ALL MY GEORGIAS
Paris—NewYork—Tbilisi
By Redjeb Jordania
Copyright Redjeb Jordania 2012
Published by Driftwood Press at Smashwords
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
An earlier version of this book saw light for the first time in a Georgian translation from the original French. It was published by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Tbilisi, 2004, with a reprint in 2011.
A short English language preview appeared as part of a collection in Icarus No. 6 (NY 2001). Also, some chapters are included as discrete stories in the author’s publication Escape from the South Fork and Other Stories, Driftwood Press, NY 2009 (Amazon.com).
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Acknowledgments
Many people encouraged me in the writing of this book. Above all I would like to thank Peggy Backman for her support and painstaking help with the editing, and Dominic Ambrose for his translation from French to English of most of Part I, Growing up in Leuville.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION: From Presidency to Exile, by Stephen Jone, Ph.D.s
PART ONE:
GROWING UP IN LEUVILLE
Closing the Circle: Lanshkhuti, Republic of Georgia, November 1990
Childhood: Fleeting images
Birth—Rabbits; Lord the Dog— The Quince Tree — Behinds —The Inkwell—In the Colony— The Chévardéni
The Eternal Family
Our Household—Father’s Days—The Importance of Democracy —The Right to Vote—Noé, Humanist— Religion and Me — President in Exile—Kako
Maternal Affairs
Cleaning Ladies — Pensions de Famille – Doctor Manoukhin — My Wardrobe — Music and Nicolas — the Ballet Shota Roustaveli
Encounters
On My Mother’s Side — On My Father’s Side — Ancestors – Redjeb —My Paternal Grandparents —My Father’s Education: A Child’s Changing View of the world in 19th Century Tsarist Georgia. (Excerpts from Noé Jordania’s Memoirs) — My Mother’s Education — Love and Politics
The Chateau In Leuville
The Little Train — The Village — At Madame Brou’s —The Chateau — The Colonel — At the Chateau — Us the Children – Clambering — People of the Chateau: The Farm; the Eradze; Poor Data
Matter And Mind
Money Questions — Noé’s Death — My Sister Atia
Georgians
Shota – Visitors — Gentlemen of the Government — Vlasa — Thina
My Adventures
Alienation—Me, Canadian—My Brother Andreika — Running Away – First Love — Playing Hooky — The House in Vanves —My Mother Was a Cat —
How to Become Stateless by Trying Very Hard – Becoming Georgian
PART TWO: TBILISI, AT LONG LAST
10. New York--Tbilisi
11. Tbilisi Diary, Fall 1990: The Rise of Independent Georgia
12. One Year Later: Summer and Fall 1991:
Decline and Fall of President Gamsakhurdia …and the Soviet Union
Afterword: Leuville 2011
Post-Script: Reflections on my Georgias
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Foreword
In September 1990 the long-awaited occasion to go to Georgia for the very first time of my long life came to pass. As the son of Noé Jordania, president of independent Georgia at the end of World War One, it had been unthinkable to obtain a visa for the Soviet Union even after the death of Stalin, who considered my father, a social-democrat, as one of his greatest personal enemies: a country’s memory is very long, and half a century is nothing for a bureaucracy! But with Glasnost and Perestroika, with the fall of the Berlin Wall just a few months before in November 1989, things got better, the Soviet paranoia abated, and a voyage to the Soviet Union became possible even for those who had been excluded.
I found myself in Tbilisi just in time to witness some of the events which would lead to Georgia’s proclamation of independence and the election of Zviad Gamsakhurdia as president … and his fall, just-about a year later.
But for me even more important was the simple fact of finding myself physically in the real Georgia, to breathe its flagrances, to rub shoulders with its people, and quite unexpectedly confront some of my childhood’s inner demons that I did not know still lurked in my conscience.
This first encounter with the land of my ancestors is what made this book of memoirs psychologically possible. My cousins and relatives from Tbilisi and Lanchkhouti as well as many historians, students and other Georgians showed an avid interest in the life in exile of their first president, my father Noé Jordania, the Georgian colony in Paris, and of course the chateau and cemetery in Leuville, near Paris, which to this day remains the main center of the Georgian diaspora. Their questions forced many events and memories to the surface of my consciousness, and thus, without perceptible effort, they found a new life on paper through the magic of writing.
I hope this memoir adds a human dimension to the historical figure of President Noé Jordania, the father of modern Georgia, as well as my mother Ina Koreneva, other historical figures, and in general to the history of the Georgian colony in exile in Paris and Leuville.
And I dedicate this book to my children, nephews, nieces, and all their descendants, wherever they may be, so that with its help they’ll never forget their roots in Georgia.
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Introduction
By Professor Stephen Jones, Ph.D.
In March 1921, President Jordania and members of his government boarded an Italian ship in the Georgian port of Batumi. They were bound for Istanbul, fleeing the Red Army invasion which ended the brief life of the Georgian Democratic Republic. They were forced to abandon not only an innovative experiment in democratic socialism but their homes and in many cases their families. None returned to Georgia, except to Soviet prison or execution. They spent the rest of their lives in exile, most of them in France. Noé’s wife, Ina Koreneva, was pregnant when she boarded the ship, and Redjeb was born in Paris nine months later in December 1921.
