The Russian card game is called Durak, or The Fool. The object is to get rid of all of one’s cards, lest one be labeled The Fool. In this photo, my father’s hand is stronger than mine.
THE NEXT YEAR I get the present every boy wants. A circumcision.
At Solomon Schechter I have been given an appropriately sacrificial Hebrew name: Yitzhak, or Isaac. And so the knife is drawn at Coney Island Hospital, Orthodox men davening out a blessing in the adjoining room, a sedation mask placed over my mouth (perfect for an asthmatic boy with an anxiety disorder), and then the public hospital walls — green on green on green on green — disappear to be replaced by a dream where the horrible things lovingly perpetrated upon Emmanuelle in a Hong Kong brothel are done to me by the men in black hats.
And then the pain.
Mama, Papa, where are you?
And then the layers of pain.
Mama, Papa, help.
And then the layers of pain and humiliation.
My mother has cut a hole in my underwear so that my broken penis will not have to touch polyester. I have been transferred from my army cot to my parents’ bed. I lie there with my ruined genital exposed to the outside world, and shockingly enough people come to visit, all of my relatives come to see the awful thing I have between my legs. “Nu, how do you feel?” they ask wolfishly.
“Bol’no,” I say. It hurts.
“Zato evreichik!” they cry in approval. But you’re a little Jew now!
I cover up with the book I have at my side, All Rome, making a little tent over myself. What I’ve been staring at since coming home from the hospital is one of Pietro da Cortona’s oils, Rape of the Sabine Women. The women are not being raped in the contemporary sense, of course, but rather being abducted by the first generation of Roman men, their little children weeping at their feet, parts of their breasts exposed à la Emmanuelle in Hong Kong. And these men in their tunics and their helmets, they are as strong and swarthy as my father. And I am as pale and helpless as—
I’m not suggesting what I seem to be suggesting here. Only that it has all come full circle to this. The Stinky Russian Bear, the second most hated boy in first and soon to be second grade of Hebrew school (I’ll get to the most hated boy shortly), is lying, his crotch exposed, in his parents’ bed with what feels like razor blades cutting through his penis, over and over again. (It goes without saying that the procedure at the public hospital did not go well.) There will be creatures in horror movies in my near future, the softshell crabs of Ridley Scott’s Alien the most visually accomplished ones, but this baroque chiaroscuro of dried blood and thread will never find equal. And, to this day, whenever I see a naked blade, I shudder because I know what it can do to a boy of eight.
We’ve all done what we’ve had to since coming here. My mother has slaved in an overheated watch factory in Queens, my father has studied English and the other languages of the day, COBOL and Fortran, painstakingly. Our apartment is littered with IBM punch cards from my father’s computer classes, which I handle with the same awe as I do the free Honeycomb license plates, intrigued as much by their crisp, beige, American feel as by the words and phrases my father has written upon them, English on one side, Russian on the other. I remember, for some reason, the following words: “industry” (promyshlennost’), “teapot” (chainik), “heart attack” (infarkt), “symbolism” (simvolizm), “mortgage” (zaklad), and “ranch” (rancho).
Still, we didn’t come to this country just to one day get a zaklad for our rancho, did we? It wasn’t all about the money. We came to be Jews, right? Or at least my father did. I didn’t really have any feeling on the subject one way or another. And now there has to be simvolizm. And that’s why I’ve been cut so brutally, to be more like the children who hate me so much at school, who hate me more than I will ever be hated for the rest of my life. They hate me because I come from the country our new president will soon declare to be the “Evil Empire,” giving rise to the endless category of movies beginning with the word “Red”—Red Dawn, Red Gerbil, Red Hamster. “Commie!” they shout, with a jolly push into a soft Hebrew school wall. “Russki!”
But I got cut down there for you! I want to shout back at them. I left Latin Lenin in Moscow Square just to get this circumcision. I’m a Jew like you, and doesn’t that matter more than where I was born? Why won’t you share a sticky Fruit Roll-Up with me?
It is hard to question the choices my parents made during the long and strange days of immigration, and I think they mostly did all right given the circumstances. But allow me to travel up to the ceiling of our Kew Gardens one-bedroom, the way I frequently did during asthma attacks when I felt myself lifted out of my deoxygenated body, allow me to look down at the boy with his little toy, Chewie from Star Wars missing his right arm, and then his other little toy, the one so broken and deformed that for two years every act of urination has to be done through gritted teeth, the one framed by a genital-sized hole in his underwear, and allow me to ask the pertinent question: What the fuck?
