My dad collected coins when he was a kid. They lived in a box, in the upper reaches of my parents' closet, and one day--when I was about 12--he let me choose one. Maybe he hoped, since I'd been pretty much a wash-out in my half-hearted venture into his current hobby--basketball (he coached,) that an interest in numismatics might provide an intellectual diversion from my usual vague activities of tromping through the woods and neglecting to brush my hair. (My brother collected stamps and encyclopedic knowledge. My sister collected straight A report cards and horse-show ribbons. I collected dirt under the fingernails and dust under my bed.)
As it happens, it didn't take. But I remember the coin I chose. It was an Estonian "1 sent." (plural: senti.) It was tiny and cute, and that was the basis on which I'd selected it. I knew nothing about Estonia. I don't know what became of that coin. I kept it in a box of random objects, with a pearl from Sea World in Florida, and a small gold cross pendant of the sort people used to give babies, but babies never wore. I'm sure my mom eventually dispersed/dispensed, or otherwise dispatched those objects and that box, after I left home.
Fast forward to the present. As I mentioned in another entry, I have a small stash of hardwood, purchased at Whole Foods Market, next to my fireplace. The wood, oddly, was imported from Estonia. I don't know why they'd sell Estonian firewood in Annapolis. The point is, though, that I thought of my firewood as I watched the opening panoramic vistas in the film The Singing Revolution, because there they were--the verdant forests and hills of the Baltics sweeping past--former home of the logs I've yet to burn.
The film is a documentary, tracing the history of Estonia's occupation by a succession of external forces, from the time of Czarist Russia, to the final--very recent--efforts to sweep away the remaining hold of the U.S.S.R (as it lost its grip all over the place.) I assume that the gaping hole in my familiarity with Estonia and its close neighbors--Latvia and Lithuania--stems from the fact that when I was going to high school, Estonia was a Soviet Socialist Republic, not yet enjoying the relative liberties of perestroika and glasnost, and the Iron Curtain was a barrier we rarely peered behind, even from the boring comfort of 10th grade European History.
Childhood impressions are weird, and while I could have told you next to nothing about the nature of the nation of Estonia, I could have attached emotive words to my vague impressions of the Iron Curtain concept--cold, grey, metallic--most likely the very impressions our post-McCarthy curriculum would have wanted to impart to our young democratic minds.
Hence, if my guess about the Estonian people might have been that they were a drab and colorless lot, with drawn faces and dreary raincoats, huddled around the clanking radiator in a two-room apartment while dining on the solitary potato that was for sale at the market...well, I would have been mistaken. Not that the fear and chill evoked by the specter of Soviet occupation didn't feature in the story of Estonia's emancipation--it certainly did, and many if not most of the players interviewed for the film had spent time in Siberia, while the rest lived under the threat. But, still, the people portrayed in the documentary took me by surprise.
So much blond hair. A Scandinavian-looking bunch, for sure. Now, I'm not going to argue that I didn't fail myself in obtaining a proper education, because I most certainly did...but I think it's all too easy for American schoolchildren (if they get a sense of Eastern Europe at all, and they might not,) to mix up things like Baltic and Balkan.
Thus, when imagining an Estonian, it is important to imagine an Estonian. And not, let's say, a Macedonian. Because the fact that Estonians are closely linked to the Finns in both language and ethnicity is quite obvious, once you begin to pay attention.
When you grow up in middle-America, thinking that your second grade textbook, Greenfield, U.S.A, gives a reasonably accurate picture of what life is like, you tend--at least as a child--to extend such assumptions about life (safety, comfort, friendliness, plenty,) to encompass the folks on that continent over that-a-way...Europe. (You have no such illusions about the other continent over that-a-way...Africa...because that's the one they always use to illustrate how things aren't always so great.)
And you assume that stuff you saw in old newsreel footage--Nazis, concentrations camps, the strafing of cities by small buzzing planes--is history. As in, distant history. (Maybe it was easier to be so oblivious as a 12 year old in 1974 than it would be for a 12 year old in 2010, who has to learn why she can only bring liquids in 3 oz increments on airplanes.) But, anyway...here's the remarkable thing about Estonia in the 20th Century--When the Allies routed the Third Reich, and the parts of Europe about which I knew the most returned to a way of life I would have more or less recognized--the Soviets marched right back into the Baltic countries. Estonia continued to experience a continuity of bad news until the last of the Soviet forces marched away in 1994. That's practically yesterday.
And here, on film, are sweeping scenes of a beautiful, wooded landscape, and the lovely singing faces of people who are neither drab, metallic, nor wearing grey raincoats. But who are both young, and still remember when singing was, maybe, a slightly risky proposition.
