I remember when I was a child, my mother scolded me – daughter, talk to whoever you want, just not to a Russian or a Jew. Jewish because in her youth in the 1940s, in Kārsava, a Jewish merchant had prevented her son from meeting a poor Latvian girl, but for Russians it is clear – painful memories from the wartime, deportation… And who do you think I married? That’s right – the mother-in-law is Jewish, but the father-in-law is Russian. It’s true that my husband (well, ex) – the artist Kirils Shmelkovs speaks Latvian without an accent, and at the beginning of our relationship I was convinced for a long time that he was like those many Latvians with Russian surnames. My youth is the Awakening, May 4, the first years of Latvia’s independence, where everything was thrown into one cauldron of change without sorting. At that time, the eldest son, still in kindergarten, asked very sad one evening – he had heard on the radio that the Russians should leave Latvia, or should dad also leave, and what would happen to him? I rushed to comfort – if mom is Latvian, then don’t worry, but the son, after thinking for a while, solemnly announced that he would take grandfather’s nationality – being Latvian. More than 30 years have passed, and once again the “Russian question” has become very, very hot, this time in the context of an insane war. And the director of SKDS, Arnis Kaktiņš, frantically waving survey data in the air, warns that our society is very dangerously divided on important issues in Latvia.
2023-05-03 21:04:52
#bed #Russian
