BOOK REVIEW
Maxim D. Shrayer. Leaving Russian: A Jewish Story. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 2013. Illustrations, Index of Names and Places. xxii + 324pp. $29.95 (cloth).
Once, in Moscow, in his seventh-grade
classroom Maxim Shrayer was passed a note, “To the Jew from the Russians.” Containing
the usual message of bigotry—“You Jewboy son of a bitch,” etc., complete with
misspellings—it was signed by two boys, both named Fedya, neither of whom had
previously appeared particularly virulent in their anti-Semitism.
Episodes such as this were part of the
normal life’s experience of a Jew in the Soviet Union. Prof. Shrayer’s book
treats not only what it’s like to be a Jew in Russia, but also what it’s like
to be part of a “refusenik” family. He was eleven years old when his parents decided
to apply for emigration. After nine years of living in limbo, the family
finally was given permission to leave when he was twenty.
Those nine years were, to put it mildly,
full of stress. While describing numerous incidents of harassment, however,
this book is not about a worst-case scenario, not about Jews who were hounded unmercifully
to their perdition. There are probably other Russian Jews who could write such
a story. Take the issue of bullying at school. Maxim Shrayer was harassed
periodically, subjected to taunts, sometimes to collective jeers directed at
Jews in general. But he was not bullied. Wisely his father taught him early on
to fight, and fight he did. He seems to have had, always, a highly developed
self-assurance. He was, as he himself says, outgoing, a “popular” schoolmate.
The what if question shows up, or is
implicit, again and again in this book. First off, what if the boy had been
introverted, shy, not a fist fighter? Plenty of Jewish boys are like that.
Plenty of American children, Jewish and otherwise, are subjected on a daily
basis to horrendous bullying in American schools today. It drives some to
suicide.
What of his parents, Emilia and David
Shrayer? What was their life like in the Soviet Union? Once again, the
situation could have been much worse. “My mother and father had both reached
professional prominence”(30). Emilia was a teacher of English and a translator.
David was a successful doctor and a published author, a member of the Union of
Soviet Writers. His pen name was/is David Shrayer-Petrov. Of course, after they
declared their intention to leave, their lives changed drastically. No more
Union of Soviet Writers, no more good jobs. But, lucky for them, they were able
to find menial jobs, they were able to survive. Their only son was consistently
successful at everything he did. He was bright, an A student, he had
experiences that other Soviet students seldom have: working during breaks from
his studies as an orderly in a hospital, riding horses at the Moscow race
track.
By the time the family was finally allowed
to leave in 1987, after nine long years of harassment and frustration,
Gorbachev’s New Era was on the horizon, and on a different horizon—not far past
that—was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The author himself poses the
question, “Should we have left?”
“In some memories of my Moscow youth I feel so at peace that I start
wondering why I left in the first place. Had I experienced the best of
friendships in the wrong place at the right time so I would then go on
remembering the time even as I forget the place?” (117).
This book, despite the limbo and the
stress of those nine years, is full of good friends, happy times and the halcyon
days of youth. The chapter describing a university expedition to the south of
Russia in 1986, when Maxim was studying in the Soil Sciences department at
Moscow State University, is idyllic. The family’s yearly trips to Estonia for
summer vacations are described as highly relaxing and appealing.
Prof. Shrayer is a published writer of
poetry, fiction and literary criticism. Recently he published a fascinating
book on the relationship between Bunin and Nabokov. He began his writing career
while still a student in Moscow. The book is full of little details that embody
Soviet life of the seventies and eighties, things that I myself recall from the
many times I visited the country.
Caraway/coriander rye bread (“Borodinsky”),
poplar fluff, fatback and sunflower seeds. Ah yes, Russia. The way you walk
into a restaurant and never ask for a menu— because nothing on the menu is
available. You just say, “What have you got?” This is such a normal situation
that Shrayer doesn’t bother explaining it for the non-Soviet reader (116). And
this: “One of the two bus drivers was a misanthropic middle-aged man who
regarded his ochre-colored bus as a submarine under his command” (166). Ah,
yes, you could write a whole book about Russian driving habits and the
puffed-up pride that men take in being the all-powerful captain of the
auto-ship.
