People � How a black/Jewish/Polish/Russian/African woman found her roots: Yelena Khanga's family spans four generations on three continents
Author: admin | 30 June 2009 | Views: 1575
Yelena Khanga's family spans four generations on three continents
By Karima A. Haynes - Soul to Soul
Yelena Khanga recalls the day in I February 1991 when she ran her fingers through the rich soil of a farm once owned by her great-grandfather in Yazoo County, Miss.
At that moment, the Black American Russian Jewish African great-granddaughter of a former slave and a Polish rabbi knew in the deepest recesses of her soul that she was connected to something much larger than herself
"I always believed that the only relatives I had were my mother and my grandmother," 30-year-old Khanga says with a distinctly Russian accent. "But when I went to Mississippi and saw the land, I was like, 'Wow! We have roots. This is where we come from.' Now, I feel that I am somebody."
The trip to the Mississippi Delta was yet another personal discovery in Khanga's two-year quest to trace her unique family. The journey has taken the Russian journalist from the post-Civil War South to the Harlem nightclubs of the late 1920s; from a Soviet Union stymied by Stalin's brutal dictatorship to the heady, early days of glasnost; from Zanzibar, a tiny island off the coast of Tanzania, East Africa, to the bright lights of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Russian journalist Yelena Khanga pauses on Chicago's South Side (far left) during her recent journey into her family's past. She is the granddaughter of Oliver Golden, a Black American from Mississippi, and Bertha Bialek, a Polish Jewish immigrant, who moved to the Soviet Union in 1931.
It is a story that reached its climax at a recent family reunion in Chicago when the African-American Goldens and the Jewish Polish-American Bialeks met for the first time.
Blacks and Jews alike greeted one another with warm bearhugs and friendly kisses during the social hour. They posed for photographs and animatedly tried to figure out how exactly they were related to one another. And Khanga and her Polish-American cousin, Nancy Bialek, even sang a few bars of Stevie Wonders "Ebony and Ivory."
Once the families took their seats for dinner, a Black Pentacostal preacher and a Jewish rabbi solemnly approached a podium and blessed the meal of roasted lamb and Russian-style stuffed cabbage.
Following dinner and impromptu speeches by family members, the Bialeks and Goldens took to the dance floor to dance to a Mississippi blues band playing "Sweet Home Chicago" and then to the dizzying beat of a Jewish klezmer band.
At right in Chicago, Khanga poses with her mother, Lily Golden, the interracial couple's only child. left, at outset of her U.S. trip, Khanga stands in front of Moscow's Basil's Cathedral at the edge of famed Red Square.
At a family reunion in Chicago, Khanga (c.) and Lily Golden (a, 1.) pose with the African-American Goldens and the Jewish Polish-American Bialeks who represent both sides of their culturally diverse family
left - Khanga and co-author Susan Jacoby (below, left) celebrate the publication of their book, Soul to Soul: The Story of a Black Russian American Family 1865-1992, which chronicles the family's "Roots' Mike saga.
right - Jamming to a Mississippi blues band, Khanga and her cousin, Mark Bialek (above, right), dance. The families join hands (below, left) to dance the hora, a traditional Jewish dance of celebration. Khanga greets Lee Young (below, right), whom she calls her 'American father," and his wife, Maureen.
"My life is like a soap opera,'' Khanga says, shaking her head and smiling.�If it didn't happen to me, I wouldn't believe it."
At the heart of the story are Khanga s grandparents Oliver Golden, a Black American agronomist trained by George Washington Carver at Tuskegee Institute, and Bertha Bialek, a Polish Jewish immigrant.
The couple met in 1927 in a New York City jailhouse where they were briefly detained for participating in an equal rights demonstration organized by the U. S. Communist Party.
By all accounts, it was love at first sight. Bertha, 22, was attracted to the handsome, sophisticated, World War I veteran who spoke French and loved to cook. And Oliver, 40, was equally smitten by the intelligent, independent-minded young woman who possessed a soulful gentleness.