Redjeb Jordania has written a fascinating memoir of his childhood and youth among the exiled Georgian community in Paris. It is a personal story, but also a plea for memory. It begins with Redjeb’s visit to his father’s village of Lanshkhuti in Guria in 1990, just before the collapse of the USSR. There was then almost nothing left in this village – now a town – to remind Georgians that this was the birthplace of their first democratically elected President. The Soviet authorities erased every memory of the Jordanias – the house, the estate, and the family graves including that of little Andreika Jordania, Redjeb’s elder brother, who died at the age of twelve.
Curiously, after 12 years of independence and adoption of the first republic’s flag, there is no public monument to that republic or to President Noé Jordania, an innovative theoretician, a national leader, and a statesman. Noé Jordania awaits his proper place in history even in his own homeland.
Redjeb Jordania’s memoir is humorous and well-written. Redjeb was an aspiring musician and writes delightful vignettes of his teachers Nicolas Stein and Monsieur Becker. One of the most amusing passages describes his delirious music lesson amidst the British bombardment of Paris. But the memoir is also an important record of the lives of Georgia’s politicians after they left power, and in particular of Redjeb's father, Noé Jordania, who died in January 1953, two months before that of his Bolshevik rival and fellow Georgian, Josef Stalin. In the last decade, we have learned much more about the Georgian Democratic Republic from Georgian historians, but Noé Jordania is still an enigma, under-researched and his works underappreciated. Redjeb Jordania provides personal insight into the character of his father and to his no less intriguing mother, one of the first women to study at the Sorbonne’s Faculty of Law.
In old age, Noé Jordania undoubtedly changed, but his charisma, his qualities of leadership and self-discipline are apparent in his son’s telling. Redjeb describes his father’s library, his reading tastes, his circle of friends, his view of religion and patriotism and his dealings with agents of the communist Georgian government. He introduces us to some of the great figures of Georgian social democracy and European socialism – Akaki Chkhenkeli, Evgenii Gegetchkori and Konstantin Kandelaki among them. He recalls his parents’ lives in their previous exile before the 1917 revolution among revolutionaries like Lenin and Trotsky.
The Jordanias, like their fellow exiles, suffered great privation. Redjeb tells us his father never bought a new suit in his entire 32 years in exile. These sorts of things, of course, did not matter to these Georgian humanists who had suffered worse under tsarism. But their life in the “Chateau” in Leuville just outside Paris, out of the maelstrom and forgotten by the international community, must have been a hard blow for these activists to bear. They continued to work for Georgian independence but after the League of Nations recognized the USSR as a legitimate state in 1933, the Georgian government in exile, led by Noé Jordania, lost its official status. Nevertheless Noé Jordania and the Georgians in exile never ceased working and fighting for the liberation of Georgia from the Soviet Union.
In the final section Redjeb Jordania describes his first visit to Georgia in 1990 amidst the excitement and anxieties surrounding the election of the former dissident, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, as head of the new non-communist government. The context was similar to that of the first republic – imperial collapse, domestic conflict and massive economic decline. Redjeb shares his diary with us which has some fascinating insights on the new leaders.
This little book is a personal memoir. It is naturally selective and episodic, but it touches on many of the major issues and characters that have shaped the life of the Georgian Republic and its people. It adds color and important details to Georgia’s long-suffering story in the twentieth century.
Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Mount Holyoke College, Stephen Jones is the author of “Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883-1917” (Harvard University Press, 2005); “War and Revolution in the Caucasus: Georgia Ablaze” [ed.] (Routledge, March, 2010); “A History of Independent Georgia, 1991-2010” (I.B. Tauris, 2012).
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1. Closing the Circle
Lanshkhuti, Republic of Georgia, November 1990
They stood to the side. In a semi-circle. Talking in whispers. Respecting my silence. Respecting my retreat into the tumultuous memories summoned by the stone jutting out of the fading grass. “The circle has been completed... seventy years already... But the circle has been, finally, completed...” A circle without a beginning, although it had clearly reached its end. A circle closed upon itself, holding me the man, me the child, whole at long last within myself.
“They tried to erase all traces of your family,” I had been told many times. “They” were the Georgian communists, those Makharadze, Orjonikidze, Stalin, who seven long decades ago had helped organize the Red Army invasion, the conquest of their own country by the Russian Soviet forces. “Your father’s house was here,” pointing to a grassy lot where a pair of long- haired black piglets were scurrying, hunting for chestnuts. “They even demolished your grandfather’s and your brother’s graves,” that brother I never knew, but whose ghost overshadowed my whole childhood. “All that remains is this corner of a headstone stubbornly sticking out of the ground. And they didn’t think to chop down the magnolia your father planted. There it is, regal now, behind the flower stand.”
That autumn Sunday the villageof Lanshkhutiwas almost deserted. The local soccer team was playing in Tbilisi, the capital, in what was the most important match of the season; and all the locals, led by the town dignitaries, had set out to support their heroes. No mayor, prefect, police chief, party secretary. I was relieved: there would be no solemn ceremonies, no official banquet lasting for hours, no long— winded hypocritical speeches, as generally happened whenever I was recognized. We had done well not to announce our visit. Undoubtedly the first visit in seventy years of the son of the late Georgian President to his father’s village would not have failed to spur an overwhelming program of celebrations. Georgian hospitality is not known for moderation: for them, too much is not enough!
It was precisely to avoid this that we had arrived unannounced from Batumi. “We” included my childhood friend Thina, with whom I had been raised in Paris, and whom I had not seen for some 45 years. She had settled in Batumi, a nearby seaside resort. With her came several relatives and friends, since no one does anything alone here; and from Tbilisi, especially for that occasion, had come my relatives Tsira and Marina Gugushvili, together with Leo Jordania, and his wife. Leo was one of Lanshkhuti’s most famous sons: at a young age he had become a celebrated soccer player, member of the Georgian national team. Now, that is fame!
