Babi Yar in Manhattan

Tatyana Samoilova is running up the staircase, wrapped in smoke from the fire following a German bombing, jumping over the pulsating hoses. A fireman with a blackened face, looking like a coal miner, tries to stop her, but she slips from his hands and pushes open the door of the apartment, where she had left her parents...

The floor has vanished. After the threshold, an abyss--only a half-burned lampshade is swaying, and from the ticking ancient wall clock, a small mechanical bird is sounding a farewell "cuckoo." Only a week before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, my young students in Oklahoma, at the University of Tulsa, were watching this bombing of Russia on the screen as I showed them the famous 1957 Russian film The Cranes Are Flying. (This film symbolized "the thaw" in Russia and won many international prizes.) The students were watching, holding their breath, some of them with tears in their eyes.

I was shocked when one girl wrote in her paper that she was glad my course helped her discover so much kindness in the Russian people "despite the fact that Russia during WWII fought together with the Germans against America." To be honest, I was no less bitterly surprised in my homeland when some Russian teenagers answered in a questionnaire that they didn't know who Yuri Gagarin was. Sometimes in teaching cinema and poetry, it seems that I also teach history.

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