Strange Way to Live. Carl Dixon
that emotion travels much faster through us than does thought. Strong feelings short-circuit the intellect and can leave even the greatest thinker trembling with misguided or misdirected anger. This was a frequent occurrence for my father. As one elderly librarian hotly upbraided him on the day after he’d made a fuss about something with her, “You were wrong, Mr. Dixon … and so loud about it too!” That line became a classic in our family.
His powerful emotions, which resulted in continual changing of jobs and homes, led my father inevitably closer to the fringe. Ron was well liked by many, and he often gave selflessly of his knowledge and ideas. At the same time he would be appalled time and again by the expressions of human nature and the ways in which people would often not live up to the highest ideals in conducting their affairs. Dad’s sharp tongue could be unleashed at unexpected moments, as his beautiful, polished manners gave way to a sudden torrent of outrage. He was a seeker of truth and beauty in a world populated with the unpredictable and unmanageable, the hell of “other people.” If I were to ascribe a thought to him, for much of his life I’d make it: Why do you all have to be like that?
A self-imposed distancing from his disappointing fellow humans led him into near-isolation in his last years. A man of so much brilliance should have been staying highly connected with society. He was unfortunately so frequently misunderstood (or, alas, sometimes understood all too well) that to engage him might turn upsetting for all concerned, including himself. It must have been difficult to navigate a world in which so few people were able to live up to one’s lofty standards. As brilliant and loving and sentimental as he could be, dear old Dad marginalized himself through behaviour that he was either unable or unwilling to control. That continues to be an important lesson to me.
Ron sure had a fun side, though. Put together quick wit, intelligence, energy, a desire to please, and a quirky outlook and you get a man who would constantly conjure up improbable things to say and do. My mother often says he made her laugh through their whole life together, and that talent to amuse is what made her stick with him. I guess it may be true when they say that’s what a woman really wants in a man: someone to make her laugh.
In his last years Ron was happiest with his books, making corrections to the author’s work in the margins, or painting oil on canvas, or working on supposedly impossible math problems. His mind was keen to the end. We lost Dad to a heart attack on December 29, 2009. He would have been eighty-five on the following June 13. I miss him every day.
My mother, Marje (Mar-yeh), is the polar opposite of my father in many ways: cool, calm, composed, enduring, stoic, but also extremely intelligent, with a surprisingly wicked sense of humour. She quietly set about making a solid home base wherever my father’s fancy led us. Mom also set about becoming a reliable and substantial force for earnings and savings power. Marje is remarkable for her capacity to analyze a situation and find the smartest solution. Her knack of climbing smartly in every new workplace that our travels took her seemed so normal, I thought everybody was like that. An early example of a “working mom,” she knew how to budget, cook, raise children, and keep a marriage together while going to work every day and exceeding expectations. I owe to my mother’s example whatever I have of sticking to things and of enduring, whatever happens.
My mother’s family is Estonian; they fled from their homeland on the Baltic Sea during the Second World War, when the Russians invaded for the second time in modern history, in 1944. My grandmother Hella Magi was born 1911 in Voru, a small town near the Russian border. Her maiden name was Jaason, an educated family we would now call upper-middle-class, with a large lakefront property as well as a farm on the other side of the lake. Her father, Juhan, was a banker and a director of the local arts council.
Estonia had been under Russian rule for two hundred years, but the collapse of Czarist Russia after the 1917 revolution was the chance for the little country to declare its independence, even though Communist sympathizers agitated in their midst for alignment with the revolution. The small but determined Estonian army repulsed a Red Army invasion in 1919. After a year of fighting, Russia signed a peace treaty in 1920 in which it gave up any future claim over Estonia’s territory. This left Estonian Communists seething with resentment, awaiting the next chance. Juhan Jaason would pay dearly for his prominence in free Estonia when the USSR invaded in June 1940.
My maternal grandfather, Rudolf Magi, born in 1905, came from a small village called Pormanni. It no longer exists, having been bulldozed during one of the Soviet collective farming or industry schemes. After completing his studies, Rudi made his way to an education in military college, where he became the youngest cadet ever to graduate. His first posting as a young officer took him to Voru, where he met Hella at the local music and dance hall. Married in 1931, they had “three years’ honeymoon,” in Hella’s words, until the arrival of their first son, Rein, in 1934. Then came Tonu in 1936 and finally my mother Marje in 1938.
Rudi went to Officers Higher Military College, where he earned a captain’s rank. He served in the Estonian army in that rank until the end of the Second World War.
My Grandma Hella (Jaason) Magi is one of my heroes in this world, a survivor and thriver without equal. In January 2011 I attended her hundredth birthday party and performed a song for her with my daughter, Lauren Hella, the great-granddaughter named for her. My elder girl Carlin helped Lauren read the birthday greetings from the Queen, the prime minister, and various other dignitaries, including the president of Estonia.
Hella often regaled me with stories of the family’s escape from the Russian invasion. In 1944 the Germans were losing the Eastern Front to the strengthening Russians. Rudi saw the threat looming, and in concern for the safety of his children he managed to get a secret letter to Hella in the south, urging her to leave Estonia with the kids as soon as possible. While the Russians were entering the northern part of Estonia above Lake Peipus, she gathered up her three children, including my mother (then six years old), and they were able to evacuate on one of the last trains leaving Voru.
Hella could have gotten her mother out before the Russians arrived, but her mother, Elisabet Jaason, felt she was too old to start over in a new country and refused to leave her homeland by getting on that train with them. My grandmother had already seen her father and her brother, Juhan and Juhan Jr., arrested by the Russians during the first Soviet invasion in 1940 and sent to slave labour camps in Siberia, where they subsequently died.
Like most Estonians, Hella knew that worse was to come under a second Soviet occupation. Only Communist sympathizers were pleased to see the Russians return. Hella waved goodbye to her mother and ensured the safety of her children and herself by getting on that train.
In the end Elisabet was not singled out for persecution under the Soviet regime as a former capitalist. Marje tells me her grandmother had been kind to the Jewish people in Voru and helped some of them to live through the Nazi occupation. She and Hella both believed that Elisabet was so kind, generous, and good, she charmed even the Communists.
The Magi family’s boarding of the troop train was followed by a week of rough travel on changing trains in order to put safe distance between themselves and the Russian advance. My mother remembers riding in open cattle cars with other refugees for parts of the journey. The family sometimes slept in fields beside the tracks while awaiting the next train’s arrival. There’s a lovely story of the day when Marje lost her dolly somewhere on the train and all the German soldiers helped her look for it. It is humanizing to think of them that way.
South from Estonia through Latvia and Lithuania, then to stops in Poland and finally into Germany: this was the course their journey followed over the next months. My grandma got her children into refugee quarters in southern Germany, just as the collapse of the Third Reich began all around them. From their town they could see the distant flames of the firebombing of Dresden. The family bounced around a number of German towns as refugees in the next years, while the chaos that followed the surrender of Germany slowly turned the corner to recovery under the Marshall Plan.
Then my grandfather Rudolf re-entered the stage. He’d somehow survived the fighting and by stealth escaped Estonia ahead of the Soviet invading armies. He searched the refugee settlements for his family until he found them. Rudi was reinstalled as head of his family. Having him back in place meant that the Magis could now apply to leave Germany for