All told, ten people considered it their honor and duty to escort me for what was ostensibly my first encounter with the paternal village. They did not realize that of still greater significance for me was confronting the memory of my older brother Andreika. He had died at the age of twelve, before I was born, yet in some way created me, since he wanted a little brother to be named Redjeb, after a great—grandfather of that name whose character and adventurous life he greatly admired.
My father and his friends had often spoken to me about Lanshkhuti, which represented the center of their lives, the locus of their childhood. The details escape me, after so many years, but the impression remained that it was a small village surrounded by fields, where among others lived a whole clan of Jordanias divided into some twenty families, descendants of a common ancestor who had settled there in the 18th century. I remember a certain knoll that the locals had dubbed “Jordania hill”, also known as “the Hillock of Thought”. There the men gathered towards dusk to solve the world’s problems and
share the local news, while the women, in the kitchens, ground walnuts and corn before cooking the evening meal. It is unlikely that these Jordanias were industrious. Nature is generous in Georgia, and little effort is required to harvest its riches. My mother, who was Russian, often told me how, when she first came to Lanshkhuti, she could not but ask, after a few days: “But where are the peasants?”, since she never saw anyone working the fields.
I thus had the impression that Lanshkhuti was but a small village. What a surprise to discover that it was rather a small town, which its inhabitants had ironically but affectionately nicknamed “little Paris.” There were fields, all right, but far away, on the outskirts. And my ancestral home—or rather ancestral lot, since the house no longer exists — is located right in the center of town, on the main street, next to City Hall.
The house, which I know only through photographs, was typical of the Guria province, where winters are mild and snowfalls scarce and far-between. It was a one-story wooden house, adorned with a covered porch, standing on a stone platform, and had no basement. One can see houses like that in the villages, still inhabited, but now with electricity and running water. And some unique exemplars have been preserved in ethnographic museums with all the housekeeping details of an extinct lifestyle. Now that the communism is a thing of the past,— we hope for ever—, the city fathers are contemplating establishing a museum in honor of my father and locating it in a replica of the demolished house on its original site.
I find it curious that although the communists demolished house and grave, inexplicably they left the lot vacant, erecting nothing more substantial than a small flower stand. They even left undisturbed the grove of trees and the magnolia that my father supposedly planted — an anecdote that seems to me rather apocryphal. True, a tea factory built in the thirties extends onto the property, but only minimally. I also find it interesting that despite their hatred for the Jordanias and the Mensheviks in general, the Bolsheviks allowed my grandmother Cristiné to live and die in that same house. When my parents were forced onto exile in 1921, they wanted to take her with them, but she refused: “I well know that if don’t go with you I’1l lose my son and my grandchildren, whom I may probably never see again. But if I do go, I’ll lose my home, my village, my country, my reason for being...” She thus stayed on, and lived six more years until 1927 without being harassed in any way; it was only after her death that the Bolsheviks destroyed both house and gravesite. It makes one think that in those times even they had a sense of decency.
My grandmother was not buried in the garden, since that was no longer allowed, but in a small cemetery in town. The cemetery was later demolished and replaced by a park with a chi1dren’s playground. As for my grandmother’s remains, no one knows what became of them.
Thus it was that in November 1990 I stood before the remnants of the grave, in what had been the garden of my father’s house, now an untended lot where a grove of slender trees reaches to the sky,including that famous magnolia supposedly planted by my father, in front of which romantically stands a flower kiosk. Nothing marked the spot, except for what appeared to be the corner of an ordinary stone sticking out of the short grass.
“This is actually the tombstone underneath which Andreika and Nikoloz have been put to rest,” Leo explained. “We always knew it, but no one ever dared mark the spot in any way or do anything about it. You have no idea what a handicap it was to be a Jordania. It was difficult or impossible to find work, many Jordanias were deported to Siberia, never to be heard of again. Children in school were taunted by their comrades, and you know how hard this type of thing is for children. Myself, if I had been born earlier, I never could have become a national team soccer player. It is only because Stalin had died, and de-Stalinization took place, with the profound change of attitudes that went with it, that I could succeed. Before that time, my name would have kept me down, as it did many.”
Yes, it was for me a trying moment to find myself for the first time in my ancestral village in front of the grave of that 12 years old boy who for all eternity will remain the big brother I never knew. He got hurt while playing “giant’s steps,” a game that consisted of a sort of carrousel revolving high over head around a central pole, and long straps. Children would hang on these straps, running in circles, and when momentum was created, would take giant steps, touching ground only at wide intervals. My brother fell, got concussion, meningitis followed and, given the state of medicine in those times, died.What a tragedy to die so young! For him, for my parents, and also for me, even though I was not yet born...
When I was a child, I hated Andreika. I hated him because his presence in our house was overwhelming. There was a painting of him on his deathbed hanging over my father’s bed. There was a sculpture of him dominating the salon, downstairs. And my mother was always telling me how good he was, for ever holding him up to me as an example: everything he did was admirable, and I was made to feel totally worthless in comparison. Poor Andreika! He was only a small boy, when he died, he never did anything to me. Yet there it was...
