Savage Feast Read online

  Dedication

  To Jessica Cole, who helps me translate

  Epigraph

  From time to time, [the Americans] are invaded by foreigners of questionable antecedents who, eager to do anything but honest work, capitalize on American naïveté by writing about the food and drink that, in another clime, sustained their useless lives.

  —Angelo Pellegrini, The Unprejudiced Palate

  The average American enjoys inexhaustible abundance. Nevertheless, he complains. . . . He is right, of course, in his efforts continuously to improve his circumstances. . . . [But] if he is willing to learn how to live well on what is immediately available to him, his best bet is to look to the immigrant for advice.

  —Angelo Pellegrini, The Unprejudiced Palate

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part III Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Works Referenced

  A Word about the Recipes in This Book and an Index of Dishes

  Acknowledgments

  Announcement

  About the Author

  Also by Boris Fishman

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  2008

  I can argue my mother out of almost anything. Except the several days on the calendar when she needs everyone in the family at the same table. Our family is so small—World War II, the Holocaust, the Soviet Union. On Passover, Rosh Hashanah, birthdays, anniversaries, and Thanksgiving, we have to please come together.

  We always meet at my grandfather’s apartment in Brooklyn. “I don’t want to ruin your weekend,” the altruist says when we ask whether he might come to my parents’ home in New Jersey instead. Imagine if he had an attack of some kind—my parents’ joy-encrusted life would come to a halt and they’d have to take him to the local hospital (as opposed to an attack in Brooklyn, where reaching him would take two hours). My grandfather can’t say that suburban New Jersey—with its deadly, arcadian quiet; where he can do nothing more than read the newspaper, rest, and talk with his family; where he wanders the too many rooms like an unoccupied child—is insipid. That would offend. And going to New Jersey would allow time for more subjects than concern him about his progeny. “I get up with you, and I go to bed with you,” he likes to say, meaning we never leave his thoughts. And that is where he likes to keep us.

  He really believes he’ll have an attack. He awaits illness like an informant who knows the assassin will eventually come. So he pursues it instead—almost romantically. Many of the ex-Soviet boys and girls who came to America when I did (age nine) are now doctors; many of them have offices in south Brooklyn, where he lives; many have my grandfather as their fattest file. He frequents multiple neurologists to compare their diagnoses, and takes the pills each prescribes—just in case—creating complications and requiring the intervention of ever more doctors. His blood-pressure-measuring device is an appendage of his arm. When I walk into his apartment, he extends this bionic limb and its readout—101 over 54, a little low but not terrible, even a little athletic—by way of greeting. He can’t very well leave all this for a weekend in New Jersey. More than twenty years after my parents moved there from south Brooklyn—“I didn’t come to America to keep living among Russians,” my father had said—my grandfather still doesn’t understand why his daughter and her husband don’t live near enough to be summoned easily every time he feels aches in his toe, his upper back, his you-know-where.

  So we funnel toward him, my parents from the west—down the New Jersey Turnpike, across Staten Island—and I from the north, the F line across the East River and a dogleg toward the ocean. For me, leaving one place for another, even a trip as brief as Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Midwood, his neighborhood in south Brooklyn, strikes some new well of anticipation. Not least because by the time the subway car rises aboveground at Ditmas Avenue, forty-five minutes after I’ve left Manhattan, there’s almost no one left on it who hasn’t at some point in their lives—maybe that very morning—had beef tongue for breakfast. Uzbeks and Georgians and Moldovans and Ukrainians and Belarusians and Russians, bonded only by the language and culture of their former overlords, a little ex-Soviet Andorra inside the Pyrenees of New York.

  It’s been like this since we got to the States. To take the backseat of my parents’ Oldsmobile for the drive from New Jersey to Brooklyn (the Lincoln Tunnel, the river heavy above; the Brooklyn Bridge, the other river sparkling beneath) in our first years in America, in the 1990s, was to open up possibilities. On the other side, finally, things would be purposeful and true, my uncertainty alchemized into understanding. Like starting a fresh notebook. And flying somewhere was rare and momentous enough to dress in your best.

