Brotherly *and Sisterly* Love

Brotherly and Sisterly Love

Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love.

Or that's what it's called. Having just returned from a wonderful Slavic conference weekend, I can at least push the sisterhood.

I cannot imagine how many conferences I have attended, and even in Philadelphia, and even at that same Center City Marriott. At one under-attended panel Friday, I was recalling a section I organized on Chernyshevsky (ten years ago? twenty?) for which a colleague from Moscow flew in specially. There were five of us on the panel and one in the audience. With forty simultaneous panels in any one time slot, it's inevitable that not every panel garners a crowd.

But when I looked across a different room this weekend and caught the eye of a beloved colleague, Anne, who had been on that ill-fated Chernyshevsky panel, it came home to me: Philadelphia is the city of sisterly love.

Anne is much more of a film scholar than a Chernyshevsky scholar (though her book that uses Nikolai Gavrilovich as a stepping off point is fabulous), and we were in a panel to screen a short documentary by Ruslan Fedotow about young Ukrainian artists in Budapest, fleeing the war and making protest art about the violation of brotherhood that is this horrific Russian war on its neighbor. Great film, fascinating discussion, tragic situation. The sense of humanity conveyed in the film was striking. For example, the young artist was working with children evacuated mostly from Kharkiv, Russian speakers, and he exhibited immense patience in letting them talk about what bothered them, what they'd experienced. The pace created a feeling of shared intimacy, sadness and even hope. Away won the Best Short Documentary Award at the 35th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2022. A film I will watch again.

That connection across the room, though, one smile and nod from each of us, is part of why I love ASEEES. (The Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. It's a mouthful.) And also AWSS: The Association for Women in Slavic Studies. That's another place the sisterhood feels real. For that organization I have chaired the best article committee in women's and gender studies for the past two years and was able to award those prizes (such fun!). I also was excited to see that a book I had taught the week before was awarded honorable mention as well. Can I pick them or what?

Michele Rivkin-Fish announcing book awards

Małgorzata Fidelis, author of
Imagining the World
from Behind the Iron Curtain

At the conference I saw many colleagues, former students, friends, many of them of course women. And that itself brings hope. It's a difficult time for the part of the world we study, but the energy around the conference theme of decolonization was palpable. Many panels on Ukrainian themes, even more books on display. An awareness of gender and gender issues that has become a hallmark of the more sensitive Slavic studies of the 21st century.

It's possible that the combination of that sensitivity, our sadness and anger about war, and our post-pandemic gratitude at being together was what made the conference so successful. Kudos to the organizers, kudos to the sisterhood.

Of course, I'm writing this and musing about it all while home for a few days as a cautionary step--at least one sister of mine contracted Covid this weekend. The pandemic may have eased, but the illness has not gone away.

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