“Sverdlov,” he said, “was the leader of the revolution, you know that. He was Jewish. You know the country Finland? It used to be part of Russia. Big military division there. The Bolsheviks said, Okay, if you help us, you don’t have to be part of Russia anymore. Finland said, Okay, give us our freedom. So that was good. The Bolsheviks had some good soldiers and they had the proletariat and they took Caesar’s Palace— the tsar’s house, Winter Palace! Wow, beautiful! Very beautiful. Italian. Windows! Doors! Gold! The provisional government was there, and they had the Women’s Battalion. Women protected the palace. They had no one left, the provisional government. Just the Women’s Battalion and some Cossacks. A steel ship came into the harbor, a Baltic ship, and the Bolsheviks came into Caesar’s Palace through a back door. Someone left it open by accident. And they shat all over Caesar’s Palace. Bye-bye beautiful art, bye-bye beautiful wine, bye-bye beautiful furniture, bye-bye beautiful diamonds, rubies, crystals, everything bye-bye. The tsar, you know, he had the best wine in the world. French. The soldiers said, Let’s go, boys! Party time! They were boozing into the next life. They boozed for ten livers that day. They were unstoppable. The leaders said, Come on assholes, you have to work! They poured the wine into the river. The soldiers lapped it up from the drains. Eventually they got to the Duma, pew pew pew, pistols, and said, You don’t exist anymore. The provisional government pissed their pants. They were hungry, they were starving. No food left in Caesar’s Palace. They pissed their pants and ran. The Bolsheviks shat all over the palace. It was symbolic.”
“Then the Bolsheviks said, Okay, now we have a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. They brought Lenin back from Germany on a wagon. He had Jewish blood, too, Lenin. You know why he died? He loved prostitutes. He had neurosyphilis. His wife signed his papers when he was abroad with prostitutes. He suffered a lot before he died. Anyway, Lenin was the leader of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. There were lots of committees. There was significant confusion in the party about what direction to take. Some people wanted to cultivate the peasants, We are a nation of peasants! Go peasants! Some people wanted global revolution. Trotsky wanted a global revolution. A few globalists tried to stir something up in Germany after WW1; they were all shot. Germans are very organized. So yeah, the factions were in conflict. Stalin was the smartest. He poisoned everyone against each other. Lenin was dead by then. He only made it a few years. You know the saying, Whoever counts the ballots wins the election. That was Stalin. He annihilated the other guys. He couldn’t annihilate Trotsky because Trotsky had built the great Red Army, so he sent him to Mexico. There was a big communist movement there at the time. Look at Frida Kahlo’s paintings, okay? It’s all in the paintings— red flags, blah blah. Her paintings and her fat husband’s, too. She was a melancholic woman. She had some Jewish blood. Frida Kahlo. Then they sent some guys to shoot him in Mexico. Trotsky.”
“Okay, so they were brainwashing people. Everything belongs to the people! Everything belongs to this, everything belongs to that! Peasants and proletariat. This and that, demagogues. That’s all. And a lot of people believed in it, especially people who didn’t want to do anything. The people who didn’t want to work believed in it— brotherhood, equality, freedom. Your grandfather the pigeon keeper was absolutely fucked in the head. He screamed his whole life— This isn’t real communism! This isn’t for the people! This is not the Soviet Union, this is the Bandit’s Union! He was very idealistic. He never read a book. He was an ideologue. You know— Reuben, the pigeon keeper. Very.”
“At some point the party wanted to get rid of Stalin. They saw he was a dictator. The party said, He’s not good, he’s a dictator. They wanted to get Kirov in. Kirov was in St. Petersberg, he was respected. Stalin was in Moscow. The party voted for Kirov, he won the election. But Stalin was counting the votes, you know that. Whoever counts the votes wins! Kirov loved broads. Stalin was good, he got everyone. He got a husband of one of the broads to pew pew Kirov. Bye-bye Kirov. This was 1926 or 1927. Stalin was very good at consolidating power. But it wasn’t very good in the country, the country was still weak. The peasants gobbled up their children all over the Soviet Union. Cannibalism was very popular. You can look it up. You’re my devil! You’re sucking my blood! I love you. There were deficits, you understand. De-fi-cits. Mama’s grandfather, he was confiscating grain and cows from the peasants. He was an agricultural expert. So he had to go get the grain—feed, for livestock, for animals—and cows, and bring everything back to the starving workers of the cities, that’s what they called it. They were giving the peasants a shakedown, you know, taking all their grain and seed and cows. That was his job, Mama’s grandfather, he was official. So he went to the peasants and said, Hi, I’m official, guess what? That is not your cow anymore. It’s a cow for the people. Your grain is the people’s grain. I’m going to take it. So he took the seed and the grain and the cows and started back for the city, to Kiev. And then the peasants caught up to the transport, killed all the guards, and the commissar and Mama’s grandfather—you know he played the violin—they cooked them in a boiling pot. After two, three weeks, the transport hasn’t shown up. The state wants to know, Where are the cows? So they organize another group to go see what happened. The group shows up and starts staging a little terror, shooting peasants. The peasants who don’t want to get mixed up in that admit what happened to the first transport. So the new transport takes the seed and the grain and the cows and everything back to the city and the state calls the family to the city and tells them your great-grandfather was a hero. It was a big family. Jews never do abortions. My mother had twelve siblings.”
