As with most of the Harmony Day Center’s regulars, Ms. Kuchaidze worked hard to create a good life. She overcame a difficult childhood and practical abandonment and put herself through technical school. As an adult, she mended wounds and bolstered spirits on the front, raised a family and built a career. “I will be 94 and so far, thank God, my sight is good,” she says, chuckling, “and my brain still works.” “Sometimes I think about everything I have lived through and I wonder how I have survived until this year,” she says. “To live until one’s 90’s is not a short life.” Hers is the story of so many Georgians of her generation — defined, in large part, by jagged contours of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. It is the story of perseverance in the face of oppression, of holding on to hope in spite of every imaginable hardship. It is a story of longing and loss. Ms. Kuchaidze has had plenty of practice surviving.
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vlita Kuchaidze was born in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, in 1922, a year after Red Army forces invaded. During this chaotic
The Caritas center has been a source of support for her. “If I didn’t come here, I don’t know what would have become of me,” she says. “I cannot imagine it.” period, factions led by Georgianborn Joseph Stalin and other party officials lent force to Georgian Bolsheviks’ efforts to seize power from the dominant Mensheviks, and political repression was a fact of life. Her parents withstood the turmoil but divorced soon after. The one-story house they shared near the city center — built by Ivlita’s great-grandfather — was divided into rooms, one for her and her mother, another for her father and his new wife.
“I was just 4 when my parents divorced,” she says. “After that my mother started to study, at the evening schools that existed at that time. After that she went to the agriculture university.” Among her earliest memories, she says, are the times her parents would argue over who would pick her up from the kindergarten down the street. Ms. Kuchaidze would often spend hours alone. “Mama would lay out food on the table, so I could eat when I wanted to. And when I wanted to go to bed, I got ready by myself and went to bed by myself.” A few years later, when her mother completed her education, her job required her to move to another town, Kutaisi, about 120 miles from Tbilisi. “She left me here, in that room. I was in the fifth grade,” Ms. Kuchaidze remembers. At the time, the Soviet Union was in the middle of the devastating famine of 1932-1933. While Georgia was not as hard hit as some of the other Soviet republics, such as Ukraine, Ms. Kuchaidze remembers it as a time of loneliness and hunger. “I am in the fifth grade and I start thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’
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