Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  Let’s start with my surname: Shteyngart. A German name whose insane Sovietized spelling, eye-watering bunching of consonants (just one i between the h and t and you got some pretty nice “Shit” there), and overall unattractiveness has cost me a lot of human warmth. “Mr., uh, I can’t pronounce this … Shit … Shit … Shitfart?” the sweet Alabama girl at reception giggles. “Is, uh, a single bed okay for you?”

  What do you think, honey, I want to say. Do you think a Shitfart gets to share a bed?

  All my life I’ve tried not to think of that misspelled “Shteyngart” as a pungent waste product of history. The correct name had to be Steingarten, or Stone Garden, which is as beautifully Zen as a German Jewish name can get, a name offering the kind of serenity and peace that none of my Hebrew ancestors had surely ever experienced in their short, explosive lifetimes. Stone Garden. As if.

  Recently I found out from my father that Shteyngart is not our name at all. A slip of the pen in some Soviet official’s hand, a drunk notary, a semiliterate commissar, who knows, but I am not really Gary Shteyngart. My family name is—Steinhorn. Meaning “Stone Horn.” Though I was born Igor—my name was changed to Gary in America so that I would suffer one or two fewer beatings—my Leningrad birth certificate should have welcomed into this world one Citizen Igor Stone Horn. I have clearly spent thirty-nine years unaware that my real destiny was to go through life as a Bavarian porn star, but some further questions present themselves: If neither Gary nor Shteyngart is truly my name, then what the hell am I doing calling myself Gary Shteyngart? Is every single cell in my body a historical lie?

  “Just don’t write like a self-hating Jew,” my father is whispering into my ear.

  The Stone Horns inhabit the Ukrainian town of Chemirovets, where my father’s paternal grandfather was killed for no good reason in the 1920s. My father’s grandmother was left to fend for herself and a family of five children. There was not enough to eat. Those who could went up to Leningrad, Russia’s former imperial capital and second most important city once the Bolsheviks crowned Moscow as the capital. There, they mostly died, too. They were a deeply religious clan, but the Soviets took that from them as well, before they took what little else remained.

  On the maternal side of my father’s family, the Millers lived in the nearby Ukrainian village of Orinino, population about one thousand souls. My father visited Orinino once in the 1960s, where he found a handful of hospitable Jews to talk genocide with, but I’ve never been on a shtetl pilgrimage. I envision a town that isn’t down on its luck, because it never had any luck to begin with; a postagricultural, post-Soviet village, clapboard houses missing large sections of, well, clapboard, women bearing tubs of yellowish water from a local pump, a man pulling a South Korean TV/VCR combo in a donkey cart, a dazed rooster stumbling along some main thoroughfare—inevitably Lenin or Soviet Street—toward that little hill just outside of town where all the Jews lie safely in a nice long burial mound, never to bother anyone with their alien Yiddish, their dour garb and kosher butcheries. But this is just an author’s imagination. Perhaps it’s nothing like that. Perhaps.

  In addition to the Millers and the Stone Horns, the other surnames to track in this family drama are Stalin and Hitler. As I march my relatives onto the pages of this book, please remember that I am also marching them toward their graves and that they will most likely meet their ends in some of the worst ways imaginable.

  But they don’t have to wait for the Second World War to start. The good times are already rolling in the 1920s. While my great-grandpa Stone Horn is being killed in one part of the Ukraine, Great-grandpa Miller is being killed in another part. The Millers are not a poor family. Their main source of income is one of the largest houses in town, which they have turned into a coach inn. Farmers and merchants coming to the local fair shelter their horses and oxen with my great-grandparents. They are probably as rich as anyone on that side of my family has ever been, until nearly a hundred years later, in 2013, I lease myself a Volvo. One bitter Eastern European night, Great-grandpa Miller is riding home with a great deal of Jewish money in his saddlebag, when one of the many criminal bands roaming freely across the Ukraine in the chaos following the 1917 Revolution murders him. The Millers are ruined.

  In order for me to be born, all four branches of my family have to end up in Leningrad, trading in their tiny towns and villages for that somber, canal-laced cityscape. Here’s how it happens.

