Mom, who was smarter than Orpheus and never once looked back after heading up the ramp at Sheremetyevo Airport, roamed Pathmark’s acres with childlike glee. “She-ree-ohs … Ri-seh-rohonee … Vel. Vee. Tah …” She murmured these alien names as if they’d been concocted by Proust, lovingly prodding and handling all the foodstuffs in their bright packaging, their promiscuous, throwaway tara.
Meanwhile, I steered the supermarket cart behind her like a zombie. I hated the Pathmark of Northeast Philadelphia. It was the graveyard of my own zagranitsa dream, possessed of a fittingly funerary chill and an otherworldly fluorescence. Shuffling the aisles, I felt entombed in the abundance of food, now drained of its social power and magic. Who really wanted the eleven-cent bag of bananas if you couldn’t parade it down Kalinin Prospect inside your transparent avoska after standing in a four-hour line, basking in envious stares? What happened when you replaced the heroic Soviet verb dostat’ (to obtain with difficulty) with the banal kupit’ (to buy), a term barely used back in the USSR? Shopping at Pathmark was acquisitioning robbed of thrills, drama, ritual. Where did blat come into play, with its savvy maneuvering of social ties, its camaraderie? Where was envy and social prestige? The reassuring communal ochered’ smell of hangovers and armpits? Nobody and nothing smelled inside Pathmark.
A few weeks into our Philadelphia life, I began to suspect that all those cheery disposable boxes and plastic containers piled on Pathmark’s shelves were a decoy to conceal the dark truth. That American food—I hesitate to say it—wasn’t exactly delicious. Not the Pop-Tarts that Mom served cold and semi-raw because nobody told her about the toasting part. Not American sosiski, hot dogs sour from nitrates. Definitely not the yellow-skinned thirty-nine-cent chicken parts bandaged in plastic. These made me pine for the bluish, Pravda-swaddled chicks Baballa brought back from her elite canteen at Gosstroy. Those had graphic claws, a poignant comb, sad dead eyes, and stray feathers Grandma burned off with her clunky cigarette lighter, filling the house with a smell like burnt hair. We enjoyed the chicks once a month, as a defitsit treat.
When our Jewish Family Services stipend ended, Mom worked cleaning Philadelphia houses, a job she pronounced “fascinating!” Then she landed work as a receptionist at a hospital, which required her to ride three separate buses. Her shift began at noon and brought her home past ten, when I was already in bed. Tactfully she spared me the details of standing in all weather at unshielded bus stops. I, in turn, never told her how I felt coming back to an empty, ugly apartment from the dreaded Louis H. Farrell Elementary School, with only our hand-me-down grainy black-and-white TV for company. When Dinah Shore came on, I wanted to howl. She was the human equivalent of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that came with my free refugee school lunch. All squishy, pseudofolksy whiteness, with an unnatural, cloying coupling of sugar and salt.
I spent most of my first afterschool hours slumped on our shared mattress, nose in books from the two boxes of them Mom had had slow-mailed from Moscow. The bottle-green Chekhov, the gray Dostoyevsky—breaking off from their color-coordinated collected works, I tried to practice Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons on the battered secondhand piano Mom had bought for me with a handout from Clara, her American aunt. But the notes under my fingers produced only tears, the wrenching reminder of our old Arbat life. And so I paced in dazed agitation, from the bedroom, past the TV to the piano, to the kitchenette and back. And yet not even in my worst homesick moments could I admit to missing Rodina with any sincerity. Sincerity, it seemed, had been bled out of us by the cynical Brezhnevian seventies. Which added a layer of denial to homesickness.
Rodina-Urodina. A Motherland that rhymed with “ugly hag.” A scarlet-blazed myth that flipped into an ironic gag. Historically the word—denoting one’s birthplace, from the root rod (origin/kin)—had been the intimate, maternal counterpart to otchizna (fatherland), that resoundingly heroic, martially tinted noun. The Bolsheviks banned Rodina, suspicious of its folkloric entwining with nationalism. Under Stalin it resurfaced in 1934, aligned now with official Soviet patriotism. In World War II it was mobilized full force—feminized further—as Rodina-Mat’, literally “motherland-mother,” to be defended to the last by its sons and daughters. Grassroots patriotism swept the nation. But by my childhood, like all “meaningful” words, Rodina had acquired a cartoonish bathos. Even if treason to the motherland was a criminal offense.