“So that’s what was happening. People worked under the stick. Sometimes they sent you to Siberia for re-education. People worked badly, but they were forced to so it was fine. You’re my little blood-sucker. You are a genetic genius. You are genetically a genius. It’s in our blood. Yes! What do you want? You want me to explain everything. Okay, I’m telling you. Listen, Stalin said, Time for industrialization. In actuality, who made the Soviet Union? I’ll tell you. Prisoners and American engineers. Famous American engineers—what was America at this time? In 1925? Yes! Hunger! Depression! The Soviet Union said, You want a job? No problem. We have a lot of jobs here. So the American engineers came, some were Jews, some not. Some knew Russian language, some not. All over the world, then, the Soviet Union was the new future, the new horizon for humanity, brotherhood. They built the infrastructure and all that, the machines and the factories. Americans! And they taught the Russians. Some Americans decided to get Soviet citizenship. After they finished building they sent those to Siberia for labor. The Americans with American citizenship they sent back to America. How did Stalin pay for all this? I’ll tell you. He sold anything he could get his hands on— art, grain, oil. To whom? Yes! The West! Anything he sold to keep the currency hard—gold, dollars. And that’s how he industrialized the Soviet Union. The West got a good deal. He sold stuff at a discount, he needed money. People got good deals. Who were the prisoners? I’ll tell you. You said something not very nice? Seven years in the labor camps. Bye-bye. You stole a few potatoes? Bye-bye! Turks, Tatars, anybody. Russia has 117 ethnicities. It’s not a stable society. That’s imperialism. It’s not good.”
“So industrialization made the Soviet Union a very powerful nation but still poor. But people were okay, they said— Wow, look at this. We have industry now. In a few years, we’ll be okay. But the biggest problem was Bulgakov. You know Bulgakov? You know Master and Margarita. Living space. Everyone had one room and in the middle, communal kitchen. Nobody likes that. Later they built different apartment blocks for bureaucrats. That was in the 50’s and 60’s. Small houses you could have then. That was later. Separate houses. That was later.”
“Now what do you want you devil! You’re a devil! I’ll tell you everything. Okay, Stalin is working. He has the prisoners digging channels. What’s happening in Germany? Yes. Depression, hunger. They paid out the ass after WW1. Their assholes were bleeding, the Germans. Wah wah wah. In 1933 power came to Hitler. Why? Because Stalin said Communists do not get together with Social Democrats. The social democrats in Germany, they wanted to get together with the Communists. Stalin said, No coalition between social democrats and communists. So what happened? No coalition. A lot of people did not want Hitler. But they were all— helter-skelter. You know what helter-skelter means— rock ‘n’ roll, yeah baby, Rolling Stones! But it wasn’t good for Germany, helter-skelter. If the communists and social democrats got together, no Hitler. But it was too helter-skelter so they got Hitler. He won the elections. Anyway, Europe was okay with Hitler. They liked Hitler. What does Nazi mean? National Socialist German Worker’s Party! Socialism, national socialism. He started building roads, military power. Stalin says, Okay. He sees Hitler is trying to be a big guy. They do a pact. Molotov Pact. Non-aggression. You don’t attack me, I don’t attack you. Stalin believes the pact is good.”
“What happens? Poland is fucked. Poland is always getting fucked. Poland is always getting fucked by Russia, Germany, Lithuania, everybody. Everybody fucks Poland. Okay, Hitler says, I’m going to cross Stalin, fuck Stalin. Germany comes to Poland and the war began. Jesus Christ! Poland gets fucked! I hate Poles, they hate Jews. But they fight with empty hands. You understand? Polish people, they fought Germans with empty hands. You never saw something like that. That was later. That was in 1944. You know this. But in 1942, the Germans you know—their divisions made it all the way to Moscow. The Soviets were not expecting them. They had very good technology. Their tanks were amazing. They were snatching up territory very easily. They took over a million Soviet soldiers in that advance. But Stalin held Moscow against the Germans. The Germans, they’d made some kind of tactical mistake. I think they ran out of gas or something. So Stalin kept Moscow. Ten Soviet soldiers died for every one German. They fought very badly at first. The Germans ran out of bullets to shoot Russians with. Soviet generals fought with bodies. If you were a soldier you had three days to live once they called you to the front. Not the bread slicers, not the generals. The soldiers. They calculated it. Whoever pays picks the song, you know that. For Stalin’s birthday, you know, they took Kharkov. A thousand soldiers died and they took Kharkov. On the radio they said, Our mighty forces took Kharkov, Wow! Hooray! Two days later the Germans surrounded the city, pew pew pew! Germans know how to fight. They surrounded Kharkov. You won’t believe how many soldiers they killed in Kharkov then. Tens of thousands. This was two days later. Corruption, you understand, it’s inevitable. There’s no way to avoid it. Russia, America, Germany, it doesn’t matter. If you have a society, you have corruption. That’s just how it is. Life sucks.”
“So the fascists arrived in Ukraine. The peasants still hated the Soviets because they’d robbed them and made them starve and everything. So when the fascists came, they gave them bread and salt. They wanted them to defeat the Soviet Union so they could stop working in the collectives. I would say two-thirds supported the fascists. One-third was loyal to the state. Once the fascists came, they started building labor camps for the Jews. Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia—they all did it. This was 1941. They started gunning the Jews into camps. But the Germans didn’t want to get their hands dirty so the Ukrainaians did it. The Ukrainians got boots and whatever from the Germans for building the camps. The Jewish mothers tried to save their children, they gave their jewelry, money. The Germans took it and threw the children back into their graves.”
“Mama lived in the Jewish Bazaar in Kiev. The Germans came. They said, Everybody is going to Poland. The Jews. The neighbors started tattling, This is a Jew, that’s Jew. They got into the wagons and drove them away. Outside of Kiev, they built a huge ditch. They called the men first. Men, they said, Line up. Pew pew pew. They killed the men. The men are in the ditch. Then the women and children. The land breathed with—the bodies. The ditch was rising and falling, you could see it. They covered it all up with more dirt. You know this is called Babi Yar. Oh my god, I’m crying. They killed a million and half Jews in Ukraine, you know that, our family, your aunts, your uncles. The Ukrainians did it, just like the Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, French. The French sometimes hid Jews until they ran out of money. Then they gave them over to the Germans and they burned.”
