ACTUALLY, THE SONG IS CALLED, “Za Stalina, za rodinu” (“For Stalin and the homeland”) in Russian. Even I know these words, their meaning and context. I once saw a documentary about the Second World War, which contained a Soviet propaganda clip created at this time when the Soviet Union was no longer on friendly terms with Nazi Germany. And there they were, Red Army soldiers marching and singing about what they were fighting for. For their leader and their country. The only question is, where this homeland actually is, because sometimes it seems to me that, for Russians, “the homeland” is wherever they happen to lay their heads at the end of the day. Even New York could be their homeland. Once, I was parking my car in Brighton Beach, which has a large Russian community, and I asked a young man if I was allowed to park there. He stared at me with an odd look and said, “что?” (chto, “What” in Russian).
I drove on.
When I arrive to Tallinn, I often sing my own version of this old Russian song: “Za Tallina, za rodinu.” It’s a bit of a mean-spirited joke. I know that it would annoy the Estonians in Tallinn, who remain the city’s linguistic majority. More than half of Tallinn residents are Estonians. Russians are a third. But Estonians are somehow silent, or they are in their offices, or cars, or on the internet, or just don’t speak up, which means that I often hear Russian more frequently on the streets of Tallinn than I do Estonian. This bothers me, but not because I am a nationalist. I am not an Estonian, and I therefore can never be a nationalist. That would be funny. An American who is an Estonian nationalist. I would have to send myself home then.
No, I worry more that someone will ask me something in Russian, and while I speak English and Estonian, and some Swedish and Danish, and Italian and even a little Spanish, and could even tell you where to go in Portuguese — esquerda! — I don’t speak Russian, and I don’t feel like learning it either, because I came to Estonia and learned Estonian, and they can do the same.
And not just me. Swedes learn Estonian. Ukrainians, of course. Syrians. And also Russians. Recently, I was in a pharmacy at the Baltic Station Market where I heard another American ask for help from the seller in Estonian! He was totally unknown to me, an American who spoke Estonian with a California accent. So, we have learned, but why is this random Russian in Tallinn so special that he doesn’t have to? Yet it still happens that someone will ask me something in Russian, and he can’t understand that I can’t respond to him. Then he goes on his way, looking for help elsewhere. Of course, he will find it, but these experiences are confusing for me. How can you live so deeply in your own world that you cannot recognize that another world exists? How does it feel to live in a reality where you have to ignore the majority of people most of the time? To feel like a life-long tourist? I don’t know. I only know that I find myself singing some old Russian song from the last great war.
“Za Stalina, za rodinu.”
Or, in my version, “Za Tallina, za rodinu.”
***
Long ago, when I had just moved to Tallinn, and lived with an Estonian girl from Karksi-Nuia in the city center, we would go to the Central Market on weekends to buy fruits, buckwheat, cheese, butter, and milk, for example.
This was probably my first experience with Russians and Russian culture. Of course, I am a child of the Cold War, and Russians, or the Soviets rather, were always suspicious characters in our films. Later, when I was in college in Copenhagen, I had a classmate named Viktor, whom the police stopped one night, only because he looked like one of these suspicious Russian characters. Maybe he was a criminal? He was a great person though. Sometimes, when I would call him “comrade” as a joke, Viktor would shift uncomfortably in his seat, eye me, and inquire if I happened to be a Communist.
But in Tallinn I had to live among these suspicious characters. Old ladies at the market would sit around listening to Russian radio programs. I remember thinking that they existed in another reality. In our world, Estonia was part of Europe. Estonia was a small northern country, like Iceland or Denmark. Most people spoke Estonian, a close relative of Finnish. This was the year before Estonia joined the EU and NATO. A time when people dreamed of Schengen and the euro. But they were still sitting around and listening to the news from Russia, as if nothing had changed. For them, it was still 1990. This was the Russian world, or russki mir, about which I later heard so much. The only trouble was that other worlds, in addition to that one, also existed. What was I supposed to do about it?
In some ways, as a person who derives from another diaspora, the Italians who settled New York at the start of the last century, it’s not hard for me to understand them. My great grandparents probably did not know English very well. A neighbor girl taught my grandfather how to speak English. He was born in New York, but didn’t speak English until he was seven years old. At the same time, he learned it. He didn’t expect New Yorkers to learn Italian. In that sense, New Yorkers can be quite strict. I have witnessed conductors on trains who have refused to sell tickets to people who ask for them in Spanish.
Once, when I was speaking to that Karksi-Nuia girl in Estonian on the train, I noticed that some people gave me weird looks. How could I be so bold as to not speak English on the train? For them, it was probably uncomfortable. Which doesn’t mean that it was right, but that’s what I was accustomed to.