Come to think of it, there wasn’t a single word for the country we’d never see again that I could use with any authentic nostalgia. Soviet Union? Pining for anything with Soviet in it was politically incorrect since the word evoked the lumbering carcass of the official regime. Rossiya (Russia)? That too was tainted with the saccharine kitsch of state-certified nationalism: all those swaying birch trees and troika sleds. And so I resorted to sovok or sovdep—bitterly sarcastic slang for the land of the Homo sovieticus.
Such linguistic calibrations didn’t concern Mother much. After all, she’d spent most of her adult Soviet life as a spiritual émigré, yearning for the imaginary Elsewhere she envisioned as her own true Rodina. Occasionally she’d admit to missing the tart-green antonovka apples, a fairly neutral Nabokovian gesture. And once, only once, when she heard a song about Arbat, our intimate old Moscow neighborhood, she burst into tears.
Myself, I had neither accepted nor rejected our socialist state. Instead I constantly played the angles, with its values and countervalues, its resonances. From this all-encompassing game I’d created my childhood identity. So now, along with the unmentionable Rodina I was mourning the loss of a self.
My name, for example.
Anna, Anya, An’ka, Anechka, Anyuta, Nyura, Niusha. What a menu of nuanced social meanings and linguistic attitudes available within my own single name. And now? I wasn’t even Anna (my official passport name). I was a Philly-accented Ee-ya-nna—the sonorous, open Russian “A” squished and rubberized like the Wonder Bread of our exile.
Bread. I missed Moscow bread.
Standing at the fridge, dragging a slice of Oscar Mayer bologna onto a slice of spongy whiteness, I’d mentally inhale the voluptuous sourdough tang of our neighborhood bakery by the tree-lined Tverskoy Boulevard. There, manipulating in my small grip a giant two-pronged fork attached by a grimy string to the wall, I’d poke and press, testing for freshness, the dark burnished loaves arranged on their tilted worn-wood shelves under a slogan: BREAD IS OUR SOVIET WEALTH—DON’T BUY MORE THAN YOU NEED!
We had arrived in Philadelphia on November 14, 1974. A few weeks later, we noticed people appearing downtown in drab uniforms, singing and clanging bells beside red buckets under puzzling signs for a “Salvation Army.” To this day, “Jingle Bells” and “Joy to the World” pierce me as the soundtracks of émigré dislocation.
I had stopped believing in Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) when I was six and we still lived in Davydkovo. My neighbor Kiril and I stayed up past midnight waiting for the promised arrival of our Soviet New Year’s version of Santa in his long flowing robe. I had on a tiara of snowflakes and a satiny costume gown Mom fashioned for the occasion from an old dress of hers. The doorbell rang at last. Ded Moroz himself swayed on our threshold, majestic and glassy-eyed. Then all six feet of him collapsed face-first into our khrushcheba’s tiny foyer. The next morning he was still there, snoring, still in his robe but with his beard now detached and crumpled under one cheek. A dead-drunk Ded Moroz wasn’t the worst. The really awful ones screwed up the gifts parents had given them in advance—delivering rubber-smelling inflatable beach balls, for instance, to the family who’d bought expensive East German toy sets.
But I loved Soviet novy god (New Year’s) anyway. The harsh scent of pine on our balcony where our tree awaited decoration. My small mom teetering on a tall wobbly stool to reach the high closet for the box of our New Year’s ornaments, swaddled in coarse pharmacy cotton. By the last week of December, the State dumped long-hoarded delicacies onto store counters. From Praga Dad carried home the white box of its famous chocolate layer cake;
Mom’s avoska bulged with sharply fragrant thin-skinned clementines from Abkhazia. And eagerly we awaited Baballa’s holiday zakaz, the elite take-home package of defitsit goods from Gosstroy. You never knew what each year would bring. I prayed for the buttery balik (smoked sturgeon) instead of the prestigious but disgusting canned cod liver.
Philadelphia had no snow our first December. Worse, fellow émigrés gravely warned one another against putting up Christmas trees, since Jewish-American sponsors liked to drop in on their charges to deliver mezuzahs or bags of used clothes. Our generous sponsors went ballistic at the sight of an evergreen, sometimes even reporting the blasphemous refugees to Jewish Family Services. Many ex-Soviet citizens didn’t realize that their Jewishness was now a religion, not simply the “ethnicity” declared in the fifth entry of their surrendered red passports. The sponsors in turn had no clue that Christmas was banned in the USSR—that the trees, gifts, Ded Moroz, and general cheer were the secular socialist hooray to the new year.
