The Persistence of Remembrance

Sixty-seven years ago this September, WWII ended and the GI's began to head home. Those of reasoning age on V-J Day are fast dwindling in numbers and they have not only grandchildren but great grandchildren as well.

Still, there is something inescapable about WWII and that Greatest Generation and Levittown's remembrance thereof every Memorial Day. It's powerful here in Levittown. It's especially powerful in Russia.     

Back in 1987 during his tour of the Soviet Union, Levittown's own, Billy Joel, befriended a Russian man named Viktor whose father died during the Great Patriotic War, as WWII is called over there. The friendship became inspiration for Joel's "Leningrad" two years later wherein Joel compared Viktor's life in Cold War Leningrad with that of his own life in Levittown.

It was around this time, too, as the Soviet Union was beginning to unravel that I sat in the periodical section of the Levittown Public Library. Just out the window was our own community's Veteran's Memorial Park where we reflect upon the 20-odd Levittowners who died in military service as well as the many who died in the WWII whose aftermath brought Levittown into being.

It was in the library that I saw the teenage girl smartly attired in uniform, great coat, and fur hat adorned with a red star. Around her shoulder was a Kalashnikov rifle and on her face a solemn expression. This girl appeared in a glossy magazine photograph as I thumbed through an issue of Soviet Life, an English-language publication founded in 1956 as part of a cultural exchange whereby Soviet citizens might have a gander at life in the U.S. via the Russian counterpart Amerika. She stood in the arctic chill, at attention, guarding a monument to those who died in the Great Patriotic War.

Indeed, across this vast land - from Smolensk to Kamchatka - there are countless memorials to the 20 million Soviet people, to entire families and villages, who perished between 1941 and 1945. They are amongst the most dignified, poignant, and bittersweet places on Earth. The dedication to remembrance has not diminished the slightest by the collapse of the Soviet Union. When all is said and done, the patriotism of these people, of all peoples, is not defined by regime, ideological system, or flag but by people and community and sacrifice and remembrance; about not forgetting the many who didn't come home - not to Lenningrad and not to a house in Levittown.     

Over the years, I've wondered whatever became of that teenage girl with soft features, silky dark hair, and Red Army uniform. She came from a generation that could honestly say that their standard of living and level of education exceeded anything their grandparents could have imagined and he reason for this Soviet version of the American Dream was the modernization of their country wrought by the Communist Party. Alas - and here's the devil in the details - that didn't mean that communism was a viable political and economic system in the long run. Every dinosaur has its day.     

The Soviet Union is gone. An entire generation has reached childhood with no memory of life in the U.S.S.R. and the successor states that replaced the once invincible Soviet empire struggle to give their people a better life and look to the future. And yet, remembrance persists. Those who sacrificed everything in the Great Patriotic War are not forgotten but are recalled with the most profound respect and gratitude; undiminished by the subsequent upheavals. Here a bond, albeit one of kindred spirit, exists between these people and the people of Levittown for whom remembrance persists and is reflected upon on Hempstead Turnpike every Memorial Day.     

Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit www.levittownhistoricalsociety.org