After my parents retrieved their car—parking in the city gives them as much palpitation as the drive to the city itself—they pulled up by the brownstone for one more goodbye and saw their son sitting next to a woman who was tucking into their chicken stew and syrniki with all the abandon of a native. Their native. If the boy’s grandmother were around, she would have nodded approvingly, with the authority that only the once hungry among us possess. Two people eating in famished, silent synchrony—what more did you need?
“Housepainter” Syrniki (SEER-nee-kee) (v)
Time: 30–45 minutes
Serves: 4
Syr is “cheese” in Russian, but the cheese in question here is farmer cheese—the densest and least watery you can find. These sweet little pucks will be good cold or hot, at midnight or noon, but there’s nothing like them fresh out of the pan for breakfast.
1 pound farmer cheese
2 eggs
4–6 tablespoons flour, plus additional for dusting
2–3 tablespoons sugar
Raisins, to taste
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Sunflower oil
Mix the farmer cheese with the eggs, 4 tablespoons of the flour, 2 tablespoons of the sugar, the raisins, and the vanilla. If the mix could use a little thickening, add up to 2 tablespoons more flour. If you like a sweeter taste, add the additional tablespoon of sugar.
Dust a cutting board or kitchen counter with flour. With your fingers, scoop up some of the cheese mixture and ball it in the palm of your hand into a sphere the size of a golf ball. Drop it into the flour and pat it down so that it starts to resemble a small hockey puck. Lift it gently and flip so the other side can get floured. Shake off excess flour, if any, and set aside. Repeat for the remaining cheese mixture. You should get 16 pucks.
Now do the flouring again. Ball each puck back up—it should be easier now, as it’s covered with flour—and re-flour in the way described in step 2.
Set a nonstick pan—or two nonstick pans, if you want to save time—over medium-low heat. Place a generous amount of sunflower oil in the pan (the pucks should be able to slide around in it) and, once it’s had a minute or two to warm up, place the pucks in carefully. Ideally, your pans will each fit 8. Brown for about 6 minutes on each side. Keep an eye on the oil—the pucks will burn quickly if there isn’t enough.
Let cool and serve on their own, or with a dollop of your favorite jam, yogurt, or even sour cream.
Epilogue
In the fall of 2016, I went to Latvia, in the Baltics, on a cultural mission for the State Department. I asked to be taken to Madona, in central Latvia, where my grandfather’s brother, my great-uncle Aaron, was supposed to have been buried in a “brothers’ grave” of Red Army soldiers killed on the 3rd Baltic Front. The burial ground was up a little hill. It felt equally tended and unkempt, memorialized and forgotten. Things get tangled up in places like Latvia. The Latvians were forcibly conscripted into the USSR in 1940; some of them welcomed the Germans, and helped them. In the same place, hundreds or thousands of non-Latvian boys and men had died trying to keep Latvia for the Soviet Union. How to commemorate this? “Where was your family during the war?” I asked the caretaker, an old woman in rain boots, through an interpreter. She said she didn’t know. In Latvia, that means they were with the Germans. As I walked past the engraved names, I thought about what it was like to be someone whose family had aided the Germans and who now made her living by looking after a memorial to the soldiers who died to defeat them.
My grandfather was about to turn ninety, and I wanted to bring him a photo of a plate bearing the family surname and Aaron’s initial. But I couldn’t find it. The caretaker had said that, “for some reason,” the original, more comprehensive plates had come down, replaced with these, a partial record. Despairingly, I scanned the Os (the first letter of my grandfather’s surname) again and again. No Aaron. Appealing to the Ns in the hope of finding a misplaced O there, like a misshelved book in the library, my eyes fell on a soldier named Novikov. That was the name I had invented for myself to ward off the Jew-beating boys back in Minsk. What kind of man had this Novikov been? If he’d stayed alive, and was strolling past on the day those boys finally came, would he have interfered to defend me? I did with this discovery the only thing that I could: When we went to the middle school in town where I was giving a talk about art and identity, I told the students about Novikov and Aaron and my grandfather, and how these things could add up to a story. Otherwise baffled, to this part they listened.
