The Story of Valentina's Uncle

 

When I was around 11 years old, I lived in a battered old blue-and-white trailer in the town of Kirby, WV, with my mother.  We were extremely poor, and during the summers in particular I had to find ways to occupy my time as there was not a lot of connectivity then with the wider world.  One of the things we got as a sort of blessing were a huge number of old magazines - Time, Newsweek, and Reader's Digest.  I was an avid reader then, and there were some especially good stories that caught my attention in Reader's Digest back in the day.  One of those features the magazine had was a lengthy book review of some new release that caught the reviewer's attention.  Many of these books were somewhat obscure to most - one particularly good one was Jacobo Timerman's book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. Timerman, a Argentine-born Jewish author, was a victim of the various factions of the Peron regime (it was one of the movements that had both a "right-wing" and a "left-wing," and neither were that great as far as ideology was concerned) and he was imprisoned at different times by both of those factions.  His book is a sort of journal of his prison experience, and it leaves nothing to the imagination - the man really suffered.  I now have a copy of that book behind me on my bookshelf, and I am actually encouraging my 11th graders I teach to read it as an extra credit project.  Another book of interest that was featured in a 1980 issue of Reader's Digest was published in 1981 by Gerda S. Mathan, a noted educator and photographer at the time.  Mathan took an interest in some accounts a colleague of hers by the name of Valentina Zavarin, a Russian emigre who had earned her Ph.D.,  at the university they both taught at.   Mathan initially proposed doing a photo essay of Valentina's five little children, but Valentina had another idea - she asked if Mathan would mind doing some photos of her aging uncle, a Russian immigrant named Vadim Shepkin, who at this time was 92 and lived in California if I recall correctly.  As Mathan got to know the elderly gentleman, her initial portrait project grew into a photo essay that she would later publish in book form, and thus that is how Valentina's Uncle became a published work.

Vadim Shepkin was a man who had lived a pretty amazing life overall.  He was born when Russia still had a Czar, but later he became part of the October Revolution and for a time was an enthusiastic Leninist until he was later disillusioned by the sheer cruelty of Stalin and then immigrated to the US in 1950. In his later years too, he also became intensely religious as a devout Orthodox Christian, and his pride and joy was the herd of cats and his numerous fruit trees he planted in his yard.  The sad part of the story came when Vadim was no longer able to care for himself, so he had to leave his beloved house and became a resident in the local nursing home.  Not long after, he passed away, but thankfully his legacy lives on thanks to this book and also his great-nieces and nephews, who are all probably in their late 40s and early 50s now, as some of them were younger than me. It is this last part I wanted to spend some time talking about, as it sort of goes along the theme of my thoughts as of late.

Vadim's demise was sad, and Mathan did such an amazing job on the book that you feel that melancholy when he is no longer to live independently.  She documents how the empty house deteriorates, and even how a small child living next door said "who will pick the fruit now?"  It is really a powerful documentary of the life of a unique man who otherwise would have been forgotten as just another old immigrant in California.  Vadim Shepkin is the type of person I wish I would have known, as I feel there was a lot of wisdom contained in that old man's mind.  Reading stuff like this always has a certain level of resonance with me, as we can all see ourselves in him if we look close enough.  Especially as many of us get older ourselves.  I know for a fact that after age 50 I started thinking about things I never gave much thought to before - after losing both my parents within 5 years, experiencing a divorce, and even losing a home recently, it made me think more about legacy - what legacy will I leave?  Vadim Shepkin was blessed to have a niece who had the foresight to enlist a friend of hers to document some precious moments of his life, and also who was there for him when he needed people to care for him.  As it seems that he had no children of his own, the mantle of preserving his legacy fell upon his niece, and now it falls upon her children, who as I mentioned would be close to my age now.  Hopefully they passed this on to their kids and grandkids, so that Vadim Shepkin will have immortality in the best way that can be done - tell his story.  

There is a lot more that could be said about this book, but it is definitely worth a read.  Copies of it are quite rare to find now, although I have had success on both Amazon and Ebay.  I have with me now the second copy of it I ever owned, and even as I write this now I am thinking of ways it could be used to create other discussions.  It pays sometimes to look in unexpected places for the rarest treasures, and I thank God for bringing that issue of Reader's Digest to me when I was an 11-year-old kid stuck in a poverty-stricken home in a small West Virginia town.  Although over the years I had forgotten the story, it was maybe about 10 years ago a thought of it had crossed my mind, and it took a while to remember the title but I did find it.  It now keeps a good place in my library, and maybe something in it can be used to inspire others.

Thank you for allowing me to share yet again, and will see you soon.