And this: “The director [of the House of
Culture] spent much of her time drinking tea in the company of two junior
administrators, whose principal tasks were to brew tea and to pour it into
cups” (50). When working for the Red Cross in Russia and Central Asia
(1992-1993) I ran into hordes of these “junior administrators.” They were hired
to be, largely, sycophants, while the director (and maybe one secretary) did
all the work. That’s the way Russian institutions often operate.
Then there’s the yearly harvest, the days
in late August when the big cities overflow with luscious watermelons and the
denizens are afflicted with watermelon fever:
“The city streets reeked of rotting
watermelons. . . . Street corners and areas in front of food stores would be
filled up with cage-like metal containers full of watermelons. People
congregated in front of the large metal containers, picking and choosing ripe
melons, sniffing them, tugging at their twisted piggish stems, tapping and
pressing at them like doctors giving an abdominal exam. Parents would lift up
children and put them inside the containers, and children crawled over the
mounds of white and green stripy balls. Emotions ran wild and people would get
in fights over watermelons. Women would lean over dirty edges of the metal
containers in order to reach for watermelons, and boys would peer at the
‘panorama,’ as we called it in our jargon, of underwear and garter belts.
Streams of pink watermelon juice flowed down pavements and mixed with the
Stygian waters of the city streets” (75). Stygian?
There are lots of other passages in the
book striking for their literary merit and evocative of Russian quotidian life.
The train cars of Russia, “stuffed with people like sausages are stuffed with
meat, fat and fennel seeds” (xvi). “A flowering potato field we passed on the
way to the whitewashed milestone where my father would get off the heaving bus,
mesh sacks of groceries in both hands” (8). The “Soviet grandee Boris Rozanov,”
who had “the large, jutting mauve ears of a pedigreed Chihuahua” (109). Not
just a Chihuahua was Comrade Rozanov, but a Chihuahua with a pedigree!
What’s it like, leaving all these things behind—familiar
things that constitute the everyday quintessence of your very life—and starting
out in a new country, “the miracle country” (40) of American the Beautiful? Did
the new country live up to the expectations of the Shrayers? This myth of
America as Fairyland Wonder has a long history in Russia, dating back at least
to the eighteenth century. Time and again in the great works of Russian
literature characters and authors dream of leaving all their troubles behind
and going to America. Just before shooting himself—in the presence of a Jewish
watchman whose face “had the eternal expression of resentful affliction that is
so sharply etched on every Jewish face”—Dostoevsky’s perverted Svidrigailov (in
Crime and Punishment) says, “If
anyone asks, say that I said I was off for America.” In the torment of his last
years Tolstoy considered emigrating to America. In the Russian imagination
America was the place where dreams came true.
As representative in flesh of the Great
Myth an American in Russia always had a special status. On the unwritten list
of national rankings America and Americans were number one. In 1972, for
example, when I was at Moscow State University for the first time with a group
of American Russian teachers—and where I probably walked past young Max Shrayer
on the street—the American contingent received the highest stipend of any group
there. The group leader of the North Vietnamese—with whom we were then at war,
and with whom the Soviets were allied—went to the administration to complain.
The Vietnamese received the lowest stipend, except, perhaps, for the Africans.
He, the complainer, was quickly shown the door. How could a mere Vietnamese
demand higher status than an American?
Then, in 2012, not having been in the
country for several years, I went back to St. Petersburg and there I discovered
the corpse of the old myth. I wasn’t special any more. It took the collapse of
the Soviet Union to finally kill off the American dream in the Russian mind.
For the first time in Russian history the citizens of the country were allowed to
visit the U.S. They came in great hordes to the promised land. Some of them
emigrated. Many of them were disillusioned. Guess what? It’s not a wonderland
after all. But then, even if it had been a hundred times better than it really
is, America could never have lived up to the dream. Russian visitors took that
sad news back home with them, and the long-perpetuated myth expired.
It’s not for nothing that the book
mentions an American TV documentary about Russians miserable abroad (224-25).
