littered with the names of concentration camps like Sobibor and Majdanek. At least eighteen of my relatives on this side of the family were killed by the Nazis.
Then there are the ones who survived, and their offspring: the childrenof Icek and Valentina Sherman, Tanya and Ira, who now live respectively in the Russian cities of Kurgan and Nizhniy Tagil; the children of Rita and Boris Gillman, Edik and Gennady, and of Moisey and Sima Sherman, all born in Slavuta in the Ukraine, and where the extended family lives still. The “what if?” school of history can be terribly unconvincing, because of the myriad possible outcomes to any given situation. But here, spread out on the counterpane of my expensive hotel bed in my expensive (if free) hotel suite in Moscow, was a clear path I genuinely could have followed. Had I been on another branch of this family tree, the funny Jewish food I liked to force upon my wife would not have been an occasional culinary diversion. It would not have been the focus of my fragile cultural identity. It would just have been dinner, and for some reason I found that terribly chilling.
A wet weekday night and I am in an expensive black four-wheel drive, barreling past a line of stationary traffic on the outskirts of Moscow. Next to me is Katya Dovlatov, daughter of the late Sergei Dovlatov, a highly regarded Russian writer who was forced to emigrate, unpublished, to the U.S. in the 1970s and who only found a Russian readership in the nineties, long after his death. The car we are in, and its driver, have been borrowed from Katya’s flat mate, an executive with the oil company British Petroleum, who is away on business (for in Moscow, all executives have cars and drivers on twenty-four-hour call). Katya says nothing as the car speeds past the other vehicles, but leans forward a little in her seat to see what awaits us. This spur of road ends at the motorway, where we find a single policeman, holding back the traffic. I feel Katya stiffen in her seat.
Our driver, Alexi, winds down the window, and barks something at the policeman who stares back at him impassively.
“He’s telling him that we are foreigners and that we are late for dinner,” she says with a bitter laugh. Katya left the USSR when she was eleven, and lived amid all the other Russian émigrés in Queens—heraccent when she speaks English is pure New York—where her father edited the Russian-language newspaper The New American and wrote stories for The New Yorker. She first revisited Moscow shortly after the collapse of communism and, after studying Russian literature in London, has increasingly made Moscow her home.
Now she runs a charitable foundation in her father’s name, though she makes no attempt to hide the fact that the way the city operates drives her nuts. On our journey we had seen big black cars simply drive down the pavement to escape the traffic, and others, with blue lights flashing, driving on the wrong side of the road. “Under Yeltsin anybody could get a blue light for $20,000,” she told me. “Now you still have to pay, but they only go to certain people.” This, she says, is a city that functions according to status and it does not surprise her that the driver should be trying to get us onto the closed motorway by intoning our position as foreigners with restaurant reservations. It’s usually a killer combination.
Tonight it makes no difference. Our driver is “fined” the equivalent of £10 ($20, in reality, a bribe to keep him out of the judicial process), and we are told to wait in line. Then, out of the darkness, its red and blue lights flashing against the wet surface of the empty motorway, comes a police car moving at serious speed, a thick mist bursting from its back wheels. A few seconds later comes the reason for this traffic jam: a long, shiny black limo, low to the road, the flag of the Russian Federation flying on its bonnet. President Vladimir Putin is being driven to his country
Then there are the ones who survived, and their offspring: the childrenof Icek and Valentina Sherman, Tanya and Ira, who now live respectively in the Russian cities of Kurgan and Nizhniy Tagil; the children of Rita and Boris Gillman, Edik and Gennady, and of Moisey and Sima Sherman, all born in Slavuta in the Ukraine, and where the extended family lives still. The “what if?” school of history can be terribly unconvincing, because of the myriad possible outcomes to any given situation. But here, spread out on the counterpane of my expensive hotel bed in my expensive (if free) hotel suite in Moscow, was a clear path I genuinely could have followed. Had I been on another branch of this family tree, the funny Jewish food I liked to force upon my wife would not have been an occasional culinary diversion. It would not have been the focus of my fragile cultural identity. It would just have been dinner, and for some reason I found that terribly chilling.
A wet weekday night and I am in an expensive black four-wheel drive, barreling past a line of stationary traffic on the outskirts of Moscow. Next to me is Katya Dovlatov, daughter of the late Sergei Dovlatov, a highly regarded Russian writer who was forced to emigrate, unpublished, to the U.S. in the 1970s and who only found a Russian readership in the nineties, long after his death. The car we are in, and its driver, have been borrowed from Katya’s flat mate, an executive with the oil company British Petroleum, who is away on business (for in Moscow, all executives have cars and drivers on twenty-four-hour call). Katya says nothing as the car speeds past the other vehicles, but leans forward a little in her seat to see what awaits us. This spur of road ends at the motorway, where we find a single policeman, holding back the traffic. I feel Katya stiffen in her seat.
Our driver, Alexi, winds down the window, and barks something at the policeman who stares back at him impassively.
“He’s telling him that we are foreigners and that we are late for dinner,” she says with a bitter laugh. Katya left the USSR when she was eleven, and lived amid all the other Russian émigrés in Queens—heraccent when she speaks English is pure New York—where her father edited the Russian-language newspaper The New American and wrote stories for The New Yorker. She first revisited Moscow shortly after the collapse of communism and, after studying Russian literature in London, has increasingly made Moscow her home.
Now she runs a charitable foundation in her father’s name, though she makes no attempt to hide the fact that the way the city operates drives her nuts. On our journey we had seen big black cars simply drive down the pavement to escape the traffic, and others, with blue lights flashing, driving on the wrong side of the road. “Under Yeltsin anybody could get a blue light for $20,000,” she told me. “Now you still have to pay, but they only go to certain people.” This, she says, is a city that functions according to status and it does not surprise her that the driver should be trying to get us onto the closed motorway by intoning our position as foreigners with restaurant reservations. It’s usually a killer combination.
Tonight it makes no difference. Our driver is “fined” the equivalent of £10 ($20, in reality, a bribe to keep him out of the judicial process), and we are told to wait in line. Then, out of the darkness, its red and blue lights flashing against the wet surface of the empty motorway, comes a police car moving at serious speed, a thick mist bursting from its back wheels. A few seconds later comes the reason for this traffic jam: a long, shiny black limo, low to the road, the flag of the Russian Federation flying on its bonnet. President Vladimir Putin is being driven to his country
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