“Mama was twenty years old. She had Lionel and Boris. This was before that. There was no occupation yet. So, Mama, she was a big lady. Yes! She was big, big, big. Everyone respected Mama. She was very vigorous. She loved equality, freedom, brotherhood, sisterhood, all that stupid stuff. It wasn’t like that but it doesn’t matter. Everyone loved Mama because she was good. She was fun, she was good, she did everything nice and easy. Everyone got what they needed from Mama. So before the occupation, the State called Mama. They said, Mama, we know you are a Jew. The Jews are being killed. You need to get on a train and go away. Mama got on the train with the two children. On the way to Odessa, the train is bombed by Germans. Mama runs out with the children. Boris ran ahead with a white sheet yelling, I don’t want to die, Mama! I don’t want to die, Mama! Weeeeeeeeeee, planes are flying overhead, Germans. Weeeeeeeeyoooooooo. They told this story after. Anyway, Boris was cut but Lionel wasn’t. She always carried him around naked to show everyone he wasn’t cut. But Boris, he was always in shorts. And he really looked like a Jew— little darky, little curls. I’m crying. Anyway, they never made it to Odessa. They ended up with some Romanians. The Romanians were with Hitler, but they weren’t as anti-Semitic. They said to Mama, You’re Ukrainian, right? She said, Yeah. They said, Okay, you’re going to cook for our soldiers. So Mama was saved. She was there for half a year or so. Papa, he was a typical loser. He drove a convoy during the war, in Leningrad. He drove on the lake. It was the only way to get to Leningrad during the occupation. It was called Life Road, you know—Road of Life. He drove food, gas, whatever. One time his truck fell through the ice. It was almost spring. The Soviets could’ve shot him for that, but they pulled him out and sent him to the hospital.”
“A story, you know—Mama told this story. There was a Romanian general who liked Mama. One day he came up to Boris and began petting his face. Judah, Judah, he said, Don’t worry, I won’t give you up. Boris was eight years old. Mama always said she was Ukrainian, she sang Ukrainian songs. But the general knew. There were people like that, yes. There were people like that. After a year and a half the Soviet army came and got Mama. She lost one son, Jacob. This was before they tried to get to Odessa. He ran off a wagon and got shot. That was a tragedy. When they came back to Kiev after the war, everything was gone. The piano, the furniture—the neighbors had it. When people came back, you know—other people were there. In their apartments. One officer said, Hey, get out. The guy in his apartment said, No. So the officer—he was Jewish—he shot the guy. He’d made it through the war and he wanted to sit in his own apartment. Then there was a big, big pogrom. This was in 1946. Kruschev came and snuffed it out quietly. They kept it quiet. That’s why I hate Ukranians. They drink hatred from their mother’s bosoms. Why do they hate us so much? It’s a big problem. That’s why I always wanted to come to America. Everyone is crazy. It’s a very difficult situation in the world right now.”
“After the war, Mama went back to work. She fed everyone, the bureaucrats, everyone. The bureaucrats called her and said, Mama, we need salmon, we need sprats. She sent a car with a spread. Salami, all that. She was a formidable logistical thinker. She went around to the neighbors and collected all the stuff they’d taken. Papa was all depleted by the time he came back. He’d been lying around hospitals for a while. He was sick, he had cancer in his lymph nodes. He came back from the war a sick man. Mama loved art, she loved to show off. She was a show-off. She always got tickets to the philharmonic, she wore long white gloves, jewelry. Yes, she loved art, and she loved to show off. Food was the currency then and Mama was a food manager. That’s how she was big. Not money—kielbasa, fruits, vegetables, caviar. The table was always open in our house. Boris always brought musicians over, artists. They always wanted to eat; they were poor. They came over and ate and drank, then they recited poetry for Mama. They were hungry as dogs. Boris liked art, too. Do you know the instrument the tuba? Tu-ba. Boris played the tuba in the orchestra in some palace. He made a little extra playing funerals. Pom pom pom boo boo boo BOM BOM BOM—behind the coffin. The tuba. This was later.”
“I was born in 1950. Mama was forty years old. She started bloating. Something was wrong with her stomach. She went to the doctor, they told her she was pregnant. She already had Boris, Lionel, Jacob had died, and a set of girl twins had also died. They got the wrong blood type in a transfusion, they gave them the wrong blood. No one talked about it. Just like I don’t talk about my little Yasha. He was born and they took him. They came back and said he’d suffocated. I never even saw him. We don’t know what happened to him. They might’ve stolen him, who knows. We never saw him. I was twenty-seven. I don’t talk about that. Me and Mama were two idiots alone. We were two nobodies in the wind. Who knows what happened. I brought Mama to America."
"Okay, so Mama was pregnant. My Mama not your Mama. She decided not to abort. Me and Vladimir were born. We had one big room for Papa, Mama, Lionel, Boris, me and Vladimir. Lionel slept on the fold-up cot. Boris was always out adventuring. He was out somewhere. One of us, me and Vladimir, had to sleep with Mama, and one had to sleep with Papa. Vladimir always yelled, I want to sleep with Papa, I want to sleep with Papa! And I yelled, I want to sleep with Papa, too! This hurt Mama’s feelings. She sat on the opposite bed and said, This is how I’m repaid. We wanted to sleep with Papa, we didn’t see him very often. He was a man, you know how it is. We were boys. We took his war medals and threw them against the wall. It was a game. In the courtyard we played all kinds of games. I remember that. Usually you play the game with coins. We didn’t have any coins so we used Papa’s war medals. It got to be that I was the one who always slept with Mama. That’s just how it got to be. I always slept with Mama and Vladimir slept with Papa. Mama, she was not large in height, but she was very hearty—boned. She had huge boobies, I slept on them. It wasn’t Oedipal or anything, we just only had two beds. I washed Mama’s feet. She came home with her aching feet and said, Children help me. I put the water in the bucket and I washed Mama’s feet. I was crying the whole time I filled the bucket, Why do I have to wash Mama’s feet, why do I have to Mama’s feet! I washed her feet and I dried them with a towel. I was a Mama’s boy.”
