Stitching Together Memory

My old Singer sewing machine pulley belt is in tatters and shreds and no longer adequately drives the wheel. The canvas belt is separating from the rubber and has shredded so as to interfere with the wheel pulley. I trimmed the belt with a nail scissors and got a little more life out of it but now the old belt's literally hanging by a thread.

I haven't been able to properly use my Singer for years. Last time I used it was five years ago to mend Neil's 1920s military kilt. It's literally falling apart again and the polyester thread I used to hand-stitch its myriad pleats back into place, doesn't hold up to the considerable weight of the fabric. The kilt must weigh 7-10 pounds so that's a lot of strain on the thread and the buckle fastenings.

Hard to find the old Coates and Clarke thread these days. "The best thread in the world," my grandmother always said. "Good sturdy stuff," she'd say, pulling on the thread, making it taut until it twanged and sang like a harp string. "Made in Scotland too." Little did I know that my domestic destiny would be caught up in that bobbin of thread manufactured in the cotton factories along the Clydebank.

I haven't been able to use my old Singer for years. The little motor spins and moans when the belt slips and I have to coax it along by hand.  At this point, I'd be better off with a treadle sewing machine. I really need a replacement belt. But when I look for belts, I can't seem to find one for that model.

Sure, I could get a new sewing machine. Lord knows they're cheap enough new. I could even get one for nothing on Freecycle. But I have a fierce loyalty to my old outdated Singer sewing machine. Sure it'd be lovely to be able to zig-zag or embroider or make button holes, or even have a reverse option.

My grandmother had a similar model Singer bought used from a peddler during the Depression in San Francisco. She gave him five bucks a week until it was paid off. She sewed all the clothes for 8 of her own children (4 boys and 4 girls), and also for my brother and me (she raised us) on that old Singer.

She also sewed generations of curtains and bedsheets on that Singer. When the sheets got worn out down the middle, she ripped them apart and sewed the relatively unworn outside ends together. I even had a set of summer sheets pieced together from old flour sacks. I loved their fresh laundered line dried stiff scratchy feel. It heralded summer.

My brother and I, we both learned how to sew on that old Singer. He became an auto upholsterer. During the hippie era, I even sewed leather skirts, vests and purses on it—not to mention rather, er, inventive dressed and tops! My mom once sewed up a multicolored red and blue canvas panel tepee on that Singer.

My brother and I, we both accidentally sewed up the tips of our fingers on that Singer. We sang and howled with pain but it made us much more careful sewers.

Apparently it was a family right of passage. My mom also sewed up the tip of her finger several times over on that old Singer. She later did a lot of theatre and costume designing on it. One costuming stint at the Cal Neva casino for Sinatra's fan dancing show girls—not a whole lot of material involved on that job—mostly feathers and beads.

I remember another sewing stint of hers with the famous Hollywood designer Ruben Panis (she married him so he could get his Green Card; he was later brutally murdered by a jealous lover) making Miss World costumes—I did the seed pearl beading on Miss Korea's pageant gown. The point is, that old Singer was running 12-16 hours a day under deadline and it never once faltered.

My cousin Kate has my grandmother's Singer now and it's still working fine (it's on its 2nd or 3rd motor), but she needs a belt as well. (BTW, she too has sewed up the tip of her finger. A good thing we have fingernails. It usually stops the needle from traveling up to the tip of the metatarsal finger bone.)

When I moved away from home, I bought my Singer in 1972 for a whopping $40 on 2nd Street between C and D Streets in San Rafael, CA. A neighbor had given me a gorgeous similar vintage White model but it didn't work as well as the Singer. After about 6 months using it, I was ready for a better sewing machine. So one morning when I was driving down 2nd street saw this old black and gold Singer exactly like my grannie's in the window, I slammed on the brakes, jumped out of the car and ran into the used appliance store.

