Travelive

Traveling is moving out of the comfort zone, mostly. Sometimes to gain a new experience you don’t even need to go abroad.
The story of my great adventure begins in a train. It’s 2013, and I’m going to find out the truth about my Jewish grandparents who were evacuated to a village near Vladimir during the war. The tea in a glass is delicious and though I have been warned about the dangers of the remote I feel almighty.
The village called Papki strikes me in the solar plexus the moment I see it. It counts the eleven houses that stand so close to the cliff that they seem to be falling into the Klyazma river. There is nothing Jewish in this landscape.
The terror reaches its climax when I see a man limping towards me. He looks like a nightmare: one-eyed and dirty, he’s wearing a coat so old that it looks like armor. He is holding a shovel that under these circumstances seems to be a spear.
“Can I help you? I’m an archive-keeper” he says and I glance at him with surprise. Chivalry is the last thing I expected. As it appears, the archive is inside the one of the safest izbas. The locals made a promise to keep this building whole, and when the keeper tells me this I feel an urge to cry.
The archive keeps the stories of a 100 Jews evacuated in 1942. “They were like aliens. We hid them from the authorities if they had problems with their documents. They have problems all the time, the Jews, don’t they? - the keeper’s laughing, and I laugh back. – To me, that’s what Russians have to do – help the little ones”. I give him a hug, because I can’t help it anymore. He seems ablush. “A hug from a Jewish girl, I can die happy now. OK, let’s go find your family”.
In an hour the story of my grandparents is clear. They arrived in Papki in the autumn of 1942 and lived here for nine years. After that no more vestiges of them were to be found. With an obscure feeling I stand there holding an old yellow paper saying “Sara and Samuel Tricher, 1942, registered with luggage and kids”.
Later I sit on the cliff looking into the water. I wear an old tales – Jewish headscarf - that I found in the archive. Most likely, it never belonged to my family but I feel inevitably connected to my roots, both Jewish and Russian. The flow, impetuous in the narrow river-bed, seems to carry the lives of all the people whose blood I share.
That’s where the search of my homeland started. And I’m not afraid anymore, because now I know how big my comfort-zone is. It has a size of Russia, actually.