To my grandfather, I pretended that Aaron’s name was among those listed. I’d taken pictures, yes—they were getting developed. He was old and removed enough from reality not to know that nobody really developed pictures anymore. This was how we spoke now. The time for truth “into the forehead”—expressed directly and without mercy—was over. He had aged out. I’d stopped trying to explain, to get him to understand. I visited, I answered the same questions several times, and we settled down to watch the Russian news programs whose (anti-American) propaganda makes Fox News seem like 60 Minutes.
By then he was already using a cane. He kept calling himself “the Last of the Mohicans”: His neighbor Yasha, the Fitness Fanatic, had passed. So had Ilya, the Intellectual in the wheelchair. The friend who used to catch contraband beef over the fence had lost his wife to a car accident. He and my grandfather were the last ones standing. Sitting. My last visit before I went to Latvia was the first time my grandfather didn’t accompany me out to the stairwell and try to stuff a wad of cash into my hand by way of goodbye.
In 2015, my parents returned to Vienna for the first time since 1988. This time, they bought themselves bratwursts. Thirty years after arriving in America, we have a lot more money and feel a lot less security. Or maybe statelessness is blessed by oblivion—you don’t know what you don’t know. By accident, you might feel good about something.
Now we know. Now, even my father, who tries to avoid doctors as sedulously as his father did, succumbs to the American way of taking care of yourself, the constant checkups that leave you with the impression you’re half-dead though you are relatively healthy. “There are no healthy people,” he says of the American medical system. “Only the undiagnosed.” Now he wishes he had agreed to have his age revised up on his immigration documents before we left Minsk. When he was on his honeymoon, in that shed in Crimea, he wondered if he would ever get to stay in a real hotel. Now, his American earnings having made many hotel stays possible, he tries to rent places that resemble that shed.
He does all the cooking. Now it’s grilled eggplant and baked fish, about as delicious as cooking so sinless can manage to be. Sometimes his talents exceed even these limitations, like a certain oatmeal cake with raspberry filling. The syrniki remain my mother’s to make, and on special occasions she will make my grandmother’s potato latkes. Special because you have to use all that oil. It’s my father who resists it; after decades of chasteness, she’s started making her omelets with butter, like we used to back home. “Butter’s not the problem,” she says. “Look at the French. It’s the quality of the butter. We ate shitty Russian food for the first time in America.”
In 2017, my grandfather was diagnosed with Stage III bladder cancer. Stage III was good—it wasn’t in the bone. But there was a tumor the size of a soccer ball pressing on his prostate, making it impossible for him to relieve himself. After an agonizing interlude involving three hospitals and a catheter, radiation and low-dose chemo destroyed the tumor. He “felt like a human being again.” Cancer is supposed to spread slowly through an old body, so we cautiously hoped for a reprieve. But his next checkup had revealed the opposite.
His hemoglobin was shredded, but, remembering what had happened to my grandmother during her gallbladder operation, he refused to hear of a transfusion. We tricked him into it: He was told he was getting my mother’s blood. (With the doctor’s collusion, she made a show of having it drawn.) We lied to him about everything having to do with the illn
ess: He didn’t know he had cancer. Knowing would have activated a fatalism that would have made his usual hypochondria seem like enthusiasm. Not knowing made it possible for him, beached like a big baby in the doctor’s examining chair, to say, as if he was haggling at the open-air market in Minsk, “What’s he saying? Think I can squeeze out another tenner?”
When he fell ill, I experienced the desire, in the time he had left, to offer him nothing but love on his terms. In doing so, I knew, I was resolving to lie better. I’d lost, but it didn’t matter, because he was about to lose something much bigger.