The owner tried to dissuade me from buying that old Singer, saying, "what-aya want that old thing for? I got some real nice Kenmores here. How 'bout a White? They're better than that old Singer. More features. It's old. Won't last long. Won't be able to find parts for it. You'll want the newer features" He really wanted to sell me a more modern 1960s sewing machine. But I had my heart set on that Singer.

Besides, the old White, though it was truly magnificent to behold, with its plethora of dizzying gold foil and colored enamel scroll work to admire, it was a real Jezebel. Despite its fancy inlaid walnut cabinet and painted beauty, it was really a lousy machine. The spindle bobbin was always jamming and balling up into a tight knot of thread (I. M. Singer improved the old bobbin and tension assembly) and I never got used to using the pressure foot pedal. There were gas and brake pedals more accurate than that pedal. I missed the much more accurate and precise knee pressure pedal on my grannie's Singer.

I wanted that old Singer. I wanted the best. You might say I was destined to own that old Singer. I emptied my wallet on the counter, but I was about a dollar short of $20 so I ran out to my car and scrounged for lost coins in the ash tray but I was still a few cents short, so I looked under the car seat: a nickel, a penny a dime. I had the down payment! I had an old hand-me-down '58 Volvo panel van from my uncle John—are you ready for this?—originally imported as a Singer delivery van, and thanks to its coin swallowing crevices managed to scrape up the $20 down on it.

Unbeknownst to me, I had entered into the original innovative Singer Hire-Purchase process—put a little money down, pay in installments—precursor to the credit card. It took me a few months to earn the rest of the money for the Singer. When I finally came to claim it, the shopkeeper, shaking his head doubtfully at my folly, he thought the Singer was a more modern 1939 model than my Grannie's.

So did I—until today when I stumbled upon the Singer website. Looking up specs on another machine being offered for free on Freecycle, I was shocked to discover that AC515997 was a 1929 model. I don't know how many motors it had from 1929 to 1972, but I've only had the one motor for nearly 35 years. I have used it for 30 years... until the belt shredded about 5 years ago.....

Well, suffice to say, nearly 35 years later, I still don't need any parts for my Singer but I do need a new pulley belt. My machine was never quite  as robust as my grandmother's Singer, it can't sew through thick material like a tepee with French seams, or leather without a lot of coaxing, but it usually did the job. I miss it. I really don't want a new machine.

ADDENDUM 9/6/08: After hauling my Singer into several sewing stores in Oakland and after calling almost every quilting store in Alameda County during the 3-digit heat heat wave in June, I resorted to trial and error, trying every sewing machine and vacuum cleaner belt I could find that was around 13 inches long. Nothing worked. Most belts are far too short.

Women stopped to admire my black and gold Singer strapped to the wheelie luggage rack like a lovely child in a pram, they, with their modern sewing machines, couldn't believe their eyes. A mirage. I felt like I'd stepped out of a living history museum time warp. We swapped stories on the longivity and sheer sewing power of the old Singers that could sew through most anything.

One rather toney sewing store owner on Piedmont Avenue (my last hope), haughtily rendered a suburban sniff at my machine as if it was something dragged in from the gutter, wanted to know when's the last time I got it serviced. I said never, I did it myself. She looked at me as if I was deranged. "But you can't do that," she said. Of course I can. I replied. Dead simple to lube and tune it. Like a Volkswagon Bug. An idiot could do it. I resorted to special ordering a motor pulley belt that never arrived.

After three months of waiting for the Singer pulley belt, when Costco had a special sale on Singers, I broke down and bought a newfangled machine for $150 that makes buttonholes, embroiders & zizzags too. But though it has 51 stitches, and it even self threads, it's more cumbersome and bothersome to use than my old Singer. it's claketty as a train, sounds like it needs a valve job and a lube. Too many levers in the way. Little plastic knobs come off at the slightest touch.