“Vladimir decided he was my big brother because he was born five minutes before me. He was the tough one. We wrestled a lot. Mama wanted us to build up our—closeness. We had to stay together. She could’ve bought us each a hundred toys but she only bought one, for sharing. Once she bought us this football game. We were playing once, he was bothering me. He was cheating. I took the game—it was metal. I knocked him over the head with it. Then we fought hard, not to the blood. I remember that. I remember how I knocked him on the head. Anyway, Stalin died in 1953 but of course I don’t remember. They say people were wailing in the streets, Our Father, Our Father. By the end of his life, he was totally paranoid. He didn’t fear the Russians or the Ukranians. He feared one people only, the Jews. They were in every organ of the state, and they had the capacity. People say they did kill him, but I don’t know. He wanted to send them all to Siberia, but they did a lot of work for him undercover. Jews. No one knew what they were doing officially. Of course when he died, all the intrigues began. Kruschev—a slob of rare order. An absolute idiot. He ordered the Jews out of the state agencies. Why? everyone said at first, They’re very creative, they’re effective. Kruschev said, You want to sleep easy at night? They said, Okay. Then he began building up the nationalism; Ukrainians for the Ukrainian apparatus, Kazakhs in Kazakhstan, et cetera. The directors were officially nationals but you know the muscle men, the engineers, the operators—those were Jews. It didn’t matter anymore, anyway. No one believed in anything, people just wanted to live better. We had two ideas in the Soviet Union by then: America and the cosmos. Yes, I remember when Gagrin was first. He was the first man in the cosmos. Yes, we won, that I remember. Everyone was out on the streets. We had a little idea again. Those were our pyramids, like in Egypt. The pyramids were just a national idea, too. They had to build them for the slaves to say, Wow! I’m good! You need an idea to unite people, otherwise everyone is out for himself and governance crumbles—greed, jealousy, aggression, you know how it goes in Rome, everyone knows. America has fifty more years, maybe a little more, who knows. Someone doesn’t want it anymore. Globalists have to do their business wherever they like, no more countries, just markets. Except China, that’s why they’re good. That’s why they’re winning, they have a strong national personality. They’re shaking down the Uighurs, too, but aside from that. Anyway, so that was Stalin. Bye-bye, Father. He was in the pyramids now.”
“On Saturdays Mama took us to eat at restaurants. She didn’t want to cook; she worked with food all week. Mama loved to tip. She took us to the movies. She was a kind woman. She was busy. We grew like weeds, no one watched us. If you don’t know, you’ll be taught, if you don’t want to, you’ll be forced. That’s what she said. We were street kids. We were always out in the courtyards, boys, girls, kids. Once I got in trouble—I took a big slice of bread out to the yard. The bread, I covered it with butter, lots of butter. What else? Black caviar. I brought out to the yard a slab of bread dripping with caviar. There was still hunger then. I was walking around eating my sandwich. Everyone wanted to know, what’s that? Caviar, I said. Fish eggs! I was having fun. Mama found out, she said, How could you? She was very upset. People were hungry. She said we could only eat caviar at home. Vladimir was there. We were always together. To-ge-ther. We were unbreakable. No one messed with us because we were two. Once an older girl was knocking Vladimir around. I jumped on her back, scratched her all over the face, and ran home to hide behind Papa. I was spoiled. Everyone forgave me for everything, I was cute. Everyone loved me. I loved girls. I was always looking under girls’ skirts. I told the girls what color underwear they were wearing. Yellow. I got in trouble. I didn’t like to study, I’m an artist. Vladimir had a steel ass. He didn’t like to study either but he had an ass of steel to sit on. He stayed in the chair. He was good. He kept his ass in the chair and plowed. I wanted to be a pilot. Mama said, You want to be a doctor? Nah, I said. Mama told everyone not to hurt my feelings. I was the youngest. I was her little cow—a calfling. Even after she died, everyone forgave me for everything, just me. Not Vladimir. He finished university with honors. They gave him a medal. He was focused.”
“Anyway, in school they taught that you were the little friend of Grandpa Lenin. All the kids did it; you got a badge for being an Octoberist. And how bad and starving it was under the tsars, and how we lived in the most perfect time. We sang some patriotic songs or something. I don’t remember them. Mama remembers; she loves all that stuff. Ask her, she’ll sing it. You know Mama. When you were sixteen you got promoted from Octoberist to Pioneer. They gave you a red tie, you were grown up. And then you were the keeper of the ideology. Your ideology is strong, you have the education, and you have to do something for the country, that’s what they told you. Like on Saturday you had to clean the streets or pick up metal scraps or whatever. That was called Saturdays. I had to go, but I didn’t pick up shit. I was a bad Pioneer. Even from the time I was a child, my brain was clear. I thought, I don’t know who Lenin is. Some old fart. I love Mama and Papa. I was a critical thinker. Then after Pioneer, when you were really good, if you earned it, you got to be a member of the Komsomol. They didn’t accept me, I wasn’t an achiever. I got in trouble for playing spin the bottle at newspaper club. Someone told on me, probably a girl I didn’t kiss enough. Then they said, Okay, you’re morally unstable. And I couldn’t be in the Komsomol. You couldn’t wear your long hair like The Beatles on the bus or some guys from the Komsomol would cut it off. That’s what they did. Also they cut your pants if they were too tight. They said, This is not Soviet style. You had to get your information quietly with the blinds pulled. There was a guy, Will-is Conover. Willis Conover! He was on Voice of America playing everything—Benny Goodman, Sachmo, and they were telling what a nice system they had over there in America, what a good system it was. I didn’t care about all that yet, I liked the music. David Brubeck, Duke Ellington, then the rock ‘n’ roll, psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll. I pissed my pants. The Soviets played something they called jazz, it sucked. I had heard some things before. They brought Paul Robeson over to talk about slavery. That was allowed. Paul Robeson came, and they talked about how they were killing Black people in America. You couldn’t get a ticket to see him. You couldn’t get anything good like that. People waited in lines all night for books—Walter Scott, Dumas, Maupassant. That was censored. We read Maupassant under the covers with flashlights. If it was nice and romantic we could read that, or about Western decay. The State allowed those books, we waited in lines as soon as they came out. Walter Scott. You had to live in the city for that. You couldn’t get shit in the provinces. It was only in the cities you could get that. Anyway, Paul Robeson came a few times, he was friends with Jews—artists, writers, poets. This was before the war. Then he came back later, all his friends were gone. He said, What happened? They were all dead. There were some Black people in universities; they were very popular. They were mostly from Africa. Socialism makes sense for African people, they have a tribal society. The girls liked them, they wanted them to bring them shirts and pants and all that, from across the border, nice jackets. You know gold-diggers. Yeah, I liked Voice of America.”