And I know the answer, the fairly reasonable one, that my parents have to questions of this caliber: “But we didn’t know.”
Or, a more pathetic refugee one attributed to my mother: “We were told to do it.”
Or a less reasonable one, the one I would attribute to my father: “But you have to be a man.”
And now Yona Metzger, chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel: “It is a stamp, a seal on the body of a Jew.”
In school, my penis is trying to put on a brave face. It can’t tell anyone what happened or they’ll make fun of its owner, Igor, or Gary, or whatever. But if they push The Refugee Formerly Known as Igor penis-first into the wall on the line to the lunchroom, well … ouch.
I’m trying to put a brave face on myself, too. I begin to write out my first lies in the new language.
GARY SHTEYNGART SSS [SOLOMON SCHECHTER SCHOOL]
April 31 [sadly, there are only thirty days in April], 1981 Class 2C
ESSAY: SPRING
Spring is here The weather is warm an rainy Birds come From south and sing songs In spring I play soccer baseball with my friends [lie] I ride my bike [the asthma is returning from all the stress, so mostly I don’t] happy spring And I go fishing [with my father, who gets very upset if I don’t bait the hook right] I like spring [relatively speaking] I hate winter [because I am even sicker than in spring].
Games in spring that I play baseball [lie, a drawing of me hitting a ball with what looks like a chain saw] bike [drawing of me and what looks like my circumcised penis, a swollen third leg, on top of a bicycle] friesbee [sic, lie, a drawing of me throwing a Frisbee at a boy’s neck], soccer [lie, in another drawing, a boy is shouting at me, “Don’t throw it to (sic) high,” and I am shouting back, “Why I listen should?”]
Oh, who is this sportsman, I ask you? This tough-talking soccer-baseball-Frisbee hero with the tons of friends, whose every response borders on the insouciant: Why I listen should? Left behind by a year, he’s still not mastering any English, that’s for sure. Putting together a report on his beloved Italy, he describes the Colosseum fairly concisely as Had roof not any more. Summoned down to the office of the principal: “I do samsing bad?” “No, sweetheart,” the dear secretaries say, “no, asheine punim,” “nice face” in Yiddish. They present me with bags from places called Gimbels and Macy’s, filled with batches of their children’s old clothes, more T-shirt appearances by the man who turns into a bat and his masked young slave, the Boy Wonder. Upstairs, back in class, with the sacks of clothes at my feet, the kids whisper at me.
“Whatchoo got there?”
“Dzhas samsing.”
“More new T-shirts? Ooh, let’s see!” Laughter.
“Dzhas samsing for my mazer.”
Mrs. A — Z, not R: “Sheket! Sheket bevakasha!”
“Your mazer goes to Macy’s?”
“Dzhas samsing for my mazer zey geeff daun ze stairs.”
More laughter, except from the liberals’ son and one other source. The kid who is hated even more than I am.
His name is Jerry Himmelstein (no, it’s not). He was born in the U.S.A. to a set of American parents with all the rights and privileges entailed therein. And yet: He is the most hated boy in all of Schechter. I know that I must study him hard and avoid certain behaviors if I am to maintain my position as the second most hated.
It is Shabbat, one of the boys has been chosen to be the Abba (the Father, Hebrew), usually gentle Isaac or Yitzhak. (Every other boy here, myself included, is given the Hebrew name of Yitzhak; all we’re missing are the corresponding Abrahams, our fathers.) A girl, equally gentle Chava (Eve), is the Imma, or Mother. She is singing in a sweet preadolescent voice over the candles, “Baruch atah Adonai … Le’hadlik ner shel Shabbat.” We are all salivating over the braided challah bread and the sour-sweet Kedem “wine” and the promise of two Hershey’s chocolate candies to signal the end of the ritual. The Israeli kids in the back are inducting us into the world of adulthood. Zain, one of them says and grabs his crotch, then makes a challah shape with his hands. Kus, he says and sticks his fingers down an imaginary vagina (I know what that is! Oh, Emmanuelle!), then brings three or four fingers up to his nose and smells them. Mmmm … kussss. Even as Chava and Isaac are kosherizing the candles and the bread and the “wine” and the Hershey’s Kisses for Shabbat, we boys in the back are smelling our fingers with a far more religious expression, until Jerry Himmelstein breaks out in this explosion that he does, the one that sounds like: AGOOF!
