The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

To the Midnight Sun: A Story of Exile and Return by Stephen Saletan is another search for one’s own identity by researching a close relative, in this case, Saletan’s Russian-born grandmother, Eda Grigorievna Bamuner. As a child in suburban New York, Saletan spent weekends together and enjoyed a special relationship with her. From the elderly lady, he learned the music of the Russian language and reveled in the stories of her life in an affluent mercantile family in Pskov at the end of the tsarist rule at the dawn of the 20^th century.

As a teenager, Eda, 19, had a naïve fascination with revolutionary ideas, despite her father’s iron opposition to her independent thinking. When her younger sister Rulia, 15, was arrested and sentenced to exile for signing a petition at school calling for greater freedoms, Eda decided to accompany Rulia to the isolated northern hamlet of Mezen at the edge of the Arctic Circle. After months of isolation, Eda, never arrested herself, contrived an escape for the two of them that eventually led to their settling in New York. She made multiple trips back to Russia to visit family and, still in thrall to her revolutionary idealism, decided to move back to the USSR in 1932.  To get her visa, she enlisted the help of a former lover. He had been a hero of the Russian revolution who became a uniformed Marshal of the Soviet Union, a henchman of Stalin. The actual reality of living under this brutal dictator opened Eda’s eyes to the tyranny and oppression visited upon ordinary people, and she returned to New York for the rest of her life.

In 1963, when Saletan was 13, his imposing grandmother took him for a visit to Russia to meet his extended family. Eda’s ten siblings had stayed behind in Russia, mostly living together in a communal apartment in what was then called Leningrad. He was able to put faces to names and experience the sights, smells and sounds of the places about which his grandmother had told him vivid accounts.

Even as a child, he absorbed the DNA of his Russian forebears and knew it held some deep meaning for him. He went to Harvard (where he was a close friend of my brother-in-law, artist Tom Barron) and on to Harvard Medical School. He became an oncologist in New York, but his deep obsession with his Russian side endured. He got himself a Master’s degree in Journalism and studied the Russian language. Finally, in 1996, in the brief euphoria following the end of the Cold War, he took a break from his medical career and spent an extended period in Russia.

He found, along with the state of disrepair in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg again), enormous classical beauty that spoke to him of his now-deceased grandmother’s cultural background.  Staying for a while in that communal apartment but traveling to Pskov, Mezen, and Arkhangelsk,  Saletan – with the help of a translator and researcher – built not only rebuilt the details of his grandmother’s past but uncovered how her history was part of his own deeply personal legacy.

From library archives (the Publichka) to the institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the State Archive of the Russian Federation of Moscow, the Ministry of Justice, and throughout the extended labyrinth of Russian bureaucratic records, he gathered details to retrace and clarify his grandmother’s life’s journey through the turbulent history of Russia. In finding her, he found himself.

Saletan’s painstaking recapitulation of 20^th century Russian history (which you have probably already learned from many different sources) can become a little tedious.  So, too, with his sometimes ponderous and frequent repetition of how our lives can be intertwined with those of our forebears in ways we don’t always understand.  The more animated parts of this book are those describing time spent with his grandmother, how he was motivated to unearth details of her personal history and the enduring, intimate relationship he had as her most special grandchild. What’s also intriguing is Saletan’s sharing the intricacies of thoroughly exploring one’s genealogy. For the many of my readers who have explored their family past, often frustrated by the obstacles to easy revelation, this book is a good read and a helpful guidebook to the rewards of forging ahead. If you, too, have embarked on this journey, I’d love to hear what you’ve done in the comment section.