Street without a Name by Kapka
Kassabova: Book Note
In
1990 I visited what was then still the Soviet Union, as part of an exchange of
American with Soviet human rights scholars (I am not American, but the
delegation needed a woman, which I am). While there a Russian member of Amnesty
International invited us to her apartment. This was a very big deal, as only a
short time previously this woman would have been arrested for being in AI, let
alone inviting us to her apartment.
The
apartment was in a very ugly block of high-rises in a suburb of Moscow. I
noticed long, uncut grass around the blocks, providing a nice refuge for rats. Also
there were no street names. Our hostess
explained that the authorities thought if there were street names, the CIA
would be able to use them for its nefarious purposes. But you could find where you
were going as the authorities had recently decided to paint different-colored
decorations on the different blocks, so you could tell your visitors, for
example, to visit the blue block.
I
thought of this when I recently (April 2017) read Kapka Kassabova’s Street without a Name: Childhood and Other
Misadventures in Bulgaria (Skyhorse Publishing, New York, 2009). Kassabova
was born in 1973 and lived in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, until 1990, when her
parents emigrated with her and her sister to New Zealand. The first half of the
book recounts her childhood, and the second half her visits back to Bulgaria in
the early 2000s.
 |
| Kapka Kassabova |
Like
my Soviet host, Kassabova lived on a street without a name. Her parents, a
professional couple, were interested in literature, arts, politics—all the
usual “bourgeois” preoccupations of European intelligentsia—but knew better
than to speak their minds about the Bulgarian dictatorship. In extremely
cramped quarters, with neighbours who could hear everything and who might very
well be spies, it was best to keep one’s own counsel. The price for minimal material
security was political silence.
The
poverty is pervasive and all-consuming. Kassabova’s father spends six months at
a university in the Netherlands on an exchange program. Later, some Dutch
colleagues come to visit. They comment that the the shops display many goods,
and the Kassabova family does not explain that these are for display only: to
get any of those goods requires connections and long wait times. At one point
they all visit a rural village, and the Dutch colleagues suggest having a
barbeque. Knowing that meat is very expensive for Bulgarians, they suggest that
Kassabova’s parents bring potatoes. There is a mad scramble for the potatoes,
eventually supplied by the hosts at the cottage where they are staying, as the
family doesn’t want to admit to the Dutch people that even potatoes are scarce.
The Dutch visitors, meanwhile, have given up on their idea of camping in
Bulgaria after they discover how filthy the campground toilets are.
Kassabova
glosses over some significant incidents in her life. In 1986 she was hospitalized
for some time after contracting a “mysterious” immunodeficiency disease. This
was, not coincidentally, just after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. When
she returned home in the early 2000s, she learned than several people she’d
known as a child, including fellow schoolchildren, had died of cancer.
Kassabova
also discusses a little-noticed incident in Bulgaria’s history, shortly before
the fall of communism in 1989. This was the de facto expulsion of about 300,000
ethnic Turks from Bulgaria in the 1980s. As Kassabova says (p. 114) “The ethnic
Turks were the tobacco-growers, the agricultural workers, the humble workforce
that buzzed away in the background, propping up the diseased body of the State.”
In principle, there was no need to go into exile: the government was demanding
that all ethnic Turks change their names to Bulgarian ones: you couldn’t
register your baby at birth, for example, if you hadn’t changed your name. But
those who didn’t want to do so fled to Turkey. This expulsion was a precursor
of the ethnic wars in former-Yugoslavia, which started only a few years later.
On
one of her trips home Kassabova meets a woman on a train who tells her that she
was one of the 1,643 infant and child prisoners in Bulgaria’s communist prison camps.
According to her account (pp. 315-17) when her mother was being sent to the
camp a guard grabbed her baby and dumped her into a pail of dirty water, since
children would not be able to survive in the camps. Another guard fished her
out and gave her back to her mother. This woman was trying to obtain
compensation, so far unsuccessfully. She described the camp to Kassabova as
equivalent to Nazi concentration camps for Jews, which I have no difficulty believing,
although Communist camps were not overtly exterminationist. But then she told
Kassabova that this was only for comparative purposes, as the Jews hadn’t
really been exterminated and the Holocaust was a Zionist conspiracy. It’s a
shame she knew so little about Bulgaria’s own history, as it was one of the few
countries in Europe that refused to deport Jews during WWII.
I
didn’t know anything about Bulgaria before I read this book, and I am terrible
at geography, so I sat with an old hard-copy atlas beside me (National Geographic
1975!) while I read this memoir. Bulgaria is in South-east Europe, very close to
Turkey: it has an extremely long history and in earlier times profited from the
confluence of civilizations, Muslims mixing with Sephardic Jews and Armenians
as well as with ethnic Bulgarians and Gypsies (as Kassabova refers to
them). Now it’s Bulgarians and Gypsies,
the latter far worse off than the former. It’s a shame that in this otherwise engrossing
and intelligent book, Kassabova seems rather insensitive to the plight of
Bulgarian Roma.