  In 1932 Stalin decrees that the inhabitants of the Ukraine should pretty much fucking starve to death, leading to the elimination of an estimated six to seven million citizens, Christians, Jews, anyone who has a stomach that can’t be filled with rye. My great-grandmother sends her starving seven-year-old daughter, Fenya, to an orphanage in Leningrad. Fenya and my grandmother are among the three Miller siblings out of nine who will survive World War II. Some will die fighting at the front against the invading Germans; some will die at the hands of the SS and their Ukrainian colleagues; at least one will, poignantly, “lose her mind,” according to my father, and die before the war even gets properly started.

  Polina, or Babushka (Grandma) Polya as I knew her, arrives in Leningrad in the 1930s when she is fourteen years old. In three novels I have written about the immigrant experience in the final years of the twentieth century with a sense of righteous ownership. But my parents came to this country stuffed with advanced degrees and keen to master the universal language of English. As for me, I was merely seven and expected to succeed wildly in a country we thought of as magical but whose population did not strike us as being especially clever.

  But back in the 1930s my grandma Polya is a true immigrant. She comes to Leningrad as a Yiddish- and Ukrainian-speaking teenager, without knowledge of Russian or city life. Somehow, she gets herself admitted to the Teacher’s Technical College, a two-year school, where a kindly instructor takes pity on her and helps her master the tongue of Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. I always thought that both of my grandmothers struggled against the despised Jewish accent, the Ghhhh sound in place of the strong Russian RRRRRR, but when I bring it up with my father, he says emphatically: “Your grandmother never had a Jewish accent.” Still, whenever I try to flaunt my hard-perfected English, whenever my new language comes pouring out of me, I think of her.

  After finishing the teachers college, Grandma is sent to work in an orphanage, known euphemistically as a children’s home (detskii dom), in a Leningrad suburb. Stalin’s Great Purge, a political bloodletting with few equals in human history, is hitting its peak, and some of the Soviet Union’s finest people are being shot outright or packed onto trains and sent eastward to the labor camps. Other fine people are allowed to starve to death in their homes. The children of the tortured and the dead are often sent to the “children’s homes” that dot the land, and Grandma Polya, by age seventeen, is already employed as a teacher and disciplinarian. By the age of twenty she is the deputy director of the orphanage. She is murderously tough as only the daughter of a murdered Jewish coach-inn owner can be, but if I, her grandson, can attest to one fact that I know is true beyond all others, it is this: She loved children.

  As my grandmother is settling into life in the big city, the great Jewish express from the Ukrainian countryside delivers up to Leningrad my grandfather, Isaac Stone Horn, who has by now been rechristened Shteyngart. Grandpa Isaac is from a village close to Grandma Polya’s, and the humid ties of Judaism bring them together in the cold imperial capital in 1936. Some fifty-five-odd years later I am at a seminar table at Oberlin College. Our small class, with its combined $1,642,800 of annual tuition and fees, is dutifully discussing the travails of that mysterious but glorious working class we’ve heard so much about, but what I’m not quite realizing is that my grandpa Isaac was an honest-to-goodness common worker, and I, by extension, am the grandson of an honest-to-goodness common worker.

  In the late 1930s Isaac is toiling at a leather factory in Leningrad, making soccer balls, volleyballs, and belts. He’s self-educated, a soc
ialist, loves singing and books and Grandma Polya. Out of that love, my father, Semyon, is born in 1938, a year and ten days before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

  The world surrounding new Soviet citizen Semyon Shteyngart is about to set itself on fire.

  “Oni menya lyubili kak cherty,” my father says of those fleeting few years when both his parents were alive. They loved me like devils. It’s an inelegant statement from a man who can veer between depression and anger and humor and joy with Bellovian flair. It’s an unverifiable Statement as well. After all, how could he remember? So let’s say this: It’s a belief, and a near-holy belief at that. And whatever grace was imparted to him in those few years before the first German Panzer Division crossed the border, I want to believe in it, too.

  “If the war hadn’t happened,” my father says, “my parents would have had two, three children.” Rarely, but sometimes, the differences between us collapse as quickly as the Soviet Union’s defenses on June 22, 1941. Like my father, I am also an only child.