“Sheket!” Mrs. A — Z yells. “SHEKET, YELADIM!!!” Quiet, children!
“It was Jerry! It was Jerry!” everyone tattles at once.
“Jerry, shtok et-hapeh!” Shut your mouth!
And everyone is laughing, even me, because that’s Jerry for you.
Agoof is Jerry Himmelstein’s rallying cry and identity statement; it is half spoken and half sneezed, and it means: (1) I think this is funny; (2) I’m confused; (3) I don’t know where I am; (4) I want to be one of you; (5) please stop hitting me; (6) I don’t know how to express this yet because I am eight years old, and my family is troubled, and the world in the way it is presently configured does not treat me as a human, does not afford me all the freedoms promised in the Declaration of Independence that hangs on the wall of class 2C, and I do not understand why it has to be that way.
Does agoof also mean “I have goofed”? Is it apologetic in nature? I will never know.
Jerry Himmelstein has both shirttails hanging out of the front of his pants like little dicks, while I normally only have one. “Jerry!” Mrs. A — Z will say, pointing at his shirttails. “Agoof!” Jerry Himmelstein’s shoes are untied like mine, but sometimes when he’s nervously swinging his little Jerry legs up and down in class, a shoe will fly up in the air and it will hit someone in the head who, if it’s a boy, will hit Jerry in the stomach by return mail. “Agoof!” Jerry’s brown hair descends down his head as if an Italian had emptied a kettle of his favorite food upon it, and his teeth are as yellow as egg yolks. His face darts back and forth looking for potential enemies. A web of spittle will attach to his face when he’s in full breakdown agoof mode. This will usually happen at a birthday party, let’s say his own. An SSSQ girl will tell him, in one way or another, that he’s not a person. Agoof! Then a boy will knock him down into the dirt or smush him with the leftovers of a magical Carvel Cookie Puss cake onto his pasta head. Agoof! Then it’s time to be picked for Wiffle ball, and I’ll be picked second to last and he will be picked last. Agoof! Then instead of hitting the Wiffle ball with the Wiffle bat he will clock himself with it, and then he’ll be lying down on the “plate” clutching at his own chin. Agooooooof! Then another girl, in OshKosh overalls or, later, in a Benetton sweater, will come over and, instead of administering help, inform him once more that he is not a person. And now all these agoofs have added up, as they must, and he sits there, hand to his jaw, hand to his stomach, hand to his face, hand to whatever part has been offended, and he’s wailing like something out of the Torah, like something before Abraham even, like when the earth was exploding into place in Genesis. Adonaaaaaaaaaai! Yaaaaaahweeeeeh! And the more he wails, the more we laugh, the girls and boys of SSSQ, because it’s pretty wonderful, his pain, pretty wonderful as far as these things go.
I take the role of Jerry Himmelstein’s second-in-command seriously. I must be humiliated and hit, too. It is understood that anyone can hit me. That’s what I’m there for, to absorb the sunlit, nascent-mustachioed hatred of the future homeowners of eastern Queens. In a school without excessive discipline, without excessive leadership, without excessive education, speed bumps must be provided so that the whole enterprise can run smoothly. The Stinky Russian Bear, the Red Gerbil, will rise to the occasion!
In the back of the school bus, my friend, another Yitzhak, is punching me in the stomach. Yitzi is only several steps up the totem above me: He’s not from Forest Hills or Ramat Aviv, in the fancy north of Tel Aviv; he’s from Soviet Georgia, and there’s only his mother to care for him, the father I don’t know where he went. I like Yitzi quite a lot, because he can hit me in my own language, and when I cry out Bol’no! (It hurts!), he’ll know what it means. He also must know about my brand-spanking-new circumcision, because he never hits below the belt. His apartment is across the street from my grandmother, who watches me after school, and we’ll go there to play a handheld electronic game called Donkey Kong after the school bus drops us off. He won’t really hit me after we’re out of sight of the other boys, so I think this is probably just a way to assert his place. In a combination of Russian and English we try to discuss ways to move ahead in the ranks of SSSQ, me the impressionable Boy Wonder to his Batman, while his mother serves us delicious Georgian-style dumplings heavy on the onion.