I can't see what I'm doing without hunching down for fear of sewing up my nose. I hate the micro LED light. No pulley belt in sight. Everything's locked away behind a bulky white plastic case. Even the thread guys. The thread spool now lays sideways, you need a toy wheel to keep it on. A piece guaranteed to get lost sooner rather than later around kids. How hard would it have been to put a hinge on the spool holder rod and let gravity keep it in place? Like the old days? No room for oversized industrial spools here. Just the weenie expensive spools of thread with exotic names. No Coates and Clarks. Alas, I've entered into the realm where one gets one's machine annually "serviced" for the price I originally paid for it.

I miss the knee pedal. I wound up dragging the foot pedal onto the bed and sitting cross-legged, I could lean on it and approximate the knee pedal action by using the foot pedal as a knee pedal. One woman said it's easy to use the foot pedal, like driving a car. I'm from the four-on-the-floor, pedal-to-the-metal driving school. Not easy to switch when you've learned to sew with your knee for 45 years! Programming's utterly different. Like comparing dressage to drag racing. The slow stitch finger button makes up for it. Maybe I'll adjust to it in time. Meanwhile, an mountain of sewing repairs, in some cases, dating back five years, awaits.

This summer, I did stand at the falls on the River Cart in Paisley, Scotland, and took photos of the old Coates & Clarkes building, now renovated into fancy loft offices. All the cotton mills and thread factories are being torn down for condos in Johnstone, Elderslie, and the other industrial towns that sprung into being during the 1800s. I couldn't even find a sewing machine belt there either, for love or money.

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I loved the story of how the modern sewing machine was invented and perfected via a dream. Whether or not it's true, it was a flash of inspiration. I can't find the reference, but I.M. Singer couldn't resolve the thread breaking, he dreamed of two swordsmen fighting with needles with eyes on the tips...and that's how the solution to create a needle tension mechanism came to him.

I was also once tight friends with Sonoma County poet Pam Singer Raphael, distantly related to Isaac Merritt Singer. God only knows what branch she descends from, there are many. I never asked. She was a real New Jersey girl, talked kinda funny, with a heart of gold and in those halcyon daze we had a strong taste for Humboldt Heaven, Acapulco Gold and Maui Wowie.

Pam was a real waterdog, she was once a champion water skater back in Jersey. We spent many a summer day swimming hidden pools along the Russian River and the Gualala River. Back in 1979, we apprenticed together under Lee Perron and trained to become poet-teachers for California Poets in the Schools, teaching poetry (and art ) to kids—a job which became my lifelong calling. I never thought to ask if Pam was also related to Isaac Bashievs Singer, I think she was... I'd met his literary agent Sylvia Tota on a Hungarian train one summer. (See blog: Budapest Nights).

Pam's father was a chemist who invented Sensodyne and Qwell! After the Summer of Love, Pam said a lot of her hippie friends used to profusely thank her father for inventing Quell when they met him. her boyfriend Michael Yesbik said he shook Pam's father's hand for inventing Quell.

Having read a bit of Pam's paternal ancestor's somewhat philanderous ways (I. M. Singer had several simultaneous wives and more than a Baker's dozen of children), it's an aptly fitting invention! Singer, escaping a matrimonial scandal in New York, fled to Glasgow with his new bride, set up a Singer factory and built a residence on Clydebank.

One time she told her father how much I liked Sensodyne but it was so hard to find in Sonoma County. He sent me a care package, a whole box full of Sensodyne toothpaste. I didn't dare mention to her that I was i also intimate with Qwell as I picked up lice that summer while trying on clothes in Waikiki stores. I was completely hysterical when I found out, but that's another story...

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My partner Neil's hard working chain smoking aunties and mum were all employed by Clydebank Singer (Coates and Clarke) factories. The old brick and glass walled factories still stand along the River Cart in Paisley, Scotland. Their myriad window panes glint in the sunlight. In the afternoon, the sun shines right through the building so the vast banks of windows light up like vast cathedrals of prisms. Now the buildings have been converted into modern malls.

My grandmother would tell me that the thread was made in Scotland. I still have some old Scottish Coates & Clarke wooden thread spools, once a prime toy find. It rolled, it made a fine a building block and it even made for a crude yo-yo or necklace of sorts. I even made a flute out of several thread spools. It didn't work. I didn't know about reeds.

