On Sunday, November 16, Protodeacon Nicolas Mokhoff (cleric of the Synodal Cathedral of the Sign in New York City) reposed in the Lord. December 25 marked the 40th day of the Synodal protodeacon’s passing. In memory of Fr. Nicolas, we offer below an interview with him and his Matushka Nadezhda.
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The future Fr. Nicolas Mokhoff, a descendant of Don Cossacks and a protodeacon at the Synodal Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign in New York City for many years, was born in Luxembourg. But he was never a Luxembourger. Displaced Persons and their descendants were not entitled to any European citizenship at all. So his first citizenship was American after his family moved to the USA in 1958.
If we take a closer look at the pedigree of this wonderful family, emigrants from Russia in different years contributed to the religious and cultural life of the country. Fr. Nicolas’ uncle, Archpriest Serge Poukh, together with his wife Emmie, a Luxembourger, built the Russian church in the capital of Luxembourg, reviving the dying parish. Emmie mastered Russian and Church Slavonic, learned to sing, conducted a small choir and read in the church. She knows entire services by heart; she restored the church after her husband’s death and now she helps its new rector. Fr. Nicolas’ parents sang in the church choir their entire lives, first in Luxembourg and then in New York.
The birthplace of his future wife Nadezhda was Germany, and her first citizenship, since 1951, has been American. She is a historian and an anthropologist by trade, as well as a translator and editor. Since her university years she worked on a popular UN project – space bridges, in which American and Soviet deputies, doctors, writers and priests participated. She worked as a manager in other joint American-Russian cultural projects as well.
They first met in New York as students of St. Sergius of Radonezh Russian Orthodox school at the ROCOR Synod of Bishops. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign has been home to the wonderworking Kursk Root Icon of the Sign, and has been their parish since 1959. It is here that Nadezhda has worked on a voluntary basis behind the candle box and helped in the church in many ways for over fifty years.
Before the Revolution & Afterward
– Your ancestors were from Ukraine. What was their fate after the Revolution?
– Prior to the Revolution, my grandfather, Mikhail Danilovich Yanevsky, was an agronomist near Kiev where he had estates and plots of land. After the October Revolution, he was arrested, but then released several times so that he could help organize the work at collective farms. Once things began to improve, he would be sent to prison or exile again.
In addition to my mother, Zinaida, there were two younger daughters in the family. In the early 1940s, they lived in Kiev. My mother studied to be an engineer, her sisters studied to be a surgeon and a teacher.
My grandfather died in 1941. My mother was doing an internship at a recording studio in Tashkent then. When she finally managed to return to Kiev, the Nazis were approaching the city. My grandmother, Anna Andreevna, was sent to dig trenches, and the Germans took my aunt to the front as a surgeon. My mother and other aunt were hired to work in the office, as they knew German and French well.
To Austria Under Fire
In 1943, when the Nazis were leaving Kiev, my mother’s immediate boss (an Austrian who hated Germans) saved our family. He said to her that the next day they would all be taken out from work and sent with the retreating army. Mother managed to bring grandma secretly and hide her in a truck with things that the Nazis were taking with them. Later, in America, we would laugh at our grandmother, saying that she had been taken out of Kiev "like old junk." They were put onto trains with blocked windows and taken under fire in an unknown direction.
When the railway was bombed, they trudged on foot through Austria until they reached Vienna, where at night they were locked in a basement – men and women together. The Germans were surprised that they lived decently and not like animals. At daytime they were taken out to work at a factory. From time to time, the prisoners were transferred from place to place, and by the end of the war, they ended up in the American zone in Landshut, at the Schleißheim Displaced Persons Camp. There they lived in the barracks which had previously been occupied by American soldiers.