My experience with Russians in the U.S. is that the great majority of them adapt,
if at all, rather poorly to American life. Some of them go crazy. “The social
stress of being an immigrant to a new country is one of the critical factors in
developing schizophrenia” [David Eagleman, Incognito:
The Secret Lives of the Brain (NY: Random House, 2011), p. 211].
But what about the Shrayers? We don’t know
if they consider America enough of a dream to justify all their trials, what
they had to go through to get here. Only another book by Maxim Shrayer will
clear that up for us, for this one ends with their departure from the Soviet
Union. He does, however, describe how it feels going back “home.” “While
visiting Russia I now feel like a comprehending alien” (xix).
Being a part of the great Jewish
community, of course, is a consolation, but, then again, there are big
differences between Russian Jews and American Jews and Israeli Jews. Prof.
Shrayer writes, “I have encountered American- and Canadian-born Jews who regard
me and other ex-Soviet Jews with a mixture of solidarity, skepticism, and
condescension—as somehow a lesser Jew” (113). He describes his anger when a
rabbi in Boston informs him, “We’re going to grow you as a Jew” (114).
I often tell Russians and Russian Jews I
know that a Russian Jew, in my opinion, is much more like a Russian than like
an American Jew. Both the Russians and the Russian Jews get insulted when I say
this. But I see the Russians—Jewish or otherwise—as often voicing the same
opinions and playing the same games.. A friend of mine, laughing, once told me
about his reception in Israel after leaving the Soviet Union: “In Russia they
called us Yids; in Israel they call us Russians. We can’t win for losing!”
At one point Prof. Shrayer mentions “the
members of the Soviet intelligentsia who wear masks in public and remove them
from their faces when they come home at night, only to discover one day that
the masks won’t peel off” (133). Yea, Bogoo, oh so true, but it’s not only the
intelligentsia. The Soviet Union (and now Russia—nothing has changed in this
respect) is a country full of people wearing masks. This book is full of the
very Russian thing of pretending, faking it, telling untruths and half-truths. The
chess games. I have known Russians who push this business to the point where
they lie so much that they end up bamboozling their very selves. Russian
refuseniks, however, were in a special situation; not only did they have to do
the usual Russian prevaricating—they were forced to prevaricate at a still
higher level!
Shrayer describes his romance with a young
woman from another refusenik family, Lyuba, who remarks “how odd it was that we
were refuseniks, our families had been oppressed by the Soviet regime, and yet
we still remained brainchildren of the Revolution and subscribed to its myths”
(136). Lyuba goes on to tell Maxim that they would have to keep their trysts secret
from her parents. Why? Because her mother thinks she should already be married
and having children. She would not approve of the still-too-young,
“un-marriable” Maxim. So that’s the way it went, with Maxim’s parents knowing
and Lyuba’s family “either not knowing or pretending not to know.” Later Maxim
describes how he and his mother had a risky meeting with an American
journalist, after which their cab was chased by an unmarked car. He was tempted
to tell Lyuba about “the night chase, but I didn’t, deflecting Lyuba’s question
with another half-truth about having been ‘occupied’ on account of my parents’
troubles” (151).
As part of my class on Russian folklore
and folklife at Miami University I included a discussion of Russian
mentalities. In that class there were often students who were born in the
Soviet Union, or whose parents were. Once, when I was discussing the Russian
games of lying and perpetual chess, one of my students raised his hand.
Thoroughly puzzled (after all, he was American-born), he told the following
story.
“My uncle Boris fell down the stairs drunk
and broke his arm. Aunt Lydia, not even a member of our family, but some kind
of cousin, came over and began telling us how we would present this event to
friends and family. We would tell grandma that he fell, but he was not drunk.
We would tell his brother that the arm was not really broken. We would tell
Aunt Lena that he was walking backwards down the stairs, and the reason he fell
was because someone left a book on the steps, and we would keep the whole thing
secret from that horrible Masha Volkova—although she was bound to find out and
spread her nasty gossip. What I want to know, though (said my student), Why
can’t we just tell the truth?” Ah, the naïve American, who believes that truth
can be told!