With each visit, some new part of him fell away. His fabled hair went brittle and dry—he stared vacantly at the television while I ran my hands through it anyway. He began seeing a man in a fedora and a long coat at the side of his bed. At night, he screamed to be let out, let go.
He could no longer shave himself, an even grimmer milestone in his case, because he’d spent half a century giving shaves. I did it for him. Even in his impairment—I would tell him to stick out his chin, and he would, but then his face would collapse from the effort—it was clear he thought I was doing a shit job. But as I scraped the razor down his soapy cheek, cradling his face like a lover’s, sometimes he smiled like a boy without cares. That’s how it is with our people—reflexive disapproval, then begrudging acknowledgment that it had turned out all right.
Doing this reminded me of a dark evening during the catheter time. There was a blockage, perhaps caked blood around the meatus. This was too much even for Oksana, so my father and I went into my grandfather’s bedroom. Then, using gauze and peroxide, I cleaned the tip of my grandfather’s penis. It was one of the most painful, intimate things I’d ever done, the old man squirming and squalling like a toddler no matter how gently I went. After I was done, he wept again, now in gratitude.
Not everything about his decline was grim. His eyelashes became as long and lustrous as Jessica’s. And the things that floated up from the mud barrel of his cracked psyche now obeyed an unreachable but magical logic. Once, as I was bending down to kiss him goodbye, he took my forearm with his mottled hand and said, his breath like rustling paper, “Sometimes you’ve got this egg in your hands, and you have to carry it such a long way. Kilometers. So careful the whole time. And then you’re just a meter or two from the threshold, and poof. It’s gone.” It was nonsense the way poetry was nonsense, and enchanted the same way. As he lost his cognition—as he fell free of the self he’d hewn from his unkind lot—he sounded like the child whose youth had been stolen by the war, a child who had sat in him, waiting, for three-quarters of a century.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that hand, gone mottled seemingly overnight. Even at ninety, his nails were clean and square. Though I’d never watched his hands purposefully, I realized I knew their habitual gestures better than my own: the way the shelf of his pinkie moved crumbs around on the tablecloth while he spoke on the phone; the way he kept his palm on his forehead as he slept, occasionally opening it as if reasoning with someone, or calculating the make on a deal; the way he spat on his fingertips when he was counting money. Sometimes he dismissed things by pushing the air away with four fingers, as if they weren’t worth the trouble of an impassioned rejection. Sometimes by smacking the air left to right with the back of his hand. And sometimes, he ridged his hand as if he was about to shake someone else’s but then rotated it and opened the fingers slightly in a Yiddish-like gesture that meant Just look at that asshole.
Oddly, our phone conversations, never long, grew longer, perhaps because it was no longer necessary to speak. Once, driving somewhere while speaking to him, I became lost in my thoughts. When I came back, he was humming an old song as if I weren’t there. He kept humming, softly and dreamily, and I just listened, even after I’d gotten to where I was going and parked, like when Oksana sometimes didn’t hang up the landline properly and I stayed on, listening to the distant sounds of his life without me there to spoil it.
Things started happening to me, too. My left eyelid started twitching. I lost my sense of space and broke three cups in two days. Once, standing in the shower, I became entranced by the tile and burst into tears. I nearly punched a bus driver and crashed the car a half dozen times. He was in the world before Stalin had control of the Soviet Union. Before anyone knew the name Hitler. He had lived almost a century.
Once, as in a fairy tale, the illness receded enough for him not only to regain sense but to perform a miraculous feat. Oksana had pulled him out of his wheelchair to do leg calisthenics. My mother put on an old Soviet waltz and, little by little, he and Oksana started . . . twirling, just as they had before tango all those years ago. He was, of course, more or less swaying in place, but there he was, dancing on the doorstep of death. Later, as I was leaving, I leaned into the living room for a final look. He winked at me. I winked back.
