The author’s mother at age eleven, with the worried adult gaze he will grow to know well. Note the pretty bow in her hair. The year is 1956, and the place is the Soviet Union.
“IT SEEMS LIKE you don’t really know me.
“You see me through your father’s eyes.
“And sometimes I think I do not know you.”
It is my mother’s birthday, and we are in the rotating restaurant atop the Marriott Marquis. My father and Aunt Tanya, my mother’s younger sister, have sat down at our table awaiting their truffle soup and steak medium to medium well, but my mother wants ten minutes alone with me. We are sitting by the ladies’ toilet in the restaurant’s nonrevolving core, watching women pass by in their piquant suburban outfits, so much flesh on a freezing December night.
My mother’s line of thought confuses me. I know she is anxious about the memoir I am writing. They both are. “Tell us, how many more months do we have to live?” my father will ask about the impending publication date. But how can she say we do not know each other? We have spent eighteen years living in such close proximity that any non-Jewish, non-Italian, non-Asian American exposed to even an hour of such closeness would raise up her blond locks to the sky and cry, “Boundaries!”
Do I really not know my mother? She was my friend when I was a little boy. I was rarely allowed any others, because she deemed them disease carriers who could aggravate my bronchial illnesses. Cousin Victoria, the ballerina — I remember staring at her through glass back in Leningrad, the two of us smudging the square pane of a French door with our palms, coating it with our breath. How we wanted to reach out and hold hands. She was also an only child.
And so, mother and son alone, trudging through lines to get water for their underground vacation hut in Crimea, to marvel at the Swallow’s Nest Castle near Yalta, walking hand in hand through innumerable trains, train stations, town squares, mausoleums — and always talking to each other, because my Russian was advanced and curious, and she could use an advanced and curious companion. In those days, I eased her anxiety instead of provoking it.
And as for seeing her through my father’s eyes? For so long, I have adapted his world-weariness, his sarcasm, his shutki (jokes). I have tried to be him, because I was a boy and he was meant to illustrate the next step in my evolution. “Whom do you love more, your mother or your father?” was the unfair question foisted upon me by my parents in Leningrad. Unfair, because I needed my mother, needed her company and her dark hair to braid during the moments when I was too tired of reading a book. But I felt the explosive nature of my father’s love for me, the centering role I was to play in his difficult life. You can either run toward such love or run away from it. Only recently have I chosen to do neither, to stand still and watch it take its course.
But as I have grown older I have chosen my mother’s life. The endless calculations, the worries, the presentiments, and, most of all, the endless work. The sunrise-to-sundown work, even in retirement, that keeps you from fully settling up with the past. The chicken cutlets she sold me for $1.40 a piece after I had graduated from college have given birth to a thousand such cutlets, a hundred thousand, a million, each clearly marked with a price tag. The fanatic attention to detail I’m sure my father never had, not as an opera singer, not as an engineer, I now call my own. As well as the attendant worry, the fear of getting it wrong, the fear of authority. As I stroll around the grounds of an upstate historic site, the mansion of FDR’s cousin-mistress, I am already preparing that all-important question for the elderly woman behind the counter: “I’ve bought tickets to the guided tour, but could I use the bathroom now, before the tour starts?”
My mother, her ambition stifled, channeled away by history and language, has given birth to my own. The only difference is: I have no God, no family myth, to cling to, no mythmaking abilities beyond the lies I tell on the page.
“Ours was such a nice family compared to your father’s,” my mother says. “We always used diminutives with each other, Ninochka, Tanechka. We had season’s tickets to the symphony.” When announced with such regularity, the Song of the Enlightened Loving Family, triumphing over adversity and despair, begins to sound like my father’s Song of Israel, which is always holy, always incapable of wrong. Am I mad to think that love is not so easy? Or am I missing the right gene for easy love?
“And sometimes I think I do not know you,” my mother says.
I have written close to twelve hundred pages of fiction, all of it translated into Russian, and hundreds of pages of nonfiction, much of it about the experience of being a Russian child in America, some of it trapped between the pages of this very book. Even if the fictional parts were not entirely autobiographical, shouldn’t they have served as at least a partial explanation for who I am? Or were the more important parts obfuscated by the shutki? Or perhaps, scarier still, the cognitive gap between mother and son is too great; the distance from here to there, from Moscow Square to my apartment near Union Square to this revolving restaurant in Times Square, cannot be closed with words alone.
Is hers but a less angry, more bewildered version of my father’s My son, how could he leave me?
