Thanksgiving

About 25 years ago, my Grandfather, Irving Appelbaum, had a heart attack. My grandmother, Cecelia, strong willed Jewish woman that she was (and is), resolved to keep him alive for as long as humanly possible. The staple of this effort lay in putting my grandfather on a very strict diet. No more cigars, no more scotch, no more cheeseburgers. And no more pie.
Cecelia was known the world over for her pies. Well, if not the world, then certainly some percentage of the population who would join my family for thanksgiving every year. My Grandfather accepted most of the restrictions, but on one he refused. He had to have pie on thanksgiving. And so my Grandmother found a not-too-fatty apple pie recipe, and a tradition was borne.
And so year after year in late November my family and I would trek to the airport and fly to Chicago, to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with my aunt and cousins and Grandparents. And year after year we would eat turkey and stuffing and sweet potatoes and cranberries and we would watch football and old home movies and we would be together as a family. And in the end, of course, we would indulge with Apple Pie.
This was my first Thanksgiving away from home. If there were two annual events that marked the consistency of my childhood, it was Passover in New Jersey and Thanksgiving in Chicago. I had missed this past year’s Passover by a nose, but I was so rushed in the jumble of excitement that was my initial few days in Ukraine that the shock of missing it all was hard to find. But this time around I am all ready well into my Ukrainian routine, 8 months in (man how time has flown, and also crept incredibly slowly) and thinking a lot more about home than I used to. It was hard to imagine that I wouldn’t be at the Thanksgiving table, that 22 years of tradition was coming to an abrupt end (or, optimistically, a pause).
The approaching holiday coincided with the fact that these past few weeks have been among my hardest in Ukraine. My workload has begun to spiral ever so slightly out of control. Full days at school, followed by 3-4 hours of English tutoring sessions at night. No one is pressuring me to take on such a heavy workload; I primarily bring it upon myself. But I can’t say no to these kids. My over bearing Jewish-White-Upper-Middle-Class guilt too much.
The perfect storm of stress and the sun setting at 4 O’clock and winter’s imminent arrival and Thanksgiving made me, for the first time since arriving, pretty homesick. I was, therefore, pretty glad when three of my Peace Corps friends, Paula, Julia, and Vanessa, decided to come check out my humble abode in Boyarka for the weekend.
I have a perfect place to host visitors. Plenty of room, extra beds, a welcoming community. The only problem lies, of course, in the fact that there is only one bus a day directly into my village, and it leaves from the Oblast center, Cherkassy, not far from where Vanessa is placed. Vanessa and Julia were arriving together late at night, and they were understandably nervous about finding the right bus. I assured them it would be easy enough. Just ask the bus driver if their name is Sasha or Petya, and if it is, ask them if they know Jeremy, the American who lives in Boyarka. Just a couple of small town folk’.
All worked to plan, and when Vanessa and Julia arrived, we set to work on a presentation, to be given at my school the next day, about the meaning of Thanksgiving. Wanting to balance American cliches of being grateful with historical accuracies of the desecration of a continent’s worth of inhabitants, we hobbled together a brief presentation that covered history, culture, and traditional foods. We topped it all of by drawing a “Thanking tree.” Vanessa sketched a beautiful tree with hanging leaves, and at the end of our presentation, we encouraged people to come up and write what they are thankful for. At first everyone was a bit hesitant, so I wrote down three examples: Cimya, Druzi, i Boyarka. Family, Friends, and Boyarka.
Then the crowd really got into it. First a few of the teachers came up, and then the oldest students, and then a group of seventh grade girls who have developed some affectionate feelings for our fair writer. (Author’s note: When I was in seventh grade, I couldn’t get a girl to talk to me. Now that I’m a teacher, they follow me wherever I go.) It only took a few minutes for the tree to get filled in. What are you thankful for? I was asking. Their answers were beautiful and humbling, honest and embarressing. Druzi, Cimya, Babusia, Zdorovya, Friends, Family, Grandmothers and Health topped the list. But not far behind were scribbled markings saying Dzeremi Natanovich, Jeremy Son of Natan. Our schools technology teacher even took it a bit further: I am thankful for Jeremy, and his parents, and his sister Abby, and his two grandmothers. Thousands of miles away and family was still around.