That was our final communication. Shortly afterward, he stopped speaking, though once, Oksana pleading with him through a wall of tears to tell her who was that boy standing next to his bed, the last of him collected into enough of a gust for my name to come out. Not my Russian name, but Berele, a diminutive in the Yiddish that was his childhood language.
When we were clearing out his home, among the only things I kept was one of his clowns. There was a set—Oksana took one, my parents took one, and I did. The reason he gave for collecting them—he didn’t want to offend the owner of the bric-a-brac store who’d pressed them on him—surely was only part of the story, the rest of which he probably didn’t know himself. But they were the only things he owned for no purpose other than pleasure.
The clown reminds me that in two decades of weekly visits, a vast part of this man remained off-access to me, perhaps because it was off-access to him, too. I have never, at once, felt such intimacy and distance with someone, and I suspect I never will. He gave me the gift of an extraordinarily rare human experience, and it feels symbolic that it was not at all the gift he meant to give.
Jessica and I are still together. We make that roast chicken—Salvation Chicken, we call it—a lot. I got her to see Ireland in a new way. And she got me to change my mind about hipsters. For a while I made my life among them, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in her apartment, a future that once seemed about as likely as making my life with someone like her. You get what you wanted, just not what you planned. My hunger has been good for my work, and a near calamity for everything else. At least I know not to rely on it.
I eat more moderately now. For a while, I was even gluten- and dairy-free. I brew my own kombucha. Sometimes I even leave food on the plate. But I still go the extra mile—in New York, that takes an hour—because that place charges a dollar less for goat milk, and I still pack lots of tinfoil for the airplane. At least eight sandwiches—after all—if the haul is long, and even ten, if you want to be extra-sure. I don’t care who sees.
I call Oksana and tell her about the sandwiches, and she laughs. And then the laughter gives way as we remember my grandfather. He has finally claimed his half of the burial plot he bought after my grandmother’s death. He no longer has to figure out how to survive.
Author’s Note
In the author’s note to her memoir Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl mentions an improbable family memory, then writes that by the time she was old enough to dispute it, her “father was no longer available for questions, but I am sure that if he had been he would have insisted that the story was true. For him it was.”
She goes on: “This book is absolutely in the family tradition. Everything here is true, but it may not be entirely factual. In some cases I have compressed events; in others I have made two people into one. I have occasionally embroidered. I learned early that the most important thing in life is a good story.”
The novelist in me agrees, but the journalist and former fact-checker starts to feel a bit of an itch. Of course, the idea that even fully “factual” memoirs carry some whole truth is wishful; memory is slippery even for those trying to recollect it without self-
serving bias, a matter complicated by the fact that we’re sure it’s not slippery at all. Once a recollection sets in, it seems to hold on without any interest in doubt. Especially if you keep sharing the story, which reinforces the idea that it happened exactly this way.
In the preceding pages, I’ve had to imagine more than embroider; I’ve compressed events and presented them out of order for clarity’s sake, but only when it didn’t violate the spirit of what happened. As to what, indeed, happened, what you’ve read is an earnest effort to get as close as our imperfect toolbox allows.
I wanted to write this book—have been dreaming of it since my first years as a writer, when I was a journalist—because its genre’s potential for complexity, beauty, and meaning often feels peerless: a true story, with the immediacy and urgency of fact, told with the style and transport present more often in novels. In asking what could be proven, literary nonfiction proves a great deal, and insists especially on one of these truths: The facts rarely live at the extremes, and almost nothing can be so true that another possibility has no value. As such, this genre seems to me to have a great deal to say in our difficult times.
Works Referenced
I received a superbly conveyed education about Soviet refuseniks, the American effort to free Soviet Jewry, and the political context of the time from Gal Beckerman’s When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry.
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope: A Memoir (translated by Max Hayward) was only tangentially related to my research about what my grandfather experienced before and during the war, but I couldn’t stop thinking of it—with horror, but also something more exalted, because of the testimonial she created. It is among the truest, most penetrating records of what the Stalin Terror was like.
Savage Feast Page 33
