Lidija Dimkovska trans. Christina E. Kramer

 from When I left Karl Liebknecht

(Ili-Ili, Skopje, North Macedonia, 2019, shortlisted for the Writers Association of North Macedonia Prize for best prose book of the year, 2020).

In the Karl Liebknecht House in Leipzig, Germany, thirty people of various nationalities are seated around an improvised table on the stage in the Events Hall, interpreters behind them, some with texts in front of them, some without. While it looks as though they’re at an ordinary meeting, they are, in fact, at an exceptional one, one that could be called a performance. They are taking part in a pilot project organized by the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht of Leipzig, which, on 19 January 2018, in recognition of the 99th anniversary of the death of Karl Liebknecht—the great German leftist and colleague of Rosa Luxemburg—had invited them, all migrants who, prior to their emigration, had lived at an address either bearing his name or having some other connection with him. Some had changed addresses temporarily, others had moved away permanently, some wanted to leave, some never completely left, and still others were connected in some particular way with places named “Karl Liebknecht.” The call was announced publicly, and it generated a great deal of interest, but in the end, thirty people were selected. The hall is completely packed—residents of Leipzig, and most others connected in some way with Karl Liebknecht, the majority of whom were also members of the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht—all showing great interest in the event.

After a short speech by a representative of the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht, people were given the opportunity either to speak extemporaneously or to read from a prepared text, each in his or her own way, in whatever manner they wished and considered appropriate, about how their Karl Liebknecht address had left its mark on them, both while they were living there and afterward they left.

Here are some of their stories:

Yurii, 44, Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine to Donetsk, self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic

Ostap, 45, Donetsk, self-proclaimed People’s Republic to Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine

Yurii: We’ve come as a pair, though we’re not brothers, we’re not even related. We are closer than that because our lives somehow brought us together. Here, let Ostap explain it to you.

Ostap: In 2015, a year after Donetsk was declared a republic under pressure from Russia, I suddenly lost my work because I am Ukrainian with a Ukrainian wife, and not a single Russian blood-relation in the family. I had worked for years at a chemical factory but the day after an explosion purportedly set intentionally by Ukrainian forces, all of the Ukrainians and Ukrainian-sympathizers were let go. That left me unemployed with a wife, who is a kindergarten teacher, a daughter, whose final exams were cancelled due to the unrest, and a mother, who can’t walk and is in a wheelchair. We survived for two months with the money we had, but the war raged around us, a war I didn’t know whether I, too, should join, and it presented me with a difficult dilemma: I began to wish we would all die, best of all if we died together, in one of the Russian or Ukrainian attacks which were occurring more frequently in the city, to put an end to our insecurity and poverty, and, at least for us, put an end to the war. But just then Yurii’s letter arrived.

 Yurii: To tell you the truth, I hadn’t thought about Ostap for nearly thirty years. That might surprise you, but it’s true. When I was in grade four our teacher asked whether any of us lived on “Karl Liebknecht Street” and whether we wanted to get a letter from an unknown comrade who also lived on “Karl Liebknecht Street,” but in far-away Donetsk. I raised my hand and so did Marina, who lived in the same building as me but in the second entryway. When the teacher said the letter was from a boy named Ostap, Marina immediately put down her hand and acted as though she’d never raised it, so the teacher gave me the letter from this unknown comrade. I opened it. In the letter Ostap introduced himself as a grade four student, his mother worked in a drugstore, and his father was an auto mechanic, he had a sister and they lived with their grandmother and grandfather in a building on “Karl Liebknecht” street in the city of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine. He wrote that he wanted to correspond with a student who also lived on a street called “Karl Liebknecht” whom they had just learned about in their social studies classes. Funny, right?! He wrote that he was a very good student, that he was taking karate, and in his free time he listened to music, and he really liked fishing.

Ostap: It wasn’t really my idea but my teacher’s. When we were learning about Karl Marx, Friederich Engels, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Klara Zetkin and the other famous socialists, along with the Soviet ones, of course, he asked us whether we knew how many streets in the Soviet Union were named for them. None of us knew. He said that there were more than a hundred. I raised my hand and said that I lived on “Karl Liebknecht”; in our class there were also two students who lived on “Karla Zetkin”, another girl lived on “Rosa Luxemburg”, and a few on “Karl Marx”. Then the teacher came up with the idea for us to find pen-pals who lived on streets with the same name as ours. I don’t know how, but he found addresses of schools that were near streets carrying those names and that’s how it all started. He gave me the address of Yurii’s school.

