It’s hard to focus on simple things like packing when you’re a few days away from connecting with people you’ve wondered about for more than twenty years. On the 15th of November, I’ll be heading out to St. Petersburg, Russia for a month-long trip, during which I’ll meet even more of the folks who wrote me letters of support, empathy, and brotherhood in 1988 – and shared their vision for a peaceful world. I’ll be joined by a crew of three very talented people from the US and a research team in Russia that has been working around the clock to find all of the original letter-writers.
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We’re off to St. Petersburg, Russia on July 3rd to begin shooting Letters from Leningrad. We’ll post updates here, on twitter (http://twitter NULL.com/#!/leningradletter) (we’re leningradletter (http://twitter NULL.com/#!/leningradletter)), and on our Facebook page (http://www NULL.facebook NULL.com/pages/Letters-from-Leningrad/106503166063327) (Letters from Leningrad (http://www NULL.facebook NULL.com/pages/Letters-from-Leningrad/106503166063327)).
Join us!
–The Letters from Leningrad Team
She was a girl of 10 who was worried about nuclear war and wrote a letter to our enemy’s leader asking why he wanted to destroy us. After some time, he responded, saying that his nation had no such intention, and he invited her to visit. On July 7, 1983, Samantha Smith traveled to the Soviet Union and made an appeal for world peace.
Some of the most beautiful things in the world come out of the mouths of children and of the elderly. Innocence is the cause of the former, perhaps, and wisdom the latter. The effect of the two on me is similar–a smile, sometimes a few tears, and the certitude that there is goodness around us.
On Monday mornings I volunteer at New York Methodist Hospital’s chemotherapy infusion center in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I usually ride my bike there and back, and that was the case yesterday. I finished my shift, had lunch with a fellow volunteer, donned my helmet, and hopped on my bike. I was in the process of crossing 7th Avenue when a lady in a car behind me accelerated and made a sudden right turn. I clamped down on my brakes for a second and then turned hard to the right; she saw me and jammed on her brakes and I slid past her.
There are some things you never want to have in common with another person, but you nevertheless feel connected when you do. Andrei established the connection between us at the beginning of his letter: ”You know, I am also sick, and unfortunately, terminally.”
After we finished pouring over all of the letters last week that Jeff received from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow back in 1988, we found a phone number in one of them, turned on a video camera and pointed it at Jeff, and dialed.
Eugenia translated fourteen letters in our first meeting–remarkable–and the first was written by a 17 year-old woman named Marina who lived in the Leningrad suburbs. Marina spoke initially about the beauty of Leningrad: the complex of palaces and an amazing park with fountains. She said she was studying education and was planning on becoming a preschool teacher.
When I found the letters, I immediately went about finding a translator. I had promised to do this when I first received the package from Ambassador Matlock in 1988, but the task got set aside and then I misplaced the package altogether. There are reasons, I think, why I didn’t get the translation work done back then, but it’s something I’ll get into in another post.
In late June 1988, I received a phone call from Jack Matlock, Jr., the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. He was calling from Moscow. The embassy had received boxes of letters from Soviet citizens in response to the article about me that appeared in the newspaper, Smena. He asked me about my trip, told me he’d send some of the letters (“I’m sorry, but we’re not the U.S. Postal Service, so we can’t send all of them”, he explained), and wished me well.
