Class of 1978

This column marks the halfway point in my six years as class cosecretary, and I want to thank you for your generosity at sharing your news and stories. It’s a pleasure to hear from you and a privilege to learn more about you.

The last column, about how you spent the summer after our first year at Dartmouth, produced a flood of great responses, many of which merited more than the draconian 10-word limit I imposed. This one, from Nick Sakhnovsky, is personal but universal, taking in family, history, memory, and coming of age. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

“Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my paternal grandmother, who was widowed when I was 5,” Nick writes. “We traveled frequently together, and one of these trips, in the summer of 1975, included a visit to what was then Leningrad but which was called St. Petersburg when she was born there in 1899. I was 17, the same age she was when she and her mother hastily left for Finland after the fall of the tsar in March 1917—the last time she had seen her homeland, more than 58 years earlier.

“I saw my grandmother shed tears only twice in her life: when she recalled hiding in a ditch with her little dog while bullets whizzed overhead in a skirmish during the Finnish civil war in 1918 and that summer on a bus from the Leningrad airport to our hotel. She had fallen into conversation with another woman roughly her age. My Russian wasn’t good enough to understand, and I never asked, but I suspect that the woman, noticing my grandmother’s tsarist-era accent and vocabulary, shared with her some of the trials and tribulations she had escaped.

“Of many amazing things we experienced together on that trip—visits to the Hermitage, hydrofoiling to the Summer Palace, enjoying ice cream, seeing organized groups of babushkas her age diligently sweeping the streets just after dawn—the most memorable was when she hired a taxi to take us to her birthplace on Vasilyevsky Island.

“Despite the horrors of the siege of Leningrad during World War II and the deprivation and destruction caused by the Bolsheviks and the Germans, the vast majority of the buildings in the main part of the city had been repaired and largely retained their classic beauty. Her multigenerational residence had been in a four-story apartment building next to a park. I was truly amazed at how vividly my grandmother recalled her childhood there some seven decades earlier.

“My grandmother lived only 10 years more. She made one more trip back, this time with her son, my dad. I was so glad they could share that as well. I’ve returned to St. Petersburg more than a half-dozen times and on one occasion was able to take my own son along. While time marches on for us all, these visits have been a highlight of my life, and I’m thankful.”

—Anne Bagamery, 13 rue de Presles, 75015 Paris, France; abagamery78@gmail.com; Rick Beyer, 1305 S. Michigan Ave., #1104, Chicago, IL 60605; rickbeyer78@gmail.com