alive. With her meticulous collection of family photos, some filed under the World War II subheading “Uncle Simon, Wife, Murdered Children,” written in Russian in her equally meticulous script.
My mother, in the first despairing bloom of youth, looking, as she would say,
ozabochena
, a combination of worried and moody and maybe lovesick, a Soviet-era bow crowning the top of her puffy, full-lipped face as if to inform us that the woods behind her do not belong to a sunny summer camp in the Catskills. It is 1956. She is eleven years old in a striped summer dress, resembling, already, a worried young Jewish adult.
My beaming mother in her red Young Pioneer tie, ready to serve the Soviet state with the common Pioneer cheer
I am always ready!
shouted at the top of her lungs. “I never took it off,” she says of the red tie. “After I got into the Pioneers, I never took it off. Even in the summer! Such a great Pioneer I was!”
My mother, serious and dreamy, behind a childhood piano. Her mother ties her to the piano bench with a towel so that she won’t escape to jump rope with the kids screaming for her outside her window. Eventually the music will seep in. She will go to music school and later teach piano in a Leningrad kindergarten. She will marry a man who wants to be an opera singer, who once went to music school just like her, although she will deem his school inferior.
My mother, off camera, in our Moscow Square apartment, tossing from a nightmare in one room while I am tossing from asthma
and
a nightmare in the other. She’s dreaming she left her notes at home and now the kindergarten class won’t be ready for a special performance. I’m dreaming I forgot some part of me, too, a toy version of
Buratino
, the Russian Pinocchio, left on a platform in Sevastopol, Crimea, left for some lucky boy or girl.
My mother in our first American co-op apartment, dark brown curls, backless dress, playing the shiny Red October upright piano we had brought at great cost from Leningrad. Atop the piano, a golden menorah with a fake emerald at its center alongside a white vase filled with chalky ceramic flowers. My mother looks hesitant before the keys. She is already throwing herself into her American work, work that will lead her from the title of Typist to that of Fiscal Administrator for a large Manhattan-based charity. The Red October, useless now, will be given to Goodwill in return for a three-hundred-dollar tax deduction.
“Two girls,” my mother says, holding up the photo of her playing the piano in Leningrad, the dreaming, distracted child, and the other of her, a single-minded immigrant mother, behind the Red October in Queens, New York. “One as I was and one as I became.”
I have known only one of those girls. My dear immigrant mother,my fellow anxious warrior. The one she became. The other one I have tried to know. Through the stories, the photographs, the archival evidence, the shared love of condensed milk, the Red Pioneer tie I never got to wear but that graced her neck so proudly. I have known only one of those girls. But, please believe me, I have known her.
The author’s beloved grandma Polya rejoins the family in Rome. She has flown in three kilograms of soap from Leningrad. A Soviet newscast has informed her of a shortage of soap in America
.
T HIS WAS SUPPOSED TO READ like a Cold War spy novel. Security checks, East Berlin, Soviet customs agents. This was supposed to read like a Cold War spy novel, but the James Bond in question, me, can’t make
kaka
.
“Mama! Papa! Oooooooo!” It is the day before our departure for Western Europe and then America, and I am sitting on my little green potty—write a hundred-page novel, sure; but use an actualgrown-up toilet, I’m too scared of falling in—and I can’t get the
kakashka
out.
Staraisya, staraisya
, my parents urge me, one after the other. Try harder, try harder.
Napryagis’
. Strain yourself.
Later, I’m on the Culture Couch, my stomach
My mother, in the first despairing bloom of youth, looking, as she would say,
ozabochena
, a combination of worried and moody and maybe lovesick, a Soviet-era bow crowning the top of her puffy, full-lipped face as if to inform us that the woods behind her do not belong to a sunny summer camp in the Catskills. It is 1956. She is eleven years old in a striped summer dress, resembling, already, a worried young Jewish adult.
My beaming mother in her red Young Pioneer tie, ready to serve the Soviet state with the common Pioneer cheer
I am always ready!
shouted at the top of her lungs. “I never took it off,” she says of the red tie. “After I got into the Pioneers, I never took it off. Even in the summer! Such a great Pioneer I was!”
My mother, serious and dreamy, behind a childhood piano. Her mother ties her to the piano bench with a towel so that she won’t escape to jump rope with the kids screaming for her outside her window. Eventually the music will seep in. She will go to music school and later teach piano in a Leningrad kindergarten. She will marry a man who wants to be an opera singer, who once went to music school just like her, although she will deem his school inferior.
My mother, off camera, in our Moscow Square apartment, tossing from a nightmare in one room while I am tossing from asthma
and
a nightmare in the other. She’s dreaming she left her notes at home and now the kindergarten class won’t be ready for a special performance. I’m dreaming I forgot some part of me, too, a toy version of
Buratino
, the Russian Pinocchio, left on a platform in Sevastopol, Crimea, left for some lucky boy or girl.
My mother in our first American co-op apartment, dark brown curls, backless dress, playing the shiny Red October upright piano we had brought at great cost from Leningrad. Atop the piano, a golden menorah with a fake emerald at its center alongside a white vase filled with chalky ceramic flowers. My mother looks hesitant before the keys. She is already throwing herself into her American work, work that will lead her from the title of Typist to that of Fiscal Administrator for a large Manhattan-based charity. The Red October, useless now, will be given to Goodwill in return for a three-hundred-dollar tax deduction.
“Two girls,” my mother says, holding up the photo of her playing the piano in Leningrad, the dreaming, distracted child, and the other of her, a single-minded immigrant mother, behind the Red October in Queens, New York. “One as I was and one as I became.”
I have known only one of those girls. My dear immigrant mother,my fellow anxious warrior. The one she became. The other one I have tried to know. Through the stories, the photographs, the archival evidence, the shared love of condensed milk, the Red Pioneer tie I never got to wear but that graced her neck so proudly. I have known only one of those girls. But, please believe me, I have known her.
The author’s beloved grandma Polya rejoins the family in Rome. She has flown in three kilograms of soap from Leningrad. A Soviet newscast has informed her of a shortage of soap in America
.
T HIS WAS SUPPOSED TO READ like a Cold War spy novel. Security checks, East Berlin, Soviet customs agents. This was supposed to read like a Cold War spy novel, but the James Bond in question, me, can’t make
kaka
.
“Mama! Papa! Oooooooo!” It is the day before our departure for Western Europe and then America, and I am sitting on my little green potty—write a hundred-page novel, sure; but use an actualgrown-up toilet, I’m too scared of falling in—and I can’t get the
kakashka
out.
Staraisya, staraisya
, my parents urge me, one after the other. Try harder, try harder.
Napryagis’
. Strain yourself.
Later, I’m on the Culture Couch, my stomach
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