Lex Shramko 

What if you were searching for your missing aunt, and found her obituary instead?

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Ever since I was little, my mother told stories about being orphaned, and then about losing her only family—her older sister—on the last day of World War II.

 

I grew up with this phantom aunt who held all the answers to my mom’s mysterious childhood and all I wanted was to find her—so I could fix my mom. But I was born deaf. And, later, I came out as queer. Then all my mom wanted was to fix me.

 

Her unreliable memories are fragments—victim to the chaos of a wartime childhood. She doesn’t remember her mother’s name; she barely knows her own.

 

The only way to honor her story is to acknowledge parts that can never be known. Three escaped zoo monkeys, a crow protector, and a loyal dog help me bear witness to my mother’s tangled memories and weave her origin story. 

 

EXISTENCE is a slipstream fairy tale, braided from memoir and biography with nods to fantastical realism, and runs at about 65,000 words.

 

It starts in Manchuria, China, and goes through Kharkiv, Ukraine, where my school-aged mom finds herself squeezed between Stalin’s murderous rampages, and Hitler’s advances on Russia. Clad in a black silk dress and green kid leather pumps, her sister engineers an escape by liaising with Wehrmacht officers. For the next two years they walk through Europe, stateless, until they are separated at the German border.

 

From there, my mother alternates between being homeless in the forest and being taken in by predatory do-gooders, being in an orphanage and being “adopted.” And each time, like a rescue pet, she is renamed and rebranded until she has little memory of who she was. Is she German? Ukrainian? Russian? Chinese? What was her name?

 

Her last “adoption,” this time to an American family, includes ship’s passage which is miraculously upgraded to a flight—finally a win—only to miss her sister on the original ship, the same passage.

 

Her story continues to DC where I grow up, my mother rejects my identities, and we become estranged until, randomly, I find her sister’s recent obituary in nearby Toronto. Just out of an unhealthy 12-year relationship, abandoning a tenure track professorship, and after a health scare threatens our last chance—my mother and I gingerly reunite, and travel to Kharkiv—her first homegoing in 75 years. There, when she confirms her own existence—her true identity—the question becomes: can she accept mine—deaf and gay—without constantly trying to “normalize” me?

 

Genre-wise, it’s an innovative memoir—Susan Faludi “In The Darkroom” x Carmen Maria Machado “In the Dream House” with nods to Jeanette Winterson “Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal.”