Little Failure (12 page)

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.)