The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  When, a year or so later, he managed to burn up the kitchen properly, the ample bounty of Casa Dumitrescu came in handy. It was a simple grease fire that began when he left some onions he was frying to answer the phone, but it destroyed a good deal of our cabinetry before he managed to put it out. My mother was at home to receive the assessor from the insurance company a few weeks later, and since it was lunchtime and his presence in our house made him a kind of guest, she offered him a bowl of soup. He accepted, and, I imagine, warmed and comforted by both soup and the empathetic smiles of my understanding mother, told her his story. He was Polish and was going through a heartbreaking divorce. My mother quite naturally poured him a glass of the house wine, and they continued talking. Afternoon turned into evening, and my father came home from work. Knowing well the therapeutic properties of Țuică and assuming that the poor insurance man hadn’t had anything so good since leaving his native Poland, my father pulled out a bottle and started filling little glasses. I think the assessment lasted until about 10:00 p.m. My parents soon had an entirely new kitchen.

  Every fall I make wine for the family dinner table and for the good friends who cross my threshold. These have learned to enjoy it as any European. They praise its quality and drain their glasses like true sons of Bacchus. If they do not make it themselves, it is because I dispense it so freely, frequently bringing it to their table when I dine with them.

  The kitchen remodel was a high point, but as the years passed The Wine became more and more of a burden on our family. Even when money was tight there was never a question of sitting out a year of wine production. The economic rationale for it was, after all, unbeatable, or, rather, none of us had the emotional energy to challenge my father on something so clearly central to his life. I grew embarrassed at the gallon-sized jug that was always at the foot of our table, envied my friends whose parents bought wine in decent, normal-sized bottles. My father probably knew more about the different varieties of wine than any of them, but we, his family, didn’t. For us there was no Bordeaux or Côtes du Rhône or Merlot, there was only the special blend of Casa Dumitrescu, always changing in composition, always tasting the same. Part of my father’s goal in making wine was to revive our Romanian heritage in Canada, a place that never really felt like home to him. Unfortunately, what he kept alive for us was the familiar feeling of life under communism, where you could only ever have one brand of any product and daren’t complain about it lest the big man who ran things get sour.

  This is not to say that there were not still occasional moments of pride, even as my father and I went from being tight accomplices in my early teens to arguing almost constantly as I approached twenty. My small residential college at the University of Toronto lived off stuffy Anglophile pretension and a measure of worldly sophistication, and I discovered to my surprise that I could impress the provost or an influential alumnus with an exotic bottle of homemade Țuică. As more time passed, I also cared less what other people thought. Somewhere at the core of my father’s obsession was a set of values that still feel true to me: that wine is just a beverage that goes with food, neither demon nor fetish; that local stores should not determine the limits of your culinary pleasure; that there is a warm joy in giving people food you made yourself, even if it is simple. Especially if it is simple. That gardening and cooking and fermenting and decanting can give you, if not a home, then at least a feeling that you belong to yourself even if you’re not sure who exactly you are anymore.

  As trendy as immigrant foodways and home canning and novels by ethnic women with “spice” in the title are nowadays, the dream of authenticity in food is old romance. When I discovered Angelo Pellegrini’s The Unprejudiced Palate, originally published in 1948, it seemed I had found my father’s script and bible. No wonder my father loved the Italians so! Pellegrini, who left hunger-ravaged Italy and settled in the bountiful Northwest, waxes poetic on the spiritual value of tending a small vegetable garden, the joys of serving guests out of your own cellar, and the sheer deliciousness of fresh ingredients, put together simply but with a measure of peasant cunning. His book is a paean to immigrant wisdom, pungent and coarse though it might seem from the outside. Even in the 1940s, he notes, I read with some guilt, how the second generation grumbles about the unappealing, unhygienic food practices of their Old World parents. And yet Pellegrini is also uncannily like me, a child immigrant who grew into the language of his new home, becoming a professor of English literature. Although his mother did a great deal of the cooking, his father is Pellegrini’s model and authority, the one who taught him how to think about food and, naturally, how to make wine. Like Pellegrini, I could write a chapter on “The Things My Fathers Used to Do,” but while the émigré Italian paid attention and followed in their footsteps, I strayed.

  I left for graduate school in the wake of one of our family’s uglier moments. That summer my father’s get-rich scheme was to buy fixer-upper houses, renovate them, and resell them at a profit, none of these activities fitting into what one might call his skill set. My mother was unwilling to risk their life savings on this business venture, and he presented her with an ultimatum: compliance or divorce. In the middle of this, he and I had our worst fight, so furious that when the power went out all over the eastern seaboard I was sure that my anger had blown out the lights. We had patched things up into cold civility by the time my parents drove with me down to New England. At that point he had also dropped the idea of buying property and with it, quietly, the threat of divorce. But my mother had not forgotten, and she had her own thoughts about a marriage that could be traded in for a run-down house. She made her mind up when, having said their good-byes to me and set out on the highway, the first thing my father asked was, “So when are we going to start making The Wine?”