  “Your mother and I should have had another baby,” my father says of that absence. “But we didn’t get along in America.”

  Hitler betrays Stalin and invades the Soviet Union. Stalin is horrified by this breach in schoolyard-bully etiquette and holes up in his tree house outside Moscow, where he suffers a nervous breakdown. He is about to fuck up so completely that it will take twenty-six million Soviet death certificates to save civilization from collapsing. At least two of those death certificates will bear the last name of Shteyngart.

  The Germans are advancing upon Leningrad. My grandfather Isaac is sent to the front to hold them back. For 871 days, the siege of that city will take 750,000 civilian lives, its starving residents forced to feast on sawdust; their pets; at worst, one another. Here my story almost ends. But as with so many of us foreigners clogging the subways of Queens and Brooklyn, a single twist of fate keeps our kind shuffling along. Before the Germans surround the city, Grandma Polya’s Children’s Home is evacuated from Leningrad. She, along with my three-year-old father, Semyon, and his cousins, is sent to a dark, freezing village called Zakabyakino in the Yaroslavl Region, some four hundred miles to the east of Leningrad. To the Russian ear “Zakabyakino” has the ring of “Hicksville,” and to this day, my father will refer to all remote, farcical places—e.g., the Catskill Mountains, the state of Ohio—by that name.

  The first memory of my father’s life? The evacuation from Leningrad, with the German air force in hot pursuit. “We were on a train and the Germans would bomb us. We would hide under the train wagons. The Messerschmitt planes had this sound, ZUUUUU … WOO … WOO.” My father, an emotive speaker, raises his hand, his knuckles dusted with fine hairs, and drops it in a slow but decisive arc to mimic the bombing run as he does the Messerschmitt sound. ZUUUU …

  In Zakabyakino, the survivors of the Messerschmitt bombings, my father included, are met with relative good fortune: They do not starve. There is milk and potatoes in the village. There are also fat country rats, which crawl in with my father and cousins with the intent of eating the slim Leningrad children as they sleep on the stove. To escape them, one of my aunts jumps out of a second-floor window.

  My aunt jumping out of the window to flee the rats is my father’s second childhood memory.

  My father has a best friend his age. A non-Jewish kid named Lionya. When he is three years old, my father’s best friend dies of some unspecified war-related disease. This is my father’s third memory: Lionya’s funeral. My father tells me of Lionya’s existence during the spring of 2011. “Lionya,” short for “Leonid,” is a fairly unremarkable Russian name, but in my first novel, published in 2002, the childhood friend of the novel’s hero, Vladimir Girshkin, happens to be Lionya, and indeed, he is one of the few truly sympathetic people in the book (together Vladimir and Lionya share a batch of Little Red Riding Hood candies given by Vladimir’s mother and fall asleep side by side on a Soviet kindergarten mat). In my third novel, published in 2010, “Lionya” is the Russian name of one of the two main characters, Lenny Abramov. Without knowing who he was, I have spent half my life honoring Lionya in prose.

  The fourth memory: February 1943, the news arrives from the front, my father’s father, Grandfather Isaac, has been killed near Leningrad. The Soviet troops, my grandfather among them, make several attempts to break the blockade of Russia’s second city, but they are outgunned, their most talented officers having already been shot dead during Stalin’s purge. It is unknown how Isaac Semyonovich Shteyngart died. For decades I was told he died in a tank, burned alive in a gruesome but heroic gesture to stop the Germans, but that is untrue. My grandfather was an artillerist.

  After her husband is killed, Grandmother Polya buries herself in work at the Children’s Home and refuses to acknowledge her husband’s death. Like so many women with death certificates, she continues to wait for him until after the war.

  At age five, my father is one of the millions of Russian children who cannot fully comprehend the man missing from the household. A few years later when the war is over he finally does understand. He hides under the couch, and he cries and thinks of a man he does not know. Later, when he discovers classical music, when he hears Tchaikovsky, he will cry to that, too. Under the couch, he listens to Tchaikovsky through his tears and hatches plots that will allow him to go back in time and assassinate Hitler. Still later, Grandmother Polya is remarried to a man who will all but destroy my father’s life and make me into whatever it is I am today.

