remembering anna.

Tonight I remembered Anna Politkovskaya with 300 other New Yorkers in a small auditorium across the street from the holiday-colored Empire State building.

The story of Politkovskaya's commitment to reporting human rights abuses in Russia, and of her contracted killing in Moscow this October has worked my imagination over. I have been planning to attend this talk since it was announced last month, but before tonight, I don't think I had any idea how much it would affect me to hear her work read aloud by such literary luminaries as Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, Dana Priest of the Washington Post, and novelist Francine Prose -- no idea that I would lose my breath at her description of old women making themselves smaller at the sound of falling bombs, of two Chechen newlyweds, happy though in a house with appliances and no electricity, faucets and no running water.

I cried. I admit, I cried as I watched her Chechen traveling companion, translator and friend speak to David Remnick about why Politkovskaya's "heroism...did not end when an article was published," or that there was so slim a chance of finding out who ordered her murder. I felt ashamed at how little I knew about the war in Chechnya, and ashamed to laugh when Remnick quietly commented with irony, after discussing Politkovskaya's last, unfinished article about torture, how surprising it was, "..a civilized country, resorting to torture."

Some of the readers got choked up, too, and I was surprised to see people on stage lose their composure. The feeling in the air was tangible; the romantic in me wants to believe that all of us in the audience must have felt something similar during those ninety minutes, though we had no real connection to this woman. It was a very powerful night.