Khanga's Russian and Black American worlds melded together (above, left) in the tiny, two-room apartment she shared with her mother, Lily Golden, and grandmother, Bertha Bialek. Oliver Golden and Bertha Bialek (below, left) vacation in southern Russia c. 1931. Khanga (above, right) met her paternal grandmother, Mashavu Hassan Hanga, and other family members for the first time in Zanzibar, East Africa, in 1991.
Khanga's father, Abdullah Khanga (left), was assassinated by his political enemies in 1965
But the price of interracial love was high. The couple was refused service at public accommodations and denied housing. The ultimate rejection came when Bertha's family shunned her for marrying a Black Gentile.
Fueled by political idealism and a dream of racial equality, the couple fled racial intolerance in America in 1931 in search of a better life in the socialist Soviet Union.
Khanga weaves together these multi-cultural strands in her book Soul to Soul: The Story Of A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992. The story spans four generations and chronicles a century of racial strife and political upheaval.
Yelena Khanga was born in Moscow on May 1, 1962 to Abdullah Khanga, a Zanzibari independence leader who was assassinated by his political enemies in 1965, and Lily Golden, the only daughter of Oliver Golden and Bertha Bialek.
At an early age, Khanga was acutely aware of the difference between herself and the "pure Russian" children living in her neighborhood.
She remembers walking down the street with her White grandmother and enduring Muscovites' incredulous stares at the sight of a babushka with a Black child in tow. She recalls the astonished look of a White schoolmate's mother who accidentally walked in while Khanga was changing clothes and was shocked to discover that Black people are Black all over - not just on their faces and hands.
There were schoolchildren who wanted to know why her copper-colored skin hadn't turned White in the cold Russian climate. And how come her short, curled Black hair couldn't be pulled back into a ponytail?
Like many Black American parents, Lily Golden tried to protect her daughter from the spirit-crushing effects of bigotry. She instilled in her only child a sense of pride in her unique heritage.
Khanga's Black American and Russian identities melded in her family's crowded, two-room apartment where the classic writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright jammed bookshelves along with the great works of Russian writers Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Treasured recordings by Duke Ellington and Bilie Holiday blared from the phonograph as did Tchaikovsky symphonies and Rachmaninoff piano concertos.
"Everything I know about Africans and African-Americans I learned from my mother," Khanga explains. "I am very self-confident in my color and in my history."
Lily Golden holds a doctorate in African history and helped to establish the Soviet-African Studies Institute in Moscow. Today, she is a distinguished scholar at Chicago State University, where she is translating three of her Russian history books into English.
Imbued with a positive self-image, the vivacious and engaging Khanga succeeded in the strict Soviet system. She scored high marks in school while playing on the national tennis team. Her excellent grades earned her admission to Moscow State University. Ironically, some three decades earlier, the school tried to bar her mother from taking university entrance exams because of her American background.
left - As an exchange journalist at the Christian Science Monitor in December 1987, Khanga covered the summit between Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and President Reagan. She was "discovered" by reporters who had no idea there were Black Russians. At right, Khanga and fellow reporters relax outside the Moscow News building.
right - Young called Khanga at the Christian Science Monitor
"Russian society was terribly afraid of Americans," Khanga explains. "The authorities thought that I had connections and would become a spy. If I were a White American, after two or three generations I would have just assimilated.
But with me it was: 'Wait a minute. Why is she Black? Aha, her grandparents came from America. This is suspicious. How can we trust this person?'"
Anti-American bias nearly kept her from pursuing a journalism career after she graduated from college in 1984. Newspapers were reluctant to hire a Black Russian with American roots. However, Moscow News, the most widely circulated independent weekly newspaper in the Soviet Union, was willing to take a chance on her. It was a gamble that paid off
A year after Khanga joined the staff former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev ushered in reforms and opened
the nation to Western influences. Suddenly, Khanga's fluency in English and her American background became all the more valuable in this new era of glasnost.