I thought I had long ago exercised these childish emotions, but there must have been something remaining, since they came surging back with such force. My whole childhood flooded my mind in an instantaneous surge, all my family stories suddenly surfaced. The edge of time past rejoined the present to become a single entity: The circle had been closed! Yes, the circle was, at long last, complete! The physical circle, that brought my flesh back to the place from which it had sprung; and the emotional chasm that had so long remained between my brother and me, the unknowing, was finally bridged.
Yes, that circle too was at last completed. Yes, finally I could see Andreika as the small boy he had been, carefree, enjoying life, that small boy who used to tell our parents: “If I ever get a little brother, I want him to be called Redjeb.” And indeed I was born, and my name is Redjeb, and I am now seventy years old and I am standing on the spot where the flesh of my flesh returned to the earth that nurtured it for so many generations.
I stood deep in thought for I don’t know how long; stepped towards the kiosk; selected an armful of flowers—Leo rushed forward in order that I not pay — and laid them on the mossy edge of that stone that nothing distinguished from any other. I meditated for a few more moments: no, I wouldn’t let myself be overcome here, in front of everybody; no, with a great effort, I bound my childhood memories in a mental shield and put them aside for later. And I returned to this life, to the friends, the relatives who were waiting there for me, and we continued on our way, the air of Lanshkhuti sweet to my soul...
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2. Childhood: Fleeting images
Birth
My very first childhood memory is a false one. I know perfectly well that it is composed of visual images superimposed onto oft-repeated accounts. I can see it, oh, so clearly: an apartment with somber drapes and heavy furniture, and a great canopy bed where my mother brought me into this world, Avenue de Versailles, in Paris. I can see the building’s façade and the window through which I enter, bizarrely, just as I enter the world. I see my big sister Nini – three years older and so much bigger than me! – making peepee into a flower vase. Why didn’t she have access to the toilet, where there was a chamber pot? Undoubtedly because outside of that room with its drawn curtains where she remained, possibly with my other sister Atia who was seventeen years old at the time, beyond that room was unfolding a mystery which neither one of them was allowed to witness: my birth.
I see myself naked, red and yellow, issuing from my mother’s womb, which I can’t see at all. Completely yellow, because at the first contact with the world that had expected me for nine months, I caught a violent case of jaundice! Yes, to this day our world with its beauties, vices, horrors, with its poetry, mysteries, absurdity, with its traps, rules, seriousness, this world has nothing to offer that can make me think that the newborn I was could have been wrong. The jaundice went away, of course, but its causes keep assailing us from all sides, at every moment, inside of us as well as from outside.
Rabbits; and a dog named Lord
And then, I find myself in rabbits’ cage. How good it smelled of dry straw and moist fur! How nice and cozy here, surrounded by these little lives that sustained me without ever demanding anything in return! I don’t see myself enter, no, I am already there, a small, eternal moment. I see the iron mesh, the wooden latch pivoting on an old nail driven into the worm eaten door which itself hangs off of leather hinges. On one side is a white rabbit, its quivering nose poking at the cabbage leaves in which shines a carrot. On the other side, a beige rabbit, undoubtedly a mother, surrounded by little bunnies half her size. These are a bit frightened, climbing one atop the other, trying to get as far away as possible from the giant monster that I must represent to them. And then, nothing. No follow up. The tableau simply fades away, disappears, as though I have closed the photo album. But the feeling of warm security remains with me, will remain in me for a long time.It must be years later that I see myself in Lord’s dog-house. He is Namo and Valodia Gogouadze’s big dog. Even though Lord had become my special friend, he did not like it at all that I should steal his home, so that he grabbed me by my jacket collar in order to pull me out by force, while I clung onto the inside. And pulling, and growling, and attempting to get in with me – I wouldn’t let him do it! The game that lasted a long time, until I became either too big or too sensible, alas! to devote myself to it wholeheartedly…
The Quince tree
We are all perched on the branches of the quince tree in the deepest part of our garden in Parc Saint Maur, a remote suburb of Paris, which we would soon leave to live in Vanves. Of course, despite all the warnings against it, I bit fully into the green fruit to immediately spit it all out. Disgusting! The quince is a respectable fruit when cooked in compote, but it is so bitter when raw!
In any case, that day we were sitting in the highest branches; me, my sister Nini, Ninouka, Tamara Tsouladze and I don’t know who else. I was at the most five years old. The girls were much older than me, the eldest, Tamara, was nearly nine! But in spite of the age difference, it was I, the boy, who was seated highest. On the other side of the wall, in another garden, there were three or four children of the French family that lived there. We, from our high perch, began to brag:
— What does your father do?
— My father is President, I said proudly
—That’s right, Ninouka backed me up.
And then Nini, generously:
— Well, their father is a state minister.
— Oh la la! And my father is a doctor.
— A President is greater than a doctor.
— If you’re sick, a doctor is greater than a President, no?
— Yes, but we’re not sick.
— Well, my mother is a schoolteacher.
— And mine makes clothes for fashionable women, said Tamara.
Indeed Madame Tsouladze kept her household going all her life with her fashion atelier, first at La Motte Piquet and then near Etoile, rue Lauriston.
—I won a prize in French, said the boy facing us. Do you want to see?
— Oh, yes.
And all of us admired the beautiful volume bound in red with gilded edges and borders.
— What’s your prize called?
— Le Corsaire Rouge.
—Have you read it?
— Not yet, but it’s really great!
Not wanting to be outdone, I said:
— I don’t go to school yet, but I can almost read.
—Either you can or you can’t, said the girl facing us.