Little did I know I would actually wind up with a man whose family worked in those same factories. Now his auntie Cathie, the woman who delivered him, is dead. The funeral was held day before yesterday. She was a grand old lady nicknamed Lazarus because she had been at death's door so many times and defied his debt. She gave up her ciggies (coffin fags) at 70. Her grave site overlooks the old mill factories on the River Cart. Come midsummer, we'll be visiting her grave. I have a half a mind to bring along a necklace made of those old Coates and Clarke thread spools and lay them at her grave. Fitting afterlife booty for the barrow.

Letters to Celia Woloch

c/o Vins van Neerven, 

Hogerbeetsstraat 97 III, 

1052 VV Amsterdam, Netherlands 

   
Celia, my grlfrnd—                 Aug. Sept., 1992-93?

In the weightlessness of space, an astronaut’s heart shrinks. —Omni

AUG 20—Even in between sobs, it’s good to hear your voice via the Ma Belle satellite. And yes, I’m not writing much, lacking the focus. Where are the poems hidden? Why won’t they come?

Maybe this letter will open up the dam (Amster-dam: the 16th c. dam on the Amsterele river is real, not a metaphor. I’ve given into the timelessness of being at loose ends—with no agendas, hidden or otherwise—in a country not my own, seeking what oddities life has to offer.)

Where do poems come from? Page One of my notebook documents the oddities of The Final Frontier: After fighting nearly three years with Soviet bureaucracy for permission to hook up a computer telecommunications system with the Ukraine for a cultural exchange program, I finally let go of the idea. 

Then, shortly after April Fool’s Day, I received my first E-mail message from Oleg via GlasNET. Was it incongruous to read a satellite message transmitted half-way around the world that began with: “Cosmonaut lands, doesn’t recognize his own country?” 

Ex-lovers aside, how ironic: my first message from the new independent nation, Ukraine, is not about freedom, but about space, the final frontier. O-oh K.!?

Yes. Forgotten during the 1991 August coup, stranded Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev helplessly watched his country disappear: changing its name, anthem, and political order. The abandoned space program was officially broke with no way to get him home. 

Secret calls in the night; someone trying to sell Soviet space ships for hard currency. When Krikalev eventually returned to Earth after ten months in space, he didn’t recognize his own country. It was then discovered in the weightlessness of space, an astronaut’s heart shrinks. 

Moral: be careful of hasty conclusions and hearts stranded in space. Complex metaphor swiftly approaching from the starboard side. Will I regret not going to Russia after the Fall, and seeing for myself, the changes?

Budapest Nights

Sultry Búdapest nights: as clichéd as it might sound, during the dog days of summer, 1992, I walked along a parapet of the fish market at sunset listening to the distant wild strains of someone playing gypsy violins.

I'd walked several miles from the Pest (Pesht) side of town all the way up to the top of the ancient walled hillfort of old Búda (Obúda). But as perverse luck would have it, my friend, theater critic, Ken Bullock, was with his Hungarian girlfriend on the Pest side of the river leaving me stranded.

It seems we were always on opposite shores of the Danube most of that summer. I wasn't picking up any survival Magyar, my German was non-existent and so I was pretty lonely. Búda and Pest are two separate cities conjoined by modern bridges. But this whole trip was filled with turned tables, burnt bridges, and switched alliances.

During most of August of 1992, I lived across from the Houses of Parliament on the Pest side of the river, while Ken was staying in a pied–à–terre near Boulevard Bartok in Búda proper. I loved looking at the Houses of Parliament, modeled after Westminister. The spires and steeples were constantly changing moods, it was like living within a Turner painting at sunset with the glassy Danube changing its négligé.

Calling Ken's cramped quarters a pied–à–terre was generous, Ken had a closet-sized flat, nothing more than a bookshelf and a murphy bed in a room so small you had to step into the hall just to change your mind. Let alone, your shoes. This was a country still suffering from the throes of communism. No amenities, no phones. And we were both living on frayed shoestring budgets.

