Just before Halloween, Laura Cowan summoned Baba Yaga the witch to her son Alec’s classroom.

Cranky Baba Yaga, the third-graders learned, haunts Russian folklore, flying through the air in her mortar, steering with her pestle, and devouring or comforting her guests – depending on her mood – at her cabin suspended high on four chicken legs.

“We do the Baba Yaga for Halloween, the ‘Nutcracker’ and Father Christmas for Christmas,” and a special Siberian tiger activity in the spring that marks Alec’s adoption from Russia in 1998.

In March of that year, the Orono woman and her husband, Richard May, flew from Maine to Eastern Europe to visit an orphanage in the Siberian village of Ussuriysk, on the eastern border of China. The roads to the “baby home” were deeply cracked, but the home itself was warm and austere, recalled Cowan. There was a playground, but no grass. There was warm soup for lunch, but no hot water for baths.

“I felt as if he had the best care that these people could provide,” she said of the no-frills home to about 80 Russian children waiting to be adopted. Among them was 13-month-old Alec.

The couple stayed in Russia for three weeks and then, after months of filling out paperwork, waiting for responses, reviewing referrals and holding their breath, they took the unusually small child home to Maine.

Cowan and May eased Alec, nicknamed Allyeshka, into American culture. But allowing Russia to fade into their son’s past was not in their plan.

“I feel like all culture is important to me,” said Cowan, a University of Maine English professor. “Literature and song and language. But I really want Allyeshka to be proud of himself, and by cultivating Russian culture, it helps him to cultivate himself.”

To that end, Cowan, 53, completed Russian language classes taught by Russian native Natalia Abramova at the Downeast Russian School in Bangor last spring, and she is considering joining Abramova for the fall session that began last week.

Since 1991, Allyeshka is among more than 120 children adopted from Russia by Maine families through Maine Adoption Placement Services, one of the leading international adoption services in Maine and the first adoption service in the United States to offer adoptions from Russia. So far this year, 10 Russian children have been adopted by Mainers through MAPS.

Russia is second only to China for MAPS adoptions. The agency also works with India, Kazakhstan, Peru, Guatemala and Nepal. According to a recent Associated Press report, China leads Russia and Guatemala among foreign sources of U.S. adoptees.

“It used to be that Russia was our busiest program,” said Jen McKane of MAPS, “but because of changes in Russia with the processing, things have slowed down. Families now have to make two trips to Russia … and the paperwork is a little more difficult.” She estimates it takes one and a half to two years to complete an adoption from Russia and two years for an adoption from China.

Age restrictions also may be a factor, McKane said. China rejects potential parents if they are more than 55 years old. The state does not allow domestic adoption if there is more than a 45-year difference between the child’s age and that of the oldest parent.

“As far as Russia goes,” McKane says, “there isn’t any [age] that’s set in stone. We have a policy that is no more than 45 years between the youngest parent and the child.”

Cowan recalls trying to start a family more than a decade ago. After marrying May in 1995, the newlyweds had trouble conceiving. Cowan even took a semester off from teaching to focus on having a baby, with no luck.

“We thought we could control this,” says Cowan, who refused fertility treatment, having watched friends undergo the expensive and emotionally wracking process with no results.

Cowan and May, owner of Orono’s Evermay plant nursery, began sifting through “boxes and boxes and boxes” of adoption paperwork and attending adoption conferences.

They weighed domestic adoption against foreign, settling on Russia because the baby would fit into the Maine racial makeup, and because of the age factor. At the time of Alec’s adoption, Cowan was 44 and May was 51.

“Eastern Europeans revere elders,” Cowan explains, noting that some biological mothers “look at a picture [of the potential adoptive mother] and say, ‘I’m not going to give my child to a grandmother.'”

Working with Adoption Advocates in Vermont, Cowan and May filled out stacks of applications and went through four home and lifestyle evaluations conducted by social workers – “I was such a nervous wreck,” Cowan recalled – and then waited for referrals.

Finally, on Feb. 12, 1998, the couple received word about a little boy in Ussuriysk, Siberia, orphaned after the death of his mother. The next month, Cowan and May came face-to-face with Alec and took him home.

Two years later, imagine the couple’s surprise when Cowan naturally conceived a baby boy, Cole.