Its hard to speak for their impressions, but I think Vanessa and Julia were at least a bit jealous of my village. Vanessa and Julia had trained in a small village but now were placed in larger towns or cities, and they missed that whole “everyone knowing everything about you” feel. Paula, who arrived later that day, also lives in a small village, and she enjoyed comparing our various experiences.
While I love life in the small village, it can, at times, become suffocating. I know by face, if not by name, practically every person in Boyarka, as well as much of the surrounding villages. And I am known the region over, for there aren’t many foreigners, let alone Americans, dilly-dallying around this corner of the Ukrainian countryside. The Peace Corps has a set a core expectations they have given to us periodically through our service, and one of them is this: As a Peace Corps volunteer, you are on-duty 24 hours a day. In my village, this is very much the case.
The last few weeks have been exhausting. I have been working non stop, 12 hour days becoming a norm. I am always tired and I never seem to have a free moment to ourselves. I have been speaking and thinking and dreaming so much in Ukrainian that sometimes I forget English words. In the most innocuous way possible, I have been losing it, just a little.
I don’t really drink in my village. I try to always have a smile on my face and a positive attitude in tow. My frat kegger days are far behind me, and would shock any memebr of my community. My pessimistic sarcasm wrought from angst ridden teenage years watching too many Woody Allen films has no place in my new home. My doubts and fallibilities I try to keep hidden. I portray a version of my self I want them to see, for their benefit, for America’s benefit, for the Jewish people’s benefit. I am, at the same time, both more in touch with myself than I have ever been and farther from whom I know I am than I ever could have imagined. A life of contradictions is exhausting.
The girls coming to visit wasn’t just a break. It was a wake up call, a much needed injection of life and purpose and friendship that I desperately needed. Friday night we stayed up late, talking and drinking and laughing. We weren’t trying to escape the moment, however. The lack of running water and the outdoor toilet surely prevented us from pretending we were in some other place. But perhaps we were being just a bit more ourselves than our usual circumstances allow.
On Saturday, after taking a nice stroll through the village, the girls and I got down to business. We had all gathered as much food as we could---a giant fish my neighbor had caught for me, onions, carrots, potatoes, pumpkins, apples, soy sauce, more potatoes, cheese, bread, butter, flour, baking soda, more potatoes---and begin to cook a feast for the ages. We made stuffing and mashed potatoes and vegan gravy. I was in charge of making fish burgers, which was an interesting endeavour that luckily gave no one salmonella. And Julia, at my request, ventured to bake an apple pie. It just wasn’t Thanksgiving without Apple Pie, that much I knew.
We cooked extra food, in true Appelbaum/Borovitz/Jewish style, correctly anticipating that four or five of the locals were going to stop by to get a peak at the American girls. After the food was cooked, and the table was set, we each poured ourselves a glass of wine, and the girls asked that I make a toast. My exact words are long lost, but I can still recall the basic jist:
Its easy to get lost here. Sure my village is small and there are only three roads, but its easy to get lost. We drown in language and swim through this strange culture and gasp for breaths of respite from the comparative insanity of our everyday lives. And so its nice, once in a while, to be among friends, just to remember that we know who, and where, we are.
And so we clanked our glasses and we drank our wine. Some guests came by and they tasted our food and we taught them some english and they taught us some ukrainian. I pulled out the guitar and played some American songs, and then my friend Vitaly serenaded us in Ukrainian and Russian. We played Uno and we told stories, we spoke of our old homes and our new ones, we were thankful for we had, even more thankful for what we have.
And in the end we ate Julia’s Apple Pie. And it may not have been as tasty as my Grandmother’s (although it was damn close) and it may have desperately needed a scoop of ice cream on top. But as delicious as the pie was, what it meant to me to have it was so much more important. My Grandmother’s pie helped my Grandfather live a little longer. Julia’s pie gave me that extra little jolt that I desperately needed to push my own adventure a bit farther into the future.