Katiaesque

  • A Research Question: Please Help!!

    I asked my fifth-grader son, not too long ago, what do you know about the Soviet Union? Here is what he said:  “There was a king, and, these people who didn’t like his efforts — they came and killed him. Then, they tried to make their own government, but those Russian revolutionaries weren’t nice, so it didn’t work…

    Katia Raina

  • My babushka

    In a few weeks, my grandmother who raised me, my babushka will be turning 77.  If you see her on the street, you’ll see just another New Yorker, a senior citizen with a big Russian accent, who walks the streets of Riverdale, grocery bags in hand.  But if you could look closer, you would see history,…

    Katia Raina

  • The strangeness of my Christmas

    I grew up in a land that refused to believe. And even if I do believe now, it isn’t in Jesus as the son of God. Still, Christmas is my holiday, too. I am not saying that to be in the face of the “Keep Christ in Christmas” movement. That’s just the way it is for me. To…

    Katia Raina

  • Believe . . .

    Religion is opium for the People. That’s the thing they taught me when I was a little kid. I remember my grandmother giving me a “funny Bible,” one that basically makes fun of every event described in the Big Book, from Adam and Eve on. When I was a teenager, with perestroika and freedom of…

    Katia Raina

  • The Nobel Peace Prize: Then and Now

    President Obama is going to be accepting the Nobel Peace Prize next week. The conservatives are outraged. People in the middle are confused: “What’d he win it for?” Or just not very interested. People like me think history. 🙂 I was a thirteen year-old citizen of the Soviet Union when the General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev won…

    Katia Raina

  • Disappearing History

    A country I was born and grew up in no longer exists. Kind of weird, if you think about it. But what’s weirder still, is the way it’s disappearing even from history. A curious thing is happening in Russia: it looks to me at least from over here as though people are trying to forget their country’s very…

    Katia Raina