To promote greater understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Christian Science Monitor in Boston launched a journalism exchange program with Moscow News. Khanga was the first Russian journalist selected for the program.
"Being selected was a very big thing," Khanga explains. "Usually only males, members of the Communist Party and pure Russians were sent abroad to do that kind of thing. I just couldn't believe that I was going."
Not only was the exchange program the professional opportunity of a lifetime, but a chance to go back to the country her grandparents left more than' a half century before.
For Khanga, the story of her grandparents' meeting, marriage and move to the central Asian city of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, was one she'd heard time and time again while growing up. However, the story hadn't crystallized in her mind until that November day in 1987 when she boarded a Soviet jetliner bound for the United States.
Will Americans be as friendly toward me as they always seem in Moscow? What will it feel like to be Black in the country where my grandparents suffered the pain of racial discrimination? The questions were still swirling in her mind as the airplane landed at New York's Kennedy International Airport.
The United States Khanga found was a melting pot simmering with racial tension. She met Whites who snubbed her until they learned she was a Black Russian. She met Blacks who criticized White people until they discovered her late grandmother was White.
Her budding romance with a White male colleague was scorned by Blacks and Whites alike. This was particularly disturbing because in Moscow she had little choice but to date White men.
Still, there were some heartwarming encounters with Black Americans. In Soul to Soul, Khanga recounts a brief yet eye-opening, exchange with an elderly Black man at a bus stop in Boston.
"Tell me, sister," asked the man, who obviously couldn't see well, "is this the bus to Fenway Park?"
She told him it was the right bus, but thinking the man had mistaken her for his sister, she gendy added that she was not his sister.
Hearing her foreign accent, the man explained, "Wherever you come from, if you're Black, that makes you my soul sister and me your soul brother."
"I was suffused with an unfamiliar warmth," she wrote. "Here in America, I was no longer one of a kind."
On that first transatlantic visit, Khanga also struck up a friendship with Lee Young, a Black businessman from Los Angeles whom she calls her American father.
"Lee read an article about me in Jet magazine," she says. "He saw that I was only meeting White professionals and he wanted to introduce me to Black professionals."
By Karima A. Haynes - Soul to Soul
Yelena Khanga recalls the day in I February 1991 when she ran her fingers through the rich soil of a farm once owned by her great-grandfather in Yazoo County, Miss.
At that moment, the Black American Russian Jewish African great-granddaughter of a former slave and a Polish rabbi knew in the deepest recesses of her soul that she was connected to something much larger than herself
"I always believed that the only relatives I had were my mother and my grandmother," 30-year-old Khanga says with a distinctly Russian accent. "But when I went to Mississippi and saw the land, I was like, 'Wow! We have roots. This is where we come from.' Now, I feel that I am somebody."
The trip to the Mississippi Delta was yet another personal discovery in Khanga's two-year quest to trace her unique family. The journey has taken the Russian journalist from the post-Civil War South to the Harlem nightclubs of the late 1920s; from a Soviet Union stymied by Stalin's brutal dictatorship to the heady, early days of glasnost; from Zanzibar, a tiny island off the coast of Tanzania, East Africa, to the bright lights of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Russian journalist Yelena Khanga pauses on Chicago's South Side (far left) during her recent journey into her family's past. She is the granddaughter of Oliver Golden, a Black American from Mississippi, and Bertha Bialek, a Polish Jewish immigrant, who moved to the Soviet Union in 1931.
It is a story that reached its climax at a recent family reunion in Chicago when the African-American Goldens and the Jewish Polish-American Bialeks met for the first time.
Blacks and Jews alike greeted one another with warm bearhugs and friendly kisses during the social hour. They posed for photographs and animatedly tried to figure out how exactly they were related to one another. And Khanga and her Polish-American cousin, Nancy Bialek, even sang a few bars of Stevie Wonders "Ebony and Ivory."
Once the families took their seats for dinner, a Black Pentacostal preacher and a Jewish rabbi solemnly approached a podium and blessed the meal of roasted lamb and Russian-style stuffed cabbage.
