Little Failure (18 page)

Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

I’m not sure what the Hebrew words mean (there is an English translation in the prayer book, only I don’t know any English either), but I know the tone. There is something plaintive in the way we boys and girls are beseeching the Almighty. What we’re doing, I think, is supplicating. And the members of my family are no strangers to supplication. We are the Grain Jews, brought from the Soviet Union to America by Jimmy Carter in exchange for so many tons of grain and a touch of advanced technology. We are poor. We are at the mercy of others: food stamps from the American government, financial aid from refugee organizations, secondhand Batman and Green Lantern T-shirts and scuffed furniture gathered by kind American Jews. I am sitting in the cafeteria of the Hebrew school, surrounded first by the walls of this frightening institution—a gray piece of modern architecture liberally inlaid with panes of tinted glass—with its large, sweaty rabbi, its young, underpaid teachers, and its noisy, undisciplined American Jewish kids, and, in a larger sense, surrounded by America: a complex, media-driven, gadget-happy society, whose images and language are the lingua franca of the world and whose flowery odors and easy smiles are completely beyond me. I’m sitting there, alone at a separate lunch table from all the other kids, a small boy in already oversize glasses and the same damn polka-dot-and-vertical-striped shirt, perhaps the product of some Polka Dot Shirt Factory #12 in Sverdlovsk or, if it only existed, Shirtsk, and what I’m doing is I’m talking to myself.

I’m talking to myself in Russian.

Am I muttering long-remembered crap written in capital letters on the Soviet metro: 1959—
SOVIET SPACE ROCKET REACHES THE SURFACE OF THE MOON
? It’s very possible. Am I nervously whispering an old Russian childhood ditty (one that would later find its way into one of my stories written as an adult): “Let it always be sunny, let there always be blue skies, let there always be Mommy, let there always be
me
.” Very possible. Because what I need now, in this unhappy, alien place, is Mommy, the woman who sews my mittens to my great furry overcoat—the one that has earned me the moniker Stinky Russian
Bear, or SRB in the industry—for otherwise I will lose them, as I have already lost the bottle of glue, lined notebook, and crayons that accompany me to first grade. “Mamochka,” I will tell her tonight, “don’t be sad. If I lost the glue today, I won’t be able to lose it tomorrow.”

One thing is certain—along with Mommy and Papa and one sweet kid, the son of liberal American parents who have induced him to play with me—the Russian language is my friend. It’s comfortable around me. It knows things the noisy brats around me, who laugh and point as I intone my Slavic sibilants, will never understand. The way the gray-green stone of the Vorontsovsky Palace in Crimea, where we used to take our summer vacations, matches the mountains and forests around it. The way you get frisked at the Pulkovo Airport in Leningrad, the customs guard taking off your hat and feeling it up for contraband diamonds. The way
SOVIET SCIENTISTS CREATE THE FIRST CHAIN REACTION THEORY
in 1934.

Teachers try to intervene. They tell me to get rid of the great furry overcoat. Trim my unkempt, bushy hair a little. Stop talking to myself in Russian. Be more, you know,
normal
. I am invited to play with the liberals’ son, a gentle, well-fed fellow who seems lost in the wilderness of eastern Queens. We go to a pizza parlor, and, as I inhale a slice, a large string of gooey mozzarella cheese gets stuck in my throat. Using most of my fingers, I try to pull the cheese out. I choke. I gesture about. I panic. I moo at our chaperone, a graceful American mama.
Pomogite!
I mouth. Help! I am caught in a world of cheap endless cheese. I can see a new placard for the Leningrad metro. 1979—
FIRST SOVIET CHILD CHOKES ON CAPITALIST PIZZA
. When it’s all over, I sit there shuddering, my hands covered with spittle and spent mozzarella. This is no way to live.

I am not good with others. In Leningrad, I had been too sick to go to preschool. My mother worked as a music teacher at a kindergarten, and she brought me there on several occasions when my grandmas
were not around to babysit. Invariably, I would stand up in front of the class, in front of all those pretty Slavic girls with their white bows, in front of all the xylophones arranged ceremoniously beneath the requisite portrait of musical Lenin, and announce in my self-important Mama’s Only voice to the older children: “I have something to say to you! I will not participate in any activities today. I will only sit and watch.”

But in Hebrew school, unless I am choking on a pizza, I am too ashamed to say anything.

There is one exception. The school bus is taking the Hebrew school kids back to our homes, and before the bus can get into the tonier parts of Forest Hills and beyond, we pass our five-story apartment building. “Ober zer!” I cry. “Ober zer! Loook at eet! Eet izt mai haus!”

And for the first time I am not the weirdo at the lunch table, and no one is laughing at me and making crazy cuckoo signs around their temples. “That’s your house?” the kids shout. “
You live in that whole place?
You must be so rich! Why do you have to wear my Green Lantern T-shirt from summer camp?”

As I get off the bus I finally begin to understand the miscommunication. The children think the entire building, all fifty apartments, is my home.

In the tight kitchen of our “mansion” my father and my mother are going at it with drunk Step-grandfather Ilya. There are family fights that I can now perceive only as colors—a searing yellow-green across my vision whenever I see an elderly bald man clench his fists. No one can curse with the depth and volume of Step-grandfather Ilya. Everyone is going to the dick tonight, and everybody’s mother will be fucked.