My free housing arrangements in Búdapest had fallen through at the last minute and I was afraid of spending too much money before I got to Russia as I was planning on spending six months to a year in Leningrad and dollars were the only stable currency. So what was supposed to be cash for my meager food budget went into renting a dark little hovel of a room on the other side of the river. Walking to Ken's instead of taking the tram meant I had some spare coins for morning caffè latte. My only indulgence.

Búdapest is the city of romance, and I was there all alone, thinking—trying to imagine myself as the wife of a devoutly religious Russian man, living in Russia, leaving my homeland, my family and friends—perhaps forever—and I just couldn't get the pictures and reality to merge.

These were not exactly the thoughts of a woman ready to meet her lover after an absence of seven months. I was in limbo, feeling quite lost. But I'd been in limbo since my former boyfriend John Oliver Simon and I had split up—though the parting distance between us was longer than the length of the relationship.

But my friend Celia Woloch knew of such things because, as she said before I left home, "we are not swans" mating for life—though I swam in the Duna, the Donau, the Danube with the other wild birds.

The afternoons were ours—we often met at Santo's Espresso café on the utca across from my room. Ken is my polar twin; unable to commit to his girlfriend, we endlessly fulminated over the myriad problems between cultures in regards to marriage.

Ken said the idea of Hungary and America merging was not such a stretch of the imagination—his girlfriend spoke English, and is in the same business as Ken (the theater), and she has lived in California. Yet he was extremely cautious.

Obscure guardian angel—Ken said he wanted me to see an Eastern Block country that was full of joy and prosperous—not like the Slavic dolorosa I knew so well. And my folly seemed to be an extreme form of madness under the clarity of these extraordinary Budapest skies.

My plan was to Eurail from Hungary to Helsinki (changing trains in Amsterdam, visit college classmate Vinz van Neerven a week) and then from Helsinki, I would take the St. Petersburg train into Russia, and return to Amsterdam via Moscow to catch my flight home some six months later.

I was really in a quandary over what to do about Valera.

In my suitcases—I had myriad letters and gifts from Russians living in America, I had tele-communications devices and tele-connector wires, Mac programs, even an Apple printer to trade/barter with Valentine Yemelin for an airline ticket for Valera (Valeriy) Stupachenko to come to the States… But he had no desire to live in America. His world was the Leningrad Rok Opera and serving as a deacon in a church.

It all came down to valuta. Valuta. (Hard currency). Because I had so much luggage with me, I mailed three boxes of books and two boxes of luggage and cigarettes to Valera in St. Petersburg from Búdapest. Books, cigarettes and western clothing—especially jeans—were invaluable barter currency in the former USSR. Worth a small fortune. No guarantee it would ever arrive in Russia but I was tired of lugging it around.

Ken had left a day earlier for Vienna to visit another friend, I was learning to navigate quite nicely in Búdapest on my own—even without a language. So I was really on my own to navigate the trials of travel.

Right before the end of my Búdapest stay, I visited László Tabóri and Irén Kiss's home in Búda to co-translate poetry into English for a poetry periodical I edited with Herman Berlandt, Mother Earth News.

After my first visit to the Ukraine in 1989, I came back with so much translated Russian poetry, Herman and I had concocted the idea of doing a contemporary poetry anthology in newspaper format that covered the seven continents. (See Soviet Poetry Since Glasnost.)

László, a poet and playwright and his wife Irén, a poet teaching at the university, agreed to be the Hungarian editors for the Eastern Bloc issue of Mother Earth News.

We discovered that even when English-speaking poets translated poems into English, poems needed a second translation into poetic English. Metaphor doesn't travel well. That's where I came in. I had a real knack for wrestling their broken English into poetry.

Whenever possible, I worked directly with the poets and a translator together as well. So I found myself in otherwise improbable triadic situations all for the sake of poetry. Like at the Széchenyi baths or the Houses of Parliamant.

