Excerpt

Ingrid was going to tell a good story.” She backed hurriedly away from Paul. “And I am a sensitive person…. You just don’t know me.” Paul snorted but Jennifer caught the hurt in Lona’s eyes and realized that she was being sincere.
Ignoring Lona, Ted continued on the theme that was causing so much laughter. “What would Tolstoy be doing if he lived in this century? Emancipating the south with Martin Luther King? Writing King’s speeches?”
“No, stupid, he was white,” Hank chimed in. “But he might be an evangelical speaker like Billy Graham…”
Finally, the bus driver signalled that it was time for their departure, and as they got up to leave, Jennifer considered her time well spent. She had just experienced a true sense of what it means to educate and be educated by one’s own pupils and she thought about the fine words they had used. It spoke of a nice sense of academic values, but was it really true?
If she were honest with herself, what had really attracted her to Russian in the first place were the parties—and not the Communist party either. The Russian immigrant families in her old neighbourhood in Toronto had really known how to enjoy a good time. And the Ukrainians, too, with their three-day wedding feasts and January Christmas celebrations. Then there were the Poles and the Croatians, also in her neighbourhood. You could go down to the Croatian community centre any evening or to the Russian café and listen to the music, folk tunes, parodies of English songs. You could enjoy the vodka toasts, the dancing until three in the morning, the spirit of camaraderie. Even the second generation children of immigrants had danced together as if the mother country mattered to each of them, deeply and personally. In the end it was the people, not the language, that had pulled her to this country.
★
The days continued in vigorous sightseeing.
“I never thought we’d see so many churches in the godless Soviet Union,” said Maria, as they completed a tour of Novodevichy Monastery and climbed onto the bus for the drive to the hotel.
“Well, at least the churches have been wonderfully preserved—or the ones in the Kremlin anyway,” said Ted. “That Church of the Assumption

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