In Estonia, I learned the language in part because of this mentality. I thought that’s how things worked. But at the Central Market, the old ladies had different ideas about languages and cultures. That was 20 years ago. If they are still alive, maybe they are still there talking away and listening to the news in Russian. I do remember that a very beautiful young Russian woman worked in the market at that time. She had blonde hair and would wear a red apron. Even though she was about my age, she already had a look of resignation in her eyes, though resignation too can be a mark of beauty in its own way.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to her. Did she become a mother? Is she still selling there? Or has she found a better job? What was her life back then? Cheese, milk, and some weird American client? When Estonia’s Russians were part of an empire, their lives were still just milk and cheese, but they belonged to something greater, at least in their minds. In the Republic of Estonia, they were a minority. That young woman is at least 40 years old now. Does she wear a scarf on her head these days? She had the most melancholic blue eyes. Those lovely Russian eyes.
***
Today I arrived in Tallinn, mumbling “Za Tallina, za rodinu.” The bus was full of Estonians who don’t talk. In the bus station, I only heard Russian spoken, although there are lots of languages in Tallinn. People have come here from all over the world, but Russians are still the largest minority.
Tallinn is under construction, and I had to pull apart a few metal gates and step over a barrier to get to the conference. I felt like a little New York boy again. It gives me great satisfaction to break the rules. A few construction workers were shouting to each other in Russian. I hoped that they wouldn’t start talking to me. Imagine that something was about to explode, and they needed to tell me to run. How could I understand them? But what else is there to do? Most people in Tallinn speak Estonian. It’s actually their problem if they can’t make themselves understood, but also mine as well.
On the street, I saw a Russian teenager who was talking loudly in her phone. I realized that I had gotten accustomed to the silence of the Estonians. There was also an older woman who was wearing so much makeup, I thought at first that she was an actress from the Ugala Theatre. There are these little differences that for people in the Estonian world, or in my world, are not typical, but for them are everyday things. Europe remains a continent of tribes, and my tribes are nearer to me. For others, the Italians are, for example, utterly ridiculous, but for me, they seem completely normal. I feel the same way about the Estonians now, because my children are Estonians. Even if the Estonians have this weird thing that they won’t look you in the eye, or they always have this “no bullshit, get to the point” mentality, even when their conversations are so stupidly business-like and dull they are still, in a way, family to me.
Even in Helsinki I feel this sense of closeness, because many of the Finnish girls remind me of my daughters. Recently, I offered as a joke to my youngest daughter that she could get a job at Boost in some shopping center, because she likes their smoothies so much. She’s just 12, but she answered with sarcasm. “But I can’t work there because then I have to speak to clients in Russian.” Her cousin worked at Circle K in Tallinn and had to handle clients in Russian all the time, or at least she tried to. She is only 25. She doesn’t know Russian so well.
My daughter only complained more. “I don’t understand them. Why don’t they just use their Vladimir Putin Pocket Translator if they want to order something?” It made me sad to hear this, but I laughed when I imagined a gadget called the “Vladimir Putin Pocket Translator.” It’s not just sadness for a child who doesn’t want to work somewhere because she might have to speak Russian, but also for those Russians who, when faced with an Estonian server, can only blink at them like that kid in Brighton Beach and say, “что?”
There are, of course, loads of Russians who speak Estonian fluently. They also have to deal with the stereotypes perpetuated by their compatriots. And, as an American, I do know what it’s like to travel in a world where every other person has a negative opinion about you.
I once had a problem with a Russian man in Estonia, who thought that my car door had hit his car door. He was an older, self-confident character, who boasted that he had brought his wife from Russia, and that she knew not a word of the Estonian language. They lived together, mostly peacefully, in their own reality. People were afraid of him, but I wasn’t because I am not an Estonian and I don’t have the same kind of relationship with Russians and the Russian Empire. I can whistle “Za Tallina, za rodinu” with ease.
As a New Yorker, and a Mediterranean, I know that if someone threatens you, you have to threaten them back, naturally. He threatened to call the police if I did not give him any money, I told him to get the police and the army, he wouldn’t get a cent out of me. Instead, he left quietly and with empty pockets.
Fortunately, Italy is not located next to Russia. That would be really crazy.
***
Recently, I met a man who was born in Tallinn the same year that I was. His brother was baptized in the Orthodox church in the Old Town. But he was not granted citizenship automatically when they restored the state, because his family had arrived after 1940. His family left for the US instead in the early 1990s. They were poor. They had a lot of problems. But he managed. Today, he is a successful businessman. We sat together in a restaurant and I thought it was such a shame that he left Tallinn. He’s smart, talented. He could have been of great use to this country. His only problem was that he happened to be born into a complicated situation. I still don’t think the Russians fully understand who the Estonians are though. They understand that they are a people with a different language and culture, appearance. But the Estonians are actually an indigenous people. They are like one big, extended family. Becoming an Estonian is not as simple as learning the language and getting a passport. These are things I cannot change.
It’s still a shame that man left for America. But I am still here. I am in the Culture Hub at the Tallinn Digital Summit, where Danes and Lithuanians speak English to each other. I am sitting in the corner, listening to their English-language discussions and typing this up in Estonian. I have long since forgotten about that old Soviet war song. Everyone here is talking about the Nordics, about Europe. How interesting that it only takes a few steps. Just a few steps and you can leave the Russian world and arrive to the Nordic one.
Just a few hundred meters and everything is different.
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An Estonian-language version of this article appears in Edasi. I wrote the Estonian-language version first and later translated it into English.