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The Crimean Tatars Finally Have Their Own 'Anne Frank'

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  • The Crimean Tatars Finally Have Their Own 'Anne Frank'

    THE CRIMEAN TATARS FINALLY HAVE THEIR OWN 'ANNE FRANK'
    Paul Goble

    Georgiandaily
    Jan 7 2009
    NY

    Vienna, January 7 - More than most people suspect, memoirs, novels
    and films about a nation's struggles often play a defining, even
    revolutionary role not only in uniting its members to achieve their
    common goal but also and perhaps even more important in presenting
    their case to the broader world more forcefully and effectively than
    any academic or legal study could.

    No one Jewish or not can think about the Holocaust without remembering
    The Diary of Anne Frank. No one Armenian or not can think about 1915
    without recalling the story of that terrible year as told in The
    Forty Days of Musa Dagh. And no one Ukrainian or not can think about
    the Terror Famine of the 1930s without recollecting The Yellow Prince.

    But if many nations would benefit from having such a work, few
    do. Consequently, it is always an occasion for wonder and excitement
    when a book of this kind appears. That has now happened for the
    Crimean Tatars, and with the publication of Lily Hyde's Dream Land,*
    that hard-pressed people now have their very own "Diary of Anne Frank."

    Lily Hyde, a British freelance journalist based in Ukraine, tells
    the story of the return of the Crimean Tatars to their homeland in
    the early 1990s from the perspective of Safi, a 12-year-old girl who
    comes back with her parents, brother, and grandfather to her family's
    now destroyed village in Crimea from their exile in Uzbekistan.

    While Safi's grandfather provides background on the tragedies
    the Crimean Tatars have suffered over the last century, including
    Stalin's deportation of the entire nation to Central Asia on May 18,
    1944, this novel is especially powerful because it considers their
    situation now through the eyes of a girl who must wrestle with the
    question of where is her real home is.

    Like most young people, Safi is more focused on the challenges posed
    by her immediate surroundings than on larger political questions. Will
    she be able to make friends in a new place? Why do her new neighbors
    dislike her family so much? What possessed her parents to move from
    their sunny and large house in Samarkand to what is little more than
    a hovel in Crimea?

    Over the course of the book, she does make new friends, not only
    among other Crimean Tatars but also among Ukrainians and Russians. She
    discovers that none of these communities has had an easy time of it
    in the last century. And she watches as her father and mother build
    a house and open a teahouse to earn money to finish it.

    After school - and going to school is so important for her that she
    misleads her parents as to why the Russian bus driver won't drop her
    off where he is supposed to - Safi wanders in the mountains where
    she discovers both places of beauty that remind her of what Crimea
    could be and a Karaim cemetery that undercuts her conviction that
    the Tatars were in Crimea first.

    Each of her experiences is set off by a story from her beloved
    grandfather, who was among those deported by Stalin more than half
    a century earlier. He tells her both about the heroes and victims
    among the Crimean Tatars and also about those among that nation who
    were taken in by the Nazis or the Soviets and behaved badly.

    One of Safi's grandfather's most disturbing stories concerns the
    decision of the Soviet secret police to drown the residents of several
    Crimean Tatars they had originally missed when carrying out Stalin's
    plan to exile all the Crimean Tatars from their homeland lest the
    Kremlin dictator find out about this mistake and exile or execute
    the NKVD men.

    Hyde says in an afterward that she learned of this and other
    details from conversations with Crimean Tatars and that there is no
    documentation about the drowning. In fact, that is not quite so. The
    Munich Institute for the Study of the USSR reported it in 1958,
    and in 1992, the Moscow Institute of Ethnography documented it in a
    volume on the Crimean Tatar movement.

    In the course of the novel, tensions build between the Crimean Tatars
    who are building houses without permits from the Ukrainian authorities,
    on the one hand, and Ukrainian and Russian residents of the peninsula
    who resent the return of these hardworking and totally committed
    competitors, on the other.

    Finally, in the climactic scene, an unruly mob brings up a bulldozer
    to destroy the house Safi's family has built. She throws herself in
    front of the bulldozer, not in time to save the house or to prevent
    herself from being seriously injured, but in a manner that forces the
    local authorities to decide that they must give her family at least
    permission to remain and build.

    Safi thus becomes a hero, although she does not immediately understand
    why that should be so, and she feels about herself, as she sometimes
    feels about her grandfather and his stories, that they are "telling
    him" rather than he is "telling them," a gain in self-knowledge that
    both recognize is an indication that she and her people are growing up.

    In the course of the book, her grandfather begins each of his
    stories about the past of the Crimean Tatar nation with the words,
    "Bir zamanda bar eken, bir zamanda yoke ken" - in English, "Sometime
    it was and sometime it wasn't at all." But at the end, he tells Safi
    she must not focus on his stories of the past, however important,
    but must write her own for the future.

    Safi's life as recounted in Lily Hyde's remarkable novel beyond
    any question means that the Crimean Tatars now are becoming more
    conscious of the complexities of their own past and present and thus
    well on their way to making her Dream Land ever more real for her,
    her people, and for us.
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