My father ended up in the same camp. Awaiting repatriation, Soviet prisoners of war lived in barracks surrounded by barbed wire. My mother, who then worked in the office, managed to make a certificate for my father that he was not subject to repatriation. The office workers used potatoes to make the stamps needed for such certificates, signed them with famous names and thus saved many prisoners. It was in Landshut that my parents got married in 1945, and I was born in 1947.
Our Life in the Camp & the Healing before the Kursk Root Icon
– What do you remember from your life in the camp?
– I was a baby and only remember some details of everyday life. To add some variety to our meager diet, my mother and grandmother would pick mushrooms in a nearby forest. I remember American soldiers driving around on jeeps, happily waving at us and sometimes throwing sweets or oranges. But most Germans did not regard us as human beings.
Meanwhile, several children in the camp, including me, contracted polio. I was paralyzed, and mother took me to a hospital. But there she was told to take me back home because I was going to die. But mother talked them into leaving me at the hospital, if only overnight, and rushed to pray for my healing in front of the Kursk Root Icon of the Sign in a church in that area. The next morning, I got better, though the disease left its mark and I had to learn to walk all over again.
Off to America!
– How did you manage to flee to America?
– It was hard to live among people who did not view us as human beings. My mother wanted to go somewhere, but not to the USSR where we would have been imprisoned. And she began to write appeals regarding our departure to America. We regularly checked long lists which showed who had been selected for which countries. For my mother, the top priority was to keep the family together, and she included my grandmother, my aunt and me in the list. By that time, my father had already emigrated to America, but we were unaware of this.
In 1951, as part of an agreement with the American Red Cross and the Tolstoy Foundation, and with the help of my godmother, whose husband worked as a driver for an American general, we managed to depart for New York by a military transport steamship via Bremerhaven. The men were accommodated in the cabins, and the women and children – in the hold on five-level bunks. We were fed American food that our poor people had never seen before, having gone from the Revolution to the war and then the camps. But many got seasick easily, and the food in wooden boxes was thrown into the water against the wind. I remember food flying and sometimes the salad or bread would fall back onto the deck.
For our voyage, American soldiers gave us warm old blankets, army camping utensils, and they hammered together two boxes and put all our stuff there. Before our departure, the customs officers opened our boxes for checking and waved us through! Rumors had been spreading in the camp that there were neither garlic nor onions in America! And there were people who took it with them!
We still have those small wooden boxes at home. They kept a wall carpet from Tashkent, along with some photos that we were able to take with us.
New York, New York!
– You descended from the deck of the steamer and found yourself in New York…
– My godmother from America sent me a dollar for the journey! On June 23, 1951, we arrived in New York and used the dollar: Mother bought a token for the subway for ten cents, a German newspaper to look for an apartment and job, and cleaning fluid for our future bathroom.
We were brought to 123rd Street in the Upper East Side and dropped off in the middle of the street. I remember the terrible heat, the mud and the horrible stench. We were sitting on our boxes, with people gathering around us.
Mother began to weep loudly. A plump Italian woman came up to her, hugged her, gave her a plastic rose and said that we would like it in America and everything would be fine. The rose in a glass vase stood on our fireplace for fifteen years until it fell apart when we moved to another apartment.
A day after arriving in New York, my mother went to look for an apartment. As she was walking along the street, she saw an elderly gentleman with a German newspaper in his hands. He turned out to be a landlord and rented out his apartment to us.
The place where our home was then and still remains quite prestigious, with luxurious expensive houses. The apartment that we rented had two rooms, a shared toiled in the hallway for two families and a bath in the kitchen. Electricity and gas had been cut off due to the debts of the previous tenant. We found four beds in the street. I slept on the army bed given to us until I got married.
A few days later, my mother was hired to work at the Sunshine Biscuits confectionery factory. As a newcomer she was assigned to work on a conveyor belt during the night shift. Many representatives of various ethnic groups worked at the factory and were unfriendly to each other. In the afternoon, my mother would attend English courses. When she completed the course, she began to work at the American Express Company.