As we walk over to the table, my father already itching to discharge his own shutki at me — the ten minutes I have spent alone with my mother have raised his jealousy and his ire — I think: What if it didn’t have to be like this? What if I were born to American parents instead?
It is not an altogether idle question. It almost happened. In a way.
My mother comes from two very different breeds of inhabitants of the mighty Rus. On her father’s side, the Yasnitsky clan is descended from twelve generations of Russian Orthodox churchmen hailing from the godforsaken Kirov Region lost somewhere in Russia’s vastness, somewhere between Helsinki and Kazakhstan. Photographs of my great-grandfather, a deacon, and his brother, the archpriest of a tiny village, offer a funny contrast to my Semitic features: Each looks as if the Holy Spirit has long decamped within his transparent blue eyes; each looks beautiful and content and so far removed from the acid baths of horror in which the rest of my ancestry used to take their morning dips. The cross hanging from Archpriest Yasnitsky’s neck could have been used to crucify a medium-sized animal like a fox terrier or a young capybara. The only physical features tying together my disparate ancestry are the full-blown rabbinical beards that both churchmen are sporting.
My mother’s half Jewishness often raises a pause among literary interviewers from Israeli and American Jewish publications. “And,” they ask, “Jewish on which side?” The subtext here is that Judaism is a matrilineal religion; hence if my mother’s mother were to be a gentile, I would be a “Jewish writer” in name only. I like to dawdle for a bit, to allow the worst to cross (quite literally) the minds of my Hebraic interlocutors, before revealing to everyone’s relief that it was my grandfather who was the big gentile and my mother’s mother was of Jewish stock.
And was she ever.
The Nirman family hails from the small town of Dubrovno in what is now the independent dictatorship of Belarus, sandwiched between Poland and Russia. The nearest city is Vitebsk, Marc Chagall’s birthplace and muse. Orthodox Jews, dripping with prayer shawls and mysticism, once graced both sides of the Dnieper River, which runs through Dubrovno like a minor Mississippi. Unlike my father’s ancestry of laborers, the Nirmans are shtetl royalty, descendants of a long line of rabbis.
One of the Dubrovno villagers leaves for America between the wars, where, inevitably, he makes a killing in some minor trade. He comes back to Dubrovno to claim a bride, my great-grandmother Seina. They hit it off, but then the poor schmuck lights a cigar on a Friday evening in front of my rabbinical great-great-grandfather. Thou shalt not spark up a Montecristo on the Sabbath is yet another prohibition of our overwhelming faith. The rabbi cries “Never!” to the marriage proposal and throws the suitor out of his house.
“If not for that cigar,” my mother tells me, “we could have been born in America and not had the tsoris [Yiddish: “trouble”] we had in that Russia.”
I’m pretty sure that’s not how lineages work, but perhaps if my great-grandmother Seina had emigrated to America with her cigar-chomping suitor, some strange, distant iteration of a Gary could have been cobbled together in a Chicago or a Burbank, versed in baseball lore and tax strategies. If the many-universe hypothesis that the scientists are working on is true, perhaps that Gary could meet this Gary, maybe after I’ve given a reading at a Jewish center in Chicagoland or LA. Perhaps alternate-Gary would come up to me and say, “I’m Russian, too!” And I would say, “Ah, vy govorite po-russki?” And he would say “Huh?” and explain to me that, no, he doesn’t speak Russian, but his great-grandmother was from Dub-something, a town near Vitebsk. And I would explain that Vitebsk’s not even really in Russia, it is in Belarus, and that what alternate-Gary truly is is an American Jew or, better yet, an American, which is a fine enough identity that one doesn’t have to add Russian or Belarusian or anything else to it. And then we would split the difference and go out for soy-crusted chicken wings at a local tapas bar, where I would learn that alternate-Gary’s niece, a budding essayist, is applying to my department at Columbia.
After the American goes back to his star-spangled land with another local maiden, Great-grandma Seina takes second prize in the marital sweepstakes: She marries the village butcher. The good life ensues in a big house with a garden and apple trees and many children. My grandmother Galya, the one who fed me cheese in exchange for my first novel, is born around 1911. When she is ten years old Galya is given the task of watching over the family’s youngest daughter during the night. The child falls out of the crib and dies. To compound the horror, her parents make the ten-year-old attend her sister’s funeral. She never sets foot in a cemetery again. For the rest of her life, Grandmother Galya is haunted by the fear of being buried alive. For the rest of her life, my mother is also haunted by the fear of being buried alive. Being a modern man, I take this deeply ancestral fear and turn it into something more practical: I am afraid of being buried within a sealed metal container such as a subway car or an airplane.