Following dinner and impromptu speeches by family members, the Bialeks and Goldens took to the dance floor to dance to a Mississippi blues band playing "Sweet Home Chicago" and then to the dizzying beat of a Jewish klezmer band.
At right in Chicago, Khanga poses with her mother, Lily Golden, the interracial couple's only child. left, at outset of her U.S. trip, Khanga stands in front of Moscow's Basil's Cathedral at the edge of famed Red Square.
At a family reunion in Chicago, Khanga (c.) and Lily Golden (a, 1.) pose with the African-American Goldens and the Jewish Polish-American Bialeks who represent both sides of their culturally diverse family
left - Khanga and co-author Susan Jacoby (below, left) celebrate the publication of their book, Soul to Soul: The Story of a Black Russian American Family 1865-1992, which chronicles the family's "Roots' Mike saga.
right - Jamming to a Mississippi blues band, Khanga and her cousin, Mark Bialek (above, right), dance. The families join hands (below, left) to dance the hora, a traditional Jewish dance of celebration. Khanga greets Lee Young (below, right), whom she calls her 'American father," and his wife, Maureen.
"My life is like a soap opera,'' Khanga says, shaking her head and smiling.�If it didn't happen to me, I wouldn't believe it."
At the heart of the story are Khanga s grandparents Oliver Golden, a Black American agronomist trained by George Washington Carver at Tuskegee Institute, and Bertha Bialek, a Polish Jewish immigrant.
The couple met in 1927 in a New York City jailhouse where they were briefly detained for participating in an equal rights demonstration organized by the U. S. Communist Party.
By all accounts, it was love at first sight. Bertha, 22, was attracted to the handsome, sophisticated, World War I veteran who spoke French and loved to cook. And Oliver, 40, was equally smitten by the intelligent, independent-minded young woman who possessed a soulful gentleness.
Khanga's Russian and Black American worlds melded together (above, left) in the tiny, two-room apartment she shared with her mother, Lily Golden, and grandmother, Bertha Bialek. Oliver Golden and Bertha Bialek (below, left) vacation in southern Russia c. 1931. Khanga (above, right) met her paternal grandmother, Mashavu Hassan Hanga, and other family members for the first time in Zanzibar, East Africa, in 1991.
Khanga's father, Abdullah Khanga (left), was assassinated by his political enemies in 1965
But the price of interracial love was high. The couple was refused service at public accommodations and denied housing. The ultimate rejection came when Bertha's family shunned her for marrying a Black Gentile.
Fueled by political idealism and a dream of racial equality, the couple fled racial intolerance in America in 1931 in search of a better life in the socialist Soviet Union.
Khanga weaves together these multi-cultural strands in her book Soul to Soul: The Story Of A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992. The story spans four generations and chronicles a century of racial strife and political upheaval.
Yelena Khanga was born in Moscow on May 1, 1962 to Abdullah Khanga, a Zanzibari independence leader who was assassinated by his political enemies in 1965, and Lily Golden, the only daughter of Oliver Golden and Bertha Bialek.
At an early age, Khanga was acutely aware of the difference between herself and the "pure Russian" children living in her neighborhood.
She remembers walking down the street with her White grandmother and enduring Muscovites' incredulous stares at the sight of a babushka with a Black child in tow. She recalls the astonished look of a White schoolmate's mother who accidentally walked in while Khanga was changing clothes and was shocked to discover that Black people are Black all over - not just on their faces and hands.
There were schoolchildren who wanted to know why her copper-colored skin hadn't turned White in the cold Russian climate. And how come her short, curled Black hair couldn't be pulled back into a ponytail?
Like many Black American parents, Lily Golden tried to protect her daughter from the spirit-crushing effects of bigotry. She instilled in her only child a sense of pride in her unique heritage.
