“I have this constant awareness that I have my foot in each culture but I don’t wholly belong to either,” Arthur Velker says.
Velker (33) moved to Ireland as a child from Omsk, a city in Siberia, Russia.
“Omsk is about 1,500 miles east of Moscow. It’s three hours by plane, which is actually about the same distance from Dublin to Moscow as the crow flies.”
During the Covid-19 pandemic Velker moved to Co Mayo to spend a year focused on his writing.
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On arrival, he says he walked into a coffee shop and a local woman was staring at him.
“Eventually she comes over and we had a nice chat and she said, ‘Jaysus I thought you were foreign before you started talking’ [Velker speaks with a broad north Dublin accent]. I said, ‘I was born in Russia’. She said, ‘I knew it. You just look different’.”
Velker emphasises that the woman clearly meant no harm and had spoken to him “in the nicest possible way that she could have phrased it”.
Nevertheless, for Velker it was another reminder of how caught between two cultures he has always felt.
“I like to think that it gives me an ability to look at things from the outside in, which helps sometimes, but then occasionally there is this gnawing self-awareness that, I’m an outsider, whatever that means in this day and age.”
Speaking of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, he says: “It’s a great tragedy that Ukraine has become the frontline for an ideological war, mostly because the cost is human life. I have a relative who lost his life fighting for the Russian side, a very young man. And my heart bleeds for Ukrainian people who lost family and friends in this tragedy. It is a very sad situation.”
Due to visa restrictions Velker’s family were not able to return to Russia for 18 years after they left, although Velker has since been back a few times.
“When I went back to Russia I’m identified as a European or American before they hear me speak fluent Russian. There may be something in my appearance or maybe I’ve spent too long living here and all the visible traces of my Russianness have completely evaporated.”
Velker thinks he knows what it is about him that suggests to people in Russia that he has lived abroad for so long.
“I think it is probably smiling to strangers in the street. Which is not necessarily something that you will ever encounter in Russia or in eastern Europe. It’s not necessarily because people are just constantly angry all the time, which you might be led to believe, but because it requires a lot more to breach that initial veneer for somebody to express themselves in an outwardly warm way towards you.”
Cabra was probably the best possible place that I could have ended up in
— Arthur Velker
His parents left Russia in 2001 when Velker was nine. His recollections of life in Russia are fragmentary, but what really sticks in his mind is how fraught with tension everyday life was.
“People were finding it very difficult to get by, and there was a lot of political friction. People were incredibly frustrated to make ends meet. This produced a palpable sense of unease when you’re going about your daily life.”
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The family initially moved to Belgium, though Velker was told they were just going on holiday.
“It was quite precarious because I think that my parents didn’t have a concrete plan of where we were going. We were in between the social welfare system and the registration for migrants and asylum seekers. So we didn’t always have a place to stay. We would occasionally spend the night in a bus terminal or on a park bench.”
At the time Velker was not aware that the family did not have anywhere to stay as he said his parents, “always had a way of making it look like it was some kind of adventure or amazing camping trip. A lot of the time I was grumpy but very much oblivious to what was happening”.
Velker is not exactly sure why his parents decided to move to Ireland – he thinks it might be because they had heard while in Belgium that Ireland had a more favourable system towards asylum seekers. The family arrived in Ireland in 2001 and, after a few months with other migrant families in a B&B in Co Tipperary, settled in Cabra in Dublin.
“We were part of the first wave of migrants. It was a completely new experience to Irish people to have these people from all these different backgrounds come in. So naturally there was a lot of curiosity and questions, a lot of which obviously came from a good place.”
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Within the first two weeks of attending school in Cabra, Velker was being invited to playdates in his classmates’ homes and meeting their parents.
“Cabra was probably the best possible place that I could have ended up in.”
To this day many of Velker’s close friends are people that he met at school in Cabra.
After finishing secondary school Velker became the first member of his family to attend university, reading journalism at Dublin City University. Velker went on to do a master’s degree in geopolitics and the global economy at University College Dublin. He then worked for numerous Irish publications, though writing fiction had always been his dream. Eventually he saved up enough money to focus on his writing and his first book, Going to Zossen: Or the Capitulation of Vasily Mikhailovich, was published earlier this year.
Today Velker lives in Wicklow with his wife Christine, whom he met during his master’s. The pair have recently moved back to Ireland after living in London for three years.
“London was never going to work out for me long term as someone who enjoys peace and quiet.”
When thinking about his identity Velker said, “I’m 70 per cent Irish and maybe 30 per cent Russian.”
We would like to hear from people who have moved to Ireland in the past 10 years. To get involved, email newtotheparish@irishtimes.com or tweet @newtotheparish
