“Everything Has Its Own Soul”: a review of Crimean Fig: Contemporary Crimean Tatar Poetry and Fiction by Liz Ziemska

Crimean Fig: Contemporary Crimean Tatar Poetry and Fiction
Edited by Anastasia Levkova, Askold Melnyczuk, Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed,
Arrowsmith Press, 2025

I had always heard that during WWII, my Kyivan-born mother was evacuated with her family to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, far from the Nazi war machine. How lucky for them, I thought. Who was my maternal grandfather (I had only met him once) to have merited such special treatment in the Stalin-era Soviet Union? Was he important? I never asked, no one ever elaborated. Born in 1937 and 1938, neither of my parents liked to talk about their toddler war years, which they survived in body, though not entirely in mind.

Then I read Crimean Fig: Contemporary Crimean Tatar Poetry and Fiction, edited by Anastasia Levkova, Askold Melnyczuk, Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed, with a Foreword by Alim Aliev, and I understood that my mother’s experience was part of a much bigger story.

At the beginning of WWII, Hitler was Stalin’s ally until he wasn’t. He needed Russia on his side while he invaded Poland and France, but the people who invented Communism were always his second target, after the Jews. The invasion of Russia began in the summer of 1941.

By the end of that first year, Stalin pulled about 16 million Soviet citizens out of the path of the Nazi war machine, my mother among them, sending them to Uzbekistan, Siberia, and other eastern provinces. The goal was to preserve industry, intelligence, the Soviet way of life.

Evacuation was structured hierarchically—the most valuable to the least. For instance, state-sanctioned writers, considered “engineers of the human soul,” were put on trains with candles and sausages. (To see how unsanctioned writers were treated in the Soviet Union, read Master and Margarita.) Everyone else had to fend for themselves.

But the Crimean Tatars were left behind to fend for themselves as the Germans advanced across Russian territory, soon occupying the entire Crimean Peninsula.

And in 1944, when the war was over, and my mother and her family came back to Kyiv and resumed their lives, the Crimean Tatars who had somehow survived the war were deemed collaborators, shoved into packed trains, and shipped east. Jammed into overcrowded trains with no food or water, no windows, a hole in the floor for a toilet, an estimated 46 percent of these people died during Stalin’s ethnic cleansing campaign.

The Crimean Tatars weren’t allowed back into their homeland until late 1991, after the Soviet Union fell. Those who survived the four-decade-long expulsion, and hadn’t settled in other countries, came back to the Crimean Peninsula to rebuild.

And then Russian invaded Crimea in 2014. And once again, the Crimean Tatar people are being forced off their land.

The Crimean Tatar people were shaped by history and landscape. The last remnant of the Mongol Empire that swept west from 1240, they settled in the warm climate of the Crimean Peninsula, bathed by the Black Sea, backed by the Crimean Mountains with forested slopes, made a living from agriculture, animal husbandry, trade. Intermingled with the Greeks, Balkans, Khazars, Italians. In the 16th to the 18th century, the Crimean Peninsula was an Ottoman vassal state constantly nibbled on by the Russian Empire. In 1783, Catherine the Great finally annexed the Crimea and began settling Russians on the land.

But the people endured. Their creed is Sunni Islam, adopted around the 14th century, with a deep reverence for nature inherited from their animist Mongol ancestors.

In “The Black Walls of the Zindan” by Mustafa Amet (adapted by John Fulton and Lara Stecewycz), our narrator, thrown into an underground prison, recalls:

My grandmother used to say that everything has its own soul: stone, grass, water, earth, wood, and air, and even the sun, the moon, planet Earth, and each star… ‘If there is no need, do not tear off a leaf…use water only when necessary.’

Words we could use right now. The narrator recalls his childhood in the Steppe District of the upper Crimean Peninsula, driving down to the seashore, “dazzling green, blue and white glimmers of light…a storm of excitement in my heart,” combing the shore for “beautiful shells, colored glass.” Thoughts like these keep him alive while he waits to be released or at least be told why he was taken. Finally, interrogations, forced confessions to extremism, to secret, anti-government organizations. More beatings. Memories of autumn harvest, grapes, apples, and pears. Regrets. Cries of forgiveness heard only by the stones of the cell, but they are listening, for they too have souls.

In “My Blue-Eyed Adile,” by Zekiye Ismailova, adapted by David R. Earl and Scott Aumont, an old woman is woken from a light sleep by the sound of her name. The other passengers on the train are talking, eating, not noticing the young girl who comes in, gentle, blue-eyed, dimples on her cheeks. She sits next to the old woman and they begin to chat. They both have the same name. How strange. Then we find out that during the war, the old woman’s father was a railroad worker so was able to take his family away from the city, into the hills at the foot of an old fortress. There she met a young man who eventually went off to fight in the Resistance. They lost touch. She assumed he had died. But here was his granddaughter, whom he named after the young girl he had met during the war. And now the old woman knows how much she was loved.

In “Yearning,” by Elmira Bekirova, adapted by Shuchi Saraswat and Lara Stecewycz, an old man dreams of his youth in German-occupied Crimea, of climbing cherry trees with friends, gorging themselves with ripe fruit. Verboten. Carrying out small assignments for the Partisans. Now he lives alone in his small house. His wife is dead. His son has adopted a stricter form of worship, no longer approves of his father’s ways. At first, the father thought, it might be not be so bad: “It’s better that he prefers religion to walking around and drinking with the Russian guys.” But the “young, foreign mullahs” are recruiting, driving a wedge between the generations. We know how this ended elsewhere.

But the young people are angry. Since the Russians took over in 2014, they have banned the May 18th commemorations—May 18, 1944, the date of deportation of the Crimean Tatars, a national day of mourning. What is an old man to do, but yearn for the past?

And what can we do? We can bear witness. We can read these stories and poems, translated from a language that is endangered, learn about a way of life that may be disappearing, once again. For the Crimean Tatars deserve so much more than candles and sausages.  

Liz Ziemska is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Interfictions: 2, Strange Horizons, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Pushcart Prize XLI, and has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. She is the author of Mandelbrot the Magnificent and lives in Los Angeles.