Until we immigrated to Germany in 2004 from Odessa, my mom had not travelled much internationally. That is, until she became a mom. Also compared to her husband, my dad, who travelled extensively for work: not at all surprising for a sea captain. After the Berlin Wall fell, all the other moms I knew stormed the markets of Poland, Romania, Turkey and China in attempts to feed their families with the help of commerce.
The scheme was simple: buy something here — sell something there; buy something there — sell at home in Odessa. Well, my mom played with an idea to join her friends and neighbors, but never actually followed through. Meanwhile the friends and neighbors bought houses, put their kids through school, and in the most tragic case — got killed by Polish mobsters, a real story that happened to our neighbour. But this I guess is common for a rapidly changing society in which market forces become dominant beyond what is actually marketable. More on that later. Now back to my mom.
Well, before she was a mom, a wife, she actually travelled to Cuba. None of my friends’ moms ever travelled to Cuba. Neither then, nor now, I am sure. It was very uncommon to travel, especially that far, and being a young single woman on top of that. This idea of her travelling so far and alone combined with the souvenirs that she had brought from there and the pictures she had taken that I loved to flip though as a kid fascinated me.
Those images were impressive in many ways: the nature of the Caribbean seemed very foreign, as did the colonial architecture. But the posters of the Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin, of Fidel Castro mounted on the buildings in Socialist Realist style were very familiar. The prints we had were all black and white. Well, I guess the reason being the rationing and the consumer deficit in the 70s and 80s of the command-administrative economy and the 5-year plan that limited the color printing.
In my family we developed our films at home. Always black and white. So the greatest joy and fascination was getting my tiny hands on those colorful slides that my mom kept in a box and allowed me to look at from time to time. From the first time I put a little slide-viewing device next to my eye, I knew where I would be going once I grew up.
