Dead here or alive somewhere else.

“Are you working on your book? How is it going!?!” a young, earnest graduate student asked me at Sofia library.

I quickly closed Twitter. “Yes. Working on the book. Yes haha. Good!”

I’d met him and his girlfriend a few weeks ago at the library, which is next to Sofia University, where I go to write and feel ancient.

We decided to take a break and go for a walk. He only ever wants to talk about my book. I get it, when I was in grad school — and for most of my 20s really — I worshipped any idiot who wrote a blog even dumber than this one: they were a hallowed Published Writer.

Any time I see this kid at the library he announces, “She’s writing a book!” to whoever’s around. (“Fantastic,” the elderly security guard grumbled rolling his eyes).

We were strolling and he asked if I’d have it translated into Bulgarian and published here. I thought about it. “I’m not sure it would go over very well? For two reasons?”

***

It’s a family history about my refugee grandparents interwoven with the stories of current refugees. My step-grandfather, Georgi, tried to escape Communist Bulgaria in the 1940s. He got caught and sent to a Gulag called “The Island of Death.” He survived and got out. He’d try to escape three more times. He’d get caught and sent to prison, over and over again. It’s impossible to track how many times he got the shit beaten out of him by guards, of both the prison and border variety. He finally made it out in the late 1960s by jumping and clinging to the underside of a freight train.

Before the last escape he met my grandmother, who was married and had a young son (my Dad). They had an affair. She decided to run to the West as well and got smuggled in the trunk of a car, leaving her only child behind.

So that’s the totally normal family story. I have a lot of material. Unlike trauma victims who shut down, Georgi never stopped talking about the Gulag and his escapes (“Eventually I only pretended to listen while thinking about more pleasant things,” Grandma admits). So I have a lot of detail about the Gulag and all the prisons. And all of the escapes. They’re wild. This fucking lunatic tried to cross through Turkey, Yugoslavia, Greece, and again Yugoslavia, until he made it out. Then he smuggled out my grandmother.

I also try to tell the stories of several young Syrians I met and grew close to at a camp on the Turkish border. A century later, they’d clawed their way through the same mountain Georgi tried to cross the first time. Their stories, too, are insane.

“There was the time we were chased by wild boars,” my friend Humada casually told me.

“Once the guards beat up the guy they thought was a smuggler and then started to drag him into a fire pit while we screamed,” Muhaned recalls, about one out of 7 times he tried to get from Syria to Turkey as a teenager.

***

My grandmother recalls Georgi once telling her, before his final escape, “I have no choice, either I’m dead here or I’m alive somewhere else.” So the working title for the book is “Dead Here or Alive Somewhere Else.”

The basic theme is that people will do anything to escape an intolerable existence for a better life elsewhere.

***

OK so back to my conversation with the grad student who is impressed by me.

“Why don’t you think the book would do well here?” he asked.

“Well …. many people either don’t know about the Gulags or believe they didn’t exist,” I replied.

I remember, once, I’d made friends with a woman my age on vacation. I’d been carrying around an out-of-print copy of gulag survivor testimonies. When I showed it to her she stared straight ahead and sharply said, “We never had gulags in Bulgaria.”

“I mean … my grandfather was in Belene—”

She retorted, “Your grandfather must have been a criminal. I don’t want to talk about this again.” Nothing like a gulag truther!

I told the grad student this story. He said that a book had recently come out about the labor camps and that people are starting to wake up to the history, but that yeah, there are still denialists, people with roots in the former Communist regime or brainwashed by Russia—but he didn’t think it would be an impediment. Educated people—readers—are aware of the history.

I added, “Well, also, it’s about current day refugees, and the parallels with my grandparents’ refugee story and — “

“Oh. No one likes the refugees,” he said bluntly, shaking his head. “No one.”

He continued: “Their culture is too different! They can’t fit in. Do you know, they don’t shake hands with women?” he breathlessly told me. I tell him that I’ve met multiple refugees willing to shake my hand and, in fact, the ones I’m friends with hug me and (respectfully) kiss me goodbye on the cheeks.

“I mean… I’m sure there are some who are exceptions…” he allows. Yes I’ve accidentally stumbled upon the maverick “We’re Syrians Who Shake Hands With Women” Club.¹

I say, “So you have sympathy for my grandfather wanting to escape, but not them? My grandfather had it really bad, but there weren’t bombs falling on him…”

This Bulgarian kid absorbs none of this information and continues to lecture me about the refugees (apparently mansplaining, unlike the nation-state, knows no borders). “They refuse to assimilate!”

“Look,” I say. “They don’t ‘refuse to assimilate.’ There are no resources to help them. The ones I know wish they could learn Bulgarian or English but there aren’t language classes. If you don’t know the language, obviously you’re going to stick to enclaves of people who know your language.”

“They hate gays! So you see, it’s ironic that progressive people are for them!”

LGBTQ issues do not come up, but I guarantee that these guys who spend 60 hours a week working construction to send money back to their families aren’t like “My priority is hating gays.”

Anyway, it was upsetting because I’d been hoping that it was only old people who were so bigoted against refugees. This is not a topic I would bring up with my cranky right-wing Uncle.

But this fresh-faced grad student—it’s his job to absorb new information. I told him a dozen times, in a dozen different ways, that you can’t assume every Muslim is the Taliban. It bounced off like Teflon.

It was nauseating.

I keep coming back to this.

There are endless waves of panic about the dire state of the Western Young Man, who, castrated by feminists and DEI or whatever is not manly enough to sire. Or clean his room. Or find a wife and sire. Whatever. That in turn has created a cottage industry—Elon Musk Andrew Tate Scott Galloway Jordan Peterson—that professes to model real masculinity, based around fucking and siring.

The manly cosplay, paired with natalism, is almost always accompanied by extreme anti-immigrant sentiment. Western men can’t step up. Childless cat ladies aren’t making white babies. And so dark hordes are “penetrating”🙄 the border and outbreeding the whites.

It’s almost like … 🤔 … 🤔… 🤔… they feel threatened by young men brave enough to risk their lives for a better life elsewhere?

Quiz!

What’s “manlier?”

a) Being a total baller that sex traffics Romanian teenagers?

b) Outrunning wild boars to make it to a new country in order to work nonstop to send money to your family in a war zone?

🤔

1. Yes I know Ahmed al-Shara doesn’t shake hands with women. I also don’t care, when he meets female dignitaries he obviously shows respect in other ways and I hate it when liberal feminists are like, “He doesn’t think women are human!” just because he doesn’t engage in a totally arbitrary Western custom.