Yurii: The letter really surprised me; I thought of tossing it out, but my mother spent the whole afternoon convincing me to answer Ostap, and she ended up dictating a letter for me, because I had already torn up four sheets of white paper that she had brought home from work. I simply wasn’t used to writing letters. She kept telling my father: “Look how sweet this is, how did that child come up with the idea of looking for a pen-pal on “Karl Liebknecht”? I didn’t have a brother or sister so my parents thought this was an excellent opportunity for me to make friends with someone, at least through writing, and that I should follow his example and find pen-pals not only in Ukraine, but in other places, too. That way I’d be able to have friends in my life from all parts of the Soviet Union. But I didn’t want to, so I just wrote back and forth with Ostap.

Ostap: I was so happy to get Yurii’s reply and that’s how our correspondence started, and it lasted all the way through our second year of high school, when I fell so madly in love with a girl that I was no longer interested in karate, or fishing, just her, Maya, who is now my wife. After that I only managed to send Yurii a final New Year’s card in response to the longest letter he had ever written in which he wrote about how interested he was in cars, how he was collecting pictures of all kinds of cars; he also sent me a New Year’s card, but I never wrote to him again. Yurii tried two more times, with a birthday card and a greeting card for my mother on March 8th for International Women’s Day, and then he also stopped writing.

Yurii: I remember how strange it was for me when Ostap stopped writing. I felt betrayed. I mean, in my whole life I had never written a letter as long as the last one I sent to Ostap, and all he sent back was a New Year’s card! I tried once more, but all he sent back was a greeting card for my mother for International Women’s Day, and it didn’t arrive until April. He could just have told me he had a girlfriend. I still didn’t have one, all that interested me at that time was cars, nothing else; I searched around for encyclopedias about western car models, I collected small pictures of cars. After a while, to tell you the truth, I forgot about Ostap, and that whole business of exchanging letters struck me again as childish and naïve, even funny.

Ostap: I also forgot about our letter exchange, even though my conscience gnawed at me from time to time that I hadn’t responded to his last card, but the more time passed, the more unpleasant it was for me to send anything. My mother literally forced me to send a March 8th card to Yurii’s mother, but I didn’t even do that until the beginning of April. It was the last contact I had with Yurii, and that was to his mother.

Yurii: My mother did indeed get the greeting card, she laughed because it was already April, and she placed it behind the glass of the cupboard in the bedroom, saying, well, at least Ostap remembered to get in touch. Maybe I’m heartless, but after that I didn’t write to him at all. She didn’t believe me that Ostap was the one who stopped writing, not me. Out of spite I gathered up all his letters and when we were collecting old paper for school, I stuffed them between the left-over newspapers and magazines. All that was left was my mother’s Women’s Day card tucked behind the glass of the bedroom cupboard. In fact, it was what reminded me of Ostap many years later, when everything began in Donetsk. And that’s how today’s story begins.

Ostap: That’s right. When the crisis began in Ukraine, we Ukrainians were treated with unbelievable violence and mistreatment. As I said, I lost my job only because I’m Ukrainian. My daughter had no way of passing her graduation exams, the university closed. All around us there was shooting, grenades flying, people we knew were dying, my first cousin was killed in the crossfire. I thought we would either flee or die, there was no third option. But where could we go? We were Ukrainians, but we had no relatives elsewhere in Ukraine, all my family and my wife’s family were from Donetsk. We could only find shelter outside of Donetsk, in other parts of Ukraine, but we had nowhere to go and no one to go to; Ukraine was collapsing.

Yurii: I have to confess that even though I’m Russian, my wife, who unfortunately died of cancer, was a Ukrainian. I never felt threatened in Ukraine. I have always felt like a Ukrainian, although deep inside, of course, I was Russian, or, as I joked with my wife: my soul was Russian and my body Ukrainian. The poor thing, before she died, she tried to make a joke at her own expense, saying: “Maybe if my soul had also been Russian, I would have gotten better.” Who knows, but cancer has no soul. She died with her body in such pain that none of us were thinking any longer about her soul. But before that, when she thought she was healthy, when, in fact she was already sick, all this shit began in Ukraine, if you’ll pardon the expression. Majdan, Crimea, Donetsk… My wife kept looking through all the newspapers and said: “If you weren’t Russian, we ‘d have gone to Majdan in Kiev, too.” I didn’t even want to think about the fact that I was Russian. The Russians became heartless in Ukraine. And Donetsk - when I saw on television what was happening there, at first I felt sick and terrible for all those people who were literally left homeless and without their close family in these mindless attacks and crossfires. And then, it dawned on me: “Wait, what about Ostap!?” Suddenly I remembered Ostap whom I hadn’t thought about for nearly thirty years. What was going on with Ostap? And then I could only think about him, I asked myself whether he was still living in Donetsk, what was happening to him, whether he was still alive.

Ostap: It never even crossed my mind to think of Yurii, all Russians had suddenly become the same for me. Even unintentionally, I now hated all my Russian friends, and everything that was Russian, and especially all those who were Ukrainian but pro-Russian, to me they were the worst. After all, it was because of them that Donetsk had declared itself a republic!

Yurii: I can understand that. At home I looked around everywhere and finally, in a box with photographs that my parents had left me, I found the greeting card that Ostap had sent my mother for March 8th, 1988. I knew that on the left side of the card, in the upper corner, I would find Ostap’s address, because on each letter or card he sent he would always glue on a small square which had his address neatly written in script on it.

Ostap: I have absolutely no idea why I did it; after we had exchanged letters for so many years we knew each other’s addresses by heart, but I remember how I liked writing in beautiful script, maybe that’s why I began to work at a printing press later on, and it was only when it closed that I transferred to the chemical factory.

Yurii: I wrote a letter to Ostap, like in the good old days. I told him briefly what I was doing and what had happened in the intervening years, then in capital letters I asked: HOW ARE YOU GETTING ALONG?

Ostap: The letter arrived a whole month after it had been sent, I could tell by the postmark. I answered, telling him how things were. I told him it was so bad that I didn’t know whether it was better to kill my family and myself or for us to die of hunger. At the end, I asked how things were for him, because it surely wasn’t easy to be a Russian in Ukraine.

Yurii: It took a bit of time for me to explain to my wife that there was a childhood friend of mine in Donetsk, a guy named Ostap, but we had never seen one another, and this Ostap was now in a terrible situation. That night, as I lay awake and thought about everything, I had a crazy idea. I got out of bed and went into the kitchen and paced from one end of the room to the other waiting for morning. My wife finally got up; it was still just six o’clock. I had thought she’d never get up, that’s how long the night seemed. I waited for her to finish her coffee and then I said to her: “Olga, should we move to Donetsk? … And give our house to Ostap and his family? “What?” Olga cut me right off. She was visibly shocked by my suggestion. Our daughters were even more so. That day neither of us went to work; we were still arguing when our daughters got home from school. Olga swore that the three of them would leave me and go to Kiev. In a moment of insanity, I said to her: “Ok, then at least I could give the apartment to Ostap!” This went on for three days. Finally, Olga said: “OK. Call him.” I often thought later on how, if she was already sick then, this stress likely made her situation worse. I felt both guilty and relieved that she had agreed for us to help Ostap and his family.

Ostap: Yurii called me on the phone; it was a good thing I had sent him my number as soon as he wrote me a letter. He tried five times to get a connection; the lines were either cut off or weren’t working, but we finally managed somehow to speak to one another. We were both emotional. How do you begin a conversation with a person you’re acquainted with, but only through letters and only from when we were children? But Yurii began right away: “Ostap, would you come live here? We could exchange homes.” “Are you crazy?” I asked, “What will you do here? There are no conditions here to make a life…”

Yurii: “Maybe there aren’t now, but there will be in the future,” I told him. “You know that Putin isn’t going to just up and leave Donetsk now that it’s already his one way or another. I’m a Russian, after all. I’ll get by.” And that’s how it all came about. I became one of the engineers who made parts for the bridge between Crimea and Russia.

Ostap: At home, my family couldn’t believe it. Were we really going to leave Donetsk and move to western Ukraine? My mother cried and wrung her hands. My daughter was very happy. Maia and I were frightened, and sad, and happy. Yurii said it was only temporary, just until the situation quieted down. Just until Donetsk belonged to Ukraine again. Which was absolutely the biggest white lie I’ve heard in my life.

