ME AND HISTORY

Here is another passage from my book Stalin, and Other Family, elucidating how history had become my very personal preoccupation. Why strive to put the same substance into a different form, when this passage encapsulates it so succinctly, and so adequately:

“As I was growing up, I naturally wanted to find out more about myself, my family, and my circumstances. I learned from my parents, grandparents, friends, and relatives. Then I discovered the strangest thing. My growing knowledge was both a blessing and a curse... Yes, I claimed to know and understand history. But what I had come to know as history was not what the outside world called history. My life and knowledge did not fit into any history textbook.

“No question, my life was weird. But it was real and I was living it. Then something must be wrong with the textbooks! And then it dawned upon me. The books were politically correct. The truth was not.

“Searching for answers, I had to drop my bib and tucker and to enter naked into the raw sewage of history, poking her unimaginable filth with my rosy finger… Thus history became my life’s preoccupation. I would never call it business, because it was always too personal.”

Several other entries in this small subsection will throw additional light on this theme of “me and history.” I am well aware that the personal element which is getting front and center in this batch, is normally assigned to the Mirror section. But in this case, Lady (History) first!