BOOKISHGAL

[Writer’s note: This post really does have a connection to a book. Read on and you’ll get there! Hee!]

It was 1972, and a Canadian all-star hockey team, made up of professional NHL players, was about to play an 8-game series with the Soviet Union national team, for the very first time in history.

Canadians had complained for years that NHL players were kept out of the Olympics because they were professionals in their sport, while the Soviet players were considered “amateurs.” Those players, on paper, were technically workers in other professions, yet they never actually worked in those professions and in reality all they actually did was train and play hockey for the various leagues in the USSR, and then for the national team. Everyone knew that they were elite professional hockey players in everything but name. And it drove us Canadians crazy because it meant our very best players couldn’t play, but theirs could - and they won Olympic and World championships all over the place as a result, while we were shut out.

Enter the Summit Series, as it’s commonly known in English.

You can read about it in detail at the Wikipedia article if you’re interested. But the pertinent thing for this post is that the first four games would be held in Canada, with the final four taking place in Moscow. And we Canadians assumed that now that we had a level playing surface - we would wipe the ice with the Russians. (Though of course they weren’t all Russian; the USSR had several republics, and some of the players were from areas other than Russia.)

The thing was - we didn’t wipe the ice with them. Quite the opposite, in fact. It was a stunning blow to the national identity, and it wasn’t until the very last game, in which Paul Henderson scored the winning goal, that Canada won the victory in the series, giving my country vastly more of a thrill than we’d expected when the series started.

I was in school, but was old enough to be upset with the Canadian players. Already I knew hockey well enough to decide that one reason the Canadians weren’t winning was that the North American style relied more on brute force than on fine skill. Canadian players tended to shoot the puck down into the opposing team’s end, and then skate down there and kind of wrestle other players off the puck and try to shoot it at the net.

The Russians, on the other hand, rarely shot the puck in - they carried it, stick-handling and passing with exquisite skill. It was like poetry on ice. I saw a brand of hockey I rarely ever saw in the NHL, and I was enthralled.

In fact, for the first three or four games, I actually cheered for the Soviets. (Don’t worry, though - by the time the series headed to Moscow, I’d gotten over that, and was fully back in the “Go Canada!” camp.)

But this is where the Book Without ISBN comes in. So enthralled was I by the Soviet players and their skill that I went out and bought a second-hand textbook, Essentials of Russianby A.V. Gronicka and H. Bates-Yakobson. It was a 1964 reprint of an original 1948 textbook. Dark blue hard cover, silver lettering, with a small black Russian onion dome traced beside the book title.

You see, the Soviet players had their names on their sweaters in Cyrillic script, the script used in Russia - and I loved those players so much that I wanted to be able to read their names in Russian. Kind of a minor tribute to them, or something.

So there they were, all those great names from that original great team: Aleksandr Yakushev (Якушев), Boris Michailov (Михалов), Vladislav Tretiak (Третяк) - and my very favourite, the brilliant and, um, very nice-looking Valery Kharlamov (Харламов). I learned the Cyrillic script, and I could read their names.

And while the games were going, I even started learning some of the grammar. When I open the book now, I still find a clump of lined paper stuck in there, with the notes I made. (”Some symbols that look like ours stand for different sounds. ‘B’ for English ‘v’. ‘C’ for ’s’.” And so on.) I still have the pages where I practised writing the Cyrillic script, and made grammatical notes from the first couple of chapters.

I loved the script and the language so much that several years later, when I went to university, I decided to major in Russian for a couple of years. I have several more recent textbooks, of course, and learned way more than I had done on my own, way back in 1972.

But that hockey series - and that book - were responsible for all my Russian study later on (2 1/2 years of it before I switched majors). Such a small thing, really, that led to such extensive study years later.

I still look back on those games with great happiness, and every time I pick up the book (and I still do, often), I immediately see them - Kharlamov, Yakushev, Michailov - streaking down the ice, weaving their pinpoint passes in between the Canadian players as they zoom by with grace and speed. Pure Russian poetry.

Essentials of Russian is another book I wouldn’t part with, ever, for any reason on earth. One of my treasures, without an ISBN.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS