Victor Topaller: On the last Monday of May - drink without clinking glasses

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Strictly speaking, the last Monday of May is not a holiday. America is down because it remembers the soldiers who died in the Revolutionary War; those killed in the battles of the North and South; pays tribute to the soldiers of World War II.

The Americans on this day commemorate not only the fighters, but also all their loved ones, go to cemeteries, put flowers on gravestones ... Our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight either in the troops of General Lee, nor in the troops of General Grant, did not wade through the Vietnamese jungle and if they were embracing with the allies on the Elbe, then in their overcoats and tunics of the Soviet army.

In general, we were cut off from many important things: the boat sailed from one shore, has not yet approached another - the flow is too wide to be overcome in one human life ...
But many of us have already had graves here, to which we can and should go on this day.

And how many graves we left in Moscow and Riga, St. Petersburg and Odessa ... And we do not always have the opportunity to tint the fence at least once a year, cover the tarnished letters with gilding, put flowers, just stand silently, feeling fragments of memories about relatives and people close to us.

And if it turns out that we are deprived of this simple, elementary thing, so necessary for the soul of every person, then perhaps we should take Memorial Day not only as an extra day off, but also as a day when we simply must REMEMBER. And we must also make sure that children and grandchildren, who are already completely Americans or Israelis, know about distant graves, about their roots. It’s not about cemeteries, not about obelisks and tombstones; any cemetery is not so much a home for the departed, but a place of memories for the living.

It seems to me that for us, who are in a boat between the shores, Memory is important to anyone. The memory of loved ones who remained on the left bank, the memory of the American soldiers who fought in Korea and Iraq, the memory of the Israeli soldiers who sacrificed their lives for the Jewish state, our grandfathers. Paradoxically, they all have a direct bearing on us, on our life today.

So maybe the Memorial Day in America, Memorial Day for the Fallen in Israel - these are days of compensation for our Memory?

Compensation for the fact that we can not today put flowers on the graves of their loved ones. This is not just one special day given to our souls, but several. And, probably, in each of these days we have to drink a glass of vodka, without clinking glasses.

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