You Are Not An Orphan
Soviet Union｜1963｜Russian｜Shukhrat Abbasov
The 1963 Uzbek movie, “You Are not an Orphan”, was inspired by the true story of an Uzbek blacksmith and his wife who adopted 15 orphans and children displaced by World War II, all while the elderly couple’s own son fought at the frontlines. The The movie reveals two layers of how citizens on the periphery of the Soviet Union coordinated their own lives and relationship with the nation during the wartime. To those unfamiliar with Soviet and Uzbek history, the director, Shukhrat Abbasov, draws a picture of daily life in the hinterland during wartime: family members leaving to fight at the front; children losing their parents; trains with people and material passing through the town every day; workers forging iron for the war effort; people continually selling off their most cherished items in exchange for necessary supplies; women leaving the house to work in offices; and children being over the moon after seeing a simple loaf of white bread. Yet under these layers of the life of ordinary people, the audience also encounters the subtext of political metaphor. Here, the audience is faced with an image of how various nationalities within the Soviet Union unified themselves during wartime.
The 1963 Uzbek movie, “You Are not an Orphan”, was inspired by the true story of an Uzbek blacksmith and his wife who adopted 15 orphans and children displaced by World War II, all while the elderly couple’s own son fought at the frontlines. The The movie reveals two layers of how citizens on the periphery of the Soviet Union coordinated their own lives and relationship with the nation during the wartime. To those unfamiliar with Soviet and Uzbek history, the director, Shukhrat Abbasov, draws a picture of daily life in the hinterland during wartime: family members leaving to fight at the front; children losing their parents; trains with people and material passing through the town every day; workers forging iron for the war effort; people continually selling off their most cherished items in exchange for necessary supplies; women leaving the house to work in offices; and children being over the moon after seeing a simple loaf of white bread. Yet under these layers of the life of ordinary people, the audience also encounters the subtext of political metaphor. Here, the audience is faced with an image of how various nationalities within the Soviet Union unified themselves during wartime.
The major conflicts in the movie’s storyline involve the children who were adopted by a couple, Fotima opa (the mother) and Mahkam ota (the father). The nationalities and ages of these children are diverse, including Russian, Belarusian, Kazakh, Jewish, and others who the audience cannot identify — just like the composition of the Soviet Union. It is hard to know when and how they arrived in Uzbekistan. Whenever a new child arrives, the other children tend to exclude them initially; however, Fotima opa and Mahkam ota will use a combination of unquestionable authority and an inclusive-sounding attitude to stress to the other children that “he is your brother”. Most children, due to a lack of other choices or a desire for a family, quickly accept this family structure. And though the children often play together with their “brothers and sisters”, conflicts are inevitable. In one remarkable scene, a Russian boy throws a stone at his (Muslim) brother, and is kicked out of the house. As Mahkam ota says: The Russian boy should not hit his own brother. These storylines reflect the difficulties of national integration in the Soviet Union.
Living in a big family leads the children to question their self-identity — another common question that emerges in a multiethnic or multinational country. In one scene, a boy named Renat tells one of his sisters that they are not real siblings, while the other children were at the cinema. He says something that approximately means “they have no right to keep all of us”. This might originate from the fear of new abandonment after the war should the family’s biological son come back from the battle. However, it could also be interpreted as a subconscious protest against the idea that the Soviet Union is able to control so many different nationalities under one unified state. In another scene, a woman shows up at the house looking for her daughter, Taras. Here the question of belonging that the movie delivers to its audience is made even stronger. The audience can clearly see the desire to return home and see this mother on the faces of the little girl and her siblings while they’re running back from the cinema. To a certain degree this suggests that the family created by the conditions of wartime is temporary and not reliable, and therefore, that the Soviet Union’s multinational model is equally unreliable. In other words, if those nationalities ruled by the Soviet Union had the chance to return to their own nationhood, they would prefer to do so.
The viewer might experience mood swings throughout the development of the movie’s storyline, and worry that some kind of tragedy looms over this big family. However, the family remains intact; and the children only become closer and more unified when Fotima opa’s is eventually laid down. The phenomenon recalls Whittington’s argument (2019) about the Soviet Union’s history during and after World War II, that “war experience itself would contribute to ongoing negotiation of the Soviet identity among all nationalities” (155). Therefore, the most touching moment of movie is when all of the children voluntarily identify themselves under the same name as Mahkam ota. In the end, the story has a happy ending. Even though the movie uses a “war game” to reveal how the war left children with long-term trauma, the director reminds the audience that, far away from fighting at the front, a much more humane type of glory was taking place among ordinary people, and especially children.
Reference
Whittington, Anna. 2015. “Making a Home for the Soviet People: WWII and the Origins of the Sovetskii Narod.” In Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands, edited by Lewis Siegelbaum and Krista Goff, 147–161. Cornell: Cornell University Press.
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