Page 11 - February 2021

STORY OF A METAL BOX
STORY OF A METAL BOX
STORY OF A METAL BOX

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 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 to 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’, i.e. 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 Yūrmala, 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, and 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, and where we ate dinner

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litterateur February 2021