Obediently Mom lit the alien Hanukkah candles on the menorah we’d been given. On the plywood shelf around it she heaped candies gooey with vile peanut butter, and charcoal-black cookies filled with something white and synthetic. A charcoal-black cookie! Would anyone eat such a thing? The candies remained unsucked, the cookies unwrapped. My eyes grew duller and more vacant each day—and Mom relented and bought a yolka, a holiday tree, from the five-and-dime store. Barely twelve inches tall, made of rough plastic, and decorated with out-of-scale red and green balls that cost nineteen cents a package, it didn’t make me any happier.
For our first New Year’s in America, instead of champagne Mom served the sticky-sweet Manischewitz wine our sponsors had urged on us. And she gave our celebratory salat Olivier a thorough Pathmark makeover! Mercifully, Mom didn’t tamper with the potatoes and eggs. But she replaced the proper fresh-boiled diced carrots with canned ones, swapped our canned peas for the bright-green frozen variety, devoid of the requisite mushiness. For protein, some evil force propelled her toward the gristly, vinegary Hormel’s pickled pig’s feet. Worst of all was the mayo. Instead of our loose, tangy-sharp vanished Provansal, it was Hellmann’s now smothering Mom’s Olivier in a cloyingly fluffy, infuriatingly sweet blanket.
At eleven p.m. Mom scooped the Pathmark Olivier into the two Czech bowls with pink flowers—the scant remnants of our past lives we’d carried inside our two tiny suitcases.
The bowls had been Baballa’s present to us for our last Moscow New Year’s. That night, right before suppertime, she’d stormed into our Arbat apartment, furiously stomping snow off her green wool coat, swearing in a voice raspy from cigarettes and cold. “Your present,” she snorted bitterly, handing Mom a misshapen, rattling parcel inside an avoska. It had been a very desirable Czech dinner set. Except that after standing in line for it for most of the day, Baballa had slipped on some ice on her way over. We sat on the floor under our festive Soviet tree, picking through a wreck of broken socialist china. Only two bowls had survived intact. At the dinner table Baballa drowned her regrets in vodka, topping up my glass with champagne when Mom wasn’t looking. After dessert and the turning-of-the-year tumult, she led us all out for a walk to Red Square.
It had just stopped snowing outside and the temperatures were plunging to minus twenty. And I was drunk. For the first time in my life. On Red Square! Thanks to the cold, the alcohol coursed through my bloodstream slowly, caressingly, warming my limbs as we tramped along. Beneath the floodlit tropical marzipan domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, we uncorked another bottle of Sovetskoye bubbly. It was 1974, the year of our emigration. My parents kissed on the lips while Grandma sang patriotic songs in disharmony with the other drunks on the square. Squealing with pleasure like a collective farm piglet, I rolled around in the fresh powdery snowdrifts, sending up silvery showers twinkling and dancing against the floodlights.
In Philly, as the clock struck 1975, Mom and I picked at our Pathmark salat Olivier and sipped the bubbleless Manischewitz from hand-me-down mugs. Far away, eight hours earlier, in another land, Dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev had once again adjusted his reading glasses, rattled his medals, thunderously cleared his throat, and then shuffled his papers in a desperate scramble to locate the first line of his New Year’s address to the Rodina.
“Dear Compatriots!” The phrase no longer included us.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1980s: MOSCOW THROUGH THE SHOT GLASS
At the start of the eighties, less than a decade into our American exile, I went to a gadalka, a fortune-teller.
Trudging up to her fifth-floor lair in New York’s Little Italy, I murmured curses at every landing. This gadalka, Terri by name, charged a whopping ninety bucks for her readings—and I didn’t even trust fortune-tellers. But an attack of professional angst had driven me there.
“I hear music.”
The gadalka Terri announced this on her threshold in a thick Italian New Yorkese.
I stared at her, panting and amazed. My angst involved my piano studies at Juilliard. How’d she know I was a musician?
But from here the reading went nowhere. Terri, in her thirties, sipped tea from a chipped I Heart NY mug, squinted and strained, conjured trivialities.
“Your cousin doesn’t love her husband … In your mama’s life there’s a person named Bennett …” I nodded along. I felt the ninety bucks evaporating in my pocket.
