Small Town Life in Derbent: Emma Agadzhanova

  It is ten p.m. on a Wednesday night. My grandmother, Emma Agadzhanova, who is 81 years old is waiting to be interviewed at my house. Emma is from Derbent, Dagistan, and she remembers her childhood very well. She tells me she will be very happy to answer all of my questions. Now, she is old and lives by herself in the same apartment building as myself. Derbent was her hometown for twenty years, and she was born there and she still has family members that live there. She frequently tells me stories about her hometown, so I am very much excited about what she has to say about her childhood. I know this will be very interesting and detailed. As we get ready to start the interview, I prepare two glasses of water, one for me and one for her. Then we sit down, and I begin to ask her my questions.

  I was born in Derbent and I lived there for twenty years. Even though it was not a pretty town to live in, there was a still the Caspian Sea near it where I went to have fun at every summer. It was a small town, to tell you the truth, and because of this our family knew everyone. For example, I remember how my father would walk down the street and all he would say was, “Hi, hi how are you?” This is how well we knew everyone in our town.

  I have warm memories of how when we were kids we had a big place in our building where all the kids played with each other. We played games such as hide and go seek, tag, and we played with the ball. However, the only bad thing was that the old grandmas always got mad at us for playing too much. They would complain about how we yelled, and they especially hated it when we played with the ball. I also remember how when we were ten or so years old, we would get an adult and we would go the sea to swim. My cousin also picked me up, and he would take me to the mountains with his friends. It was a great deal of fun.

  As children, we went to school and everyone treated school differently, depending upon the person. Like if you take me, I was a serious student. If I didn’t do my homework or if I didn’t study I would go on the street crying until I got to school. My mom would watch me and say, “go, go, if you studied or not, just go.” When I would arrive to class, I would be afraid that the teacher would call me up to see what I knew, and I wouldn’t be able to answer the and she will give me a grade of “2.” Some times I would even cry to the teacher and tell her that I didn’t study the homework, and she would do one of two things: she would give me a “2,” or she would tell me, “it’s ok you’ll learn it next time.”

  Derbent had a lot of different religions. We had Armenians, Russians, Jews, Muslims, and also Dagistanians. Each one had their own church, but communists did not allow religion. I remember how the in the Russian church’s field, they used to sell sunflower seeds. I would always go to buy seeds from their, and when my dad, who is a communist, found out about this he would always get mad at me for going there because it was a church, but despite this, I went to the Armenian church maybe once or twice, it was a regular church, it had crosses, candles, priests read prayers and people prayed. Communists did not go to church though, they were afraid to lose their jobs. Just how religious were the believers you ask? I’ll tell you how religious they were. We had an old woman in our building that was very religious. She never ate anything that we made. Sometimes, she would even spend the whole day hungry because she could not afford food, but she never ate from us. She only ate what they were allowed to eat. So they had to cook everything by themselves.

  Mostly, the people in Derbent were kind, but there were some downsides. For example, we had bad people that committed crimes such as robbery and hooliganism. For these people, we had a big jail in our town which was located on the road to the sea. Also, we had alcoholics in our town, they would drink a lot then go and start fights with ach other, or they would come home very drunk. However, the good thing is that in Derbent we had no such thing as drug addicts. During those days, I didn’t even know what a drug was.

  Ehh, these were the good days of Derbent. All of this suddenly changed when World War II started. This was a horrible time for us. No one expected the war to start so unexpectedly. It lasted five years. We had all our news about the war from a newspaper called “Dagistanskaya Pravda.” This was a newspaper that came six times a week and everyone read it to get their information. We also listened to the radio. Every man was sent to the front to fight. They had no choice because the government drafted everyone. I lived in front of the recruiting center and every Sunday I would see a lot of people get together and they recruited people in the military. Men as young as sixteen years old were sent to fight. During the war, many losses occurred. Sometimes I would go outside and se a mother crying because she just found out that her son had died in action. When the war ended, I got very happy. Once I found out the news about the war’s end, I ran out of my house and yelled to everyone, “The was ended! The war ended!!” I ran to my cousin’s house and I yelled to her, “Haikanush, the war ended!” Then I went near my building and I saw everyone hugging and kissing each other in happiness.

  If everyone was still alive, and if I could go back in time to Derbent, I would probably do so. I liked my life a lot in Derbent. My neighbors were very friendly, everyone knew each other, and there was no fighting between religious groups. Everyone loved each other. I would relive this experience if I could.

Interviewed by Suren Agadzhanov