Cowan visited Cole’s classroom, too, to tell Baba Yaga’s story and teach the youngsters their names in Russian and some vocabulary.

“When the kids started asking me about more information, I knew it!” said Cowan.

Cowan was one of Abramova’s spring-semester students. During one session in the spring, three adult students arranged notebooks and flashcards at desks in the room Abramova used as her classroom. The room was decorated with matryoshka nesting dolls, a map of Europe, and brightly colored posters with pictures of animals and their names in Russian and English.

That day, Abramova asked them to open their course books to Page 46, No. 24. Abramova, seated at a large desk piled with notebooks and papers, called on “Laurel.”

“Oh, no,” moaned Laurel Anderson, 37, who had just come from work as a nurse at St. Joseph Hospital. Anderson, still in her scrubs, sharpened her focus on the passage.

“Word by word,” cheered Abramova. “You can do it.”

Frustration and exhaustion are normal in Abramova’s adult classes. The schedule is designed for adults who work during the day, for one thing, and secondly, “Russian grammar is so complicated,” Abramova said, but still they come.

For the fall session, Abramova is offering a beginner’s class, an intermediate class, and individual lessons by appointment, charging $10 per hour for group sessions. She will kick off her winter session in mid-January.

“When my daughter, [Nina], was 3,” Abramova said, “I realized that for her not to forget Russian, she needs to see other people talking Russian. So I was thinking about opening up a school just for the kids, but then adult people got involved, so I teach all of them.”

Abramova’s hour-long classes, which are held at her home on Union Street, are billed as Russian language lessons, but a visit to one of last session’s classes revealed what keeps parents coming back. After an exercise on grammatical gender – “How do you say, ‘my Russian female teacher’? Does your brain hurt yet?” – Abramova fired into an oration on Russian iconography and orthodox Christianity.

Describing the reverse perspective in Russian stained-glass windows, Abramova said, “It transforms the idea of God. God is not there. He’s right here. Before the 18th century, God didn’t live in the clouds.

“Do you know how Christianity came to Russia?” she continued. Roman Catholicism was too serious. In Islam, drinking was not allowed, “which was no good to Russians,” quipped the former University of Virginia biologist, adding that Russian Orthodox Christianity incorporates many pagan rituals because of Russian tribal influences.

In the children’s session, which also is geared toward English speakers, things work a little differently.

“With the little guys,” Abramova said, “it takes a lot of effort to keep them focused.” So they play games that are keyed in to translation. In one game, Abramova described in Russian characteristics of a monster for her four young pupils – a long tail, sharp teeth, stripes – and asked the children to draw the monster.

“You can’t ask a kid to translate sentence by sentence,” she said, “but they can draw.”

Abramova’s technique is unique. Hers is one of few Russian classes in the state that is designed for English speakers. “Ninety-nine percent target Russian-speaking kids,” said the Moscow native, who also has a 17-year-old son, Eugene. “To teach English-speaking kids, they say, ‘It’s not going to work, it’s way too hard and way too boring for them.'” But Abramova taught 18 students last term – four of them children – and has about 15 students enrolled for the fall term.

At home, Cowan picks up where Abramova leaves off, playing games with the boys that teach numbers, vocabulary and colors.

“I wanted my son to be really proud,” Cowan said. “I worry sometimes. He has said to me when he’s mad, ‘You’re not my real mom.’ And I say, ‘I most certainly am, and you’re going to do what I just told you to,'” she said with a laugh. “He’s the best thing that has ever happened in all of our lives.”

An hour earlier, Anderson had sat at that dining room table, waiting for Abramova’s class to begin. Anderson, 37 and divorced, is a MAPS client waiting to adopt a baby girl from Russia, and was taking the spring course for her future visits to orphanages in the country.

Abramova’s nimble daughter, Nina, climbed onto the back of a dining room chair, the stiff skirt of her pink tutu bouncing with her steps, and Anderson instinctively moved her foot to the chair’s base to anchor it.

“I’m going to expose her to [Russian culture and language],” Anderson said of her future daughter, “but I’m really going to let her choose. … But I do want her to be exposed to her culture and other people from Russia just so she feels she has those roots as well.”

For information about Natalia Abramova’s Russian classes, visit www.downeastrussianschool.wtcsites.com. Tracy Collins can be reached at collinstb@gmail.com.