NOTES FROM THE BLOCKADE: BOOK REVIEW
TW: War, violence
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about generational trauma. Maybe it’s the sense that time has accelerated lately, with each bloated, “unprecedented” moment blotting out larger and larger swaths of my cultural memory. Maybe it’s just the downtime. But whatever the reason, I was Going Through It™ -- so I picked up a copy of a book I got as a present from a teacher long ago, Notes From the Blockade by Lidiya Ginzburg.
No one knows exactly when Notes From the Blockade was written, nor whether it’s a true story. The main character is called “N” -- anonymous, the everyman -- and the book recounts a day in his life in 1942, during the nearly 3-year Siege of Leningrad. Not a lot of Americans know what the Siege of Leningrad is, but growing up, I often heard about “the Siege” from my parents. I knew it to be something unspeakably horrible, an event that caused my family nearly as much trauma as the Holocaust. I knew that my great-grandmother starved to death during the Siege, at the age of 27. I knew that my grandparents could not bear to talk about their childhoods.
There is something indescribably surreal about reading your own family’s tragic history, especially when they have spent decades attempting to forget it. Rumor has it that Lydia Ginzburg wrote “N” as the composite of people she met on the street, of stories she heard in passing in breadlines or in tramcars. As I read, I often wondered: Am I reading the story of my own great-grandmother? My great-uncle? My grandfather?
But Notes from the Blockade is not a history book. It does not mention the numerical death toll of the Siege of Leningrad, or lay out its exact causes and results. You could feasibly read the entire book without quite grasping what the Siege of Leningrad actually was (a large-scale military blockade undertaken by the Nazis). Notes from the Blockade is about the psyche. N goes about his life: he goes to the well in the morning to get water, struggles to stay awake at his job, eats dinner with his mother. Throughout the book’s storyline, no major character dies, though death is ubiquitous. Life is both the same as it was before -- mundane, laden with routine -- and radically, incomprehensibly, different. The horror of the Siege hangs in the air, underlies every thought, influences every action in way or another. It’s grossly obvious, but it’s never stated outright.
If social media slacktivism has shown us anything, it’s that we often view tragedy as something “over there” -- in another country, in another time, located on the far side of some invisible line dividing the normal beat of life from the abyss, the shadowy and perturbing, the arrhythmic. In English, we say that tragedy “befalls” us: collapses suddenly onto our way of life, smashing everything we knew to pieces. But Notes from the Blockade posits something different. Here, the day-to-day is mired in tragedy: in the brief and jarring recollections of a better time, in the petty manifestations of state violence, in the arguments we have with our loved ones, distorted by hunger, or helplessness, or the weight of loss.
For Ginzburg, there is no central moment of tragedy. Tragedy is an undercurrent -- stemming from material horror and loss, to be sure, but impossible to isolate to one cause or one instant. The Siege, for one, did not “start” at any discrete point. According to Ginzburg, it set in gradually, almost unnoticeably.
And weirdly, it’s all a bit reassuring. For if tragedy exists in the mundane, then the reverse is also true: in our worst moments, amidst the worst conditions, there is some normalcy. I don’t mean some trite bullshit about silver linings. I just mean that for better or for worse, life goes on, in all its traumas and in all its pleasures.
OK, so maybe that’s not really reassuring, and what I really need is to go to therapy. But if Notes From the Blockade is not happy, at least it’s edifying. In these capitalist United States, it’s easy to get caught up in the individual and lose sight of the collective. And paradoxically, it was by reading something akin to a personal diary that the story of my family, of my people and my community, began to make some sense.