  Years later, a family friend confessed to my mother how much he had dreaded coming over for dinner. You see, when someone makes their own wine, you can’t simply drink it when it’s served to you. You have to comment on it. You have to discuss its qualities, how well it turned out this year, how successful this particular blend of grapes was. Basically, you have to act like you’re at a wine tasting and it’s the pinnacle of sophistication to detect the fine nuances distinguishing Casa Dumitrescu 1998 from Casa Dumitrescu 1997. A failure of hospitality of this magnitude is the stuff Greek tragedies are made of, but its core is innocent, a natural imbalance of interest and passion. Here is what no one admits in their gleeful reports on the year of planting their own vegetables, baking their own bread, and brewing coca-cola with self-harvested cane sugar and homegrown cocaine: some undertakings require absolute, unyielding dedication, and not every member of the family or community can match it. Oh, it’s one thing to go berry picking with the kids on a farm and make a pot of jam at the end of the day. But if you are pickling tomatoes because you miss a taste from your childhood, you have to try to get it right, which means you have to do a lot of pickling. It also means the people around you will have to eat a lot of sour tomatoes while you work out the recipe.

  Wine is even more demanding, requiring copious equipment, knowledge, and most of all time. It has to be tended, observed, cared for. You have to judge the fermentation, know when to rack it to another bottle, siphoning it away from its sediment. It is intimate too, in the various demands it makes on the body of its maker: my father labored to lift bottles and bruise grapes, and he always racked wine the old-fashioned, unsanitary way, by sucking on one end of a hose and placing it in the fresh bottle, allowing the pressure to drive the wine into its new receptacle. The liquid that a proud vintner puts on the table is the fruit of months of planning, mixing, crushing, washing, testing, tasting, pouring, and smelling, but all the guest knows is that he is drinking mediocre wine. The wine was my father’s second child, one whose faults he couldn’t see.

  The deep irony of the years that followed the divorce was that my father’s liquors improved. His wine was now more than palatable, and his Țuică was the real thing, a pleasure to start a meal
with. We had all put in time, but he stuck it through. It took a long while for us to be able to talk to each other after our fight and my parents’ subsequent split, and even then our encounters were awkward, veins of hurt pulsing under the surface. But it helped that all we ever did, on those tense holiday visits, was eat and drink together. On the worst days, food and alcohol were social lubricants, keeping mouths from talking too much, giving the illusion of celebration and togetherness around a table. On the better days, it was easy to enjoy a good plum brandy, to appreciate it honestly, to see him enjoy the compliment. He would send me off with several bottles to take home with me, some pure Țuică, some experiments he had colored with tea, flavored with fruit, or aged in a bourbon wood barrel. I didn’t know what to do with that much hard liquor, but inevitably something would come up—an exam passed, a dissertation submitted, another move to yet another new city—and the Țuică I found in my stores provided the punctuation.

  We do not speak anymore, my father and I. The decision was his. When I went to pack my things for my most recent move, now so far from Toronto that I’m almost back where I started, I found one more plastic bottle of Țuică. It was full, and it would clearly be the last I would ever have from his hands. I decided not to put it in the container with all my other belongings, wrapping it instead in a plastic bag and hiding it in my luggage; it was perfectly legal, but it felt illicit. This is also an authentic Romanian gesture, one I performed instinctively. One of my parents’ friends escaped from Romania in the 1980s by hiding on a train, leaving his family behind but tightly grasping, under his jacket, two bottles of exquisite wine from the vineyard where he had worked. He opened one bottle with great pomp on his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and told his guests he was saving the second for his elder daughter’s wedding, which he did not live to see. I did not wait so long. The bottle of Țuică was a little crushed by the time it reached my new home, looking as if it might crack the moment I tried to unscrew the cap. But it held, and to celebrate the start of our new life, I poured a generous amount into espresso cups for me and my husband. I expected the fresh, clean punch-in-the-face of all-natural, homemade plum brandy, but that is not what I tasted in the cup. This bottle, it turned out, was one of my father’s experiments, an infusion with orange peels that had taken on a powerful bitter note over the years. It was undrinkable.

  They will want to suck at the siphon hose and taste whatever you taste. They will laugh and smack their lips and assure you that the wine is very good. When you leave the cellar they will insist on carrying the bottle to the dinner table . . . And as they cling tightly to the bottle, with all the elaborate care of which little ones are capable on such occasions, you may possibly glimpse a comforting symbol—the child drawing closer to the father.

  ELA HARRISON

  My Heart Lies Between “The Fleet” and “All the Ships”

  FROM The Georgia Review

  For the past several years, my friends have known it as “my translating job that I love.” When asked for specifics, I start by saying I’m employed as a translator for a Dutch publishing house, preparing an English version of an Ancient Greek–Italian dictionary. At this point, the person’s eyes may glaze over (“She said Ancient Greek!”). Or I see the wheels start to spin—Dutch . . . English . . . Ancient Greek . . . Italian . . . translating—a dictionary? Or Dictionaries usually involve one, or at most two, languages. Not three. Or Ancient Greek is a dead language—why does it need a new dictionary?