Nini came to my rescue:
— In any case, my father is President…
And that’s it, the scene stops there, nothing more. The house in Parc Saint Maur doesn’t leave me with any memories whatsoever. My only remembrance is of a small tricycle, all rusty and abandoned in the bushes of the park. How small and dirty it looked! Yet at the same time I knew that I had sat astride it when it looked nice at some earlier time already nearly forgotten, when it had been shiny, new and much bigger, it seemed, since at that time it had been just my size….
Behinds.
Another early memory comes back to me. We are all very young. I don’t think I was more than five years old. The smell of hay in the sunshine, the freshness of sheets in the semi-dark afternoon behind closed shutters, made all the sweeter by the stifling Roi des Etés outside. It was one of those summer holidays that my mother took us on, perhaps to the Vosges Mountains that year? In any case we had the use of an entire farm, with cows, horses, poultry and farm produce all around us. Oh, how I loved to pretend I was leading the livestock to the stable at nightfall, with the dog Bouvier with the large black spots on his body and on one eye, who believed it his duty to keep the cows moving forward by biting the tips of their tails while making an awful grimace, since he didn’t really like doing it.
It was the time when there was an ironclad belief that young children should take a nap after lunch, so my mother sent us into the bedrooms with the shutters closed; me, my sister, Ninouka and her sister Tamara, Claude, and other rascals. And all these little animals spread out, sprawling in a tangle as soon as the parents’ backs were turned… for often, in fact, awakening suddenly, surprised to have slept. We took to playing a game that sent us into paroxysms of giggles, so loud that an adult would often come to check on us, wiggly but close-mouthed. The game consisted of sniffing each other’s behinds…. Well, not just that, there was a whole ritual that I can’t quite recall, but the sniffing of asses was the culmination. How long this game went on, I couldn’t say, perhaps the length of one summer? After that it disappeared without ever coming back. And we never spoke about it again.
Many years later I had the occasion of meeting one of my little friends, who gave herself airs of a distinguished grande dame. She was then nearly 60 years old. Tired of her pretensions and stuffiness, I whispered in her ear, “Stop putting on airs, remember when we used to sniff behinds.” Oh what a shock!
The Inkwell
I can still see the teacher, moon-faced, sallow complexion, mousy-brown hair combed back, his tortoiseshell glasses hanging askew over one ear, black ink streaking down over his face, tie, long gray smock.
This was in elementary school in Vanves, near Paris. I was in first grade, so I must have been only six years old, and must have misbehaved or refused to obey -- which does not surprise me because this is a trait that I still have to this day: a visceral rejection of authority, wherever it comes from, even if it is to my detriment.
At that time corporal punishment was still allowed in schools, it seems, and to revisit this episode, I guess my chubby teacher, confronted with my stubborn refusal to obey, had grabbed me under his arm and spanked me despite my struggles.
The poor man! I was only six
years old, but I was not about to put up with such a treatment. As
soon as he put me back on my feet I grabbed an open inkwell -- at
that time each desk had one -- and with all my strength threw it in
his face.
And this, vivid, is the picture that sticks in my
memory: the teacher in his long gray smock, flabbergasted, dripping
ink all across his face down to his shoes.
And that's all. No follow-up. I guess I was taken out of that class, or perhaps it was he who was transferred or fired. My next memory finds myself in another class with a different teacher, thin, bearded, energetic. I remember him as strict and stern, but fair: in his class I never had the slightest difficulty.
We must believe that my reputation spread everywhere, because after this episode, no one ever touched again.
In the Colony
The major holidays of my childhood were the 26 of May – Georgian Independence Day - and Georgian Christmas. On these occasions the whole colony would come together, without regard to disputes, differences of opinion or political arguments which characterized the rest of the year. In spite of these manifestations of discord, which were at times very sharp, deep down inside all the Georgians remained loyal to each other.
The great meetings and parties took place either at the reception hall of the Sociétés Savantes, or later, in the halls of the Foreign Legion, where we gained access thanks to the participation of certain Georgians in the Legion where they conducted themselves in an exemplary fashion. So well, in fact, that to this day one of the regiments of the Legion is still called “The regiment of the Georgian princes”.
Of course, we children were all put on display, and time was always set aside for us to get up in front of everybody, one after the other, and show off our little talents. Dance a Lecouri, or a Mtioulouri, play an instrument – usually the piano, recite a Georgian poem. I still remember:
Patara Khartveli var…..
Or
Tchito tchito tchiorao, rao batono melao?
Later, when I was an adolescent, it was up to me to play the piano so that everyone could dance the Georgian dances, more or less well, but with lots of ardor and spirit. I was flattered by the attention that I received, given that I was the only young person able to bang out those dances on the piano. But at the same time I regretted that I couldn’t dance like everyone else, in order to integrate myself more into the group, instead of being somewhat set apart because of this responsibility.
From that period I recall some anecdotes: A certain Georgian, arriving in Paris, announces that he has noticed that nearly all the house were owned by just three large landowners, who must therefore, be extremely wealthy. In fact, at that time, the buildings had signs above the streetdoor saying: “Water, Gas, Electricity”, in order to show that they had been modernized. And those Georgians thought that these were the names of the owners!
And also this little story about a Georgian who buys some plums, finds a worm in the first , the second, the third one, and thinking that this is a special French delicacy, waits for nighttime to eat the rest of them, so as not to see what he is swallowing.
And also, this saying, that we repeated over and over in a sing song, a franco-russian-georgian saying:
Chto takoy? Qu’est-ce que c’est?
Mochka kochka oukouce
Mochka kochka patrice
Vot gamovida chto takoi qu’est-ce que c’est?