Time is passing. The Jews of my mother’s family are getting ready for death, or the labor camps, or a little bit of both.
As on my father’s side, a similar pattern emerges: One of the children, a girl, becomes a quick study, masters Russian, the language of power (as opposed to Yiddish, which is the language of Jews). Grandma Galya, with her gold medal from the Russian gymnasium and her dream of becoming a journalist, makes her way up to Leningrad, where she enrolls at the Printing Technical College. There, she will meet Dmitry Yasnitsky, my grandfather, son of the Russian Orthodox deacon, another hardworking provincial beaver who will one day become an economist at the prestigious Leningrad Mining Institute, even as Grandma will find an editorial perch at Evening Leningrad.
The daughter of rabbis is about to marry the son of priests, and my mother will soon be on her way to the ruined postwar country that awaits the first warm flicker of her eyelids. That country has a name.
“Dude, where are you from?”
I am sitting for an interview for some kind of MTV-like network, an interview that will never be aired.
“The Soviet Union,” I say.
A beat. The interviewer looks out from beneath his hair. “And, like, what is that?”
What is the Soviet Union? Or, more accurately, what was it? This is not an outlandish question. That particular nation passed away more than twenty years ago, a millennium in our speedy times. A generation of Russians has grown up without singing “The Soviet tankmen are ready for action! / Sons of their Great Motherland” or knowing that, before yoga, waiting in line for an eggplant for three hours could constitute a meditative experience.
To explain the Soviet Union, I will tell the story of my great-uncle Aaron, on my mother’s side. Conveniently enough, his travails will also lead to my mother’s first memory.
When the advancing German army stopped by my grandmother’s village of Dubrovno, in what is now Belarus (Grandmother Galya had long before left for Leningrad), and began herding the Jews together, sixteen-year-old Aaron’s parents faced a particular problem: Their little girl, Basya, couldn’t walk. The Germans shot all the invalids right away. They did not want the girl to die frightened and alone in her wheelchair. So they told their son Aaron to run away through the vegetable gardens and into the forest, while they would die quickly with Basya. Instead of just herding everyone into the ghetto, the German troops decided they could be more proactive and make a few house calls. Aaron ended up hiding in the family attic, where he watched his sister and parents being shot dead in the courtyard. His memory: the ticking of the clock as the Germans drew their rifles and, also, his fingers going numb because he was clutching a piece of wood as he watched.
After the Germans moved on, Aaron hoofed through the fields to a happy local chorus of “Run, Yid, run!” Other, more sympathetic Christians fed him, and eventually he joined up with a Belorussian partisan force in the forests around Dubrovno. At this point his major disadvantage was that he had only one shoe, the other having been lost to a sprint through the snow. He became what they called a “son of the regiment” (syn polka), the youngest of a ragtag band of fighters. The partisans were eventually absorbed into the Red Army proper and began to beat the Germans back toward Berlin.
And this is where Great-uncle Aaron’s problems really began.
They began the way problems so often do in Russia, with poems.
When not busy shooting Germans, Uncle Aaron wrote poems. No one really knows what they were about, but those poems did catch the eye of the girlfriend of Aaron’s superior, a corporal.
Once the corporal found out that his girl was Private Aaron’s muse, the young poet was arrested and sentenced under the USSR’s Article 58, counterrevolutionary activity, in Aaron’s case, the praising of German technology. (“He really was impressed by German tanks,” my mother says.)
And so the boy who watched his parents and sister slaughtered before his eyes at age sixteen, who ambushed German soldiers on the roads of Belorussia by age seventeen, came out of the war at age eighteen to collect the typical reward of the era, ten years of hard labor in a Siberian lagpunkt, or work camp.
My mother’s favorite thing in the world growing up was sweetened condensed milk (sgushchyonka), a cousin of the Latin American dulce de leche. Among the oversweetened pantheon of Russian desserts, it would become my childhood favorite as well.
In the labor camps foodstuffs like sgushchyonka served as currency — a good way not to get raped or forced into the worst kinds of labor — and so my grandfather would cart up to twenty of those iconic blue cans of Soviet condensed milk to the post office to send to his brother-in-law Aaron. My mother, on the other hand, was allowed only one tablespoon of condensed milk before bedtime.
My mother’s first memory: walking through the ruined streets of postwar Leningrad with her aristocratically thin, ever-ailing economist father, a cigarette stamped permanently into his mouth, as he dragged along twenty cans of sgushchyonka to send to her uncle, the prisoner, thinking, How lucky Uncle Aaron must be that he gets to eat twenty cans of condensed milk!