  The nearest subway stop to my grandfather’s lets out onto the nail salon/car service/body shop sequence without which no south Brooklyn block is complete. And temptation: an Ecuadorian luncheonette belching out clouds of roast pork, garlic, and goat stew; a Georgian place where they’re frying chebureki; the Uzbek lamb emporium—on spits, buried in dumplings, braised in soup. I ate before leaving. Nothing in life—and mine is a disciplined, even self-denying life—feels less bearable than even a faint whisper of hunger. You really do have to be a Persephone to withstand the blandishments of Hades’s kitchen, meant to seduce her into staying underground. And even she succumbed. In any case, the culinary ambush by the subway makes me hungry all over again. But I have to close my eyes and stride past—a table awaits at my grandfather’s.

  It didn’t go well last time I visited. It hasn’t gone well for years. My parents ask what I am going to do if writing doesn’t work out. My grandfather asks what my friends make. My mother mentions—just FYI—that Alana, my American girlfriend, took a full twenty-four hours to return her call the previous week. Seeing no fish at the end of her hardworking line—I’ve learned how to deflect—she asks how things are going between us. This bait I can never resist, and fit my cheek onto her hook. Things are not well with me and Alana. I certainly want to discuss it with someone, and no one inquires with my mother’s curiosity and attention. All I have to do is start talking.

  It rarely takes long for me to regret it. Her responses suggest so little comprehension that I wonder whether she pretends not to get what I’m saying so the conversation has to keep going. I try to cut it off—hard to do, because by now my father and grandfather are contributing their insights. I ask quietly to change the subject several times, but by the fourth or fifth request I’m screaming. Screaming! Only then does the table grind to a rueful silence. Heads shake, eyes stare into plates, pinkies move crumbs around. I’m so ill-tempered, someone says, looking away. So short with people who only want to help. Was I not the one who asked for help in the first place?

  But as I walk toward my grandfather’s apartment, I’m looking forward to seeing these people. Because I’ve spent my years in America trying to cut so much of them out of myself—their cynicism; their aversion to risk; their faith in force as the proper solution; their terror of not being near each other at all times; their dread, always scanning for reasons to fear one thing or another, like a guard-tower searchlight—we are foreigners with each other. (They�
��ve spent these years taking advantage of the great American privilege of getting to stay exactly as they are—people I love voluntarily reenacting, as “free people,” the things about their former homeland that made their lives, as Jews and as Soviet citizens, so miserable.) My dialysis hasn’t always succeeded. Partly because, to be a good son, I’ve tried to somehow take advantage of everything America has to offer without changing as a person, as is their wish. But also because I lived in their country not until nine, when we left the USSR, but twenty-four, when I moved out. Beyond then, too. It’s not something you can cut out simply by moving the body.

  But in other ways, I have broken away so hard that my parents sometimes feel to me the way an American person’s grandparents must feel; I’ve swallowed two generations in the time a native python eats one. But lately it feels like the indigestion isn’t temporary; there are parts of America that won’t go down. The dominion of money; the Anglo-Saxon handling of human relations; the suspicion toward smart people; the indifference toward art. My family does not mind the dominion of money—that’s why they came here. The distrust instilled in them by the Soviet Union has made it fairly easy to transition to the Anglo-Saxon way of relating as well. It would upset them to learn that many Americans resent intellectuals, and that most of the country couldn’t care less about novels—these things were sacrosanct in the Soviet Union—but they’re saved by the iron lung in which they live; they don’t know this is the case. But when I walk into my grandfather’s apartment, I feel at home with these people in a way I can’t manage to in almost any American home. Even with my American girlfriend. That’s the issue between me and her—we can’t overcome the cultural rift. We can’t succeed because I am too much like my parents. It’s a sad irony of these family encounters that for some diabolical reason they end up being dominated not by this fact, but by our divisions, misunderstandings, and resentment.

