Old Music

When I was almost ten, my parents moved into a spanking new house in the suburbs of Winnipeg. The neighbourhood was stuffed with young families and we had many a mud fight in between the mounds of construction gumbo. I learned the hard way that the pink insulation might be great for bouncing, but not so good for bare skin. There was a real comradery amongst the neighbours…we’d all moved in about the same time…and I was happy. Of course, there was the issue of my parents being German, and some kids called them Nazis. My friends were scared of Dad when he marched down the street hollering for me at sunset. His broad accent and his military strictness sometimes hid the loving, soft father that I knew.

 

A favorite place in that new home was the rec room Dad built. In the rec room we had a record player and while the rest of my friends were buying Beatle and Monkey records, I was discovering my dad’s old German 78s. (Our family belonged to a fundamentalist church and any kind of rock music was considered sinful. Yes, sad but true. That’s a whole other story.)

I played those old German songs over and over. Tangoes, seranades, operettas, folk music, songs of yearning…songs filled with Sehnsucht.  I organized them, catalogued them and secretly danced to them. My parents were too busy working, cleaning, growing tomatoes, playing crokinole, or fishing to listen to the old music. I inhaled it. Then one day, I accidently stepped on a pile of them and for years I couldn’t hear them anymore, but they played on in my mind.  Now, with YouTube they are so easy to find and I can’t keep a good thing to myself.

I’ll start with the ever-popular song, Lili Marlene. It was made famous in 1938 by the singer, Lale Anderson. The lyrics, however, were written during the First World War in 1915 by Hans Leip—schoolteacher and conscripted soldier. The name, Lili Marlene, is a combination of two of his female friends. Norbert Schultze created the melody in 1937. It’s kind of interesting how it took more than twenty years for a simple poem to become a song. And then, when it was released, not too many paid attention. By 1941, less than a thousand copies had sold. But then, Radio Belgrade—which broadcast to soldiers on duty—took a fancy to it and the song took off. After some wrangling with a reluctant Goebbels, it became the signature sign-off song when the station retired at ten every night.

In 1942, the British discovered the song and Lale Anderson released an English version.

The song reached even more troops when Marlene Dietrich recorded it in 1944 for the American Office of Strategic Service as part of the Allied propaganda effort to discourage German soldiers.

An amazing song. An incredible time. I like Lale Anderson’s version best. Her voice is beautiful. But here’s Marlene Dietrich, with her rendition. It’s an evocative song, either way. And when I was twelve years old, down in the new rec room in suburbia, it made me cry, made me dance, and filled me with Sehnsucht for a time and place I couldn't grasp. 

The Canadian Dream and my Russian friend

As Canadians we have a pretty high opinion about our country…especially when it comes to accepting immigrants. So it’s kind of a shock to me, that a friend is packing it in and returning to her home country, Russia, after almost two years of struggle. She says that yes, Russia is more corrupt and less free than Canada. But, in Russia she can work in her chosen career. She’s had it with scrubbing toilets and barely scraping by. It’s a sad story and unfortunately, her story is not unique.

As a child of immigrants, myself, I know how hard my parents worked to give me the life that they couldn’t have. For a while, my dad was a fix-it guy and my mom worked in a potato chip factory. But they'd had no chance to get a higher education.  It’s different for children. Kids absorb the language and lifestyle in schools. Later, with job training, they automatically get the ‘correct’ paper work, to enter a career of their choice. 

For the older, highly-skilled immigrant however, Canada is often not paradise. It’s often menial labour, financial struggle, and later, sadly, the feeling of being ostracized by their own culturally-adjusted children.

It takes courage to come to a new country as an adult. Immigrants like my friend arrive in our country with a sense of optimism and adventure. Gradually, that optimism can erode into discouragement. You’re away from friends and family. And here you are, unable to move ahead, cleaning houses just to pay the bills. This is what many immigrants experience.

I asked my friend what life will be like for her back in Russia. The city where she’ll live, four hours east of Moscow, is a lot like Winnipeg, she told me…with long, cold winters. Dogs run free, owners do not pick up after them, and living in a detached house is rare. Plus, there’s more crime, violence and drinking. But her new home city offers excellent public transportation, condos and apartments are affordable and so are the restaurants. Culture is everywhere… many museums, theatres and concert halls. Post-secondary education is free.

Since making the decision to move back, my friend has had several job offers and looks forward to the life she dreamed she could have here in Canada, back where she started…in Russia.

It’s still hard for me, born in Canada, to imagine that life could be better in Russia…a place that destroyed my own family during the Stalin years. But I’ve appreciated getting to know a modern-day Russian and to have this glimpse into a country and a people that has long fascinated me.

Staying Warm when Staying Inside is not an Option

                                                                                                

Because I’m in the depths of novel revision, my thoughts are stuck in the winter of 1945, East Prussia. The severe winter weather here in Winnipeg reminds me of how difficult it must have been for the German civilians fleeing their homes in horse-pulled wagons and on foot, during the Soviet offensive. Temperatures of -25C froze old and young as they tried to reach the ships at Pillau harbor on the Baltic.   

Photo Attribution: Bundesarchiv, B 285 Bild-S00-00326 / Unknown / CC-BY-SA 3.0

I consider myself a bit of a keeping-warm expert after having spent many years working outside in Winnipeg. So here’s some advice. Forget about how you look…this is all about how you feel. Dress in layers. Something windproof is essential. Keep moving. Cover your face with a neck warmer or scarf.  Don’t drink too much liquid, because then you have to peel off all those layers…and usually in a hurry. Don’t get wet. 

Moisture chills to the bone. East Prussia, on the Baltic, would not have had the benefit of the 'dry cold' we here on the prairies are known for.  I can honestly say that when dressed properly, a sunny, windless day of minus thirty will feel balmy…assuming you keep moving. My mother cried bitter tears when she knew I worked outside in January weather. She'd say, I didn't survive Siberia and East Prussia so that my daughter would be cold here in Canada.  I'd have to remind her that I was dressed properly, that I was healthy and that I'd had a proper warm breakfast. My favourite is porridge. 

On a positive note, extreme temperatures keep the snow hard like concrete and make it for good walking…again with an assumption. Someone needs to shovel the darn stuff and make a path. Back in East Prussia in January of ’45, there were millions, like my mother and her sisters, fleeing. Most of the time they couldn’t use the main roads because those were reserved for army vehicles. So they'd  get stuck on the snowy forest trails.  I grew up imagining the faces of doll-like infants, hurriedly buried in snowbanks and left behind as their frightened families looked to the sea for help. Above them…not sundogs…but enemy bombers.

Other horrible, sad refugee stories are in the news nowadays. Different faces, different wars, different technologies, same human suffering.