An astonishing piece of writing appeared some 5 years ago in the New Yorker. Ariel Levy’s autobiographical essay on having a miscarriage during a trip to Mongolia when she was 5 moths pregnant, combined the most ruthlessly honest introspection with the clarity and sensibility of a war reporter.  Read it and weep.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/18/thanksgiving-in-mongolia

The author, still a staff writer for the New Yorker, will appear for a discussion of her new book here in PDX , having a conversation with Cheryl Strayed and Danzy Senna on March 29, 2019, at the Portland Ballroom.

I had thought I might riff off her title, Thanksgiving in Mongolia, with a Hanukkah in Mongolia, but alas it turns out there are no Jews there. Well, fewer than 100;  those 600 or so who had fled from Russia in the 1920s were purged and killed by White Russians in 1921. A few families still lived outside of the capital, but most left after the breakup of the Soviet Union and emigrated to Israel.  Mongolia had known shamanism and freedom of worship, then Buddhism throughout the centuries; once it became a satellite state of the Soviet Union, all religion was forbidden, some 30.000 Buddhist monks shot and most temples destroyed. Since the 1990s a number of Christian sects are arriving to proselytize the country which has experienced a mining boom, inviting expert personell and workers.

Mongolia has the lowest population density in the world, its capital Ulaan Baatar, the coldest capital on earth, sporting half of the entire population with 1.5 million inhabitants, all breathing in the most polluted air imaginable. The country is huge, stretching from, for sake of comparison, the latitudes of Berlin in Northern Europe to Rome in Southern Europe. Endless steppes are bounded by high mountains on one end and the Gobi desert on the other. It is hot in summer and extremely cold and windy in winter. It is also subject to occasional harsh climatic conditions known as Zud, which is a natural disaster unique to Mongolia, resulting in large proportions of the country’s livestock dying from starvation or freezing temperatures or both, producing economic upheaval for the largely pastoral, nomadic population. They rely to large parts on the export of their cashmere wool, sold to exorbitant prices here as luxury goods, paying them pennies to the dollar.

 

I would give a lot to be able to travel across Mongolia and photograph the landscape in all its variations. The pictures I have seen capture a raw natural beauty of vast spaces, high skies, colors suffused with light. I do not have the stamina, though, for the conditions of travel, even with some pricey National Geographic tour offerings, that provide the guides, the rides, the yurts.  You are responsible for your own flight to Beijing and then Ulaan Baatar on top of it.  For large parts there would be no electricity to charge the camera batteries and I could not possibly scrounge up or justify $10.000 for a 2 week trip.

 

Just as well, I sit in the comfort of my room, listening to what the world out there holds, from traditional throat singing music

to the newest band combining traditional instruments with modern rock, eating fritos instead of mutton stew (I can’t stand sheepy, lamby meat) and sifting through my snowflake photos in honor of the Mongolian climate in December.

These snowflakes, by the way, stitched with a sowing machine, were found in a Montavilla Sewing store run by a lovely Ukrainian woman in Lake Oswego who invited me in to photograph when she saw me peering through the window.