A Bloodless Hunt – The Cosmic Traveler´s search for A Name. Part II.

Part 2

The Surname: Savelieva, Ginko, Podterger, Mitelman, Lightchild.

To people who know me by my “official” name Natalia Savelieva (Savelieva Ginko in my Spanish passport), and are curious why my Facebook profile is Natasha Podterger Mitelman – here are a few reasons:

1. I felt guided to do so.

2. To taste and to give taste of the idea that our name, dress, gender, nationality, race or… fill in the blank, – is not who we really are. No more no less than a part of our temporary identity vehicle, required by law and necessary to fill in the spaces on the ID card.

3. To give Natalie Lightchild (as some people knew me for a couple of years, which was my pen name, received in a meditation when studying a Course in Miracles) a little break, she deserves it.

4. To honour my Grandfathers, Ivan Podterger and Leib Mitelman, (imagine the fusion of cultures!), who I have never met physically.

As Natasha Podterger, I acknowledge my paternal grandfather, Ivan Podterger, a so called “Russian German”, who my paternal grandma Olga separated from when she was about 21, when my father was a baby, and who she spoke about, after my life long insisting that she did, only a few years before she died at her age of 90.

Such was her stubborn decision, determined by deep heartbreak. And boy, my grandma was good at sticking with her decisions.

There wasn´t even one picture of him at her home, so I don´t even know what he looked like. My father was adopted at the age of 7 and his surname was changed to his stepfather´s, Saveliev.

I inherited this surname, which obviously isn´t our family name.

This guy turned out to be over jealous and emotionally unstable and my beautiful grandma Olga, dark haired and white skinned like Snow White; smart, well positioned job-wise, an independent Soviet citizen of the dictatorship where women believed to be equal to men, separated from him as well. My father was a teenager and his half-brother was probably around 6 or 7.

As Natasha Mitelman, I acknowledge my maternal grandfather, Leib Mitelman, a highly qualified engineer (as well as someone who spoke 5 languages and wrote poetry in French, according to what my aunt in Moscow, my mother´s elder half sister told me).

He was repatriated from Rumania to the post Second World War Soviet Union through a programme of restoration of the ruined country. He ended up in the Northern Caucasus, in the city of Grozny, built by the Russians on the River Sunzha in a beautiful sunny valley, rich in juicy corn and sweet grapes, protected from the Northern Winds by Mount Elbrus.

He was killed by the KGB when my mother was 5 years old, after having refused to work for them. The official story went that he killed himself, but everyone knew in that era how people “kill themselves” after the KGB talks to them and doesn´t like the outcome of that conversation.

My maternal grandmother, Vera, trying to save my mother from any possible further persecution in the Stalin ruled concentration camp of a country, changed her name, Maria Mitelman, to her own maiden name. She became Maria Ginko, till the age of 25, when she married my father and took his surname, and became Savelieva, – as per a strange – but not unusual – cultural tradition.

My father lived all his life under the surname of the guy he hardly knew and from 2011 this name has moved from his passport to his tombstone, which reads, according to the pictures I have seen, Vladimir Saveliev.

My mother died in 2004 at the age of 56 and her tombstone also keeps the name she had since she was 25 for 31 years of the unhappy marriage, Maria Savelieva. They are buried next to each other, which is really ironic as they coudn´t stand each other´s company and couldn´t go without shouting at each other for more than a half day. Before the war in Grozny and more so after the war, uprooted from their lives, jobs, homes and friends in 1993, having had lost the old to the air bombs and never been able to build the new. Dust in the wind is never a good foundation for building anything long-lasting.

Back to my grandfathers – as far as I know from the tiny bits and pieces I managed to extract from my paternal grandmother Olga on the phone – Ivan Podterger never had more children, other than my father.

As far as I know from what my mother told me one night in the kitchen when I was 15 years old (the first time I managed to hear any information about my grandfather, a Jew from Bucharest, the first time I heard his name and origin, such was the fear living in her since her childhood), my grandfather Leib had 4 more brothers, who all left the big family house in Bucharest during the war, some to France, some to the US, and none of them had kids.

Masha Mitelman later Ginko and later Savelieva, my mother, was his only child and the only continuation of that family.

Thus, magically and karmically, these 2 surnames had disappeared into the River of Time.

I take the power to fish them out and bring them to the light of day. I honour these 2 people, who I never met, but whose blood, genes and difficult history has formed part of my own tormented illusory identity, part of the mystery, all the way till now.