Yurii: I went to my boss at work right away and explained the situation. I explained how I wanted Ostap to take over my place at work. I explained how he had worked previously both at a printing press and in a chemical factory. At first, he just laughed; he couldn’t believe what I was suggesting. He said this was like in some movie, I mean, were we really going to exchange lives? You’re a mechanical engineer, how can he, with just a high school education, take your place? Then he added quietly, that since Ostap was a Ukrainian from Donetsk, he was morally obliged to help him. “I’ll give him some type of work that’s easier than yours,” he said. As for Olga, she couldn’t convince her boss at the store to hire Ostap’s wife in her place.

Ostap: We left in a slapdash way with just the most basic things. We traveled three days to Dnepropetrovsk. It wasn’t hard to find “Karl Liebknecht” street when we arrived in the Babushkinski Region, which, not even a month later was renamed “Shevchenko”, and “Karl Liebknecht Street” was renamed “Mihaj Grushevski”, almost out of spite. Yurii was waiting for us there with his family ready to set off for our Donetsk. It was the first time we had met. We were two grown men with families, he with twin daughters in their fourth year of high school, I with a daughter about to take her graduating exams from university. We exchanged keys. Olga tried to explain everything about the house to us, but there was no need. We had similar places, post-Soviet, middle class, inherited from our parents. Our daughters were upset. That is, theirs were angry, while mine was somehow calm, relieved. It was hardest for Yurii’s daughters, they had to begin from zero at those ages when beginning from zero is the most difficult, and in Donetsk at that time it was nearly impossible.

Yurii: Right after Ostap arrived with his family, we set off for Donetsk. We traveled for three days, then, once in Donetsk we spent a long time searching for Ostap’s address; the buildings were in terrible shape, half-destroyed, there were no sidewalks and no street names on the buildings. My wife kept sighing, her face pale, our daughters were cursing us. We finally found the building, which had only half the name: “Liebknecht.” The “Karl” had been blackened by soot, most likely from an explosion near the building. We settled into Ostap’s place. Anastasija and Aleksandra dragged the couch from the living room into the room that Ana had occupied. We were all a bit stunned. The next day I went to the chemical factory that was now making artillery and guns, to apply for the position that Ostap had held, the job he had lost because he was Ukrainian. The Boss, a Russian, greeted me with unconcealed joy. “My brother Russian, he said, everyone is leaving Donetsk, and you, you have come all the way from Dnepropetrovsk to help in the creation of our republic. A mechanical engineer! God himself has sent you!” I didn’t mention Ostap, it was better that way. He assigned me to the machine gun assembly. Later, we worked there on parts for the bridge between Crimea and Russia.

Ostap: We settled quite well into Yurii’s place in Dnepropetrovsk. We took over their space, the beds, the rooms. My mother liked the sofa in the living room. Our daughter was overjoyed with the room that had been Yurii’s daughters’. My wife went herself to the store where Yurii’s wife had worked and the woman in charge took pity on her and told her to come on the first; she would try her out stocking items on the shelves. My daughter had to take her fourth-year exams again, but at least she could take them, which she hadn’t been able to do in Donetsk. I went to the firm where Yurii had worked. I told the boss that I was Ostap, the guy Yurii had left everything for and moved to Donetsk. I told him that I only had a high school diploma, but I had worked in both a printing press and in a chemical factory and that I could do any sort of work. He told me that Yurii’s position was open, but since I was not a mechanical engineer like he was, I would first have to pass a six-month training before I could take the job, but in the meantime, he would change the job from one requiring high qualifications to one requiring lower qualifications. And that’s how it happened.

Yurii: We continued in this way living each other’s lives. It would be better if I didn’t tell you how things were in Donetsk. And about Olga’s death, and the fact that in her final stages of cancer there was simply nowhere I could take her in Donetsk; all I could do was buy morphine from the drug resellers. She was somehow ‘saved’ from everything. No, I don’t blame Ostap for anything; this was how it had to be. I would do the same thing all over again. At least my daughters were able to move to Moscow this year to study medicine, the people in power in Donetsk made that possible for me since the bridge to Crimea had been completed and I had made the most important parts for it. That’s it - even though we had to begin our lives from zero, in fact, everything was, was and still is, right in the middle.

Nathaniel, 50, Brest, Belarus – New York, USA

I am a descendent of the Jews who survived in Brest, the city which had at the time belonged to Poland. Jews from the Brest Ghetto, which the Nazis created in 1941. Less than a year after it was formed, twenty thousand Jews had already been killed. The twenty or so who survived were all that was left of the Jewish population in Brest. Among them was my grandfather. It took him some years to grapple with all the evil he had lived through and seen with his own eyes. And with the pains in his body and soul. My grandmother helped him, she was a nurse in the Brest hospital where the other surviving Jews were also treated.

