Lyuboy Niklaevna "Luba" Jackson

Lyubov Nikolaevna 'Luba' Jackson (née Kravchenko), 95, of Maumelle, died in her sleep on Saturday, August 29, 2021.  She was the only child of Nikolai Vasilievich Kravchenko and Vera Arkhipovna Shevchenko, having been born September 28, 1925 in Novomikhaylovskoe, a small settlement on the River Kuban in the far south of Russia.  The daughter of a Cossack noble family dispossessed and partly massacred during the revolution, her early life was one of hardship and frequent hunger as she witnessed her grandfather's persecution by the Stalinist regime, saw her father die of typhus in 1932, and moved from her home village to the town of Azov where her widowed mother worked in a stocking factory.  Her memories from that time were not without joy, however; she fondly recalled an evening playing cards by candlelight with two older girls in an abandoned manor house and a ride hitched with a friendly Cossack who gave her raw egg and sugar while she rode with him in his cart.

The young Lyubov Nikolaevna learned German at school, delighted in the poetry of Pushkin, and planned to train as a mathematics teacher when she went to university, but in 1942 Nazi forces occupied the Kuban and she was sent west by train to serve as forced labour in Germany.  She never saw her family again.  Upon arrival, rather than being sent to the factories or the fields, she had the good fortune to be placed in the household of Dr. Robert Stadler and his family in Heidelberg, serving as a housemaid and Russian instructor to the doctor; the Stadlers would remain lifelong friends.  She remained in Heidelberg after the war and on May 9, 1948 she married James Jackson, a member of the American occupying forces, and soon afterwards immigrated to America.  Her only child, Gloria, was born the following year.

Lyubov - now known as Luba - James, and Gloria were one of only two Russian families in Little Rock in the early 1950s before James's career in the department of the interior sent them across the U.S., moving between state capitols every few months.  They eventually settled in Sacramento, California, then moved to Texas after James's retirement, and finally returned to Arkansas where they built a house in the recently-founded community of Maumelle in 1985.  During these years Luba honed her already razor-sharp card-playing skills, read voraciously and critiqued mysteries (written, of course, in English, her third language), and realised a childhood dream by learning to quilt.  Many of her quilts, which followed traditional Ozark patterns, were subsequently exhibited and sold at the Arkansas Territorial Museum.

In Maumelle, Luba was a pillar of the Newcomers' Club - long outlasting any definition of 'newcomer' - and a regular feature at card nights across the town.  She mothered many generations of dachshunds, once cut down an apple tree to spite the squirrels who had been stealing from it, and remained sharp-witted, outspoken, and wise to the end.  She is survived and remembred by her daughter, Gloria, and son-in-law, Kenneth Williams, of Maumelle; her grandson, Kelsey Jackson Williams, and granddaughter-in-law, Dawn Hollis, of Crail, Scotland; and her two great-grandchildren, Vera and Sorley Jackson-Hollis of Crail.

At Luba's request, there will be no funeral service, but her ashes will be scattered in the Arkansas River, there to be carried to the ocean, and so, in the fullness of time, to find their way back to the Black Sea, and the home of her childhood.