It didn’t make any sense at all, and it still doesn’t make any sense, but it always made us burst with laughter… just like those absurd phrases that were making the rounds in France during that period: “C’est vot’fils, Madame? Quel oeuf!” (Is that your son, madame? What an egg!) Or, “On n’est pas des boeufs!” (We’re not cattle!), phrases that people would throw to one another, in reference to nothing at all.
Besides Christmas and the 26th of May, we Georgian children often met on Sundays on the occasion of birthdays, baptisms, marriages or simple afternoon teas or parties at the home of this one or that. On rare occasions we would go to the movies and even rarer to the theater or to concerts. I believe that the first time I attended a concert was at the age of twelve. The opera came even later. As for us coming together after school in the afternoons or in the evening, it was out of the question. First of all, our homework took up our time, and also we lived too far from each other to be able to visit each other just like that for a short while.
The Chévardéni
The colony established a sports club, the Chévardéni, and anyone of us, big or small, could belong by paying a modest sum to cover expenses. Of course, from the moment that we were old enough to take the bus and metro alone, we all became members, all of us young people, because beside the sports activities, this was an opportunity for us to meet often.
In winter we gathered in a gym on Avenue d’Orléans, on Tuesday evenings, if I remember correctly, from 7:30 to 10 P.M. The main sport was basketball. We formed several teams: adults, small children, young men and young women, and we practiced one against the other. At times, we played matches against corresponding teams from other organizations.
During the warmer seasons we would meet on Sunday afternoons or on Thursday afternoons in the stadium at Porte de Versailles, or later, on the playing fields at Issy les Moulinaux. Yes, we could meet on Thursdays, because at that time there wasn’t any school on Thursday. Instead we had school on Saturdays. People worked 6 days per week, including Saturday –the French were envious of what they called la semaine anglaise -- the English week --, because it was said that in England it was customary to work mornings only on Saturdays.
The adults served as volunteer instructors, at least those that knew something about sports. Besides coaching our basketball games, they also had us practice gymnastics: we learned horizontal bar, the high jump and the long jump, the parallel bars, the rings, and others. For us schoolchildren this constituted a supplement to the sports and gymnastics that were compulsory in high school. At the Chévardéni it was different. First of all, this was a choice, and not an obligation, and secondly, instead of being a bit lost in the midst of an undifferentiated mass of students, we found ourselves together, warmly embraced by the security of the tribe that the Georgian colony in Paris represented for us.
The gyms and stadiums chosen for the Chévardéni were located in the southern part of Paris and its suburbs, undoubtedly because the majority of the Georgians lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth arrondissements, or at Malakoff, Clamart, Meudon, Issy, all in that part of town. At any rate, it was very convenient for me, as I lived in the same area, in Vanves. Leuville was also in the southern part. Perhaps that area was chosen for the same reason of proximity? It makes one believe that some sort of tribal tropism was in full play.
When wartime came, the Chévardéni disappeared. We young people, now of college age, continued to meet, of course, particularly because there was a renewal of interest in learning Georgian dances. We met once a week for the courses given by a man named Petriashvili and also by Chota Abachidze – both of them “prisoners” liberated by the Germans.
As for the Chévardéni, it was reconstituted during the 1950s, but I don’t know how long it lasted after that.
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3. The Eternal Family
Our Household
I can’t say that I have a first memory of my father, my mother, my sisters or the other people around me. As far as I could tell, they were eternal, since they had no more of a beginning than my little mind attributed to my own self.
Oh, even as a child I knew that I had been born, that therefore, there was a time “before”, but like all children, I didn’t have a clear idea of it. Nevertheless, unlike many who apparently ask the question, “where was I before I was born?” I don’t remember ever having asked, nor to have ever even thought about that absurd question. Yes, people spoke to me about “the time before you were born”, but this meant nothing to me. And now that I am nearly 70 years old, this still means nothing to me.
Certainly, there is truth in that time “before”, chronologically speaking, but at the same time my “before” is nothing more than a myth without anything concrete to support it. “Before” can only exist in my conscious mind, and that is filled with that evanescent present, so dear to philosophers and quantum theorists. And if anyone tries to convince me by citing books, recordings, paintings, monuments, geological ages or the universe… all of that only exists in my living self, in your living self, in the you that are reading my words, if you actually exist.
So it is not at all surprising that I don’t have a first memory of my parents. My father just was, eternal. Big and standing tall, with blue eyes and a white beard, and a cane in his hand, he remained himself throughout all the years, except for a certain stooping over after the age of 80. At home, in the winter he wore his legendary shawl about his shoulders, in the folds of which, at the dinner table, he liked to hide one of the kittens that in long succession shared our home with us. Right in the middle of the evening meal, which traditionally was served at 7:30, with we four seated at the table—my parents, my sister Nathela and I — that kitten would suddenly poke its head out, climb onto the shoulder of my father — who didn’t notice anything, we were convinced, — stretch out a nimble paw and try to snatch a morsel from the laden fork, as it traveled en route to my father’s mouth. He would act totally surprised, and I would rejoice for that mischievous kitten that was capable of surprising such an imposing man!
Father’s Days
Yes, we were four at the table, everyday, afternoons and evenings, because my father was always home, and my sister Nathela and I returned from school for lunch, as everyone did in that period, except for those unfortunates who ate lunch in the cafeteria because both of their parents worked (My other sister Atia, 17 years older, had her own place). In spite of that example, which seemed to me so distant, it never entered my mind that my father might not always be there.