László and Irén had a big going-away party for me with all the intelligensci and literati of Búdapest in tow. A Rumanian woman playwright was trying to converse with me over a glass of Bull's Blood to no avail. Kiss Anna vagyok. So we slid through what languages we knew and out of the six languages we attempted, we found the only tongue we had in common was—Russian. I found myself apologizing to her in the language of the oppressor!

The famous Hungarian poet Anna Kiss had overheard me speaking in Russian and with that liberation of language, we found ourselves gleefully talking of poetry in halting Russian until we were utterly exhausted by the strain of thinking in languages not our own. Smiles and gestures became our conversation when our brains and tongues grew weary. We raised our glasses high.

I still love the Russians, and the language, and wouldn't trade my experiences in the Soviet Union for anything in the world. I hope my guilt over abandoning Valera Stupachenko won't cut me off from that experience. (Am I burning my bridges?)

Russia was my attempt to fill a vacuum in my own life— a parallel to what I experienced with John Oliver Simon's Latin American connections. And I gained some invaluable experiences from it—my writing took a giant leap forward. And I did create some excitement in my life, in fact, much, much more than I bargained for.

My college friend Vinz met me in Amsterdam what was to be a short week's stay. He often complained that I was always going to Russia, but I never came to visit him. So this time I was amending that problem. It was so wonderful to be in Amsterdam. I loved it and I could see how Peter the Great, who lived in Amsterdam for a while, was influenced by its architecture. St. Peterbourg (Leningrad) was modeled after Amsterdam.

But as the final day approached where I had to make my train reservation to Helsinki and St. Petersburg, the fears began to return full force; I was absolutely crazed. My friend Vinz was amazed when I announced I wasn't going to Russia as we went up the last escalator to the train station at the eleventh hour. More like 11:59.

I think that snap-decision was like a good game of poker, bluffing yourself (and your opponents) with a weak hand in order to win the jackpot by chance. When caught in a quandry, I often procrastinate to the last possible minute. And I often don't know how I feel or want until after the fact. Going into Russia was like that. But I'm getting ahead of my narrative. And out of sequence. In medias res.

Though I'd mailed several parcels on ahead, I was enroute to Russia with enough luggage to founder and bog a truck in the mud. My printer and laptop each had their own baggage requirements with converters and wallwarts the size and weight of bricks. Then there were my cameras. This was the pre digital camera age. I was NOT traveling light.

A lot of this baggage was my dowry—so to speak. I could sell most of it on the Black Market for ten times what it was worth stateside. I went several hours early to the Búdapest train station to get my Eurail pass stamped to Vienna where Ken was waiting with Claire.

But first, I needed to activate my Eurail Pass. So I got in line three hours early. And stood. And Stood. And Stood. Soviet "efficiency" still very much in operation in this former Eastern Block country; two minutes before my train to Vienna was to leave, I was still 5th in line at the ticket cassa.

Swearing like a sailor, I gave up trying to validate my Eurail ticket (ignoring warnings of severe penalties—your hair will fall out, we'll throw you from the moving train, excommunicate you, take all your money and revoke the ticket—threats didn't deter me). I decided to take my chances with the conductor because my friend Ken was meeting me on this train, not the later one. And we had no way of reaching each other. No phones. No addresses.

I grabbed my two wheelies laden with baggage and raced to the platform: the girl in front of me turned and said to her friend in English, "car 270." Where it was going, I wasn't sure. I didn't even have time to check. The gods must be crazy, I looked at my ticket, the numbers checked, I threw my backpack, my two bags (with computer, cameras and printer) and wheelie luggage rack onto the moving train as it pulled away from the platform.

I made a leap for the caboose, my waterbottle, loosened from my daypack, clunketed onto the spinning tracks, leaving me little time to ponder if I could really fight both gravity and physics at the same time. I was literally teetering on the brink of indecision.

The weight of the daypack on my back was literally pulling me backwards out the door. All those camera lenses. My luggage aboard, my corporal body was fighting both centrifical force and gravity at the same time. I thought, "Uh-oh, I'm not going to make it. I'm going to die horribly beneath a train just like Anna Karenina."

