Disabled Author Wins Literary Prize
1 hour, 47 minutes ago

By MARIA DANILOVA, Associated Press Writer

MOSCOW - Afflicted with severe cerebral palsy, Ruben David Gonzalez
Gallego was separated from his mother as a baby and shunted off into the
grim world of Soviet orphanages.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040208/ap_en_ot/disa
bled_author_1
AP Photo



Yet somehow he survived, found his mother after 30 years, and launched a
career as a writer - an endeavor that recently won him the prestigious
Russian Booker Prize for "White on Black," a heart-wrenching account of
his travails.


"The book was outstanding not only as a book, but as a human life," said
Igor Shaitanov, secretary of the Booker literary competition, which in
December gave Gallego its $15,000 prize for 2003.


The Russian-language book, published by Limbus Press of St. Petersburg
with an initial print run of just 3,000, was pecked out on a computer
with a single index finger - one of just two fingers Gallego can
control.


"White on Black" lifts the Russian taboo on discussing disabilities and
reveals the cruelty of a system that warehouses the physically and
mentally impaired.


That system forced Gallego, now 35, to learn at an early age that if he
were to survive, he would have to fight.


"If you don't have arms or legs, you are either a hero or a dead man,"
he wrote.


A grandson of Ignacio Gallego, a prominent leader of the Spanish
Communist Party, Gallego was born in the Kremlin hospital in 1968 to a
Spanish mother and a Venezuelan father who were both studying in Moscow.
His twin died at birth, while Gallego was diagnosed with an acute form
of cerebral palsy.


Gallego remained with his mother for just a year and a half, and much of
the time he spent in hospitals. One day, his mother got a message from a
hospital.


"They called her and said that the child was dead," Gallego said in a
telephone interview from his current home in Madrid, Spain.


In fact, the infant had been consigned to an orphanage, one of the
prison-like institutions where Soviet society hid its disabled children
and adults from public view.


Suffering from malnutrition and a lack of basics such as a wheelchair,
which forced him to crawl to get about, Gallego spent his childhood
being shuttled from one orphanage to another. Then, when he was a
teenager, officials tried to transfer him to an old-age home.


"In orphanages at least, there are caretakers who would put a spoonful
of food in your mouth if you were paralyzed," Gallego said. "But in
old-age homes, which receive scarce funding, someone like me, who can
neither walk nor control his arms, was sure to die of starvation."


Fortunately, Gallego wrote, the head of the home refused to take the boy
in, assuming he would die but then couldn't be buried by an old-age home
under Soviet law until he reached age 18.


"Where am I going to keep him these two years? The refrigerators are
broken," Gallego overheard the director say.


He was sent to yet another orphanage, this time in southern Russia.
There he found better food and education and was able to graduate from
high school.


"That orphanage was paradise, compared to everything I had experienced
before. We had potatoes, we had butter on bread, we had sweet tea," he
said.





After the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, launched his
"restructuring" campaign in the late 1980s, Gallego was finally able to
escape the world of orphanages and began a life of his own.

"Perestroika brought chaos, and our institutions, which were supposed to
be off-limits for the common people, could now receive visitors,"
Gallego said.

That opened up a whole new world for Gallego. He got married twice and
fathered two daughters.

He even traveled to the United States on a special exchange program, in
which Americans with disabilities explained their experiences in getting
greater rights such as access to buildings and transportation.

"But what could they teach us?" Gallego said with a sigh. "There was
nothing of that kind in Russia."

Retelling the trip in his book, he wrote: "I can talk a long time about
America. I can endlessly tell about the individual wheelchairs,
'talking' elevators, smooth roads, ramps, and buses equipped with
elevators. About blind programmers and paralyzed scientists. About how I
cried, when I was told that I had to go back to Russia and give up the
wheelchair."

There are up to 11 million disabled among Russia's 144 million people,
but they are largely invisible. Streets, public transport and residences
are not geared to their needs.

Three years ago, Gallego found his mother, Aurora. She was a
correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in the Czech capital
of Prague, and he tracked her down after a Spanish film director
arranged a "reality show" project to help his search.

He moved to Prague to live with his mother, and started painstakingly
typing his book.

When his mother was assigned to Madrid, he followed her there.

"If my Mom moved to live in China, without any doubt I would have moved
there after her," Gallego said.