They left behind a son, my father, who is also no longer among the living. Nor is my mother. They died in a traffic accident on the way to the university in Minsk where I was defending my master’s thesis about news correspondents. You’ll say, and you’d be right, that it’s absurd to get a master’s degree in Belarus on something related to journalism, but I needed the degree for formal reasons, so that I could get a raise as a journalist, as a correspondent for Radio Free Europe. Unfortunately, maybe due to the absurdity, God punished me as well, letting my parents perish in a traffic accident on the way to my master’s defense. They were already dead while I was answering the committee’s questions, glancing the whole time at the amphitheatre door. I thought it was strange that they were late since I knew they planned to set out early in the morning. The professors were already congratulating me when the secretary came in and told me there had just been an announcement on the radio about a terrible car accident in which a man and woman with the same last name as mine had been killed. That was the worst day of my life.

After their death I returned to Brest and several months later, in a state of total depression, I received word that I had been selected for a Fulbright scholarship to the United States. I put out an ad to rent out the house in which I had been left alone, but the ad went unanswered for months. But then, a bit later, I rented it to a family from Palestine who had, also by chance, if chance exists at all, ended up in Belarus, before I left for the United States on my Fulbright. The house was surrounded by hotels and small boutique hotels lining both sides of our street, “Karl Liebknecht”. Even I don’t know how many hotels have popped up on our street where earlier there had just been family homes. Those houses had, in fact, become hotels; some expanded into the back part of the yards around them, others were renovated to became beautiful, like little boxes. There aren’t that many tourists in Brest, or in Belarus in general, but the political system is very exotic for foreigners, and they prefer to photograph it in Minsk. Still, it is lovely seeing Karl Liebknecht Street decorated with its new and renovated façades. Out house has a fairly new façade as well. Unfortunately, that’s the least important thing when a house is left without its inhabitants, a house without its household. Well, at least the Palestinian family with its own share of misfortunes has finally found a home right in my Brest, right in our house. Fate, providence, who knows what. Sometimes it’s not clear who wants things to turn out like this, God, Allah, or someone else.

I met them at the house in Brest and stayed with them for three more days. Old parents, a daughter in the last stages of pregnancy married to a Jewish man. Her son, a child she had with her first husband who died in front of their house in Gaza, did not want to come, and he stayed in Gaza, one of the youngest members of Hamas, but they didn’t want to talk about that. How did Barak and Nadia get married? It seems that love knows no borders even between Palestinians and Jews in Israel. Nadia loved the poems of Yehuda Amichai, and Barak loved those of Mahmood Darwish. They were invited to a literary gathering in Tel Aviv by one of those nongovernmental organizations that brings together Israelis and Palestinians along with other lovers of Israeli and Palestinian poetry. That’s how they met. That’s what brought them together in every sense of the word. Just let someone say that poetry can’t change the world. They couldn’t however remain in Israel, in Palestine; Nadia didn’t want to move from Gaza, mostly on account of her son, but Barak didn’t want to move to Gaza, also on account of her son. Nadia decided to leave. They thought they would settle in Tel Aviv, but they quickly realised that for a couple like them it would be best to settle abroad somewhere. They asked around to find a country where they could live together, where neither of them would be threatened, and they moved to Germany, along with Nadia’s parents. Just at that time an important meeting was taking place in Berlin concerning the situation in Gaza. As a correspondent for Radio Free Europe, I met them as they marched around the building where the meeting was being held. When I left, they were still standing out there, as if waiting for news and a decision from the Gaza summit that would resolve their personal problems. I approached them and asked whether I could be of help. I was surprised to learn that Barak was a member of the family. Amid the whole extremely pessimistic situation of Palestine and Israel this seemed so optimistic to me.