His habits were regular: rise at 8 A.M., at which time he would come downstairs from his room to find his own breakfast tray of tea, biscuits and butter, which he would take back up to his office. He worked, wrote, and read until 11 A.M. Then he would come down for his morning walk, which he accomplished with a brisk pace and energetic step. He was so punctual that the neighbors and merchants set their watches by his passage. At noon he was back with a loaf of bread or other grocery items. Then, lunch, which lasted, possibly, a half-hour. At one o’clock he went back up to his room for a nap, after which he worked again until five o’clock, at which time he took another walk.
Often, almost every day, someone came to pay him a visit and accompany him through the streets of Vanves. But these were Georgians much younger than he was, since his own contemporaries couldn’t keep his pace, so fast did he go! These others came around six o’clock to discuss politics, plan projects or just to chat and, in good weather, to play Nardi – backgammon -, on the balcony. Dinner at 7:30, for which one or more visitors might remain, and at nine in the evening he would return to his room, where he read before going to sleep. That was practically every day, except when we went to the country at Leuville, or when we had a Keipi, or banquet, at the house, which was rather frequently before the war, as I remember.
The Importance of Democracy
It wasn’t until a long time later that I understood to what extent education and democracy were important in the eyes of my parents. For me, child and adolescent, they were eternal givens, like I was myself, me and my surroundings, like the world, the planets, the universe itself which in certain cosmogonies will most certainly have an end fore-ordained by entropy, and yet have no beginning. But for my parents, and especially for Noé, to live in a country where all the children went to school, where all the men were able to vote (at that time women still didn’t have the right to vote in France), where the newspapers could print whatever they pleased about the highest personages and express the most brutally opposing opinions without the government throwing the journalists in prison, all that was for them a daily marvel.
The reality was that for them, during their childhood, in the country where they grew up, lived, suffered, nothing of the kind existed. And it was simply to attain those rights which for me and all the French people seemed to be a natural part of the social fabric, that my parents had worked and struggled all their lives, only to be finally vanquished by the armed forces of an expanding communism, and to be obliged to flee into exile, that exile where I was born, where I grew up, where they lived for more than thirty years, and which never ceased to be exile.
The Right to Vote
My father had received a special residency card from the French government that gave him the right to vote in France, even though he remained all his life a “Refugee of Georgian Origin”, which is to say, stateless, since the League of Nations recognized the USSR in 1933 “in its borders” and thus de facto its brutal conquest of Georgia. And he never failed to vote. Each time was for him a solemn day. He never lectured me about it, but I understood very well, even as a child, that he was going to perform an action with a transcendental significance. What’s more, he was quite proud that he, a foreigner, had been considered worthy enough to participate in the political life of France, to help choose the elected leaders in whose hands the destiny of this foreign people would be put into question, again and again. It was not the election results that seemed important to him, at that point – and considering the quality of most of the elected officials of the 1930s, that was certainly not surprising – but the simple fact of participating in democracy in action. He never failed to exercise that duty and privilege that was the right to vote, except, of course, during the war years when the little honesty that remained had been shamelessly betrayed.
Noé, Humanist
I will leave to the historians the task of formulating their ever changing hypotheses concerning the political figure of Noé Jordania, and his role in his time and in Georgian history. This is a personal memoir, with all the errors, weaknesses and false memories that all writings of this genre never fail to contain. Yet, these so-called defects paradoxically render these memories more accurate than the meticulous research that historians and biographers indulge in with the purpose of better approaching their subjects. I don’t need to approach my subject, I am my subject. By this I don’t mean to say that I am writing about myself from fifty years ago, that the “me” from that time is the subject. Not in the least. If that were the case, I would be compelled to use the same methodology as that of an external biographer. I am the subject because the me of fifty years ago and the me that is writing are all one indivisible entity.
The me-persona that is writing is at the same time, author and subject at the time of writing, even when writing about long ago events with faulty memories and interpretations. Just like an object of art, for example: it doesn’t exist in itself, per se, but is always located someplace in between the observer and the object in question. So it is with autobiography, which concerns itself with events that are located somewhere between the writer at the moment of writing and the events in question. This phenomenon plays out even when the events are heavily colored by emotions. The emotions are always in the present, or else they are no longer emotions. Either one experiences the emotion again in all its fullness, or nearly, at the moment of recalling it to memory; or the emotion becomes a separate “event” by dint of time, distance, experience and all the possible “noises”, as the communication specialists have named everything that might impede clear transmission.
However, in order to be able to write about distant personal events, one must distance oneself somehow while at the same time fully feel again that which one is attempting to reconstitute on paper. Thus, it is impossible to re-create a scene from one’s childhood, for example, as seen from a child’s point of view. All attempts at this genre can be nothing more than poetry. If there is any truth in the present work, it is to be found simply in the text itself, including the interventions of the me-author at the exact moment of writing. Therefore, my reflections on my father, my family, my life in that mythic and distant time are neither more nor less accurate and valid as any historical reconstruction could ever aspire to be.
Of course, as a child, and for a long time after that, I never stopped to consider who that unknown personality, my father, really was. Even today, I couldn’t elaborate with any certainty. He appears clearly only within the complex cultural milieu in which he evolved and which influenced him so strongly. One important component of his personality could be defined as the “honest man” of classical times, so dear to the French and to westerners in general; literate, politicized, humanist, and somewhat elitist, since the phenomenon that Ortega Y Gasset baptized as “the revolt of the masses” hadn’t as yet taken place, or at least hadn’t as yet claimed its place center-stage.
