The Shoemaker and his Daughter tells the story of how the veteran Irish journalist Conor O'Clery met his Russian wife Zhanna, with fascinating insights into family history and their marriage of more than twenty years. Eileen Dunne has been absorbed.
I am one of those lucky enough to have studied history throughout my secondary school years, and I was always fascinated by Russian history, from Oleg of Novgorod, through to the various Tsars and the story of the Bolshevik Revolution and all that flowed from it. All enhanced, of course, by my love of Dr. Zhivago, War and Peace and Anna Karenina and the realisation, when I saw Irish adaptations of Chekhov plays that basically, people are the same the world over.
I was a small child during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the early Cold War years, but I remember well the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent Russian boycott of the LA Olympics in 1984.
In the late 80s, however, the mood was changing in the Eastern Bloc and in Russia itself, and when The Irish Times sent correspondent Conor O’Clery to Moscow in 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev was in power and we were hearing the words glasnost and perestroika for the first time.
O’Clery, in his articles and subsequent book entitled Melting Snow (great title), provided a fascinating insight into the changing face of Russia, while his eloquent writing adding to the power of the developing story.
He has done it again with his latest offering The Shoemaker and his Daughter, except this time it’s personal, for the story he is telling is that of his wife, Zhanna and her father Stanislav Suvarov, the shoemaker of the title. The story begins in Romania, with Conor, Zhanna and her mother Marietta, searching for the WW2 grave of former judge and Soviet army officer, Lieutenant Nerses Gukasyan, Marietta’s father and Zhanna’s grandfather who died fighting in Central Europe in 1944. Marietta was just five years old at the time.
The family lived in Martakert, a town in an autonomous Armenian enclave called Nagorno-Karabakh inside the Muslim Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Marietta was the daughter of the judge’s second wife Ferandzem, who had also been married before and had another daughter, Lena. The judge had built a fine house in the town and their standard of living was far removed from the conditions of millions of other Soviet citizens.
The shelves in the shops may have been bare, but they could always put home-grown foods and vegetables on the table. Communist party membership gave them the inside track on when deliveries were on their way to the provision store, of basics like sugar and flour which were constantly ‘deficit’ (in short supply).
The outbreak of war in 1941 came as a shock, the Party had assured people that the Soviet Union was safe from attack by Germany because of the non-aggression pact signed in 1939.
Marietta’s father and Zhanna’ s grandfather Nerses volunteered, being too old for conscription, and duly departed for the front. He returned home just twice, before October 1944 when a letter is delivered from the Soviet army saying he had given his life for the Motherland. It doesn’t say where he died or where he was buried, which adds to the suffering of his family.
Fernandzem, now living with the adult children of her dead husband, decides it’s time to move on. On the advice of a friend, she relocates to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, with her two daughters. As a war widow and party member, she secures a job on the Grozny-to-Moscow train but never marries again despite having several admirers. Her younger daughter Marietta has admirers too, notably Stanislav Suvarov, the son of neighbours, who is being trained as a cobbler by his stepfather and runs a small business as well as working in the local shoe factory. Their romance begins at a wedding, and as soon as Marietta reaches eighteen, they marry, which is not uncommon in Armenian culture.
Life is good for the young couple, the climate is mild and the diet is good with a plentiful supply of fruit and vegetables (which is not the case throughout the Soviet Union). Zhanna is born in 1958, and a second daughter Larisa arrives in 1960. Their family life plays out against the backdrop of the denunciation of Stalin, the relaxation of censorship under Khrushchev and the loosening of restrictions.
However, tragedy strikes in 1961 when Stanislav is arrested and later jailed for selling his car at a profit, thereby contravening strict laws of speculation. Party connections cannot save him, and the two girls will be without their father for seven years. The stigma of his imprisonment stays with the family, and so Stanislav and Marietta decide to move away from Grozny to Siberia and start anew .
For them it's a second chance, and they make a successful life in the town of Krasnoyarsk. Stanislav is again working two jobs, in a shoe factory and a theatre, and they even acquire the ultimate Russian accessory – a dacha or holiday home. Zhanna grows up, joins the Party herself and eventually ends up studying in Moscow where she is asked to give Russian conversation classes to one Conor O’Clery...
The rest, as they say, is history.
I’m skipping over a lot of detail, but what makes the book so interesting is the ordinariness of these peoples’ lives against the backdrop of constant surveillance and a low-level fear of being rumbled. Their world is turned upside down again with the arrival of glasnost and what it brings in terms of crime, uncertainty and constantly rising prices. For Stanislav and Marietta, the end of the only way of life they know brings nothing but trouble and disillusionment.
As for the love story between Conor and Zhanna, they too overcame obstacles, but have now been married for more than twenty years, the triumph of hope over experience!
Some of the most interesting observations are those of Zhanna, when she moves to the West – but I won’t spoil it, you’ll just have to read the book.