I plop on the army cot that is my new bed, a piece of furniture that’s been donated by two young neighborhood Jews—their amazing-sounding names are Michael and Zev—who for all their kindness seem to me like a second incarnation of the woman in the
Vienna airport, the one who gave me the Mozart candy with its prized wrapper. Around our table, Michael and Zev’s democratic and Democratic voices ring out countered by my father’s adventurous Republican English, as our new American friends support the departing Georgia peanut farmer presently in the White House and my father pines for the California actor, and in the end all is settled by the gift of a candy (Milky Way!), which I’m not allowed to eat on account of asthma, or more useful items we lack, hangers, a steam iron. For the rest of our furniture ensemble, we have selected a sofa from a nearby garbage dump and bunched up sheets to use for pillows.

When I feel sad from Hebrew school, I turn to my Soviet atlas and an Eastern Air Lines toy plane my mother bought for half a dollar on Fourteenth Street, the boulevard of discount dreams in faraway Manhattan. Using my atlas, I plot out the flight time to Rome, then to Vienna, then to East Berlin, then back to Leningrad. I memorize the coordinates of the important airports. I launch my plane down the runway of our cluttered apartment, then I sit there with the plane in my hand for the eight and a half hours it takes to get to Rome, humming to myself the sounds of the jet engine: “
Zhhhh … Mmmmmmm … Zhhhhh … Mmmmm
 …” Finally I land the plane on the green army cot (also known as Leonardo da Vinci Airport) and the next day resume the journey to Leningrad.

Soviet refugees do not freely use the diagnosis obsessive-compulsive disorder. All I know back then is that my plastic plane must
never
touch the floor until it is time to land, else all the passengers, my whole family, will die. When my asthma reappears and I can no longer
zhhhh
and
mmmm
I will tie the plane to a string hanging from the army cot so that it is technically still in the air, then sit there and watch it like the obedient child that I am, while family life takes off and crashes all around me.

My travels become more complex. I go through Paris, Amsterdam, Helsinki, then back to Leningrad. Then through London, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Moscow, Leningrad. Tokyo and Vladivostok. I become an expert on flight times and the names of important world cities.

Around this time my father begins a difficult spiritual quest. He has found an Orthodox synagogue two blocks away from us. He does not have a proper yarmulke but does possess a multicolored baseball cap with a sea bass on it. One Sabbath he decides to walk down to the shul and sits in a pew in the back. The worshippers at first think he’s “a drunken Spanisher from the street.” But when they realize he’s one of the mythical Russian Jews they’ve heard about on TV, one of their long-lost coreligionists, they shower him with unadulterated love. One of them, a follower of the ultranationalist Rabbi Kahane, gives him ten American dollars. It is the Sabbath and handling money is verboten, but making sure a Jew has enough to eat takes precedence. When my father gets his first job and makes a little cash himself, he will give two hundred dollars to Kach, Rabbi Kahane’s soon-to-be-outlawed organization in Israel—driving the Arabs into the sea a central plank of their platform. And when it is time for us to buy our first apartment, another congregant who happens to be the local mailman will lend us four hundred dollars, no questions asked, toward the down payment. I guess this is what people mean when they say “community.”
^*

The next Shabbat and almost every Friday thereafter, I am brought into the tiny yellow building of Young Israel, where I can rock and sway along with the cheaply attired but kind men (the women are sent to a balcony above us) who seem to accept me and don’t think I’m crazy when I accidentally spit out something in Russian or casually molest the English language with my tongue.

When the congregants of Young Israel learn that my mother was a pianist in Russia and my father used to sing opera, they invite our family to give a concert. After months of anonymity in a foreign country, my father’s bass reverberates across the small, crowded sanctuary as my mother accompanies on piano. Papa sings the expected Chaliapin ditty “Ochi Chyornye” (“Dark Eyes”) and the Yiddish standard
“Ofyn Pripetchek” (“Learn, children, don’t be afraid / Every beginning is hard”).

My exploits with the Soviet atlas and the nine-hour flights to Stockholm have not gone unnoticed. And so,
I
am presented as the final act—the seven-year-old refugee who can name any world capital! The worshippers shout out, “Belgium!” “Japan!” “Uruguay!” “Indonesia!” Nervous yet excited, I answer those four right but flub the last: Chad. As cosmopolitan as my travels are, I have never flown my plastic Eastern Air Lines jet to N’Djamena. Despite my humiliation, we are given $250 by the congregation for our performance, which we turn into a size 2 Harvé Benard business suit. My tiny mother fills it just in time for her first successful clerk-typist job interview.

The worshippers at Young Israel suggest I attend Solomon Schechter, a conservative Hebrew day school on a sad stretch of nearby Parsons Boulevard. My father wants very much to be a practicing Jew. My mother, half Jewish, sometimes prays in the Christian manner, palms clasped together, to the God of Good Health and Steady Raises at the Queens watch factory where she now slaves away, rejoicing when the boss gives out free ice cream instead of air-conditioning.

There are decent public schools in Queens, but we are scared of blacks. If you put together two Soviet immigrants in Queens or Brooklyn circa 1979, the subject of
shvartzes
or “the Spanish with their transistor radios” would come up by the third sentence, after the topic of asthma inhalers for little Igor or Misha is exhausted. But listen carefully to those conversations. There’s hatred and fear, sure, but just a little down the line, laughter and relief. The happy recognition that, as unemployed and clueless as we are, there is a reservoir of disgust in our new homeland for someone other than ourselves. We are refugees and even Jews, which in the Soviet Union never won you any favors, but we are also something that we never really had the chance to appreciate back home. We are white.