New Year, my grandfather.
Happy New Year to all my valued interlocutors. I wish all of you and your families the best of luck, good health, and success in your respective endeavours!
I spent mine with the ever-wonderful Lisa, and was, as is not infrequently the case, treated to a wonderful culinary sensation — seasoned lentil soup. I get the impression from her that when people think of lentils, they think of a very bare-bones, subsistence-staple kind of thing. Let me assure you that her approach, especially given the deficiency of raw ingredients with which she had to work over at my place (I am positively useless in the kitchen), finds no communion with that; it is, as with all of her creations, sophisticated and delightful, in my humble opinion.
I am saddened to say that the holiday was eclipsed by the news of the death of my grandfather in Beirut. He had been fighting metastised prostate cancer for two years. I have not seen him since I left Russia when I was six, apart from a brief and surreally ephemeral encounter in America in 1999 under a rather bizarre set of circumstances. He was an ethnic Armenian whose family repatriated to Soviet Armenia in the 1940s. A cello player and teacher in the USSR, he returned to his native Lebanon after the dissolution of the Soviet Union to teach at a reputable conservatory. I am glad to say that he spent his last days in the loving, adoring company of wonderful people of phenomenally strong, compassionate and affectionate character — his indefatigable wife, a literally unceasing stream of visitors including students, parents, colleagues, various luminaries of cultural and civic life, and their sundry families and associates.
He received students and gave lessons to the full extent of his cognitive viability. He was widely admired and revered by a very vast social circle. And, I have been made to understand, an auditorium in a university of school of music has already been named after him.
I have no trouble believing that the entire city in which he had spent his childhood was so devoted to him. There is something about the character of these people that makes me reach for an optimistic appraisal of human nature and the fundamental beneficence of people’s hearts. And despite the tragedy of his death, I am moved to say that I cannot think of a place, an atmosphere, and a culture in which I would have rather he spent his last days than among his students in Beirut. No other milieux could have possibly bestowed a worthier conclusion to his life’s work as a musician, or given greater expression to the glory of his character.
But just as I felt in 2001 when my great-grandmother (a famous WWII-era ballerina and a key figure in my early childhood in Moscow - she taught me how to read), I cannot help feeling remorseful that our emigration to America amounts to an abandonment of the little that is left of both sides of our family halfway across the world.
We Russians, after all, are supposedly not so different from the Lebanese in our values about these things.