  My life begins with a much-mimeographed piece of paper: “To Citizen Shteyngart P. [Grandma], NOTIFICATION, Your husband Sergeant Shteyngart Isaac Semyonovich, fighting for the Socialist Motherland, true to his military oath, evincing heroism and courage, was killed 18 February 1943.”

  Somewhere in distant Yaroslavl, little Lionya is buried.

  My grandfather’s body lies in a soldier’s grave near Leningrad, which is to say, closer to home.

  And the Germans, they are always massing. And Stalin, he is still cowering at his tree house near Moscow. And the Messerschmitt pilots, they know their targets well. ZUUUUU … WOO … WOO.

  Father.

  What are you doing?

  What are you saying to me?

  Who is speaking through you?

  “I read on the Russian Internet that you and your novels will soon be forgotten.”

  Staring ahead at me like an angry, wounded child, then laying his gaze down, as if scared of it, on his prix fixe dish of something truffled. We are at the View, the revolving restaurant of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. Dinner at the Marriott plus a $200 gift certificate to T.J.Maxx, the inexpensive clothing store, is my mother’s dream birthday gift.

  “Yes,” my mother says, “I read that, too. It was ____.” She cites the name of a blogger. My parents have not read my latest book, but they know the name of the blogger in Samara or Vologda or Astrakhan or Yaroslavl who says I will soon be forgotten.

  Do you want me to be forgotten, Father? Do you want me closer to you? But I do not say the obvious. “Look.” I turn to my mother. “It’s the Hudson River. And beyond it, those lights—New Jersey.”

  “Really?” My mother cranes her neck. Her ability to be fascinated by things is her best gift to me. Each time I see her now, her hair is younger and spunkier, sometimes bobbed, sometimes teased, and her pretty face stands up to the sixty-seven years it has known with youthful bluster. She will not let go of life as easily as my father will.

  “That’s Four Times Square,” I say, trying to deflect my father’s crooked stare. “The Condé Nast Building. The New Yorker’s offices are there, as well as many other magazines.”

  “A ranking of New York writers came out on the Internet,” my father says. “You were ranked thirty, and David Remnick”—The New Yorker’s editor—“was eight positions ahead of you. Philip Gourevitch”—one of the magazine’s brilliant staff writers—“was ranked number eleven. They are both ahe
ad of you.”

  “Semyon, stop,” my mother says.

  “What?” my father says. “Ya shuchu.” I am joking.

  “Shutki!” he says, loudly. Jokes.

  “No one understands your shutki,” my mother says.

  Aunt Tanya, ready to ingratiate herself with me, has her own opinion. “Yes, they say you will soon be forgotten, but many writers aren’t acknowledged until after their death.”

  My father nods. His work here is almost finished. “And tell Remnick that if he doesn’t stop writing bad things about Israel, I will be forced to write a letter to The New Yorker.”

  “Look,” I say, pointing at a skyscraper just coming into view. “That eagle! It’s Barclays Bank. Remember how our first bank checks in America had that eagle on them?”

  My father’s gaze is upon me. Trying to gauge my reaction; trying to figure out what to say next.

  Let me stop for a moment. What is it like to be him right now? What does he see through his brow-heavy stare? His son. A stranger. Ordering truffled things from the menu. With his Obama and his Remnick, the haters of Israel. My father has been to Israel for only seven days, but he loves it as obediently as anyone who doesn’t understand his young lover, who sees only her slinky dark shape, the curve of her settlements. In the third-floor attic where my father lives—the spacious second floor has long been surrendered to my mother—life is punctuated by the boom of the classical records and the drone of extremist rabbis on the radio. How did his son travel so far from there? Isn’t it his duty to stay by his father?

  After each teardown, after each discussion of Internet rankings and blogs, after each barrage of insults presented as jokes, my father finishes with, “You should call me more.”

  My son. How could he leave me?

  I am looking down to see part of the floor moving around the restaurant’s core. A dullard at physics, I don’t understand how this works exactly: why this part of the floor is gently turning and the other part is perfectly still. I picture a team of sweaty, harnessed immigrant men in the basement of the Marriott making the skyborne restaurant revolve. “The soprano Galina Vishnevskaya has died,” my father says.