A eulogy I wrote for my late grandfather, who died in Russia on November 14, 2020
Saying my grandfather had a rocky start in life would be an understatement. Just a month before he was born in 1937, Edward’s father was shot to death by Stalin’s regime, and hours after he came into the world, his mother, Nadia, abandoned him at the hospital. It’s strange to think of that towering, shadowy, intimidating figure as a helpless, abandoned newborn. But luckily for me and all of his descendants, Edward’s salvation was in his grandmother (Nadia's horrified mother, Maria Arseniyeva) who swooped in to take my newborn grandfather home with her - and didn’t let his wayward mother Nadia back into her house for a full year after what she had done.
This act of compassion by Edward’s grandmother, who had been a lady-in-waiting at the Romanov imperial court, was death-defying for Edward. It’s unlikely he would have survived if not for her. For Maria, it was not her first joust with fate, as in 1917 she and others had escaped from the besieged Russian imperial palace windows by shimmying down makeshift ropes of knotted bedsheets when the Bolsheviks came for the Romanovs. Maria also had an illegitimate daughter by Nestor Makhno, the commander of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine in 1917-21. It seems that the world’s toughest old lady had a soft spot for her grandson, my grandfather.
As for Edward’s absentee mother Nadia, she went on to four more husbands in succession, flitting in and out of Edward’s life for as long as she lived. But nobody in our family ever heard him say an unkind word about her, and he called her Mamen’ka, an endearing term. He must have learned that compassion from his grandmother.
Despite his turbulent start, Edward spent his life happily married to my grandmother - a pixie-sized biologist and social butterfly who relished any opportunity to host guests in their home. They couldn’t have been more different, but many a glass of port and whiskey flowed freely at that table for 57 years, and she took good care of the nearly-motherless Edward until the very end.
His career as a Russian nuclear physicist was mysterious to me, a cloud of words like CERN (he built part of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland) high-energy, and superconducting magnets. He led the particle accelerator program in Russia, living and working in the same town of Protvino his whole life.
I’m told, he used to carry me around the three-bedroom apartment in Protvino where they had settled in 1968, and where they lived until he died. I don’t remember that. When my parents divorced in 1989, my one-year-old self was sent to Protvino for the summer so that my 23-year-old mother could figure out her imminent immigration to the U.S. That was probably the most time I ever spent with them consecutively, before my mother left the country with me, remarried, and never set foot in the USSR or subsequently the Russian Federation, ever again.
On his rare visits to the U.S., every few years, for a few days, he would fly into JFK and my stepfather and I would drive the 5 hours from the Boston area to pick him up and drive him back. He always wore a gray business suit, even at home, and even in below freezing temperatures, a lined beige trench coat. When it rained, he never carried an umbrella - he would tell me that he had the ability to walk between the raindrops. He liked to take photos standing on submerged rocks in the oceans, with my grandmother, in that beige trench coat.
His stubborn defiance of the elements coupled with his outsized intellect and command of high-energy physics made me believe that he was truly immortal.
His stubborn defiance of the elements coupled with his outsized intellect and command of high-energy physics made me believe that he was truly immortal. But it - it was a logic trap. 24 hours after his death, I keep on thinking I’ll still have time to crack the enigma, to get to know him better one day.
In life, his family members repeated legends around his biographical details. Descended from Polish aristocracy - the Lubomirsky clan. Descended from a general in the Russo-Persian Wars who brought home a Persian wife. Secretly Jewish. Or not.
While the legends of his life are larger than life, my first-hand memories of him are sparse. The towering, shadowy figure who never spoke of worldly matters, ate like a bird, but could drink like a sailor, with a loud laugh, and who looked like Einstein to me.
For my wedding in 2016, he flew to Israel and he presented my husband with a hand-hammered brass shield with a badger encircling it. He told my husband that the badger is an animal that has absolutely zero fear. I wasn’t there in the weeks, then the moments when Edward stared down his death, and only one of his children was by his side. I won’t be able to travel to Russia to say goodbye, either.
The éminence grise of the family, a man of contrasts, a man who defied nature, defied the laws of physics, and defied death, until he conjured it up to his own doorstep when his body could no longer keep pace with his mind
The éminence grise of the family, a man of contrasts, a man who defied nature, defied the laws of physics, and defied death, until he conjured it up to his own doorstep when his body could no longer keep pace with his mind, at 83.
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