Raised to maturity in the tsarist Georgia of the late Nineteenth Century, my father couldn’t help but look at the western world from a different and critical perspective. He saw the bourgeois west as containing numerous deplorable aspects. For example, he often referred to the inner nobility of the Georgians, both country folk and princes, that he contrasted favorably with the commercialized, petit-bourgeois crassness of western countries. He noted the place of honor that women occupied in Georgian society in all social strata – remember that this is a nineteenth century man talking – compared to their situation among the Russian people and in European society. Regarding France, he noted in particular the decadence of politeness and of male attitudes:
“I remember forty years ago, when I was in Paris,” he wrote in 1933, “every time that a woman entered, the men got to their feet and offered her their seats. And that is in conformity with the nature of the sexes. Women cannot stay standing as long as men can. But that is forgotten, nowadays. In the ten years that I have been in Paris, I can safely say that I have never seen a man offer his place to a woman, not even to an elderly one.”
What would he have said if he had lived to see the shameful way so many women are treated in present day Georgia? Far from being chivalrous, the Georgian men take advantage of their physical strength and their egocentric attitudes to push in front of the women at every occasion, and where women are relegated to the most tiresome work.
For example, waiting in line at the bread shop, the only male among about twenty women, I was able to witness how some men enter, go directly to the counter, jostling those already there, if necessary, demand to be served and obtain that service despite whatever protests, the employees also being women, of course! Similarly, when the doors open to enter an airplane or a train, since there are no reserved seats, there is a mad rush, and all the men run to get ahead of the women and children to get the best places – without any shame. What’s more, I very rarely saw anyone offer his place to a woman, even elderly and loaded down with packages.
My father wrote in his memoirs: in Georgia women never work in the fields. Well, in Kakhétie, for example, it is women that work in the vineyards and harvest the grapes. I can see them, their faces lined with wrinkles, their clothes in tatters, their ankle boots pierced by holes and worn down at the heels and so formless that the women could walk only with difficulty. In the group that I remember so clearly, they all looked to be 70 years old or more, but by their youthful gestures and movements, I am sure that they were no more than 35 or 40 years old.
It’s the same at home, where it is naturally the women who do all the household chores, even when they work fulltime, just like their husbands. And at a Supra, one of those dinners that seem to go on forever, it is naturally the women that are in the kitchen while the men lounge at the table. Once in awhile, the Tamada, or toast-giver, will make a great speech in honor of the women, who are asked to come to the table to hear themselves thus honored. As Lala told me: “And we stand there, forced by custom to listen to our praises, while we are wondering what is burning in the kitchen and thinking that it would be a lot more appreciated if the men lifted a finger to help us, instead of all these empty words….”
But getting back to the topic: In spite of all his criticisms, my father highly appreciated the achievements of western thought, and he never tired of discovering the new worlds it offered. His favorite occupation was reading the great authors: poetry, philosophy, novels, history, political economics. It was in his library that I became acquainted with Michelet, Balzac, Adam Smith, Auguste Comte, Victor Hugo – whose The Art of Being a Grandfather became his bedside reading at the birth of his first granddaughter, Ethery Pagava — and also the Greek and Roman classics, which he held to a very special veneration.
I don’t believe that I have ever heard anyone refer as often as he did to Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus, Marcus Aurelius and Gallienus, among others, and with such familiarity that he might have had them as personal friends.
He also possessed in his library a beautiful bound edition of the works of Karl Marx, which included volume after volume of correspondence between Marx and Engels. Was it the books beautiful appearance, all gilded, that attracted me? Or the fact that they were usually under lock and key? In any case more than once I managed to borrow one of those volumes on the sly and peruse it without understanding a thing, to then put it back discreetly in its place. Was it for that reason that when I became of the age to interest myself in such things that I found myself incapable of reading Marx.
When the weather was nice, on Sundays, my father often took his morning promenade among the bookstalls on the banks of the Seine, where he rarely missed the opportunity to bring me some book that he judged to be at the right level for my understanding. Jules Verne, Fennimore Cooper, Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, Jack London, Paul d’Ivoi are among the authors that colored my childhood. At times – and what a treat! – he took me along with him, but then I never knew which book to have him buy for me; how to decide among all those treasures?
Something that I didn’t understand for a long time was that my father was the embodiment of a synthesis of social revolutionary, Georgian patriot and learned European with lofty ideals, supremely conscious of the intrinsic value of the human being, whatever the degradation in which the person might have fallen. “No one falls down so low that there isn’t still in him something worthy of being saved,” he said, rejoining the notion of Christ the Redeemer.
He had always been agnostic, it seemed to me, and he hardly believed in any organized church, but he recognized in religion a very important function in the life of a society. And even though he didn’t go to mass, he made it his duty to attend all the great religious feasts, such as that of Saint Nino, who brought Christianity to Georgia during the Third Century, and all the funerals, marriages and baptisms of all his compatriots.
Religion and Me
As for me and religion, my parents left me completely free, so free that they never spoke to me about it. In fact, I don’t remember ever hearing anyone speak about these questions, and this is in spite of the fact that the father of my mother had been a village priest. Naturally, I never heard any talk of religion at school, which in France is resolutely secular, and never among my playmates. Yet, I don’t know how or why, but at the age of 13 I decided to become baptized! This was solemnly done at a small orthodox Russian church in Vanves, the Georgian colony not having at that time a place of worship of its own.