Over time, we obtained an oven and later decided as a family that if we lived more modestly, we would be able to buy a fridge. We lived in that apartment from 1951 to 1962.
My mother was not active in the Church, though she did believe in God and taught me to respect everyone and to be a good person. When I was in the fifth grade in an American public school, my mother decided to send me to the Russian Saturday school at the Synod.
I paid for high school myself
– What kind of school was it?
– It was like a Sunday school in Russia. We were taught the Russian language and history, geography, music, the history of Russian culture and the Law of God. But when its principal, Archimandrite Anthony (Grabbe), learned that I could write well and knew the Law of God, he wondered if I wanted to study at St. Sergius’ High School (gymnasium). And I wanted to study there very much, feeling drawn to my own, familiar culture. It was difficult for me to be around American children who didn’t understand our strict way of life. The tuition was $900 per year. We did not have the money, but after I got a partial scholarship from a benefactor, Prince Serge S. Belosselsky, I began to work off the remaining part of the tuition fee. Our students published the Gimnazist ("High Schooler") newspaper. The circulation was small, but it was still work. I edited texts, typed, selected photographs, and helped Fr. Anthony in his office.
– Was it a full-fledged educational institution?
– Yes, it was. Fr. Anthony (Grabbe) took the lead in its foundation. He secured the support of the city administration and attracted students and teachers.
The sponsor Sergey Semenenko was the first to revive the school in the new Synodal building, organize the high school and give the premises to the Synod. Prince Belosselsky with his wife, Prince Drutskoy and other sponsors donated generously to the school and its students. Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky), a teacher by profession who was elected the First Hierarch of ROCOR in 1964, became the school’s father-confessor and trustee.
At that time, there were 21 students in the high school. I began in the eighth grade, which had only one student before my arrival – Victor Magramm (now Archimandrite John). We both were nicknamed "terrorists" for our habit of bursting into the office noisily, frightening the head of the office, Princess Eletskaya.
We studied alone for all of the eighth grade, and towards the end of the year, we were joined by a new student, Gleb Glinka (the future husband of Doctor Liza, and an attorney). In the ninth grade, there were already six of us, including my future husband.
Among the school teachers were former officers, people from high society and highly qualified educators. General subjects were taught by American teachers. Students received an excellent education, spoke two languages, and most entered famous American universities upon graduating (including Columbia and Fordham), worked in the UN and in the civil service. Despite its overall secular nature, one of the aims of the high school’s founders was to instill in the younger generation the spiritual values of the Orthodox Church, to pass on the spiritual heritage of Russia to them. Our morning would begin with joint prayer, on the major feasts we attended services at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign or the lower St. Sergius Church, and lived by the Orthodox feasts.
Two "Varenyes" with Oil
– In high school you met Metropolitan Philaret, who became your spiritual instructor and a father figure…
– Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky) was the youngest bishop to head ROCOR after the elderly Metropolitan Anastasius (Gribanovsky) retired.
Soon after his arrival from Australia, he organized a club in the Synodal building, and among the first people he invited were my husband, Victor Magramm, Victor Potapov (the current rector of St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Washington D.C.), his wife Maria and some acolytes. My mother allowed me to join the club after she had herself visited it to see what Metropolitan Philaret was like and what he was doing with students. Vladyka himself would visit the club members to see the way they lived.
The club was our family. We could ask a wide range of questions, both serious and foolish ones, and even argue with Vladyka. Sometimes he took us to his parishes, or fishing. It was all extremely interesting to us, broadened our horizons and strengthened the sense of belonging to the Russian Orthodox diaspora.
– How did you perceive Metropolitan Philaret then? What memories of him do you have now?