Prof. Shrayer mentions his encounter with
an American professor in Moscow, who launched into a tirade on the games played
in American academe. “I remember thinking, ‘How very enticing’” (233). Now a
successful writer and university professor, Shrayer has almost certainly
learned to play the American games well, but, after all, those games are
child’s play for one who has grown up in the labyrinthine morass of game
playing that is Russia!
Another example. Not many years back I met
a Russian woman (let’s call her Galya) who wanted to be my friend. In her calculating
Russian mind she pondered deeply on what she should tell me about herself to
best appear in a favorable light. Although Galya was with her Jewish friend
Tanya when we first met, she was careful to ensure me (several times) that she
herself was not Jewish. Later I learned that she had emigrated to Israel; she
had lived there twenty years and spoke Hebrew. She told me that one of her daughters
had married a Jew and emigrated to Israel, and that’s how she and her husband
had got out of the U.S.S.R. But she was not Jewish, no. Soon I learned that
both her daughters were married to Jewish men. She gingerly fed me such
information in small doses, a little at a time, so as to make it more
palatable. Her automatic assumption was that I cared deeply whether she was
Jewish or not. I didn’t.
A few months later, while I was visiting
Galya in Nevada, I noticed that all of her friends there were Russian Jews. She
again assured me that she was not Jewish, although I never brought the subject
up. Finally, just before I left, she informed me that one of her friends had
told her she better own up. So she did. “I’m not Jewish, but I am kind of
half-Jewish because my mother was Jewish.” What Galya, who had lived in the
U.S. for several years but spoke little English and knew zilch about American mindsets,
didn’t realize was (1) I couldn’t care less whether she was Jewish or not and
(2) since I have been around Russians for many many years and am well-versed in
Russian game-playing, I assumed from the
very start that she was probably Jewish. In fact, I expect, momentarily, to
receive from her the information that her father was Jewish too.
The Shrayers spent nine years playing the
excruciating game of applying for exit visas. We are never told, but apparently
this game works somewhat like the repetitive game of taking final exams in
Russia. In a process that puzzles an America professor, as it puzzled me when I
taught in Russia on a Fulbright, you never actually flunk a final exam. You get
to keep taking it over and over until you pass. The Shrayers applied and
applied, over and over, and their persistence finally paid off. In 1987 they
emigrated to the U.S. Back now to an earlier question: would they have been
better off never leaving?
One thing is for sure: the Shrayers, had
they remained in Russia, would have found no diminution in anti-Semitism after
the collapse of the Soviet Union— for disparagement of Jews is the default mode
in the psyche of average Russians. I have run into it in my dealings with
Russians and Ukrainians so often that it ceases to surprise me. Some of them
are merely casually anti-Semitic; others are virulently so—“the kind of Russians
who savor the word Kike in the mouth like a juicy fresh fig” (Nabokov). In my
experience the Russians who are not anti-Semitic tend, nevertheless, not to
discuss the topic of Jewishness, as if it were some taboo thing best left
alone.
I can give you countless examples. Once I
was sitting with a Ukrainian friend when Steven Spielberg appeared on the
television screen. Apropos of nothing the Ukrainian remarked with a sneer: “I
don’t care who gets the Academy Award, as long as it’s not that zhidyonok (little Kike).” I have special
insights into bigotry, since I grew up in a little Southern racist town in the
forties and fifties—surrounded by bigots of every stripe. One of the most
common of bigots is the one who pushes hatred almost to the point of obsessive
love.
I had one uncle who, no matter what the
subject of conversation, would inevitably bring it back to “N-word.” He had N-word
and n’s on his mind day and night and
probably in his dreams. If you were speaking of exploration of space, for
example, he would say, “A n caint get a job as an astronaut, no way. A n ain’t
got the brains for it.” A Ukrainian I knew was the same way about Jews—an
obsessive love-hater. Talk about space exploration, famine in Africa, a meteor
that fell on Buenos Aires, this Ukrainian, invariably, would bring in some
disparaging something about Jews. Once she insisted that Gogol was a Jew. I
said to her, “Listen, Marina, if Gogol was a Jew, then Pushkin was too, and
we’re all of us, you and me and your aunt Matilda, Jews!”
