Estonia

Where did all these people disappear to?

Some days I feel like the paternal side of my family came from thin air.  Living in Tartu, the only traces I experience of my Estonian family are the tombstones in the cemetery and a scattering of photos.

The Soviet occupation separated those who were inside and those who lived in the west. My Estonian grandmother had six children and for the last twenty-two years of her life, had no children in Estonia. Three died young.  One disappeared in Russia during World War I at the age of nineteen or twenty. My father escaped the Soviet Union during World War II and his brother had left before the war to study engineering. Both my father and my uncle hid their Estonian memories from their children.

A photo of a farm where the memories they shared with us where made but no knowledge of where that farm was, who the uncle was who farmed it, or if I have distant cousins living on the farm.

Photo of my grandparents with my uncle and father (shortest).

If it weren’t for the tombstones, I might imagine that my father did not come from Estonia or that his survival was fabricated.   The line drawn between the Soviet Union and the “west” still continues to haunt my life, long after the Soviet Union’s demise.

My father in front of a bike with his mother and father.

Some days I feel like one of the bus loads of tourists at the grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas, searching for the missing clues that would reveal what happened to John F. Kennedy almost sixty years ago. Only I’m searching for clues from eighty years in the past.

(just a bit of IT humor to start off the year)

Estonian flag as map of Estonia: Stasyan117, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve been in Estonia since the end of August 2022 and arrived here without processing all the challenges I faced during the previous two years. But this is a new year and I’m thinking about being in a new location, where my old patterns of coping don’t really work.  I arrived in Tartu without expectations, and still it has been hard. Learning a new language, failing tests, and navigating a country that relies on being a formal resident with participation in their electronic systems for everything (when I am not) has made me dig dig onto internal and external resources to survive.

Image by -Rita-👩‍🍳 und 📷 mit ❤ from Pixabay

Just being a vegetarian outside of California has been an eye opener. Living in California, I know we have it good, but we have it good because we made it good. Californians have thought about food, cooperatives, health, organics, the planet, air pollution, and how to live on an increasingly fragile planet for decades. During the Summer of Love (1967) there were approximately 3.4 billion people on the planet. Today here are just over 8 billion or more than double since the explosion of living lightly on the planet started in West Coast communities.  In my United States’ circles, we have a saying “the hippies were right.”   Once a fringe movement (for some people not me), the ideas put forth in the late 1960s and 1970s are the ones that if broadly implemented will create a livable planet for humans and other creatures.

I didn’t become a vegetarian until ten years after the Summer of Love, but since I joined the club, I’ve been able to rely on all the great stores focused on vegetarian and vegan lifestyles that arose from West Coast hippie culture. That is until I landed Eestis (in Estonia).

Image by Anemone123 from Pixabay

The teaching and learning methods I grew up with in California and used all through my graduate studies, don’t apply to my language learning classes here. The method seems to be based on first language acquisition instead of second language acquisition.  As someone who grew up outside of Europe, my previous learning methods did not prepare me for Estonian teaching methods. I have had to learn how to be at the literal bottom of the class after a lifetime of being in the top 10% of class without too much effort. I have had to adjust my attitude big time!

Between not eating well and trying to keep up with a class driven by the achievements of medical students in their late teens and early twenties, I was on the path to a melt down.

My classes ended in mid-December. Since then, I’ve been able to re-balance my life, my eating habits and my Estonian language studies.  I’ve visited family in Sweden, am trying to eat better, and continuing to study in a more balanced fashion.

My goal for 2023 is to study and write about Estonian mythology and maybe even learn Estonian!

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

18th Century wooden house

Tartu is not one of the oldest towns in the world, but everywhere you go, there are references to the first millennium of the common era, remnants of walls built to protect various peoples and places, and much of the town dates to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

I too am old, although not on this scale. At the university with my 20-something classmates studying Estonian (eesti keel), I feel old. Mentioning things that happened in the 1970s is ancient history to them.

Although the town and the buildings are very old (väga vana), Tartu is young and lively. No doubt the presence of multiple universities and thousands of students helps create this vibrant, active city.

Photo of old town Tartu and the Emojogi river

Amidst all this liveliness, I feel unmoored. I’m not who I was without the stories of my life. Yet I’m not a new person either. Sixty plus years of experience, education, and community activism have been erased. I am just an old woman trying to learn a new language. While I meet many young people on this adventure, some by choice, some due to war, I feel alone in my age bracket, floundering to find my footing.

C.G. Jung argues that at my age I should be working on integration between the inner and the outer, my journey towards death, and the opportunity to see and perhaps fulfill my destiny.  The turn should be inwards, towards the mysteries of life and yet…

I come from a culture obsessed with the young, the new, and the shiny.   I carry this baggage in me even though intellectually I reject it. I am caught between the journey I thought I was taking and the one life handed me. In between these two places is the life I wanted to live.

When I first visited Estonia in 2017, I was transported into an imaginal memory reel of my father’s life and tribulations, which gave birth literally and figuratively to my life. These challenges created both my drive to treat life as an adventure and the impediments to my desired experiences. Now that I am living here, the past is not some sentimental journey but rather a passage into the future.

Each day in Tartu, I awake excited to learn, explore, and expand my horizons. To step outside the bling of the USA and the constant battle over money.  Here is a post-Soviet, post-occupation world that I am struggling to read and understand.  Today it is almost five weeks that I have been in Tartu and perhaps my zip zip attitude of wanting to understand it all is holding me back from experiencing it all. No wonder I keep getting slapped down.

“Tere” means hello in Estonian.  Greetings from Estonia.

Tartu Town Hall flying both Estonian and Ukranian flags

I am in Tartu where my father lived, and where my ancestors are buried. I am poorly studying the Estonian language in an intensive course at the University of Tartu

This gives me a fantastic opportunity to feel the emotions and frustrations that must be felt by many new immigrants to the USA. While I have chosen this path, have a safe and lovely place to live as well as the funds to feed myself and receive medical attention as needed, I realize that even in this experience, I am living a life of privilege.

When my father fled Estonia at the end of World War II, he had to learn Swedish while working as a lumberjack by day. When families flee violence in Central America (created in part by the USA), they have to learn English while trying to survive day-to-day in the USA.

In our public schools, children have to endure the frustration of “not getting it.”  While I have years of learning experience and know that my frustration is temporary and eventually my brain will start “to get it,” who at the age of fifteen has that perspective?

Here in Tartu, almost half my peers in language class are Ukrainian students (mostly medical students) fleeing the war and trying to continue their studies. Also, I have classmates from around the world who have ancestors from Estonia, like I do.  We come together to help each other on this journey, regardless of why and how we ended up here.