“So that’s how it was. Papa died. I was nine years old. We loved Papa, he was a simple guy. Mama was always begging him to stop going to work. Mama earned his monthly pay in three hours. She said, I don’t need your pennies. Mostly men worked like dogs and came home and beat their wives like dogs out of worthlessness. Russian men—there’s something wrong with them. Not Jews, regular Russians, they’re uncivilized. They come home, eat dinner, drink a little vodka, their wives say something wrong, BAM, their wives fly. In our house, we prayed to Mama. Mama was the boss. She made every one of us, she set everyone up. Boris, you know, he was doing all kinds of stuff—playing tuba, making rosewood chairs, furniture. Nothing was working; he didn’t have the hands for it. I could’ve done it but not him. She said, Son, enough experimenting. You’re going to be a cook for me. You’ll always have a piece of bread. People always need to eat. People always need to eat and to die. You can be a cook or an undertaker. But we had no connections in the undertaking business, Mama was a food boss, so he became a cook. He was a good cook, but he didn’t like working. He’d earn a little money, fuck off on vacation, earn a little money, rest, come back, make doughnuts. Lionel she set up too. Lionel finished the technical institute, and Mama said, You can be a couturier. He made coats for a famous designer in Kiev. You could get anything in the shops there, pretty much. Thirty percent of the economy was black market. Planned economy sucks. Every factory, every shop, had a plan, how much to produce, how much to send to the State, money. Doesn’t matter what; one thousand fish, one thousand pencils. So everyone had to move material on the side, for a little extra. One guy was moving string, another guy was moving buttons, everyone was carrying something. Agency For Unearned Wages— that’s who was looking for you, if you had more money than you were supposed to have. Then you’d get put into jail or whatever, or moved to another republic. They were always inspecting Mama since she had cash flow. They show up and check your inventory, cash, to make sure it was all according to plan. Why do you have so many kielbasa if you said you sold this and that many? for example. So Mama had to pay them off. Any cash flow business—grocery, dry cleaning—you could live well. One time a lady came to Lionel’s coat shop, her husband was the Director of Dry Cleaning. They had oceans of money. She ordered a very fancy coat. You can’t go to an ideological meeting in something like that. You always have to know where you’re going in what. No showing off, otherwise people start asking you where you got so much money to pay for your vacations in the Caucuses. Neighbors are the first threat, then coworkers. That’s snitch society. By the time Brezhnev came to power, everyone spit on appearances and did whatever they wanted. Who killed the Soviet Union? Age! All the leaders were old. They were old and couldn’t modernize and died and the Soviet Union died.”
“Anyway, now I can understand that when Papa died that was a psychological trauma for me. I didn’t realize that for a long time. But now I understand that if a psychologist were to see me, he would say, Yes, you’re traumatized for your entire life. Why? I’ll tell you. Mama got him the best doctors, but there was no treatment for him. He died of lymphatic cancer. They brought him in the open coffin to the apartment. We had to sit all day and night next to the coffin. Everyone was there, looking at Papa. He was the color of grass. Green. I kept falling asleep on the couch, I was tired. They woke me up, we have to look at Papa, we have to look at Papa. Okay, fine. The next day, we have to, you know, accompany Papa to his final rest, and the orchestra comes—tuba, drums, clarinet. They played the funeral march, pom pom pa pom pom pa pom pa pom pa pom. Nothing was worse yet, you know, with Papa dead. I was a child, he was just lying there green. But when they played the song I saw my Papa was gone, he was dead, and I was traumatized. So that’s Papa.”
“Mama died when she was fifty-six years old. She died of a lack of discipline. She had Type II diabetes, and she died because she didn’t follow the diet and didn’t get her insulin shots. In the final stages, she had gangrene. She had a few diabetic shocks, she passed out from high blood sugar. The ambulance came. That traumatized me, too. That happened at night, she passed out, the medics came and gave her shots. I washed her feet, you know, but by the end, she had a scratch that wasn’t healing, that’s how she got the gangrene. It’s common— gangrene, stroke, heart attack. Well, they took her to the hospital and cut her foot off. The gangrene kept spreading, and they cut the other foot off, and it kept spreading, and she died. That was really a tragedy. Everyone loved Mama, she gave everyone everything. Once a gypsy came into the courtyard naked, and Mama gave her a coat, I remember that. Everyone called her Mama, no one called her by her name, the neighbors, her employees. When she died the same orchestra came again. They brought her body where she worked, and people came out and said goodbye and cried. Then it was me and Vladimir and Lionel in a communal apartment by the botanic gardens. Lionel was our Mama and our Papa then. He was our guardian. Eventually he met Asya and moved out. We had a lot to eat, we were fourteen. We partied. Our friends brought cabbage, port wine, eggplant. We partied every night.”