Khanga's Black American and Russian identities melded in her family's crowded, two-room apartment where the classic writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright jammed bookshelves along with the great works of Russian writers Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Treasured recordings by Duke Ellington and Bilie Holiday blared from the phonograph as did Tchaikovsky symphonies and Rachmaninoff piano concertos.
"Everything I know about Africans and African-Americans I learned from my mother," Khanga explains. "I am very self-confident in my color and in my history."
Lily Golden holds a doctorate in African history and helped to establish the Soviet-African Studies Institute in Moscow. Today, she is a distinguished scholar at Chicago State University, where she is translating three of her Russian history books into English.
Imbued with a positive self-image, the vivacious and engaging Khanga succeeded in the strict Soviet system. She scored high marks in school while playing on the national tennis team. Her excellent grades earned her admission to Moscow State University. Ironically, some three decades earlier, the school tried to bar her mother from taking university entrance exams because of her American background.
left - As an exchange journalist at the Christian Science Monitor in December 1987, Khanga covered the summit between Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and President Reagan. She was "discovered" by reporters who had no idea there were Black Russians. At right, Khanga and fellow reporters relax outside the Moscow News building.
right - Young called Khanga at the Christian Science Monitor
"Russian society was terribly afraid of Americans," Khanga explains. "The authorities thought that I had connections and would become a spy. If I were a White American, after two or three generations I would have just assimilated.
But with me it was: 'Wait a minute. Why is she Black? Aha, her grandparents came from America. This is suspicious. How can we trust this person?'"
Anti-American bias nearly kept her from pursuing a journalism career after she graduated from college in 1984. Newspapers were reluctant to hire a Black Russian with American roots. However, Moscow News, the most widely circulated independent weekly newspaper in the Soviet Union, was willing to take a chance on her. It was a gamble that paid off
A year after Khanga joined the staff former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev ushered in reforms and opened
the nation to Western influences. Suddenly, Khanga's fluency in English and her American background became all the more valuable in this new era of glasnost.
To promote greater understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Christian Science Monitor in Boston launched a journalism exchange program with Moscow News. Khanga was the first Russian journalist selected for the program.
"Being selected was a very big thing," Khanga explains. "Usually only males, members of the Communist Party and pure Russians were sent abroad to do that kind of thing. I just couldn't believe that I was going."
Not only was the exchange program the professional opportunity of a lifetime, but a chance to go back to the country her grandparents left more than' a half century before.
For Khanga, the story of her grandparents' meeting, marriage and move to the central Asian city of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, was one she'd heard time and time again while growing up. However, the story hadn't crystallized in her mind until that November day in 1987 when she boarded a Soviet jetliner bound for the United States.
Will Americans be as friendly toward me as they always seem in Moscow? What will it feel like to be Black in the country where my grandparents suffered the pain of racial discrimination? The questions were still swirling in her mind as the airplane landed at New York's Kennedy International Airport.
The United States Khanga found was a melting pot simmering with racial tension. She met Whites who snubbed her until they learned she was a Black Russian. She met Blacks who criticized White people until they discovered her late grandmother was White.
Her budding romance with a White male colleague was scorned by Blacks and Whites alike. This was particularly disturbing because in Moscow she had little choice but to date White men.
Still, there were some heartwarming encounters with Black Americans. In Soul to Soul, Khanga recounts a brief yet eye-opening, exchange with an elderly Black man at a bus stop in Boston.
"Tell me, sister," asked the man, who obviously couldn't see well, "is this the bus to Fenway Park?"
She told him it was the right bus, but thinking the man had mistaken her for his sister, she gendy added that she was not his sister.
Hearing her foreign accent, the man explained, "Wherever you come from, if you're Black, that makes you my soul sister and me your soul brother."
"I was suffused with an unfamiliar warmth," she wrote. "Here in America, I was no longer one of a kind."
On that first transatlantic visit, Khanga also struck up a friendship with Lee Young, a Black businessman from Los Angeles whom she calls her American father.
"Lee read an article about me in Jet magazine," she says. "He saw that I was only meeting White professionals and he wanted to introduce me to Black professionals."
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