Thursday, March 17, 2016

SOLSC Day 17: Mammogramming


I had my annual mammogram today. I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but in New York almost every mammogram technician is from eastern Europe. I always ask where east Europeans are from, since, back in 1991, I co-founded a nonprofit, the Network of East-West Women, supporting women activists in the post-communist countries, and still co-moderate a workshop on their issues.
            Today’s tech was a late-middle-aged woman with short dark hair. When I asked where she was from, she answered by asking me to guess. Hmm, I thought, is she Russian? Polish? Serbian? Croatian? Not Bulgarian, I thought. “Russia?” I guessed. Yes, she replied. I said I’d traveled in eastern Europe, but wasn’t good at distinguishing accents. She said their languages were all Slavic, so they mostly sounded the same. I said, not really, Czech sounded quite different from Polish.
           Then there were several minutes of her positioning me into the machine, adjusting my body and arms, and letting the machine squash my breast. There’s one position, with my shoulder down and head turned back, that always feels like a frozen dance move.
            When I asked where in Russia she was from (maybe I’d met someone from there?), she confessed that actually she was from Tajikistan, near Afghanistan, in what they called Middle Asia, but she’d stopped saying that when most Americans had never heard of Tajikistan. (My workshop has had a couple of speakers from Tajikistan.) I asked if she spoke Tajik. She said, the Tajik speak Farsi, but it’s written in Cyrillic. She still speaks it, but not so well, and her children, born here, don’t speak it at all and aren’t  interested in Tajikistan.
            One hundred years ago, there were massive numbers of immigrants into the United States — including all my grandparents. It feels like we’ve having another wave now, and I welcome them.

5 comments:

  1. An interesting story, meeting a women with a story. My grandparents were immigrants to Canada in the early 1900's from The Ukraine.
    I welcome the immigrants to The United States too.
    xo
    Pamela

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    Replies
    1. where in Ukraine were your grandparents from? My maternal grandparents were from Khotin (or Chotin, or Hotin, all depending on the language), a town now in south-central Ukraine, but in Romania between the world wars.

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  2. An interesting story, meeting a women with a story. My grandparents were immigrants to Canada in the early 1900's from The Ukraine.
    I welcome the immigrants to The United States too.
    xo
    Pamela

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is so interesting. I have heard of Tajikistan, but didn't know what language they spoke. I didn't realize until this year that Ukrainian is a language different than Russian.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. in many ways, it's differences in pronunciation, but there are probably also differences in vocabulary. Here's a funny story about "Serbo-Croatian," a single language that apparently no longer exists. In the late 1990s, a few years after the wars that broke up Yugoslavia had stopped, a film festival in Croatia showed a film from Serbia -- with subtitles. A Croatian friend thought this was hilarious; when Yugoslavia was one country, they all spoke one language. Now that they were separate countries, suddenly they needed subtitles?

      Delete