“When I was nineteen I got a job as a food production technician. I’d go around checking the boilers in candy factories. I learned all the tricks, I found drunks to work for rubbing alcohol and all that. Yes, drunks— they were unemployed, they drank too much, but they still knew how to do basic mechanical stuff. The State gave you a timeline, let’s say four weeks, to get some workers for a project, and a budget to pay them. But the drunks did it faster, they were fiends, they worked fast, and you could pay them in rubbing alcohol, we had jugs for cleaning machinery and whatever. Then you had two extra weeks to fuck around and a lot of extra cash. That’s how I saved enough money to buy Mama an engagement ring. Your Mama not my Mama. That was later. I didn’t know Mama then, I was with all kinds of other boys and girls. When I was in summer camp I learned a lot from one of the counselors. A lot of the guys around were very primitive, pigs. I had a lot of skill. I was nice, I didn’t make anyone do anything. Vladimir and me, and our friends, you know—we never muscled any of the girls. Never. Once I was working with an art school girl and Boris came in with his striped shirt, his darky curls, he started yelling, I want her too, I want her! She got scared, grabbed her clothes and ran out. That was only one time. Boris was crazy. We never muscled anyone, no. Parties didn’t always end in sex. We talked about books, you know, music, movies, like you. Cultural stuff. Other times, the physical pleasure. I got gonorrhea once. They poked me with penicillin for two weeks. After that I got more careful. Her name was Valentina, she gave me gonorrhea. Her boyfriend was an Iranian officer. Boyfriend, yes, married, no. I did not work with married women. That was my code.”
“By the time I met Mama I was twenty-five. I’d already been to the army. I’d been traveling to different regions all the time as a technician, they couldn’t find me. By the time I was twenty-three they got me and sent me to work on the bombers, Tu-95’s. I was too old to haze by then. Most people go when they’re eighteen, nineteen and get tortured, you know, by the older guys. But I was already older when I arrived, so no one beat me or made me peel potatoes at night. I’m good. This was a few months by Lake Baikal. Then they caught me buying booze off-base. I got three nights in the disciplinary box and sent to Chita. It sucks. It’s like Arizona. It’s in Kazakhstan. I was a right wing mechanic, mechanic of the right wing. Huge wing, check the motor, filter and all that. I met a waitress. I got up in the middle of the night, wiggled out the window, and went running for that waitress. Her name was Christina. Her dad was an aristocrat; they'd sent him out a long time ago, counter-revolution. He was nice, we had some baths together. It wasn’t bad.”
“Later I was in Bada by the nuclear testing site. They were detonating bombs underground. Everyone had to evacuate the base while they were testing in case buildings collapsed. They were giving the land a shakedown. It was like an earthquake. Everyone warned you about the radiation; they used to test the bombs in the air, not by the time I got there. Just underground. Then I had to fly with some planes to other bases. I didn’t fly, I was just a mechanic, I helped the engineers. They sent us past Siberia, to Tiksi. Tik-si! You don’t know where that is. It’s at the top of the world. It was very cold. I went one time, I said I’m not doing that again. First of all, sitting for sixteen hours on the plane, they’re always bothering you, waking you up. Then it’s very cold. I had a snowman between the legs, my balls were frosted over. Next time they tried to send me, I pulled my tooth out for medical leave. You get two days off for medical leave, it’s the rule. Each time I got assigned to Tiksi, I pulled out another tooth. I pulled out four teeth. In the hospital I played cards. By the fourth tooth, I was demobilized and I could go home. The guys from the villages, they were proud. They wanted to go home in a sparkling uniform and say, Look at me, I am so strong, I am so elegant, handsome, clean, beautiful. I said, Okay, you want to buy my uniform? I sold them all my clothes, my uniform, my hat. I never used my uniform, I wore my working clothes, I was a mechanic. Military guys— they’re very stupid. That’s why we won the war. Somebody told you to go die, they said, Okay. They’re not educated. So I sold all my clothes, and I came home in dirty old shit, I looked like a bum. I had to hide from the military police in the airports, they were on the lookout for bums. But I made it home. Vladimir opened the door and began screaming and crying. I looked like shit! They made me take off all my dirty clothes in the hallway before I could come inside. I’m not built mentally for the military. I’m an open-minded critical thinker. I can’t follow orders, just like you. We can’t take shit from anybody, that’s why we’re always alone.”
“Now, I’m home! For three months I only partied. Alcohol! Unbelievable partying. We had some poppies, you know—like opium. You cook the poppies in a little pot for tea. Vladimir had some tea and passed out. He had a date that night, at six o’ clock. He woke up and went. One of my friends, Mark, introduced me to a girl named Tanya. She was a little simple Jane, nothing special, I didn’t care, we were all hanging out. One night we went to Tanya’s apartment and Anya was there, too. Mama. I didn't pay attention to her. I could have any girl, I didn’t care, Tanya, Anya, they were all the same to me. Anya, Mama, she had a boyfriend then, anyway. He put her on the stove and they were kissing, hugging. Anya, Mama, people talked shit about her, she married for papers, blah blah. She did marry for papers, it’s true. She always dreamt of living in the big city. You know Mama, her kettles are always piping. After a year, the marriage ended, and she was shuttling between apartments. She was basically homeless, living with one girlfriend and another, bedrooms separated by curtains, a bed, a curtain, a bed, a curtain. Awful. Anyway, one day I called Tanya. Mama answered, It’s not Tanya, it’s Anya. Tanya, Anya, Fanya, I didn’t give a shit. I was going to have a nice night. So I said, Okay, it’ll be Anya. I said, Meet me by the university train station. It was close to my house. She had to travel like an hour to get there. I was waiting ten minutes and here she comes in a fur coat, a fur hat, it was cold. Nice, tall girl. Mama is tall, you know. I said, Hi, Tanya. She said, Anya. I said, Okay, let’s go. She said, You follow me, small fry. She called me a runt. I said, Okay, we’ll see who’s a runt. We went to an ice cream shop by the train station. We ate some ice cream. She talked all the time about movies, she didn’t have too many stories to tell. Inspector Louis de Funès, all kinds of stupid shit movies like that. She loved her Charles Aznavour cassette. He sang French songs, Mama is so romantic. He was Armenian. Mama is a romantic woman.”