  But—and this is another reason I’m looking forward to seeing them all—the rancor that follows every argument dissipates within minutes. No one in this family can hold on to a grudge. To no one is the dark pleasure of being wronged worth more than connection and love. Perhaps it’s more that no pride can compete with the terror of a dissolved family bond.

  When I get in, my mother will hang off my neck, my father will kiss my cheek, and my grandfather will slap me high five in a playful bit of Americana that—other than his ability to sign his name in English and the dozen words he’s learned to bargain with the Chinese fishmonger—is the only English he knows after twenty years. Then my grandfather will show me his blood-pressure readout, my father will make a crack about my grandfather’s hypochondria, my grandfather will flare his nostrils—their shtick—and my mother will throw her hands at the ceiling in an umpteenth plea to turn down the roaring television. Home. Then she will vanish into the galley kitchen to help Oksana, my grandfather’s home aide, finish the cooking that’s sending out such a narcotic aroma all the way into the stairwell.

  That aroma is as much the reason why I am striding down Avenue P with such anticipation. Oksana, who appeared in our lives just as our previous kitchen magician, my grandmother, left them, is an extraordinary cook, her food so ambrosially satisfying to some elemental receptor that I might as well be a reptile when I sit down at her table. My tongue has shot out and immured half the things on it before the others have drunk the first toast. (Not that they’re eating less slowly.) And this is only the appetizers.

  I’m semiconscious as I shove rabbit braised in sour cream into my mouth before the sheaf of peppers marinated in honey and garlic I just put there has gone down. I’m vaguely aware of what’s happening. From another part of my brain, I hear the faint call: Slow down. You will feel ill. You will hate yourself. I can make myself work at my writing for many more hours than I want to. I can make myself rise when all I want is to lie on the floor. I can make myself charm almost anyone, especially if it means they can give me something I want. But I can’t make myself stop eating so quickly. I can’t make myself stop eating even though I am full. It’s too good. And I am too hungry.

  When it’s over, I feel ill. I hate myself. Like a self-loathing addict, I swear—swear—that next time will be different. In truth, this ill humor is as responsible for the argument about to occur as anything my parents or grandfather will ask. Regret mixed with disappointment, self-pity, and sadness: The meal is over. Suddenly, none of the comfort and recognition I had been looking forward to feeling feels possible. I drag myself through as much of the afternoon as I can, then beg off to begin the long, bloated journey home. It offers none of the hope of the original trip. Food conceals the emptiness between us—and between us and the world around us—but, once gone, doubles it.

  Oksana’s spectacular skill isn’t the only reason I can’t control myself at the table. We have been hungry for as long as we have existed. My grandmother lived on potato peels as she wandered the Belarus swamps with anti-Nazi guerrillas during World War II. When she saw her first loaf of bread after returning to Minsk, our native city—black rye, a small loaf because flour was scarce—she tore at it like an animal. The woman who was with her rushed to restrain her, but it was too late—she vomited everything onto the floor. Her first postwar job was at a bread factory—she wanted to be near bread all the time. When I was a boy, her favorite meal was a finger-thick slice of the white loaf, spun into a meringue-like swirl at its top, we called polenitsa (paw-leh-NEETS-ah), another finger of butter spread on it; the apple we called Bely Naliv (White Transparent—the pink-veined white interior was almost translucent, and sharp with a tart sweetness); and instant coffee with too much boiled milk.