There is a picture of my mother at the time. She is about four years old and as chubby as I’ve ever seen her, smiling underneath a pleasant brown bob. Born months after the war ended to a family with decent connections and a decent flat, she will one day join that ever-ephemeral phenomenon, the Russian middle class. The picture is one of several of my mother being young and happy — at the Thanksgiving dinner she takes me to my upstairs bedroom with these photos and says, “Look how happy my family looked by comparison to his,” meaning my father’s. Indeed, there’s nothing special about the photo, except that its upper-right corner has been torn off, and one can discern a crescent of needle holes. Why did someone take needle and thread to this innocent image?
This photograph was “sewn into the case file” (podshyto k delu) of my great-uncle Aaron when he was in the camps. At one point, my grandmother had sent a letter with the photograph of my mother to my uncle Aaron in Siberia, and the camp’s administration had found the beaming face of a four-year-old important enough to sew into a prisoner’s case file.
Perhaps the greatest unanswered question I have toward the entire Land of the Soviets is this: Who did the sewing?
In a country recovering from the greatest war humanity has ever known, with twenty-six million in their graves (my grandfather Isaac included), who took the time out of a starving, snowy day to carefully hand sew the tiny photo of a smiling four-year-old, my mother, into the “criminal” case file of a man — a boy, really, by today’s standards — who had watched his family die just half a decade ago, who had fought the enemy back across the border, and who had subsequently been imprisoned for writing poetry and admiring a German tank? So much information is open to us, the past is ready and accessible and Googleable, but what I wouldn’t give to know the person whose job it was to make sure my mother’s photo made the rounds of Stalin’s labor camps, only to end up, as Great-uncle Aaron fortunately did, in a cozy house along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, minus the four fingers on his right hand, lost to a timber saw in Siberia during his decade of savage and pointless labor.
My mother. With her dreams of being buried alive. With her meticulous collection of family photos, some filed under the World War II subheading “Uncle Simon, Wife, Murdered Children,” written in Russian in her equally meticulous script.
My mother, in the first despairing bloom of youth, looking, as she would say, ozabochena, a combination of worried and moody and maybe lovesick, a Soviet-era bow crowning the top of her puffy, full-lipped face as if to inform us that the woods behind her do not belong to a sunny summer camp in the Catskills. It is 1956. She is eleven years old in a striped summer dress, resembling, already, a worried young Jewish adult.
My beaming mother in her red Young Pioneer tie, ready to serve the Soviet state with the common Pioneer cheer I am always ready! shouted at the top of her lungs. “I never took it off,” she says of the red tie. “After I got into the Pioneers, I never took it off. Even in the summer! Such a great Pioneer I was!”
My mother, serious and dreamy, behind a childhood piano. Her mother ties her to the piano bench with a towel so that she won’t escape to jump rope with the kids screaming for her outside her window. Eventually the music will seep in. She will go to music school and later teach piano in a Leningrad kindergarten. She will marry a man who wants to be an opera singer, who once went to music school just like her, although she will deem his school inferior.
My mother, off camera, in our Moscow Square apartment, tossing from a nightmare in one room while I am tossing from asthma and a nightmare in the other. She’s dreaming she left her notes at home and now the kindergarten class won’t be ready for a special performance. I’m dreaming I forgot some part of me, too, a toy version of Buratino, the Russian Pinocchio, left on a platform in Sevastopol, Crimea, left for some lucky boy or girl.
My mother in our first American co-op apartment, dark brown curls, backless dress, playing the shiny Red October upright piano we had brought at great cost from Leningrad. Atop the piano, a golden menorah with a fake emerald at its center alongside a white vase filled with chalky ceramic flowers. My mother looks hesitant before the keys. She is already throwing herself into her American work, work that will lead her from the title of Typist to that of Fiscal Administrator for a large Manhattan-based charity. The Red October, useless now, will be given to Goodwill in return for a three-hundred-dollar tax deduction.
“Two girls,” my mother says, holding up the photo of her playing the piano in Leningrad, the dreaming, distracted child, and the other of her, a single-minded immigrant mother, behind the Red October in Queens, New York. “One as I was and one as I became.”
I have known only one of those girls. My dear immigrant mother, my fellow anxious warrior. The one she became. The other one I have tried to know. Through the stories, the photographs, the archival evidence, the shared love of condensed milk, the Red Pioneer tie I never got to wear but that graced her neck so proudly. I have known only one of those girls. But, please believe me, I have known her.