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Redjeb Jordania
Escape from the South Fork and Other Stories
Escape from the South Fork and Other Stories
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How far do you have to go to “escape” from the South Fork? How about a bear hunt in the Caucasus?“Even though I do not hunt, and certainly did not expect to start at this late stage of my life,” East Hampton author Redjeb Jordania writes in his memoir, “Escape from the South Fork and Other Stories,” he found himself “perched on a skinny horse, on a skinny path” in the mountainous province of Daghestan. The year was 1991 and the author was then 70.
Daghestan is a semi-autonomous region of the former Soviet Union, between Chechnya and the Caspian Sea, on the border of Georgia. Air distance between New York and Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, is 5,572 miles. Nearly 6,000 miles is far enough for an escape, but for Mr. Jordania the trip was actually a return to the land of his ancestors—a land he has never lived in due to its turbulent political history.
Mr. Jordania is the son of the first president of pre-soviet Georgia, Noe Jordania, who had to flee the Red Army’s takeover in 1921, after only three years in office. Redjeb Jordania was born and educated in Paris, so that in the short story “A Hunting Trip to Daghestan,” he finds himself “a foreigner … barely able to speak the Georgian language” in the once-again independent republic.
“Escape from the South Fork” contains both memoir and fiction, all told in the candid voice of a man who has lived through the 20th century’s major conflagrations, and seen much sadness, without losing his sense of humor. The book is divided into two sections, Part I, subtitled “From far away in time and space,” and Part II, “closer to home.”
The autobiographical stories include the moving “Closing the Circle,” in which the author returns to the village where his father’s and grandfather’s house once stood. It is now “a grassy lot where a pair of long-haired black piglets were scurrying, hunting for chestnuts.”
“The Music Lesson” is an account of Mr. Jordania’s early, and lasting, involvement with music, beginning with piano lessons from an eccentric, hard-drinking teacher and going on to a musical evening during World War II in Paris, when an Allied bombardment “offered an astonishing spectacle of son et lumiére.” “Is where they got the idea?” he wonders.
In another wartime story, “A Surprise Party,” a group of Resistance fighters hide two British airmen who have managed to parachute into German-occupied France. The students in charge of helping them stay alive disguise the pilots as “Georgians”—because “nobody knows what a Georgian is supposed to look like.” It is a close call when the dreaded “milice” arrive to check everyone’s papers.
The title story opens part two of “Escape from the South Fork.” This time the escape is not into the past, but into a post-apocalyptic future. A nuclear disaster has struck, the “Napeague Causeway” has been flooded by the ocean, and Montauk is now an island. Survivors hiding in a cave have almost exhausted their supplies—“they lasted 22 days.” The narrator understands that to venture outside is death—yet it is also an escape into freedom and peace. Fortunately for the anxious reader, this story is clearly fiction.
More upbeat stories from “closer to home” recount adventures on the waters off Long Island—an encounter between the author’s small trimaran and the America Cup race—and a humorous “Letter from New York.” In “Letter” Mr. Jordania explains his conviction that “there is no such country as the USA”—it is a joint invention of Madison Avenue and Hollywood.
These stories by this multitalented, well-traveled author offer unique personal insights into recent political and social history on both sides of the Atlantic Mr. Jordania’s tales are lively and thoughtful at the same time, and introduce the reader to a charming writer and memoirist.
Daghestan is a semi-autonomous region of the former Soviet Union, between Chechnya and the Caspian Sea, on the border of Georgia. Air distance between New York and Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, is 5,572 miles. Nearly 6,000 miles is far enough for an escape, but for Mr. Jordania the trip was actually a return to the land of his ancestors—a land he has never lived in due to its turbulent political history.
Mr. Jordania is the son of the first president of pre-soviet Georgia, Noe Jordania, who had to flee the Red Army’s takeover in 1921, after only three years in office. Redjeb Jordania was born and educated in Paris, so that in the short story “A Hunting Trip to Daghestan,” he finds himself “a foreigner … barely able to speak the Georgian language” in the once-again independent republic.
“Escape from the South Fork” contains both memoir and fiction, all told in the candid voice of a man who has lived through the 20th century’s major conflagrations, and seen much sadness, without losing his sense of humor. The book is divided into two sections, Part I, subtitled “From far away in time and space,” and Part II, “closer to home.”
The autobiographical stories include the moving “Closing the Circle,” in which the author returns to the village where his father’s and grandfather’s house once stood. It is now “a grassy lot where a pair of long-haired black piglets were scurrying, hunting for chestnuts.”
“The Music Lesson” is an account of Mr. Jordania’s early, and lasting, involvement with music, beginning with piano lessons from an eccentric, hard-drinking teacher and going on to a musical evening during World War II in Paris, when an Allied bombardment “offered an astonishing spectacle of son et lumiére.” “Is where they got the idea?” he wonders.
In another wartime story, “A Surprise Party,” a group of Resistance fighters hide two British airmen who have managed to parachute into German-occupied France. The students in charge of helping them stay alive disguise the pilots as “Georgians”—because “nobody knows what a Georgian is supposed to look like.” It is a close call when the dreaded “milice” arrive to check everyone’s papers.
The title story opens part two of “Escape from the South Fork.” This time the escape is not into the past, but into a post-apocalyptic future. A nuclear disaster has struck, the “Napeague Causeway” has been flooded by the ocean, and Montauk is now an island. Survivors hiding in a cave have almost exhausted their supplies—“they lasted 22 days.” The narrator understands that to venture outside is death—yet it is also an escape into freedom and peace. Fortunately for the anxious reader, this story is clearly fiction.
More upbeat stories from “closer to home” recount adventures on the waters off Long Island—an encounter between the author’s small trimaran and the America Cup race—and a humorous “Letter from New York.” In “Letter” Mr. Jordania explains his conviction that “there is no such country as the USA”—it is a joint invention of Madison Avenue and Hollywood.
These stories by this multitalented, well-traveled author offer unique personal insights into recent political and social history on both sides of the Atlantic Mr. Jordania’s tales are lively and thoughtful at the same time, and introduce the reader to a charming writer and memoirist.
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