My Word for the Day: Hektarnitsa

As of 11:21 am today, Google had no links to this word except the one I am quoting. That is, Hektarnitsa:

Her biography would serve as an emblem of [a] new kind of spacial immobility coupled with an economic simplification. The hektarnitsa was a woman assigned a hectare (2.6 acres) of beet field. She was responsible for sowing, weeding, watering, and harvesting her hectare alone, by hand. In Ukraine, women ran households by mastering the nuances of caring for livestock, weaving, sewing, healing, preserving, as well as growing garden produce that almost entirely fed the family. In Kazakhstan, the hektarnitsa's workday narrowed to 2.6 acres, where she performed repetitive motions on uniform rows of a single crop.

The herktarnitsa worked hard, all of her life. She worked through her childbearing years, trying to keep up with the demands of her hectare. On most days of the growing season, she was in the field in heat or brisk wind. She stooped oer her eight-months-gone stomach to block and hoe, taking her children along with her to work the hectare because "no one could manage a hectare alone." When I asked these former hectarnitsi to write down their addresses, they pressed their hands behind their backs and said, "No, no, you write. I'll tell it to you." Their lives spared them no time for grammar. Yet, since literacy had become a primary ticket to prosperity, without education the hektarnitsa worked for the next generation, toward a personal definition of progress, trying to make something of the destiny handed to her, trying to get the children out opf the closed settlement to study, becaue "you had to study if you didn't want to work the beet fields all your life."

That's Kate Brown again, in A Biography of No Place. This time she has followed her Polish Ukranians on to their forced resettlement in Kazakhstan.