“At first she was like all the others to me, a girl is a girl is a girl. Later, I saw she had a very respectable quality. She had a clean spirit, she wasn’t calculating anything. She was just hanging out with me for fun. She didn’t even know how to kiss. She still doesn’t. She was nice, naive. We saw each other for a year. I got used to her. She had two abortions from me and forgave them. I saw she was loyal. Me, Vladimir, Lionel, and Boris, we went to Mama and Papa’s grave. I told them I wanted to marry her. My brothers were opposed, they said she was just looking for more papers, she wasn’t even Jewish. They wanted me to marry a nice Jewish girl. Nice Jewish girls, they were so ugly, bug-faced, boring. They didn’t like me, anyway, I wasn’t a prospect for a nice family. Jewish girls, you know, they’re either absolutely hideous or goddesses like you. A goddess is rare. I didn’t want to go around with those nose heads. Anyway, they didn’t know Mama, that was all just talk. Mama is a one hundred percent Jewish woman. Would I say it was an unreal love? Passion? Not really. I would say I grew very attached to her. And I felt bad for her, roaming between apartments, homeless, living in shit. I loved her, yes. I felt sorry for her. Where she lived— they threw babies into the garbage. Emotional appreciation, that’s what I had for Mama. Gratitude. She was loyal. We got married. Period. I never loved any woman other than the one whose foot I held in my palm when she was born. That’s the only woman I ever loved passionately. I would burn the earth for you. That’s a father’s love. Passion.”
“By then I wanted to get to America. Boris set me up selling doughnuts. I saved some money with all my tricks, you know my tricks. I said, I’m leaving. Let’s go, Mama. We lived with Mama’s alcoholic manager—she gave us a cot. Lionel kicked us out of the apartment. He was mad at me for marrying Mama. So we were living in a filthy communal apartment, shrieking all night, violence. People are animals. Eventually Lionel felt bad for us and let us come back. That was good. We didn’t start fighting until later, me and Mama. All she does is talk about Steve Jobs and Melania Trump. She lives in fairy tale world, Mama, passion. She wants eternal passion with Steve Jobs. After a few months the best you can hope for is mutual respect. That was later. I dragged Mama to America. We had the Jackson-Vanik amendment, Let my people go! I made a deal with a bureaucrat named Vasya. He was a document manager. I brought him a case of cognac. He let us all through, Me, Mama, Vladimir, Lionel, Boris. Lionel, actually, he got through first. He was shitting his pants, Why do I have to go first, why do I have to go first? Mama’s parents didn’t want her to go. Her father, you know, he was mourning Lenin, sweeping pigeon feathers his whole life. He had fake papers, you know, during the war. He was working under a false name, not Jewish. Then they found out he was Jewish and kicked him out, he didn’t want to work for anyone after that. The bureaucrats stole the Soviet Union from your grandfather, wah wah wah. Anyway, then Mama got scared. She said, Why don’t we buy an apartment here, you’ve got money. I said, America, baby, America! Freedom! Suddenly she wasn’t so nice anymore. Her engines fired up. I said, Where’s my nice, quiet girl? She was bitching all the time, she didn’t want to go to America. She said, You go, I’ll meet you there. I got really worried, I got sick. I went to the doctor with an ulcer. We’d just gotten married, and now she was betraying me. The doctor said I have to take it easy. I said, Fine, I’m not going to die in this shithole. I’m going by myself. A few weeks before I was going to leave, Mama said, You know what? I’m going to go with you. My Aunt Fayina said if I love you I shouldn’t break up the marriage. So that’s how it happened.”
“Before that, there was a really bad story. Mama was pregnant. They took Mama in an ambulance, they said the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. No one helped us. Our son died. Maybe they stole him. They never showed him to us. That night, they said, You have a boy. The next morning, they said, He died. Oh my god. We were all alone. No one came. The milk turned to stone in her breast— blue stones. Oh my god. She could’ve died. Finally Lionel found a woman to massage the garbage out of her. She pulled and worked, it finally came out. Hideous pain. Hideous. After that, Mama started feeling sick all the time. We didn’t understand, she was weak all the time, tired. We went to the doctor, he said she had thyroid cancer. We couldn’t send her to be cut on the table. The doctors were butchers. They’d slice her. She had an aunt somewhere married to an army doctor, we took her to him, he took her thyroid out. She still felt bad after but didn’t die. Her face was all bloated up like a balloon. She said, How’s my face? I said, Beautiful. Some endocrinologist said she needed more iodine. She got better slowly after that.”
