MY MATROYSKA ANCESTORS

          I’ve been fascinated by matroyska dolls since my younger daughter gave me a set for Chanukah over thirty years ago. 
          Also known as Russian nesting dolls, or sometimes as babushka dolls, matroyskas are colorful pear-shaped wooden forms. The top and bottoms separate around the middle, revealing figures of decreasing size inside until the smallest, baby doll, is exposed at the center. There is some variety, but traditionally they are hand-painted to resemble peasant women, their identical round faces fair-skinned with blonde or light brown hair. They often have rosebud lips and pink circles on their cheeks and are dressed in matching pastel dress; most have a round area over their abdomen holding images of hearts or flowers. Conventional matroyskas are female and the act of nesting them symbolizes fertility and childbirth. 
          My dolls not typical. The women have olive-toned skin with Eastern European features and black hair. Tangles of vines encircle their bodies, hued deep blood red and dark green. Their abdominal circles are gold wombs containing stylized scenes with deep forests, murky ponds, and stormy skies. Their expressions are also darker, sad or thoughtful, as if they have a painful history. I immediately loved them and welcomed them to my family.
          The thing is, they could be my ancestors. My four grandparents immigrated from Russian, from the Pale of Settlement, fleeing pogroms. One set from a shtetl near Odessa, the other from a village outside of Kiev. I doubt if my daughter, at 18, thought about this when she choose the gift. Or did she? Her cells carry the DNA of those ancestors along with her olive skin and dark hair.
          Dolls usually invite play, but the solemnity of my matroyska set discourages it. They lived quietly on my dresser, safely nested and mostly untouched, in a place where I saw them multiple times a day. For decades, I had the slightly uncomfortable feeling they were trying to tell me something important. 
          One day about five years ago, I carried the nested set to my desk. I twisted the two halves of the largest doll, separating her at her middle, releasing the faint aroma of bare wood. It smelled old. Opening the next, and the next, until all seven of them, each reassembled, stood in a row in front of the window. 
          What was their story? What did they want to tell me? What was I missing?
          I didn’t know, so I did what writers do: I put them in a story. It’s the best way I know of figuring out something that’s loitering at the edge of my brain. Teasing me, or daring me to look deeper.
          In my story, the dolls were brought to the U.S. by a ten-year-old girl fleeing the pogroms with her father. They were handed down, grandmother to granddaughter on a girl’s sixteenth birthday, celebrating her adulthood and connecting her to generations of her past. That story generated other stories and a new, imagined world, and that grew into a mosaic novel, a novel-in-stories, that moves from one generation fleeing the pogroms in Russian shtetls to near future family members fleeing climate catastrophe. Like the nesting dolls, which appear in many of the pieces, the narrative isn’t linear; the characters emerge from inside each other to tell a tale and then give birth to the next. 
          As our nation reels from onion-skin disasters, each revelation exposing larger and uglier news, as the novel that grew from the matroyskas meets the public, the dolls have been even more insistent that I pay attention. These days, the matroyskas continue to grace my dresser holding promises I still don’t fully understand. Is it something about stories within stories, about the echos of trauma across generations, about the ways in which art mirrors life, and vice versa?
          My matroyskas are generations of women, the unlikely survivors of modern catastrophes. They are worn out but they persist, carrying the weight of the stories of their people from shtetl to modern disaster, connected by blood and double helix and scar tissue. They mother each other, gathering strength from the orderly stacking of their bodies to rebuild in a world that is anything but orderly. They remind me that people can respond to calamity with perseverence and hope, even when the familiar and beloved are lost.


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Ellen Meeropol is the author of the novels Sometimes an Island, The Lost Women of Azalea Court, Her Sister’s Tattoo, Kinship of Clover, On Hurricane Island, and House Arrest, and guest editor for the anthology Dreams for a Broken World. Essay publications include Ms. Magazine, Lilith, The Writer Magazine, The Boston Globe, Solstice Magazine, Guernica, LitHub, and Mom Egg Review. Her work has been a finalist for the Sarton Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and selected by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads. Ellen lives in western Massachusetts, where she is a founding mother of Straw Dog Writers Guild.