A
FABULOUS photograph in all senses.
Total
misappropriation on my part. But who could possibly ignore this
couple?! What could I extrapolate from a family (not mine) anecdote?
I
cannot make out the Cyrillic script at the bottom left but on the
right it says Krasnoyarsk.
Ancestry
.. family history .. the ingredients that fall into place each time a
child is conceived .. are not of interest to everyone. Which random
segments of DNA contributed characteristics from a crowd of those who
came before us ―
inherited from which parent or which family line ―
is
of consuming interest to the self-actualized keepers of life's
continuum. These days, certain aspects of social media are
expanding such interest.
My
friend's mother Paule was born about 1913 in Siberia and raised
there. The family may have been of Lithuanian origin; the story is
fuzzy on when-why-how they were in Siberia at the turn of the
twentieth century (deportation by the czarist regime? Voluntary
opportunity for land ownership or improved status?). But it seems her
father married a native Siberian and had several children. The couple
in the photo seem to be Paule's parents.
We
know Paule's father was some kind of provincial official in
Krasnoyarsk. As part of his job he travelled regionally on a regular
basis. The rather suspect
aspect of the
family story says Paule's mother would occasionally stray away
to the steppes in her husband's absence and once had a fling with an
enigmatic wandering Russian. Paule's son insisted his mother looked
very different from her siblings.
From
that, beyond the lifetime of the original storyteller, some of us
have extrapolated yurodivy ―
the "holy fool" of Orthodoxy, a "crazy for God"
ascetic. Less rigorously now, meaning someone outside of and
rejecting conventional social norms. An eccentric who marches to an
altogether different drum with often deliberately provocative
behaviour.
Paule's
parents moved from Siberia to Lithuania, probably in the 1930s. She,
Paule, became a teacher with several languages to her credit. Her
story ended in Canada after tremendous trials during the Second World
War. Some friends believe that Paule's only son inherited the
yurodivy genes. Now deceased, his often erratic or bizarre
behaviour was given the more convenient modern label of atypical
bipolar disorder.
Despite
the above gentleman bearing a superficial resemblance to Rasputin ―
who by many accounts was
a yurodivy
―
he is clearly a married man of some comfortable significance.
Without
the photo, the anecdote is the stuff of exotic daydreaming. With it
... a bit of mysterious substance, if not genealogical evidence.
©
2016
Brenda Dougall Merriman