As a descendent of Jews, my conscience and my concern towards the Palestinians had over the years led me into some very unpleasant and dangerous situations. I couldn’t go against my conscience and I always explained the situation in Israel and in Palestine to my opponents like this: “What the Nazis did to us during the Holocaust, we, that is the Jews in Israel, are now doing to the Palestinians.” I’m amazed that I’m still alive. Every meeting I have with Palestinians or liberal Israelis is valuable and important to me. The family told me that that they had just recently arrived in Berlin, at the moment they were living with some relatives, but that they didn’t know how they would get by in Germany, everything seemed so expensive, rent and food, and none of them could receive international protection. Then an idea popped into my head– I was, after all, moving to the US because I had a Fulbright after many years of applying. Maybe they could live there, in Belarus, for at least a year or so, until they found a better country to live in? I told them my crazy idea, after all who would want to live in a country like Belarus, but amazingly, they accepted right away. Palestine is still a more impossible mission than democracy in Belarus, and you don’t want to be in the skin of the person who has to protect his closest kin from his own closest kin, as was the case in the marriage between Nadia and Barak. I am sure they accepted my proposal solely on account of Barak, so that he could feel like a normal Jew in the world. And not like an Israeli married to a Palestinian in an unrecognized country.

I returned to Brest the next day; they arrived three days later. I met them, spent three days with them, left them the keys to the house, and, at their insistence, I also left the number of my bank account, and we parted as friends. When they learned I was a descendent of one of the Jews who had survived the Second World War in Brest, Barak, Nadia, and her parents patted me warmly on the shoulder, but Nadia’s mother said: “Now you need to find a wife, so your line doesn’t end.” “I’m now supposed to go out and find myself a wife?” I smiled, “The years for that have passed me by.” I didn’t tell them, however, that although I had had many girlfriends in my life, I had dreamt my whole life about a girl from my childhood who had given me a chain with a crescent-moon on it. Nor that I’ve always been attracted to American women, at least, that is, the ones in the movies; who knows what could happen in New York. We parted as true friends. The rent was totally symbolic, they paid my account in the US when they could and as much as they could. They had begun to earn a little money, Nadia would give birth soon, but most of their money was money they received from Barak’s parents in Jerusalem, who were happy that their son had saved himself from military service in Israel.

Later, in the US, some of my compatriots asked me how I could rent my house to enemies of my people in Israel. To people who didn’t recognize the state of Israel, the cradle of Jews in the entire world. Didn’t I see what Hamas was doing to the Jews? I always attempted to explain slowly and calmly that what the Jews in Israel were doing today to the Palestinians was not so greatly different from what the Nazis had done to the Jews in the Second World War. I lost many friends from my groups on social media because of this point of view. Some openly called me a traitor, though sometimes, rarely, someone supported me. In any case, I immediately felt myself at home in New York. Maybe I love that shining city so much. Apparently, there is still something very Jewish about me, if I can joke a little: We Jews love America. No, I do not love their politics, today it’s a bit like in Belarus, just on a higher level, but I do love the day-to-day life. I have found several people at Columbia University who think the same as I do about the relationship of Jews to Palestinians. This view was published in the New York Times – I quote “As Jews who survived or are descendants of those who survived and are victims of Nazi genocide, we unequivocally condemn the massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza and the continued occupation and colonisation of historic Palestine.” And that has become my life’s motto. I bought a postcard of New York, and I transcribed the text onto it and sent it to my tenants in Brest. Two weeks later there, I got called into the police station in Astoria where I live: my postcard had not been sent off to Belarus because it contained subversive content. I went, explained who I was, the police found my dossier – yes, I already had a dossier, the postcard had already been scanned and printed, they held on to the original, but they gave me a photocopy that had been marked by the police. I took it, bought an envelope at the first kiosk I came to, stuffed the copy inside, and sent it, now only a photocopy, to my tenants from Palestine. It arrived! They sent me back a postcard of my native city, Brest, with a big heart drawn on it with Barak’s name inside surrounded by the names of the other members of the family. I couldn’t help laughing: The Jewish man inside the heart surrounded by Palestinians, protecting him from evil. That is, in fact love, isn’t it?

It would be interesting to hear more stories from former and current residents of places named for Karl Liebknecht throughout the world. This storytelling meeting was a first, and represents a trial run for the next one, which will be held the nineteenth of January 2019, on the occasion of the centennial of Karl Liebknecht’s death. It has been planned that following the  demonstration on the street bearing his name here in Leipzig for the rights not only of migrant workers in Europe, but for all people whose rights are endangered—humanity has not stopped fighting for these rights for centuries—the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht will invite another thirty people connected with the address Karl Liebknecht throughout the world, who, at this second meeting, will tell how, or whether, the address Karl Liebknecht marked them, their life that is, either when they lived on it or afterward. History should repeat only the good things. It should be a good teacher in that at least.

Translated from the Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer