{"id":824,"date":"2015-08-04T16:26:48","date_gmt":"2015-08-04T16:26:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=824"},"modified":"2015-10-16T18:39:24","modified_gmt":"2015-10-16T18:39:24","slug":"tale-of-two-breads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=824","title":{"rendered":"TALE OF TWO BREADS"},"content":{"rendered":"

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TALE ONE<\/p>\n

St. Petersburg is a stylized and showy city, immersed in the reflection of itself as \u201cwestern.\u201d It stares at itself in its canals, particularly now that it\u2019s nearly a modern, post-Soviet, western city.\u00a0 But absurdities were \u201cbaked into\u201d the Soviet system.\u00a0 The remaining remnants are richly comic.<\/p>\n

For instance, what could be more basic than bread?\u00a0 And wouldn\u2019t a bakery be the place to buy it? \u00a0 Gullible Westerners might read the visual cue of a little loaf hanging outside the door and make those assumptions.<\/p>\n

Not so!\u00a0 Says proud Petersburg, \u201cLet them eat cake!\u201d \u00a0 Cake is one of several of Petersburg\u2019s addictions, and inside, the display case are filled with endless examples.\u00a0 Women wearing little elasticized caps will serve you as if they\u2019re supplying the needs of the motherland. \u00a0 They serve you layers of cream and dough, fruit, Napoleons, eclairs, frilly stuff.\u00a0 And all day long, as if it\u2019s Vienna or Germany, friends will be sitting eating their sweets.\u00a0 But the only bread will be packaged and three days old, the same stuff you might buy in a 24-hour corner store that is a sad partner to the salmon, caviar, cheese you can buy at the markets.\u00a0 It might be nasty, but boy, is it cheap!<\/p>\n

Even the new crop of French-style bakeries don\u2019t know a Napoleon from a baguette.\u00a0 Crusty loaves were sitting in a lacquered basket on the counter, but the two cute girls looked at them\u00a0 and giggled.\u00a0 Trading gag lines, they guessed they were baked daily, but had no idea how much they cost – and a purchase without a receipt ticket, is simply not done.\u00a0 No ticket, no sale, no bread.<\/p>\n

TALE TWO<\/p>\n

The Museum of the Blockade. \u00a0 Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then called, was strangled by the German army for 900 days from 1941-1944.\u00a0 It\u2019s estimated that between 800,000 to a million people died from starvation, bitter cold and other privations.<\/p>\n

In one display, there is a small slice of bread weighing125 grams.\u00a0 That bread was the amount of food allotted to each person by the government each day.\u00a0 The accounts in diaries and letters are incredibly painful – in child\u2019s words, a boy dreams of the day he can eat potatoes.\u00a0 Worse is the mother who writes about how they were forced to eat the family cat.\u00a0 People ate flowers and they ate leather.\u00a0 There is detailed advice about how to make jam from scrapings of glue from the woodwork that were spread on this horrid bread.<\/p>\n

Strolling in the lush lanes of the Summer Gardens later in the day, I wondered how people hadn\u2019t gone out and cut them down to build fires to warm their kids.\u00a0 The trees are mute survivors and witnesses.\u00a0 Not that people could have eaten the wood.\u00a0 It wouldn\u2019t have kept their kids from dying of starvation.<\/p>\n

The story of the millions of Russian deaths is a trauma, as painful as witnessing as parts of the Holocaust.\u00a0 The suffering of ordinary people, the crimes of society during war and as weapons of waging of war.\u00a0 The mass starvation in Petersburg is a visceral indelible wound. \u00a0 The bread of affliction – for some means of survival, for others road to their starvation – is as painful as the memory of bread gets.<\/p>\n

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TALE ONE St. Petersburg is a stylized and showy city, immersed in the reflection of itself as \u201cwestern.\u201d It stares at itself in its canals, particularly now that it\u2019s nearly a modern, post-Soviet, western city.\u00a0 But absurdities were \u201cbaked into\u201d … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4D5qU-di","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=824"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":899,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions\/899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}