Letters from Vlad: First Message from Vlad

Saturday, September 21, 2013

First Message from Vlad

This first message came in English; Vlad had clearly tried using an online translator. Exciting, if unintelligible...

Dear Dan and Melissa. How did you get that obratno. Nadeyus normal. I have so little talk with all the little vremeni. Vsya our meeting was as korotkiyson in which I'm afraid to believe his father's death I was trying rozyskatrodnyh but bezuspeshno. Yathought of Gavlovskih odin. Ivdrug I was so happy I got as much right as relatives could not believe it. Write to me on the internet and the best simple pochtoy. ishite detail and large pismami. Adresa send all block letters so that I could read. Allkowtow.

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The Story

In the late 1920s, after the Bolshevik Revolution, my Polish great-grandfather was arrested by the Communist government and sent to Siberia, forced to leave his two children behind. After eight years in a labor camp, he began a new life, afraid to return home. He thought his family was lost, but my grandfather (or Dziadek, as I knew him) survived. Decades later, Dziadek learned he had a half-brother in Russia-- my great-uncle Vlad, who's about the same age as my dad. After Dziadek died, though, all contact with the family was lost. In the fall of 2013, a Russian reality show reunited us, and now, thanks to Google Translate and a little creativity, we're able to (mostly) communicate. These are our letters. (Translated into English for Vlad, and back into English from the Russian for me.)