“We left Kiev. First we landed in Vienna. Some of the Jews knew Yiddish, they could talk to the Germans. They understood each other. Bananas, oranges. Anyone could get bananas in Vienna! I was really impressed. We were staying at a hotel, Mama was tired. I went out by myself. I saw my first porno in a movie theater. I came back, I told Mama. She was mad I spent money on that. I said, Curiosity. Can I say I was super impressed? No. But my curiosity was satisfied. In Italy, they kept begging us to go to Israel. I said, No thanks, I want to go to America. We were in a port under Rome—Ostia. We were there for a month. In Rome, there was a circle market, a market shaped like a circle. We bought chicken wings. They called them Soviet Wings, the Italians. They sold them in bags. But I tried all kinds of stuff—oysters, mortadella. I had a fur coat I sold so we could buy some tours. We went to Venice, Tuscany. On the trains everyone was screaming about killing each other, soccer fans. When the train arrived at the station everyone hugged and left. I went to some Communist meetings, they were screaming about anti-Fascism, there was food, music. I hung out there for a while. A few blocks away the Fascists were doing the same thing, I went there after. Later you saw everyone at the same cafe drinking coffee hollering after girls. I loved Italy. Huge gypsy camps, filthy, dirty, loud. Eventually we made it to Brighton Beach. I bought some bacon at the grocery store. I thought it was salo. I ate it raw, a whole package. Oh my god. I almost died. The next morning we took the train to the Bronx, Mama found us an apartment. I was watching out the windows on the train. I couldn’t believe it—everything was burnt down, blocks and blocks. Stalingrad! I said, Fuck! Our first apartment, a lady died. She left all her furniture—plates, tables, a mattress. Mama was happy. Everything was separate; two rooms, a private kitchen, private bathroom. Plus it was furnished. Mama said, We even have a mattress! We didn’t realize it was a—spring box. We slept on it for half a year. I had a little money left over from Italy, I forgot to tell you. In Italy, the CIA found me. I told them all about my military career, you know—the planes and everything. I told them the story so nice, they loved it. They gave me three hundred dollars. I bought Mama a skirt. Like it came from the sky. Anyway, I forgot to tell you that. So Mama was happy in that apartment. But the biggest thing was when this guy I worked with took us to a supermarket. Mama went crazy. Everything was so cheap, pennies. I’d never tried a kiwi in my life before. Ki-wi. And then there were—these free things. They weren’t free, but they had no—company names—not Goya, Dole, it was—white, the supermarket made them, not a company. They were even cheaper! Mama got a whole cart of pineapples, mandarins, in the cans, the white cans.”
My dad smiled.
* * *
I had to get a train back to the city so I stopped recording. We’d keep going, I figured, though I had no definite ideas as to when, and I didn’t mind concluding on this romantic note since I knew I’d get to the truth eventually. He was content to end there, too, though he could’ve kept going; he was only humoring me with all this. He knew it was for some kind of project and accepted this as a fact there was no value in pursuing further. He’s incurious about my writing, I suppose because he can’t read it. But, as he considers himself an unusually knowledgeable person, the request to interview him made sense to him. He was never irritated or absent, only crying a little when he talked about his mother or Babi Yar. He didn’t care about how I’d use this recording, but he was happy I’d decided to make it, because he’s so proud of being an artist, a man from the capital city, who understands how life really is.
We were sitting on the deck, which my dad painted green in 2004 at my request. It was unusually warm for March, and had stayed warm through the afternoon. It was a day the backyard felt like paradise. I wanted to get as much as I could. It was an opportune moment because my mom wasn’t there—my parents had just moved from New Jersey to Florida, and my dad had come back to take care of some lingering business himself, which was very unusual, perhaps unprecedented, because my parents do everything together. My dad can’t read, write, get money out of an ATM, set up a utility, or buy a plane ticket. I believe if he had to get a plane ticket, he would go to the airport and buy one at the desk. He got to America and spent the rest of his life watching the History Channel and calling my uncle. I asked him once why he never learned to do anything, and he told me he didn’t feel like it. I came back for the weekend to help him, pretending to help to record him for my book. I can’t remember, now, what we were even supposed to do.
This was our last time in the house and though my dad and I never spent so much time talking on the deck when we lived there, it didn’t feel strange to do it now. We didn’t have any rituals or traditions. He’d planted roses around the patio downstairs. He liked to exclaim about his roses: My roses!
If my dad were here now, seeing me cry as I think about how he exclaims about his roses, he’d clench his teeth. When I was a child crying, he would hug me. My sadness is the sadness of a woman to him now, something he doesn’t know what to do with. He’s short and he wears cologne from Marshalls. His hair is white, and it gets a great lift. All we ever talk about is America and my mom, how she doesn’t understand how life really is, how impossible she is, how much quieter I am.
So we stayed sitting at the table, my dad wearing a baby blue tennis shirt under a navy bathrobe. His slippers were Friends themed. I’d wanted an olive green deck, like the American neighbors, but there was a lot of blue and yellow in the shade my Dad picked, more like turquoise. I remember being dimly disappointed when I was fourteen. Now I find it exquisite.
You’re a nice girl, he said.
I thanked him.
Yeah, you’re a very nice girl. Too nice.
I agreed.
Nice girls, you know, you have to be careful.
His face is always red, but when he runs out of things to say, it seems to get redder.
How’s work? he asked me. Everything’s okay?
I’m good, I told him.
Yeah, you’re good. But your voice is tired. You’re working too much.
Yeah, I said.
You’re working like a dog, it’s too tough. 24/7.
I agreed again. My dad doesn’t know anything about my job, but he knows I have one, like he did, and a boss and a schedule.
It’s not the best idea, he said. The hustle-bustle. It’s not necessary stuff. I’m not pushing you. That’s my opinion. You’re my number one girl. That’s the reality of life. But I love talking to you. Talking to you, my love, he began singing, doobie doobie doo . . .
I laughed.
You’re a very classy girl, he said. Two or three levels, genetically.
He started peeling an apple with a pocket knife, turning it deftly in one hand and keeping the knife still with the other, peeling the apple in one strip. I’d never seen him do that before. He looked so young peeling the apple like that. It was the first time I believed he’d ever been a soldier.
Because my dad can’t read or write, it was difficult for him to work. He spent twenty years as a biomedical technician at a big university hospital, sitting in the basement playing Candy Crush hoping his beeper didn’t go off. All the doctors knew him because he was always shouting their names in the stairwell, like, Hey! Dr. Rosen, you’re working too hard, man, I’m telling you! They’d laugh at him. As long as the doctors thought my dad was funny, it was okay when his beeper went off, and, when he needed to spell something, he called my mom.