– Vladyka was an ascetic. But he did not frighten us, did not forbid us to have fun; rather, he set us up for life by his example. He was the kindest person. Soon after our wedding, my husband suddenly became chronically ill. A special diet was necessary, but money was tight. When Vladyka heard about this, he began to give us shrimp (which were beyond our means) through his cell-attendant, Protodeacon Nikita Chakirov. It was during the fast, and while he did not want us to break it, he wanted to support Nicolas. He helped many other people too. When the metropolitan died, Fr. Nikita found a packet of money in his desk – it was to be given to a recently arrived girl to sustain her. Her mother had died of cancer, and the girl was absolutely alone.
Apart from his generosity, he had spiritual charisma. Whenever you entered church while he was serving, there was warmth, a calm, and it felt like you were taking off. When I left the service, I would start to go down slowly. It was warm by his side, and it did not matter if you talked to him or kept silent.
He could sometimes play a trick on us, but when he spoke seriously, the depth of his state and his words was palpable.
Answering our questions, Vladyka always referred to the Gospel, Patristic works, opening a corresponding place in a book in response to a question. He never spoke from his own authority, like, "I believe that…" He even warned us that if a person said something that contradicted the Church teaching, one should distance oneself from him.
Vladyka was uncomfortable with everything that was overdone. He was against it when women, as if out of humility, "wrapped themselves" in long skirts and girls wore huge headscarves – he believed that modesty is the best ornament for all.
Vladyka was of the opinion that one should not constantly run after a blessing. A blessing should be taken for Church-related things and not for daily affairs; if you asked for a blessing, then adhere to the instruction. He wanted people to know their faith, understand what goes on in church, understand their prayers rather than repeating them automatically. He gave us one example of misunderstanding the essence: There were nuns who, when receiving guests, put two varieties of jam ["varenye" in Russian] in their plates and poured vegetable oil onto it. When asked why they had done that, the nuns replied, "This is what the Church calendar says: two ‘varenyes’ with oil."
At times he would ask us questions from the Law of God to see how much we understood the essence of what we believed in.
Vladyka was indifferent to rank. For him all people were equal. He sheltered us all in the club. For me he was a grandfather, a father and a spiritual instructor, all at the same time. That was of great importance in my life. He was a remarkable man with the kind, pure soul of a child; he kept us not around the Church, but in the Church, where we lived and burned, instead of just “being.”
Our club met on Thursdays or Sundays between 1964 and 1985, as long as he was our metropolitan.
In 1984, a year before his repose, he asked us to host a reception on December 14, his namesday, and invite everyone who had been to our club. Many people came. Vladyka thanked everyone and said that it was our last meeting for his namesday.
We were all so scared to hear this that I flew out of the room in tears. In time, we forgot about it, but a year later, the morning of November 21, 1985, he peacefully reposed in the Lord. It was the feast of the Archangel Michael. Vladyka had been invited to serve at St. Michael’s parish, but he was feeling unwell.
The night before, the whole of our family went to see him after the Vigil. He lay on his bed, and we came up to him to receive his blessing. When asked about his health, he replied that we would see the next day. At parting he said to me in English, "Do your best." These words have been my motto ever since.
We arrived at the cathedral before the Liturgy, and the attendant met us with the words: "It seems Vladyka has died."
Two years later, Vladyka’s faithful cell-attendant passed away too. Fr. Nikita had first met Metropolitan Philaret in Australia and had been devoted to him ever since.
Fr. Nikita left fifteen pages for me, on which it was written what I needed to do, what debts I was to pay off, what books and vestments I was to sell. There was nothing in his room that was unrelated to the Church and his publishing work, except for a fishing rod!
He entrusted me with continuing publishing two different calendars: that of the Youth Committee, and Martianoff’s tear-off calendar [Nikolai N. Martianoff was the publisher of Novoe Russkoe Slovo ("New Russian Word"), the Russian Diaspora’s oldest newspaper, and the founder of the historical calendar –Auth.]. Fr. Nikita had taken care to draw up the youth calendar until 1990 in advance. I reluctantly had to fulfil the will of the dying man. Then I got to like that work and began to publish spiritual books and calendars and spread them throughout the Orthodox world.