He’s not a bad boy, Yitzi (one day, he’ll grow up to be a wonderful man). He’s just trying to become American, trying to get ahead. To that end, he has an amazing leather jacket with zippers, not made of real Polish leather but out of something much cooler, James Dean, for all I know. Years later, in the back of a crowded minibus huffing its way onto Moscow Square in what is now St. Petersburg, I am reintroduced with major prejudice to that Yitzi smell, the combination of leather and onion and the back of a bus. I cry out, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” fighting my way out of the packed vehicle and into the broken sunlight. “But you’ve just paid,” the incredulous driver will say. “I forgot something,” I say to him. “I forgot something at home.” Which is the opposite of what I mean.
Tot kto ne byot, tot ne lyubit, my father likes to say.
He who doesn’t hit, doesn’t love.
Or is it: Byot, znachit lyubit? He hits, therefore he loves. Said “jokingly” of violent husbands in Russian marriages.
Essentially he’s got it down. If you want to make someone love you, a child, say, you should hit him well. If you’ve come home from your new engineering job at a national laboratory on Long Island, exhausted and angry, because you don’t speak the language well and the Jewish boss was gone and you had to deal with the evil German one and the stinking Chinese one, and the Portuguese and Greek engineers who are often your allies didn’t intervene in your favor, and your wife’s a suka with her fucking rodstvenniki in Leningrad, her dying mother, and her sisters to whom she’s just sent three hundred dollars and a parcel of clothes, the money you will need not to starve if the German boss finally fires you, and your child is underfoot crawling in the shag carpet with his stupid pen or his Eastern Air Lines plane, you should give him one across the neck.
The child is shuddering beneath your hand. “Ne bei menya!” Don’t hit me!
“You didn’t do the math, nasty swine (svoloch’ gadkaya).” You’ve assigned the child math problems out of a Soviet textbook that’s more age-appropriate than the bullshit they teach at his Hebrew school, pictures of 4 + 3–2 Great Danes and then how many doggies do you have? instead of
f”(x) = –4 * [cos(x)cos(x) — sin(x)(—sin(x))] / cos2(x).
And the bitch wife whom your wolfish relatives tell you you should really divorce pops out of the kitchen. “Tol’ko ne golovu!” Just don’t hit his head! He has to think with the head.
“Zakroi rot vonyuchii.” Shut your stinking mouth.
Really, suka, can’t you see that love is in the air?
And then off you go, a smack across the left of the head, now the right, now the left. And the child is holding tight to the dizzying smacks, because each one is saying You’re mine and You’ll always love me, each one is a connection to the child that can never be broken. And what else is registering in that head being whipsawed left to right, right to left? The thing Mrs. R is singing in Hebrew as she’s marching the kids down the corridor. Yamin, smol, smol, yamin, left, right, right, left, troo-loo-loo-loo.
My mother has it all wrong when it comes to love. She barely hits. She is the expert on the silent treatment. If I don’t eat the farmer’s cheese with canned peaches (eighty-nine cents: Grand Union), there will be no communication. Go find your love somewhere else. To this day, my mother will launch into a particular childhood aria of mine. Apparently during one especially long period of making me unexist, I started screaming to her, “If you won’t speak to me, luchshe ne zhit’!” It is better not to live! And then I cried for hours, oh how I cried.
Luchshe ne zhit’! my mother likes to replay dramatically at Thanksgiving dinners, her hands spread out like Hamlet giving a soliloquy, perhaps because, in addition to being funny in her mind, the two-day-long silent treatment did what it was supposed to do. It made the child want to commit suicide without her love. It is better not to live! she cries out over her juicy Thanksgiving turkey and her “French” dessert. But I disagree with the efficacy of this technique. Yes, I don’t want to live without her love and attention and fresh laundry for a while, but the sentiment passes quickly. Noninteraction does not have the same tried-and-true result as a pummeling. When you hit the child you’re making contact. You’re contacting the child’s skin, his tender flanks, his head (with which he will eventually have to make money, true), but you are also saying something comforting: I’m here.