Running alongside the train, the train attendant literally lent me a helping hand, he shoved my protuding ass hard up the stairs and over my luggage, shutting the door behind me.

I lay sprawled in a heap over my luggage, stunned, taking a panicked personal inventory of luggage, passport, tickets, arms and toes.

MEETING SYLVIA TOTA

I stumbled into my train compartment which occupied by a henna-wigged Hungarian woman well on the other side of fifty, replete with false eyelashes and carmine claws. She was dressed like an overstuffed canary silk couch and had enough luggage to go into business retail perched on four of the six seats.

I asked to sit in the only vacant seat. Crabbily, she said in an accent more outrageous than the famous Gabor sisters, "No! Zis ees not smokingk compartment; zat's MY seat! I haf ticket." She waived it menancingly in my face.

But I was in a dangerous mood after having nearly fallen off the train as I boarded it, and with an adrenalin rush, I told her she couldn't have tickets for the whole compartment. She begrudgingly moved one of her Louis Vuitton makeup bags two inches closer to make room for me.

Trying to ameliorate our hostile beginnings, as Vienna was a long train ride away, I made some small talk, and eventually won her over. Unbelievably, we became friends by the time it took her goose liver (a whole, unadorned mountainous pale goose liver the size of Mt. Rushmore) sandwich to thaw; my pocketknife slicing neat pink cutlets from its generous slopes for breakfast.

As we began to unravel the theads that clothed our lives, Sylvia Tota told me that in 1954, when she was 19, she escaped Búdapest with her first husband via the underground railway. She described leaving home in the dead of the night, crawling through a hole under the border fence. Heavy midwinter fog, barbed wire, faces smudged with coal. Her face, too much a Jewish map for her to safely stay behind as the Soviets marched across her homeland.

They were smuggled into Austria, where she lived for a time in a refugee camp until safe passage was made on a ship destined for Canada. There weren't many places for Hungarian refugees to go. Canada was one safe harbour.

In Toronto, Sylvia learned English, she got a job waitressing, life was hard. She eventually divorced her Hungarian husband, leaving him for an Italian immigrant, which is how she wound up in New York, and then later, Miami. Her husband died so she was on her own, a wealthy widow.

Sylvia was a literary agent for the late Fedor Ágnes, a famous Hungarian writer who wrote "Sárga Nárcisz," and "Különös Karnevál," or "Strange Carnival," which she hoped to get printed in Hungarian, a challenge as Jewish Holocaust writing was banned in Hungary for so long.

Jewish Hungarian writers were truly a lost generation, lost to Hungary, lost to Israel, lost to America. She wanted to rekindle the flame, to get the book published in Hungary so that she could entice an American publishing house to print a bilingual edition.

In "Women’s Voices in Hungarian Holocaust Literature," Dr. Katalin Pécsi, Director of Education at the Holocaust Memorial and Documentation Center in Budapest, wrote, "Although quite a few personal memoirs had been published directly after the war, they did not become well known for some reason – so they did not become part of the Jewish canon either." (Alas, I found only this one link.)

Ágnes Fedor’s interview-style novel chronicles the story of her family living in hiding a la Anne Frank. Fedor’s article 'Bevilaqua' from the Esti Hírlap newspaper informs us that “Bela Borsody Bevilaqua was a patron saint of journalists… By chance, I think he saved my life…"

Fedor wrote, "When I interviewed Bevilaqua in 1939 about the origin of Hungarian Jews, whom he considered to be Khazar based on evidence of geographic and family names, he looked at me and asked, ‘Doesn't this anti-Semitic law apply to you as well?’ I nodded. ‘But you’re a typical Khazar!’ he said.

He stared at me drawing an inventory of my features—but he did so with the purpose of saving my life. Then he said, ‘With your features, complexion and bone structure, you could pass as a Slovakian maid servant. It’s only your eyebrows that you have to dye fair!’It was snowing in March 1944, just like today. I dyed my eyebrows fair in the danger of death. And I survived.”