  How can I explain the allure of rapid passage from one word to the next—one world to the next—as I work word by word through an amassed list so long I can perceive no horizon? Sometimes, whole dictionary pages, 7-by-10-inch, two columns per side, fine print, are filled with compounds based on a single concept or word: recently wealthy (nouveau riche); fresh from war; of recent appearance; freshly killed (twice, from two different words for “kill”); recently grown; freshly poured. Then I encounter, perhaps, a couple words having to do with even numbers, whose base is a sound-alike of the word for “recent”—and next maybe on into the “bread” words, another sound-alike: To give bread, giver of bread, bread seller, bread basket, piece of bread, bakery, to be a baker, pertaining to a baker, baker . . .

  Conversely, sometimes each successive entry is a leap of worlds. A word for a poisonous plant will be followed by a verb that, in its different manifestations, can mean to raise or to rise, and can also refer to the sun, a sail, or growth into adulthood. Every time I save one such entry and move along to the next, I enter a new sphere of thought and sound.

  To gather and explicate all the words of a dead language is to build on the work of others. I can’t go to the newspapers or listen to how things are said on the radio, can’t assay a sample of Internet verbiage or pull words out of current bestsellers. A comprehensive alpha-through-omega requires a grand scavenger hunt through the best literary sources—Homer, Plato, the New Testament, the historians and dramatists and orators of centuries past—as well as the mass of texts engraved on stone or written on papyrus, to say nothing of official and private documents, letters, graffiti, tombstones.

  Greek words carved on rocks, penned on papyrus carbonized by volcanic eruption, or wrapped around a mummy are still unearthed every year. Once the words are gathered—and literally cleaned up by archaeologists and others—they must be presented in snippets of sentences showing off their most flattering profiles if they are to make useful dictionary entries. The size of the lexicon is immense, what with all the objects and concepts that need words and descriptors, along with the great propensity of Greek to bud adjectives off nouns and verbs, to derive nouns and verbs out of adjectives, to form adverbs out of past tenses of verbs, to borrow words from other languages, and to make up new ones completely. Alpha alone—the letter with the greatest number of entries by far—comprises 406 pages in three columns of tiny print, with up to fifty entries per page depending on the length of the individual entries.

  Here is another dimension of my wonder: as I move from one entry to the next, I am not only shifting sound and thought gears, I’m skipping across centuries and social strata. For example, I may encounter a series of words with essentially the same meaning, but that were each spoken in a different epoch, when one or another suffix was mostly used. One comes from the most highbrow style of classical Athens; another is a colloquial form found only in texts from Egypt; another is not attested later than the Iliad, and yet another not earlier than Saint Luke.

  Four-hundred-plus pages of alpha sounds like a fat wad of print, and it is . . . and there are twenty-two other letters to traverse. But I’m not working on a paper page. These myriads of words are filed in a database I access over the Internet, sitting thousands of miles away from where the language was spoken at a time when the fastest computer was the human brain with an abacus. Five other translators are also at work (over the duration of the project there were a total of ten), none of whom I’ve met, and all of whom are located in different states or countries. We are totally dependent on electronic hardware and optic fibers, web browsers, online databases, and specialized software. The voluminous physical book with its light-gauge pages is our anchor, the bridge between the high-tech practicalities of our work and this language that so far precedes high technology—although, in an ironic twist I enjoy, it was to supply so much of the high-tech lexicon.

  Paper page . . . web page . . . The Greek words I’m dealing with were written on scrolls of goatskin that were rolled up rather than turned, or they were scrawled on scraps of pottery, or carved on a wall or pillar, or brushed onto papyrus with a reed pen. Of course, many other words of Ancient Greek were never written down; instead, they were spoken in some remote area where writing was unknown, and they disappeared when no one used them anymore. As I do my small part to preserve these survivors, this “dead language,” in a novel nonphysical context, I wonder about those disembodied words echoing in some word-Neverland. That I am working with Italian as well as English pushes the echoines
s of words closer to the front of my mind. What I’m doing, essentially, is overwriting the Italian translations of Professor Franco Montanari’s dictionary. The Italian gives me a template and a structure for a given lemma (dictionary entry), but I’m expected to rely on my expertise in Greek at least as much, especially when it comes to translating the snippets of example passages. I’m more apt to notice metaphorical resonances in languages other than my native one—even in other dialects of English—whereas in my native idiom I take such connections for granted, unreflectingly. For instance, the jump from paper page to web page is easy, but what about screen? I never think about computer screens as having a metaphorical relationship to anything else, but when I go into Italian I’m acutely conscious that schermo is also a curtain, a veil, even a shield. The Modern Greek word for (computer) screen is—with allowance for change in pronunciation—exactly the word for the veil that in the language of Homeric epic would shroud a modest young woman—and suddenly, working with these three languages, I am aware of the delicate balance of hiding and self-revelation I’m granted by the (screen of) computer and Internet—of the connection, even, between revelation and veil in my own language.