These calendars became important to me as a continuation of my education, and knowledge of my roots; at some point I realized that their importance was in the joy they brought to the older generation. We sent them to the homes of people, most of whom due to their age could not go to church, let alone use a computer. They lived by them and kept them.
At the Tolstoy Farm
– With what other famous people did you communicate in your youth?
– In the summer months, I would go to the Tolstoy Farm camp, organized by Leo Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra Lvovna (1884-1979). I went there from age six to twenty, and Nicolas was a male camp leader there in the 1960s.
Alexandra Lvovna organized the farm and Foundation on land she purchased in 1949 for one dollar from a sister of John Reed, the author of the novel "Ten Days That Shook the World."
There she set up a large vegetable garden and farm, and invited people who knew how to farm. They would get up early and work all day long, with no complaints. Alexandra Lvovna would join us in the field or the farm. She even taught us how to vaccinate chickens. Grab a chicken by the legs, inject it under the wings and throw the indignant bird into the bushes!
Former ladies-in-waiting of the Empress, people close to the Tsar, former officers, a relative of Doctor Botkin, and such figures as Sikorsky, Malozemov and Solzhenitsyn worked with her. The ladies-in-waiting and ordinary working peasants labored and dined together, working on the farm, in the library, or teaching Russian language and history.
There was a big library there. Occasionally, Alexandra Lvovna would read us some writings by her father and weep, because Leo Nikolaevich had been excommunicated by the Church.
There was a church on the farm (it is still there to this day). Alexandra Lvovna would make an agreement with the priest so that when we came to services he would not drag them out. In the morning, everybody except for the communicants had breakfast. The girls sang with the choir.
In the House of the Mother of God
– What was the Synodal Cathedral of the Sign like in those years? How has the makeup of the parishioners changed?
– The neighborhood where the premises of the Synod and the Cathedral are located, starting from East 97th Street where it crosses Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue, was inhabited by Russian-speaking emigrants at that time. Long before the Synod moved here, the Holy Fathers’ Church had been opened for Russian-speaking faithful on 153rd Street in Manhattan. Russian restaurants, shops, a Russian school, and a bookstore were located along Broadway in the neighborhood. That was when Fr. Anthony (Grabbe) got enthusiastic about the idea of opening a Russian high school there.
Most of the parishioners of the Cathedral of the Sign were emigrants of the first wave who had come to America via Germany and France. There was always a big difference between them and us, who had come via Displaced Persons camps. They considered us "Soviet" and it took them a long time to forgive us for this, but then the difference disappeared with the arrival of the third wave.
Among the cathedral’s parishioners were princes Obolensky, Beloselsky, Galitzine, Romanov, members of the Cadet Corps, and former soldiers of the White Army.
In the late 1970s, a new influx of Russians began. Big, bearded men with huge crosses on the outside of their clothes came and made prostrations. In the 1990s, businessmen in bright clothes showed up throwing around enormous sums of money, but we never saw them again. These were followed by Italian and American converts from Catholicism and Protestantism who had been disappointed with their faiths. They fervently made the sign of the cross.
Nowadays, so many new people are coming that you never know who they are and where they are from.
– Could you say that a parish community has formed in the cathedral?
– There has never been a parish as such here. Parish communities, the way they should be, exist mainly in the churches of Brooklyn, Staten Island, in the suburbs of New York City and in New Jersey. And the Cathedral of the Sign is in fact the house church of the First Hierarch of ROCOR as well as the home of the Kursk Root Icon of the Sign. People come to study or work in New York; they come to the cathedral, attend it, help it – sometimes for five or ten years – and then leave. A similar situation can be seen in the St. Nicholas Patriarchal Cathedral, situated four blocks from here.
