"Babylonian District of the Dimensionless City" by Dina Rubina, summary

"The Babylonian District of a Dimensionless City" is an autobiographical collection of essays by Dina Rubina, published in 2019. The book brings together several dozen memoirs about the writer’s childhood and youth in Tashkent, about relatives, minor and major incidents, twisted destinies, and inimitable characters. At its core is one constant image: Tashkent, multinational and overcrowded by evacuation, which the author calls a "dimensionless city" — and above all, Kashgar, its "Babylonian" district, where languages, destinies, and peoples intermingled.

Preface: Established Order

In a short introduction, Rubina reflects on the intergenerational connection. Her own granddaughter cuts her off mid-sentence, just as she herself, as a child, never listened to her grandmother, Rachel. Yet, it is the voices of long-dead elders that become increasingly clear over the years. On a car ride, Rubina suddenly realizes that she is surrounded by four generations of women of the same family: her mother, herself, her pregnant daughter, and her unborn child. This feeling — of being just a link in an unbroken chain — sets the tone for everything that follows.

Escape from a pioneer camp

The first long essay is about the escape of eight- or nine-year-old Dina from a regional party camp in the Chimgan foothills. Waking up after lights out on the fourth day, the girl, without sandals, climbed through a hole in the fence and walked barefoot for about twenty kilometers along a mountain road to Tashkent at night. All night, the starry sky hung above her, with a distinct "window" — a square of stars in the center, which she took as a sign of another universe. At dawn, she reached the tram circle and rode home free. No one in the family believed she had walked the entire journey. It was that night, as Rubina recalls, that she first realized three things: a person is alone, always unhappy — even if happy now — and cannot escape beyond this world through any other window.

Grandma

The book’s most extensive and rich essay is a portrait of Rakhil Koganovskaya, the grandmother. In an old photograph from the early 20th century, she is photographed at eighteen — long braids, a narrow shoe with a copper buckle, her foot resting on a rock — in a photo studio in the village of Zolotonosha. Rubina finds her hands in a portrait by Leonardo da Vinci: the same nervous hands, the same long fingers as Cecilia Gallerani’s. In her youth, Rakhil was in love with an artist — later the chief technologist of a major clothing company — who, according to family legend, visited her one last time before his own wedding and painted her portrait, which was later lost in the war.

Grandma was a first-class storyteller and mime. At dinner parties in Zolotonosha, at the request of guests, she would "introduce" neighbors — the pharmacist Golda Ganz, who missed her train with five suitcases, and the saleswoman Oksana Fedko — with such precision of intonation and gestures that the listeners were left in no doubt. It was she who fed little Dina porridge, distracting her with stories of the morning tram and living creatures in other people’s suitcases. In her essay, Rubina describes in detail the adobe house in Kashgarka — a room, a kitchen, and a veranda with a grapevine — where she lived with her grandparents during the holidays.

Grandfather Sander, a former cavalryman and master meat cutter at the Alay Bazaar, lost his legs to a tram in his old age: trying to jump onto the step, he fell backward onto the tracks. His uncle, who rushed to the hospital, lost consciousness while removing his boot. Grandfather, however, refused help from his fellow soldiers and learned to use prosthetics. Every morning, his grandmother bandaged his stumps with rough hands, which Rubina remembers as the most work-like she’s ever encountered.

Grandma’s sister, Berta, is the complete opposite of the artistic Rachel — she’s portrayed as a tough and principled person. During the war, Berta was the director of the factory cafeteria in Chirchik, where the machine-building plant was evacuated. She didn’t embezzle a penny, and didn’t even write an extra coupon for her husband, Misha. After the war, she worked as a shadow consultant for underground shop stewards — a lightning-fast calculator, without pencil or paper. Decades later, an old shop steward called her "a most brilliant mind" — a Rothschild and Morgan rolled into one, born in the wrong country at the wrong time.

At the end of their lives, the two sisters found themselves in adjoining rooms, and Grandma Rachel would relentlessly torment Bertha — recalling old grievances or simply out of stubbornness. Her son, an aging uncle, would shout at her, "Fear God!" but Grandma ignored him.

The Cousin and the Kashgar Court

A separate thread in the essay about Grandma is the story of Dina and her cousin, a restless leidegeer, who would "steal" her from Grandma’s care on his bicycle every summer. He would carry her on a bike rack to the most remote neighborhoods, then abandon her alone — in a vacant lot, near ruined adobe houses, in an old Muslim cemetery near a street called Champion, above the Ankhor River. There, under a weeping willow, Dina spent the entire day in a peculiar trance — a semi-consciousness in which, she says, the world fades and images emerge from the darkness. Grandma found her only at dusk, overcome with fear.

Coats and other relics

One of the book’s recurring details is a chocolate-colored cheviot coat with a mink collar, which a former artist in love sent to Rakhil as a gift (according to her mother, a special order through his company). Her grandmother carried it through three evacuations — to the Caucasus, Kazakhstan, and Tashkent — never selling it, even during the leanest wartime winters. In 1952, the coat was remade for Rubina’s mother as a wedding gift, then into a jacket for Dina herself, and eventually, it was used to make "Dunya," a doll used as a warmer for a pot of buckwheat porridge.

Babylonian Tashkent

The entire collection is organized around a single location — Kashgarka, a multilingual neighborhood in Tashkent where war and evacuation drove people from across the country: Jews from Ukraine, Russians, Uzbeks, and Roma. Rubina describes the Tashkent earthquake of 1966: when she was thirteen, an entire wall collapsed from her uncle’s adobe house, and she woke up on a trestle bed in the middle of the yard, as if on a stage. At the same time, disturbed scorpions crawled out of the cracks, and children caught them in jars and sold them. These and hundreds of other details — Vanyushka the driver with coal, the clandestine factory workers with combs and feather pillows, Uncle Misha in three katzaveikas by a cold stove — form a precise portrait of a vanished world.