is a midday meal) with rhubarb, my father’s favorite dish. Alas, I was such a slow eater in those days that we had to stay there long after everyone was gone and...