Germany

About 50 km east of Hannover is a small village called Wesendorf. It is home to a large population of Germans who emigrated from the former Soviet Union after its collapse in the late '80's. My family is one of them. My cousins Eduard and Lyddia, aunt Amalia, and numerous off-spring from them - children and grandchildren. You will hear the Russian language commonly intermixed with German, even in the same sentence. When we go into town, its not unusual for Eduard to point at some stranger in the street and exclaim "see that lady over there? She's a distant cousin of your father's." How I would like to meet them all and get their stories. I feel like I almost need to live there to understand.

When these people came to Germany, the German government offered some assistance, particularly job training and language skills. The village is now a typically clean German town, the largest industry being the Volkswagen factory in nearby Wolfsburg. The people have done well for themselves. Eduard and Lyddia live in a small community of new homes which they built themselves, the architecture not totally German, a little bit Russian.

It was Eduard's 60th birthday, and his family offered up a surprise celebration in his honor. He is a typically stoic Russian who wanted no special celebration, but his wishes were ignored. People came from far and near (more of my relatives from the Karlsruhe area came as well), people he had known since childhood. The local community hall was reserved for the occasion.

Eduard's first surprise was the arrival on Friday afternoon of myself and my brother, who had also altered his travel plans to honor the occasion. We toasted into the night after Lyddia and her husband joined us. On Saturday, Eduard's beautiful daughter Monika came to take us to the hall, with the pretense that we were taking Eduard out to dinner. With Eduard blindfolded in the back seat, she drove through side streets and made a few U-turns to make sure he had no clue as to where we were going. Everyone at the hall gave him a rousing welcome, and the music began. Speeches were made, grandchildren read poetry, a close friend presented a slideshow of his childhood. A lot of the toasts were in Russian, and I appreciated the fact I could at least understand a few words to get the general meaning. We celebrated well into the night, and some of the guests spent the night at Eduard's and Elvira's house. The next morning we went back to the hall for breakfast and some great chicken soup (wonderful for hangovers), after which folks said their good-byes and headed back to wherever they had come from.

Early Monday morning my brother and I were off, he to the Hannover airport, me to the Gifhorn train station for the ride back to Frankfurt and a plane to Moscow.