  She married a man skilled at navigating the black market—Soviet scarcity took over where wartime scarcity let up—so that her table always “groaned” with food, and the house always had four or five loaves of bread, which (instead of being reused for stuffing or bread crumbs, as by many Soviet housewives) went into the trash as soon as it lost its “first freshness.” Then my grandfather was dispatched to the bread store to test the loaves with the little spoon hanging from the wall. The price of bread had not changed in thirty years: fourteen cents for a loaf of Borodinsky. My grandfather wasn’t for spoons, nor the in-house granny who milled by the loaves in order to press, punch, handle, and weigh them on your behalf; he hand-tested, and on his own. Once, a saleswoman shouted at him to “quit pawing the bread with your grubby Jewish fingers,” loudly enough for the whole store. He turned, the loaf like a grenade in his hands, and said, also loudly enough, “I would stick this up your _____, you sour _____, but the line for it is too long.” Then he flung the loaf across the counter. But not at the saleswoman; my grandfather had manners.

  My grandmother wouldn’t allow my mother to stop eating. And she stared at my mouth, following its movements, as I chewed what she made. She could go weeks without speaking to my mother over one thing or another, but I was without sin. Unless, that is, I wished to leave on the plate my fourth caviar sandwich or a corner of the seared slab of pork belly in its corona of garlicky mashed potatoes. “But why?” she would ask, her lovely face filling with anguish.

  So I pressed on. But sometimes, with the pre-conscious wisdom, or freedom, of a child, I would feel that all this was bad rather than good, and find a way out. Once, when she left the kitchen, I tiptoed to the window and scooped my oatmeal out onto the bushes below. Another time, I lifted the seat of my stool (for some reason, our early-eighties Soviet footstools had compartments under the seats), and forked in the rest of my eggs. I slammed the seat shut and was dragging my fork across my empty plate when she returned.

  But it wasn’t enough. In my grandmother’s Soviet kitchen, I felt so at home that I could try, now and then, to push away some of what she wanted to give me. By the time I was an adult in New York, I’d been trying to disown her hunger for years. But in this new home, I felt so not at home that my—her—Russian habits wouldn’t let go of me. I couldn’t figure out how to let go of them.

 
; I’m dark-complexioned enough that people in first class—since 9/11, anyway—always look a second too long. I used to make myself shave before flights, but even if my ancestral darkness wasn’t bristling from my jaw, I would try, as I walked the aisle, to drop from my eyes the look of sullen intensity that was my default in New York. I wouldn’t go so far as to smile solicitously—that seemed like the kind of deflection a true foreign ill-doer would resort to. I would keep my eyes on the lumbering flier before me—just another passenger, patiently enduring.

  Then I would walk the gantlet of economy, now up to six staring faces per row. (I fantasized about first class for different reasons than legroom—fewer seats to reassure.) Most people want a higher-up row to get out of the airplane sooner; I did so I had fewer rows to placate. In the Soviet Union, my parents and grandparents had managed this complex matter of what others would think. In America, my elders constrained by their accents and fear, the job became mine: I stood to gain the most from the things Americans had power to give me, or not take away.

  When I reached my seat, though, my attempts at passing had to come to an end. Out came the large Ziploc with the tinfoil bundles, big as bombs. The length of the flight didn’t matter. A flying day meant not knowing when the next good meal would arrive, and that meant a large pack of tinfoil bundles. I was mortified to reveal myself as the foreigner after all, but that foreigner would not allow me to pay more to eat less well at the airport concessions. Or up in the air: nine dollars for the Beef Up, or Perk Up, or Pump Up boxes, with their baffling combinations of the wholesome and processed, which reminded me of Russian people who consummated gluttonous meals with fruit because, look, they were health-conscious eaters.

  No, I brought my own food. I brought pieces of lightly fried whiting. Chicken schnitzels in an egg batter. Tomatoes, which I ate like apples. Fried cauliflower. Pickled garlic. Marinated peppers, though these could be leaky. Sliced lox. Salami. If plain old sandwiches, then with spiced kebabs where your turkey would be. Soft fruit bruises easily, but what better inter-meal snacks than peaches and plums? (You needed inter-meal snacks, just in case.)