When I have a thick stack of plates, I hold them in my hand and spread them out like playing cards. I casually throw them on the dingy mattress my parents have hauled out of a nearby trash heap — then scoop them up and press them to my chest for no reason. I hide them under my pillow, then ferret them out like a demented post-Soviet dog. Each plate is terribly unique. Some states present themselves as “America’s Dairyland”; others wish to “Live Free or Die.” What I need now, in a very serious way, is to get an actual bike.
In America the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great. I want a bike, so some rich American neighbor (they’re all unspeakably rich) gives me a bike. A rusted red monstrosity with the spokes coming dangerously undone, but there it is. I tie a license plate to the bicycle, and I spend most of my day wondering which plate to use next, citrus-sunny FLORIDA or snowy VERMONT. This is what America is about: choice.
I don’t have much choice in pals, but there’s a one-eyed girl in our building complex whom I have sort of befriended. She’s tiny and scrappy, and poor just like us. We’re suspicious of each other at first, but I’m an immigrant and she has one eye, so we’re even. The girl rides around on a half-broken bike just like mine, and she keeps falling and scraping herself (rumor is that’s how she lost her eye) and bawling whenever her palms get bloodied, her blond head raised up to the sky. One day she sees me riding my banged-up bicycle with the Honeycomb license plate clanging behind me, and she screams, “MICHIGAN! MICHIGAN!” And I ride ahead, smiling and tooting my bike horn, proud of the English letters that are attached somewhere below my ass. Michigan! Michigan! with its bluish-black license plate the color of my friend’s remaining eye. Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.
And even here, so far away from the wonder towns of Lansing, Flint, and Detroit, something like a life is beginning for me. I have a semblance of health, the lungs are accepting and absorbing oxygen, my Soviet-o-mania is being kept at bay by Honeycomb license plates and the colorful old stash of All Rome, All Venice, and All Florence books, which I look back on as my new founding texts. I am allowed to buy a stamp album with the portrait of a jaunty pirate on the cover and also to order a thousand stamps from a stamp company in upstate New York. Some of the stamps are from the Soviet Union, to my chagrin, reminders of the ever-present upcoming Moscow Olympics, but then there are gorgeous golden stamps from Haiti bearing the images of people at work in the fields, the people we have heard so much about, that is to say, black people. (Some of the other stamps, for no reason I can now discern, are marked DEUTSCHES REICH; one features a jeep being lifted into the air by an explosion. In another, a short, uniformed man with a funny little mustache bends down to cradle the cheek of a girl holding up a basket of flowers, beneath the words 20 APRIL 1940.)
Underemployed Papa and I go to the neighborhood park down the street. At first, we are confused by the boys who like to run around a dusty field after they hit a ball with a hollow aluminum stick for no reason. So we bring our thing along, a European soccer ball, and some older boys join us in kicking it. I am not good at futbol, but then, I am not completely incompetent at it either, not with Papa by my side, being strong.
And then it all goes terribly wrong.
* The names of my father’s relatives have been changed.
8. The Solomon Schechter School of Queens
A good Jewish boy smiles for his Hebrew school class photo. Notice the widely spaced teeth, the slight furrows beneath his eyes, and the Casio music wristwatch, which played both “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Russian “Kalinka” (“Little Guelder Rose”). The author hated himself for preferring the latter.
I AM STANDING amid a gaggle of boys in white shirts and skullcaps and girls in long dresses wailing a prayer in an ancient language. Adults are on hand to make sure we are all singing in unison; that is to say, refusing to wail is not an option. “Sh’ma Yisroel,” I wail, obediently, “Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.”
Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
I’m not sure what the Hebrew words mean (there is an English translation in the prayer book, only I don’t know any English either), but I know the tone. There is something plaintive in the way we boys and girls are beseeching the Almighty. What we’re doing, I think, is supplicating. And the members of my family are no strangers to supplication. We are the Grain Jews, brought from the Soviet Union to America by Jimmy Carter in exchange for so many tons of grain and a touch of advanced technology. We are poor. We are at the mercy of others: food stamps from the American government, financial aid from refugee organizations, secondhand Batman and Green Lantern T-shirts and scuffed furniture gathered by kind American Jews. I am sitting in the cafeteria of the Hebrew school, surrounded first by the walls of this frightening institution — a gray piece of modern architecture liberally inlaid with panes of tinted glass — with its large, sweaty rabbi, its young, underpaid teachers, and its noisy, undisciplined American Jewish kids, and, in a larger sense, surrounded by America: a complex, media-driven, gadget-happy society, whose images and language are the lingua franca of the world and whose flowery odors and easy smiles are completely beyond me. I’m sitting there, alone at a separate lunch table from all the other kids, a small boy in already oversize glasses and the same damn polka-dot-and-vertical-striped shirt, perhaps the product of some Polka Dot Shirt Factory #12 in Sverdlovsk or, if it only existed, Shirtsk, and what I’m doing is I’m talking to myself.
I’m talking to myself in Russian.
Am I muttering long-remembered crap written in capital letters on the Soviet metro: 1959—SOVIET SPACE ROCKET REACHES THE SURFACE OF THE MOON? It’s very possible. Am I nervously whispering an old Russian childhood ditty (one that would later find its way into one of my stories written as an adult): “Let it always be sunny, let there always be blue skies, let there always be Mommy, let there always be me.” Very possible. Because what I need now, in this unhappy, alien place, is Mommy, the woman who sews my mittens to my great furry overcoat — the one that has earned me the moniker Stinky Russian Bear, or SRB in the industry — for otherwise I will lose them, as I have already lost the bottle of glue, lined notebook, and crayons that accompany me to first grade. “Mamochka,” I will tell her tonight, “don’t be sad. If I lost the glue today, I won’t be able to lose it tomorrow.”
One thing is certain — along with Mommy and Papa and one sweet kid, the son of liberal American parents who have induced him to play with me — the Russian language is my friend. It’s comfortable around me. It knows things the noisy brats around me, who laugh and point as I intone my Slavic sibilants, will never understand. The way the gray-green stone of the Vorontsovsky Palace in Crimea, where we used to take our summer vacations, matches the mountains and forests around it. The way you get frisked at the Pulkovo Airport in Leningrad, the customs guard taking off your hat and feeling it up for contraband diamonds. The way SOVIET SCIENTISTS CREATE THE FIRST CHAIN REACTION THEORY in 1934.
Teachers try to intervene. They tell me to get rid of the great furry overcoat. Trim my unkempt, bushy hair a little. Stop talking to myself in Russian. Be more, you know, normal. I am invited to play with the liberals’ son, a gentle, well-fed fellow who seems lost in the wilderness of eastern Queens. We go to a pizza parlor, and, as I inhale a slice, a large string of gooey mozzarella cheese gets stuck in my throat. Using most of my fingers, I try to pull the cheese out. I choke. I gesture about. I panic. I moo at our chaperone, a graceful American mama. Pomogite! I mouth. Help! I am caught in a world of cheap endless cheese. I can see a new placard for the Leningrad metro. 1979—FIRST SOVIET CHILD CHOKES ON CAPITALIST PIZZA. When it’s all over, I sit there shuddering, my hands covered with spittle and spent mozzarella. This is no way to live.