Sylvia and I chitchat about the literary world, contracts, and rights as I was in Hungary to meet poets. I told her about one poet whose poems I'd worked on, polishing them into poetic English for an upcoming Mother Earth issue on Eastern Block poetry after Glasnost. I was to meet Gyula Kodolányi, who was Hungary's Secretary of State. I never did meet with him, except to briefly shake his hand as he descended the steps of the Hungarian House of Parliament, he was a very busy man—though I talked to his wife several times.

Everything moved slowly in Hungary—the manãna complex was alive and well. It took me a week just to get his phone number from Ken's friend, playwright László Tabóri, a former student of Kodolányi's. László's wife, Irén Kiss, also a poet, was a former editor of "The New Hungarian Review," and held Kodolányi's old job at the University. Irén informed me everything is corrupt in Hungary.

She told me Kodolányi married a famous poet's daughter; Gyula Setijis—I'd never heard of him either, but then, I know little about Hungary to begin with. I was armed with a few random poet's names and a lot of faith in optimism and sychronicity.

Irén said she had quit "The New Hungarian Review" because it was a communist party organ; she said they had an editorial parting of the ways. That was a huge blow as I had counted on getting poems from their archives.

Irén studied with Italian poet Edouardo Sanguinetti (whom I later met in Holland at Poetry International); we translated several of her poems done in the Italian style. Like in Russia, everything is 10 to 20 years behind the times. Kodolányi was paradoxically a member of the old guard, and of the new wave at the same time. I wanted to meet poets from the other side but I had trouble finding them.

Sylvia told me, "There's no money in writing. At least not in America". I said, "Tell me something I don't know." I was floored—nay my flabber was ghasted—when she told me a friend of hers was Isaac Bashevis Singer. Sylvia said, that when he received the Nobel prize for literature, she called him up to congratulate him and he despaired, "Here I am, a famous writer, and all I get is rejected manuscripts in the mail. This is no life for a writer." Amen to that.

When the conductor came into our carriage to check our tickets, Sylvia explained the circumstances to him in Magyar. I was relieved to have this unlikely angel come to my rescue.

The conductor gave me a closer look and remembered me. He laughed and said, "Yes, I remember her. I saw her board the train at the last minute with all her baggage. If I validate the ticket on the train there'll be a severe penalty, but she looks like a nice, poor girl. Tell her to take care of it in Vienna." And so I rode to Vienna for free. Since Sylvia was translating this, I had only her word—but I do know they had a good laugh at my expense about my ass literally hanging out of the train.

When I told Sylvia the story of going to Moscow to meet Valera (Valeriy) Stupachenko, the Russian pop singer of the Leningrad Rok Opera, and formerly of Singing Guitars—Payush Guitara, at first she said very yenta-ishly, "Don't marry him if he can't support you and take care of you. Marriage is a business transaction."

When I showed her Valera's picture, she looked at it a long time, perhaps remembering something of her own past. I told her of the unusual circumstances of how we'd met during the August coup/putchst aboard the Soviet research vessel, the Akademik Shirshov, she said, "I see. It's very romantic, just marry him, if you wait, you'll rationalize. Don't let it spoil by waiting."

Valeriy Stupachenko, Akademik Shirshov, SF, CA 1991

Bewildered and bolstered by her advice, I prepared to leave. We kissed three times, she saw me off the train as if I was family. I was remembering other trains, seeing off the Soviet students at Kiev, staying behind with my Ukranian lover Oleg Atbashian. Ken meeting me in both times in Vienna.

I am always grateful by how special it is to be met at the train or plane; like when Ken met me at the airport before my last trip to Russia. These passages, or transitions, travel are often lonely ventures. We never come back to what we were. And we will never pass this way again.

But Peter the Great's beloved city upon which he modeled Peter'burg, Amsterdam, the city of his youth, had other plans for me. My dreams of Russia dissipated into the Baltic mist.

Maureen Hurley, Amsterdam,