The Bagration, Galitzine, Ledkovsky, and Shatiloff families all lived near the cathedral at some point; nearly all of them were our early parishioners. We attended Saturday and Sunday services at the cathedral and more or less formed a parish. Under Metropolitan Anastasius, a brotherhood was set up, and under Metropolitan Vitaly (Ustinov), a sisterhood appeared to support the cathedral materially. We held and still hold festal events at the cathedral. Over time, some parishioners have moved elsewhere, but Fr. Nicolas and I continue to attend the cathedral, which is our home.
I have been at the cathedral since I was twelve; I grew up here, as did my husband. In Europe, Nicolas knew St. John of Shanghai. At the cathedral he assisted Metropolitan Anastasius (Gribanovsky), the second First Hierarch of ROCOR.
In 1965, we both graduated from high school, and in 1969, Fr. Anthony (Grabbe) married us in the Synodal Cathedral. We were both 21 years old, and everything in our life has been connected with the Cathedral of the Sign ever since.
In 1974, Fr. Nicolas was ordained a deacon; I always went to services with him, and, at the request of our warden, Vladimir K. Galitzine, I began to sell candles once our sons started assisting in the altar and our daughter was able to sit quietly on her own.
– How did your young family live in those years?
– Six months after our wedding, I graduated from Hunter College with a BA in History and Anthropology. Nicolas became an engineer. While our children were small, I took care of them, and on Sundays we went to the cathedral together. I helped in the summer camp and in the Sunday school.
The kids went to services with us on Saturday evenings and to Liturgy on Sundays, and when they reached the age of 16, we told them that they were now free to choose whether to go to church or not.
—Nadezhda, have any of your children linked their lives with the Church?
—Our elder son Mikhail works in the civil service and, wherever he moves, he finds an Orthodox church, sings and reads during services. Our middle child Nicolas studied finance, worked in a bank, and in 1994, he moved to work in Moscow. “You taught us to love Russia!” he said to me. And he really loves Russia. During Lent, he visits monasteries and convents near Moscow. His favorite holy place is the Monastery of St. Savva of Storozhev (in Zvenigorod), and on Sundays he travels to the new Church of St. Alexander Nevsky in Istra. Our daughter Lyuba studied to be a journalist, and worked as a manager with musical groups that toured the US; she majored in languages. A deacon’s wife, she now lives in Chicago. All of our children know both Russian and English very well.
Nicolas and I normally spoke in English at home, but when our first child was born we agreed to talk only in Russian. It was not until our daughter was ten or eleven and her friends began visiting her that we started using English at home as well.
– What are some of your most memorable moments associated with the Cathedral of the Sign?
– I would rather tell you about the memories that make my heart miss a beat. First, the repose of Fr. Gelasius (Mayboroda), to whom I confessed my sins for many years. He was a joyful and peaceful spiritual father and archimandrite. Second, Metropolitan Philaret, who was very close to us, died. That era is gone, never to return.
Third, on the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 2008, Tatiana, the wife of Archpriest George Kallaur, came in worried and informed us that Metropolitan Laurus had just passed away. Although he was the First Hierarch of ROCOR, he preferred to live at Jordanville Monastery. Another era was gone forever.
And, fourth, on the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 2018, a funeral service was performed at the cathedral over our long-term warden and dear friend, Vladimir Kirillovich Golitsyn, with whom we had worked for over forty years. I will never forget those moments.
Pascha, the Nativity and the other great feasts have always been joyful and well-attended at the cathedral. The weddings were wonderful. The Church lived by services, weddings, Baptisms and namesdays. In our youth, festal meals were organized on our cathedral’s patronal feast of December 10, also on the Nativity, Pascha and the metropolitan’s namesday. In the 1960s, the whole meal consisted of tea and cake. We set tables in two halls, the hierarch alone spoke in complete silence, while everybody sat modestly and sedately. Back then no one could have imagined such big meetings and fun as at the numerous buffets and meals we have had now (before the pandemic).
Interview by Tatiana Veselkina.
Translation by Dmitry Lapa.
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