Here’s an unfortunate fact about human
beings: in one way or another we’re all bigots. Hard-wired deep into our brains
is this fear and hatred of “the other.” Recent studies in brain science have
revealed amazing things about human bigotry. People who are flaming liberals,
who pride themselves on their sense of rectitude, sometimes participate in
brain studies with neuroscientists and discover that—deep in the neurons of
their brains—they are racists!
In July, 2006, when the actor Mel Gibson
was arrested for speeding and driving drunk, he spewed out a tirade about how
Jews are responsible for all the wars of the world. The next day, sober and
contrite, Gibson issued a statement: “I said things I do not believe to be true
and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said.” Later it
turned out that Gibson had spent the afternoon before his arrest at the house
of a Jewish friend. That friend described how Mel, when he’s drinking, “becomes
a completely different person.” He went on to say, “If Mel is an anti-Semite,
then he spends a lot of time with us [the Jewish man and his Jewish wife],
which makes no sense.” [This episode is detailed in David Eagleman’s book Incognito, p. 101-104].
“There’s someone in my head, but it’s not
me.” So who is the real Mel Gibson, the bigot or the non-bigot, the friend or
the enemy of the Jewish people? It’s an impossible question to answer, since
the one-hundred billion neurons deep in our brains are—as Dostoevsky once wrote
of man in general—“broad, way too broad.” They can accommodate racism and
anti-racism and scads and scads of other viewpoints. Taking this broadness into
account, we can easily believe Maxim’s old classmate, Fedya, in an e-mail he
sent to the author in America. In that e-mail, Fedya, who had long since
forgotten the mocking note he and the other Fedya signed back in the seventh
grade, writes, “Can you really imagine that your nationality makes any
difference to me?. . . . I was NEVER, even in childhood, when many things pass
without our being conscious of them, permitted to place anybody beneath me, and
especially on the basis of ‘skin color’” (28).
So the nasty note, which still lives on
hurting in the psyche of the one offended, was probably forgotten immediately
by the perpetrators, who were kids playing a silly prank and who consider
themselves unbigoted. And, in some sense, they probably are not bigoted. But
somewhere deep in their brains they still are. Life is complicated. At the
moment of this writing there is a shocking article in the Atlantic titled, “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?” The
author, a Jew, concludes that, given the anti-Semitism of Islamic immigrants in
European countries, given the danger to life and limb, it is indeed time for
the Jews to flee Europe.
Unfortunately, the little ditties have
enormous staying power. “Fatty, fatty, two by four, can’t get in the bathroom
door, had to do it on the floor.” That comes out of my childhood, but you can
count on its still being around now, directed maliciously at any overweight
child anywhere in America. Two hundred years from now, assuming that human
beings haven’t destroyed all life on earth by then, there will still be Russian
children (and adults too sometimes) rattling off the Russian version of “Two
Jews and a Kike went to Israel on a hike” (18). The Collected Works of Maxim D.
Shrayer may be forgotten by then, but the ditties will still be around.
Would that it were not like this, but this
is the way it is. Prof. Shrayer’s beloved Nabokov once wrote a novel, Despair, which has such a skewed
narrative structure and such a brilliantly perverse narrator that you don’t
realize, even dimly, what’s going on until you are three-quarters of the way
through it. Then you read it again from a totally different perspective, and you
begin “getting” it, but you have to read it at least one more time. Or two. Shrayer’s
writings are not so complicated, but there is a parallel to be drawn here. We
can’t be sure about some of the things in Leaving
Russia without reading the next book, the one still not written. Did
America prove to be worth it for the Shrayers? I dare say it was worth it for
Maxim, but what about his parents? Would they have enjoyed their lives and
found more gratification in life if they never had started the excruciating
process of applying to emigrate, if they never had left Russia? Stay tuned for
the next book, the one called (maybe) Living
in America. There’s where you’ll find the answer to that question.
