Recess. Out in the school yard, beneath a nearby sign that says VULCAN RUBBER (two words that will become significant, the first one in my teens, the second one, unfortunately, only in my twenties), the girls play hopscotch and the boys run around with their noisy selves and I sit by the side trying to occupy myself with a ladybug if it’s warm, and my mittens if it’s not, and my cold fingers if I’ve already lost my mittens for the day. I still can’t differentiate the boys and girls by name. They are just one large mass of Am Yisroel, the Jewish nation, the darker, more aggressive ones from Israel, the lighter, happier ones from Great Neck. The liberal kid whose parents bring me over to play with him walks by on his own accord. His house in Kew Gardens is something I lack the vocabulary to describe. First of all, the whole building is his own house, and there is grass in front of it, and there is grass in back of it, and grass on the sides, and there are trees that belong to him, which are his personal property, so he can even cut them down if he wants to and he won’t go to a labor camp. And inside the house, such games there are! Board games about taking over four railroads and entire neighborhoods and also “action figures” from Star Wars, which I don’t know what it is. But someone kind has given me something from the Star Wars, and what it is is a tall, very hairy monkey, with a white bandolier around its naked body and a scowl on its face. Sometimes, when I’m especially alone, I’ll take the monkey out, and the kids will shout “Chewie!” I guess that’s Monkey’s name. And then they’ll laugh because Chewie is missing half his right arm, so you can’t even stick in his black rifle with the bow attachment. So it’s both good that I have Monkey and it’s not good, because he’s deficient. I also have my pen that goes click, but nobody wants any part of that.
Anyway, out at recess, the liberals’ son comes over and says, “Gary, you want to play airplanes?” And first I look past him, because who would want to talk to me, and then who is this Gary anyway? And then I remember: It’s me. We’ve thought it over as a family, and Igor is Frankenstein’s assistant, and I have enough problems already. So we take IGOR, and we move around the I, G, O, and R. So there’s GIRO (which would have been great for the last decade of the twentieth century) and ROGI (perfect for the first decade of the twenty-first), and GORI. That one’s nice, it’s the city where Stalin was born in Georgia, but still not perfectly right. But then there was that actor, Cooper, what’s his name? And so two vowels are traded for two others, and GARY I am.
“I want to play airplanes,” I say. More like shout: “I want to play airplanes!” Actually, why stint here? “I WANT TO PLAY AIRPLANES!” Because this is my chance to win over new friends. “To Jakarta,” I shout, “you fly Gonolulu, Gawaii,† or Guam, short rest, put benzene into wings, then Tokyo, stop Jakarta.”
The children look at me with keen American indifference or burning Israeli anger, the takeaway being sheket bevakasha, or maybe just sheket. In any case, Shut up already, you crazy freak.
The game of airplanes is as complex as every other interaction at SSSQ. The boys run around going “ZHUUUUUUUUU” with their arms outstretched, and then they knock one another down with those arms. I do not make it to Jakarta. I do not even make it as far as nearby Philadelphia Airport, at 39°52′19″ N, 75°14′28″. Someone bonks me on the head, and down I go, all passengers on the manifest dead.
There’s a movie theater on Main Street, and my father is excited because they are showing a French movie, and so it must be very cultured. The movie is called Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman, and it will be interesting to see how joyful these Frenchwomen actually are, most likely because of their exquisite cultural patrimony. (“Balzac, Renoir, Pissarro, Voltaire,” my father sings to me on the way over to the theater.) The next eighty-three minutes are spent with Papa’s hairy hand clasped to my eyes, the Herculean task before me: getting it unclasped. The less explicit parts of Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman are set in a Hong Kong brothel or a Macao girls’ boarding school, and then it’s all downhill from there. Despite my father’s best efforts I see about seven vaginas on the big screen that day, seven more than I will see for a very long time. Of course, we have to sit through the whole thing, since we have already paid for the tickets. And one of the male characters, a radio operator, is named Igor (“OH, Igor, OUI!”), my former name, so there’s that.
My father and I walk silent and dazed back to our apartment. “Nu?” my mother asks.
Silence at first, uncharacteristic silence.
“Nu?”
“Every three minutes there was a love scene!” my father shouts. “Every which way, they did it! Like this … And then like that. And then they turned her over and—” I hope that, at the least, my mother and father scrounged up the four dollars to see the movie by themselves and faithfully followed the series through Emmanuelle’s Perfume (1992) and Emmanuelle in Venice (1993) to its logical science fiction made-for-cable-TV conclusion, Emmanuelle in Space (1994). They deserved as much, the hardworking immigrants.
I’m not sure what to do with the knowledge gained at the soft French (actually, Dutch) hands of Emmanuelle. I am a little boy. But I know something is up, something hairy between the legs. Not between my legs, not yet, but between the legs of others.
At SSSQ, I find a book in English about Harriet Tubman, the former slave who rescued dozens of African Americans from a terrible place called Maryland. Maybe the Hebrew school librarian thought Tubman was Jewish (her moniker was Moses).
It’s a tough book because it’s in English, but there are many thrilling pictures of Tubman and her rescued slaves running through the awful Maryland on their way to Canada. And I am so angry at slavery, at this horrible thing, as angry as the people around me are at the blacks, so angry, in fact, that we’ve heard the new president, Ronald Reagan, is really going to give them one “across the neck.” Lying on my army cot, Emmanuelle in the back of my mind, Harriet Tubman out front, I conjure an imaginary friend, a black boy or a girl just fled from Maryland. I am still ecumenical on the subject of gender, so s/he is lying next to me, his/her arms around me, my arms around him/her, and I just say over and over something I picked up on the street, “It’s all going to be okay, Sally, I promise.”
The fastest way to fly to N’Djamena, Chad, is through Air France’s hub in Paris. Under optimal conditions, it can be done in sixteen hours and thirty-five minutes. I am flying there still.
* * *
* Eventually the State Department will add Kach to its list of foreign terrorist organizations, and the rabbi himself will be assassinated in New York in 1990.
† In Russian, the H is often rendered as a G, hence the famous university Garvard in Massachusetts and my future alma mater, the somewhat-less-famous one in Oberlin, Ogio.
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!
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