Then came her big finale. “Soon,” exclaimed Terri, waving her tea mug, “soon you’ll see your papa and the rest of your family!”
I handed over the cash and tramped back downstairs fuming, my angst unaddressed, my real question—Will I become a famous pianist?—unanswered. Outside I went and consoled myself with a jumbo cannoli.
My mother had by then followed me from Philadelphia to New York, where we shared a one-bedroom on a drab street in the mostly Colombian enclave of Jackson Heights, Queens. But still. After the doldrums of Philadelphia, immigrant multiculti New York felt like home. I loved how our hallway smelled of garlicky pernil and stewed beans. Salsa and cumbia blasted from every apartment, while our own was filled with the lofty, competing sounds of Beethoven and Brahms. Despite my career angst, generally, life was okay. Mom taught ESL at a nearby elementary school, and what’s more, she’d rekindled her Moscow lifestyle of concerts, theaters, and endless ticket lines. She was even happier seeing me worship at the altar of High Culture. Ever since I at thirteen had begun taking the train up from Philly to attend Julliard’s pre-college program—and then the college proper in 1980—I’d lived and breathed piano. The keyboard completely took over my life, sustained me through years of immigrant dislocation, repaired my fractured identity.
“So? What did the gadalka say about your piano?” Mom wanted to know. I shrugged. I asked if she knew anybody named “Bennett.” Mom nearly fell out of her chair.
“Mrs. Bennett? She’s our Board of Education comptroller—I just saw her today!”
Amid the Bennett hue and cry I almost forgot Terri’s last bit about our family reuniting. Mom slackened to a wistful smile when I remembered. It was her turn to shrug. Oh well … The Soviet State was eternal, intractable. Reunions just weren’t in the cards.
And then they all began dropping dead.
In the Russian vernacular the early eighties are known as the “pompous funeral era.” Or “the three-coffin Five-Year Plan.”
“Got your funeral pass?” went a Kremlin guard joke.
“Nah,” replies the attendee. “Got a season ticket.”
Most of the doddering Politburo were pushing seventy. The death of Alexei Kosygin, the sometime reformer, kicked off the decade. Dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev followed on November 10, 1982, three days after he’d been seen looking his usual self—a fossilized turtle—at the sixty-fifth anniversary of the revolution parade.
On Leonid Ilyich’s death day, Soviet TV turned true to form—mysteriously weird. A droopy Tchaikovsky symphony instead of a much-anticipated hockey match? A didactic Lenin flick in place of the Mili
tia Day pop concert?
The following morning, “with great sorrow,” the Kremlin announced the passing of the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee and chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet.
Nobody wailed.
Dear Leonid Ilyich, seventy-five, was neither feared nor loved. In the last of his almost twenty years ruling the 270-million-person socialist empire, he was a decrepit pill-popper who washed his sedatives down with zubrovka, a vodka flavored with buffalo grass. He’d survived strokes, a clinical death, and a jaw cancer that made mush out of his five-hour-long speeches. He still gave them—often. His rezhim clanked along, just as sclerotic as he, resuscitated somewhat by hard currency from soaring oil and gas prices.
This domino player had a nice life for himself. His cartoonish extravagance held a perfect mirror to the kitsch materialist epoch he led. Brezhnev adored foreign cars and bespoke jackets of capitalist denim. Right before dying he indulged in his favorite sport, killing boar at the Zavidovo hunting estate, where choice prey were brought in from all over the USSR and fattened on fish and oranges. The Politburo hunting party fattened itself on caviar straight out of sturgeons, steaming crayfish soup, and spit-roasted boar au plein air. It was an age of crony banquets and hyperelite food allocations, and Dear Leonid Ilyich was the empire’s first epicure, with a habit of sending culinary souvenirs—a pheasant, a rabbit, a bloody hunk of bear—to favored friends. By many accounts he was a harmless, fun-loving man. Too bad about the Prague Spring, the torture of dissidents in psychiatric wards, the war in Afghanistan.
Above all Brezhnev loved baubles—which presented a peculiar funeral problem. Protocol required each medal to be borne behind the casket on its own velvet cushion. But Dear Leonid Ilyich had amassed more then two hundred awards, including a Lenin Prize for Literature for a fabricated ghostwritten autobiography. Even with several medals per cushion, the award-bearing cortège consisted of forty-four men.
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking Page 22