Memento mori

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I’d like to have my papers in order when I die. It’s about sparing my loved ones, of course. (Or is it actually to tidy me up? Didn’t our mothers say you should change your underwear, just in case you landed in an accident?) So I’ve been making periodic stabs this year at the journals, files, boxes of research, projects in their various stages. I got rid of that pile of index cards on which I traced the chronology of a man about whom I was tempted to write a biography (a better one than existed, I mean). I dumped a few folders of articles I’d clipped that, seriously, I will never use. I transcribed a year of diary.

Alexander Nevsky Monastery cemetery, St. Petersburg

Lately, the call to review and pare seems urgent. But sometimes I’ll be struck by the fear that thinking about death and acting in this anticipatory way is some kind of signal that it’s just around the corner. Continue reading →

The brief and somewhat inarticulate version of our tour to Russia

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The peal of bells, then a choir of men’s voices… Blessed art Thou, O Christ our God…. Voices that rise and fall with the text, with the melody. Gorgeous harmonies.

Our wonderful local Mennonite men’s choir? Close, if you mean the ache and beauty of the sound, but no, definitely not. It’s the monks of the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra and the Moscow Theological Schools, singing hymns of the Russian Orthodox Church. I’m listening, as I write, to the CD; we were given it as a bonus when we paid a tiny fee to photograph inside the churches at Sergiev Posad, the place considered the heart of Russian Orthodoxy. Continue reading →

The thrill of the chase

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Anne Konrad’s parents were among those Mennonite refugees who managed to leave the Soviet Union in 1929, but most of her uncles and aunts were not. Over the past twenty years, Konrad, a writer living in Toronto, has been searching for and documenting the fates of relatives who stayed behind. She combed through old letters and documents, tramped around areas where her parents had lived, visited members of the extended family in various parts of the (eventually former) Soviet Union, and most dramatically, gained access to the police files of the trials and executions of her uncles. Continue reading →