I’m here hitting you. I will never leave you, don’t you worry, because I am the Lord, thy father. And just as I was pummeled, so I shall pummel you, and you shall pummel yours forever, ve imru Amen. Let us say Amen.
The danger is crying, of course, because crying is surrender. You have to get away from the blows and lie down someplace quiet and then cry. You have to think of what will happen next. Which is this: The pain will turn dull, then disappear, and when the weekend comes you will play a game called War at Sea with your father, rolling the dice to see if your British heavy cruiser can get out of the way of his German U-boat fast enough or if the entire course of World War II will have to be rewritten. There is no particular segue from the beating to the game, from the explosive weekday to the quiet sausage-and-kasha rhythms of the weekend. On Saturday, your father is calling you “little son” and “little one” and any UN observer sent to this armistice would take off his helmet, get back in his jeep, and make his way back to Geneva with a happy report.
But there’s something about the tissue of the ears. Maybe a medical doctor can comment here. When you’ve been hit across the ears by your father, there’s a stinging, a shameful stinging, that not only keeps your ears red seemingly for days but makes your eyes moisten, as if from allergies. And then, against your will, you will bring your hand up to your ear and sniffle. And then your father will say the one thing you don’t want to hear, although he’ll say it in a kind weekend way: “Eh, you. Snotty.”
A year or so into my thirties I was honored to meet the remarkable Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld. Our little turboprop had made the flight between Prague and Vienna, between two literary festivals, the first time Appelfeld had touched down on German-speaking soil since he had survived the camps in his teens. Waiting for our luggage at VIE, the airport where my family had first encountered the West, the seventy-something Appelfeld told me of his brief time among the Red Army after his camp had been liberated. One of the giant Russian soldiers described to Appelfeld his treatment at the hands of his superiors: I byut i plakat’ ne dayut. They hit and they don’t let me cry after.
On the day of the beating, in my little corner I am careful with the crying, a sniffle here, a spring shower of tears there, because otherwise the asthma attack will come. But maybe I want it to come. And soon enough, my father and mother are hovering over me as if nothing had happened an hour before, and perhaps nothing has. Father bundles the red comforter around my snotty chest, and my mother readies the inhaler: “One, two, three, breathe in!”
Night falls; my parents are living through their nightmares in their bed. The relatives buried alive by the Germans in Belorussian fields are rising through the alfalfa of modern American life. The inhaler’s steroids have flooded my body. In the wood-paneled closet a man composed entirely of little pinpricks of light, The Lightman, is assembling himself. This is not a fantasy. This is not the SS or Stalin’s henchmen or even the customs agent at Pulkovo Airport in Leningrad, the one who took off my fur hat. The Lightman may have been a human being once, but now he’s just made of little shimmering dots of energy — like the nuclear energy they have inside the scary silver-domed reactor at my father’s lab — and where his eyes should be are just the white sclera, minus the iris and pupil. In Russia I would open my eyes at night and find the room flooded with bursts of light, amoeba shapes that would expand and then falter like domestic supernovas, briefly outshining even the strange phosphorous nighttime glare of the explosive Signal television set. But here, in America, what used to merely keep me awake is coming together to destroy me. The pinpricks of light have achieved humanity. The Lightman is assembling himself over and over, making himself, unmaking himself, biding his time. He slots himself inside my closet and breathes his sickly adult breath all over my shirt and my pair of pants. Because he is made almost entirely of light he can travel from beneath a door jamb; he can scamper up the walls to the ceiling in no time. And I spend the whole night watching him advance slowly but monstrously toward me, my back stiff as a board, my slapped red ear pinging for him like a homing signal. I cannot tell my parents about the Lightman because they will think I’m crazy, and there’s no room for crazy around here. It would be easier if the Lightman came up to me and did his worst, but once he’s within inches of me he disassembles himself, becomes just a bunch of floating light specks and a pair of eyeless eyes, as if he knows that once he’s fully revealed himself I’ll have nothing to fear.
The next day, there I am, sleepless and angry. Everything we do here at the Solomon Schechter School of Queens is, in a way, an exchange of ideas. Jerry Himmelstein sees me coming; the spittle is arching from his lips and blowing in the wind. He looks at me with dull unhappiness. This is how it must be, and there is no return from what we must do.
I punch him in the stomach, the soft American plushiness of it.
He takes two steps back and breathes out.
“Agoof.”