Savage Feast Read online

  It wasn’t only the money. A dime would have been too dear for the thing my seatmate was holding. How did Sbarro manage to make her pizza, black suns of pepperoni moated by a permafrost of white cheese, so smell-free? That arid iceberg, asiago, and turkey salad, watered by a cry-worthy ejaculation of chemical balsamic—its scentlessness I could understand. But pizza? That obese crust, made well, could have made the entire plane groan with longing.

  One of the few things that seem to make Americans even more uncomfortable than being very close to each other for six hours in cramped quarters is when the next person over keeps pulling tinfoil bundles smelling sharply of garlic out of his rucksack. (I was kicked out of a bed once for radiating too much garlic under the covers. It was my father’s fault, I tried to explain—in America he had converted to saltless cooking, and now garlic was his one-to-one substitute; I had just had dinner with my parents. “Downstairs,” she commanded.) With the extra peripheral vision that is a kind of evolutionary adaptation for refugees, persecuted people, and immigrants, I would sense, on the plane, sideways glances of savage, disturbed curiosity. Sometimes I swiveled and committed the unpardonable sin of gazing directly at my neighbor, whereupon her eyes broadened, her forehead rose, and the rictus of a stunned smile overtook her agony.

  Sometimes we ate raw onions like apples, too, I wanted to tell her. Sometimes, the tinfoil held shredded chicken petrified in aspic. A fish head to suck on! I was filled with shame and hateful glee: everything I was feeling turned out at the person next to me.

  I was the one with an uncut cow’s tongue uncoiling in the refrigerator of his undergraduate quad, my roommates’ Gatorades and half-finished pad Thai keeping a nervous distance. I sliced it thinly, and down it went with horseradish and cold vodka like the worry of a long day sloughing off, those little dots of fat between the cold meat like garlic roasted to paste.

  I am the one who fried liver. Who brought his own lunch in an old Tupperware to his cubicle in the Condé Nast Building; who accidentally warmed it too long, and now the scent of buckwheat, stewed chicken, and carrots hung like radiation over the floor, few of whose inhabitants brought lunch from home, fewer of whom were careless enough to heat it for too long if they did, and none of whom brought a scent bomb in the first place. Fifteen floors below, the storks who staffed the fashion magazines grazed on greens in the Frank Gehry cafeteria.

  I was the one who ate mashed potatoes and frankfurters for breakfast. Who ate a sandwich for breakfast. Strange? But Americans ate cereal for dinner. Americans ate cereal, period, that oddment. They had a whole thing called “breakfast for dinner.” And the only reason they were right and I was wrong was that it was their country.

  The problem with my desire to pass for native was that everything in the tinfoil was so fucking good. When the world thinks of Soviet food, it thinks of all the wrong things. Though it was due to incompetence rather than ideology, we were local, seasonal, and organic long before Chez Panisse opened its doors. You just had to have it in a home instead of a restaurant, like British cooking after the war, as Orwell wrote. For me, the food also had cooked into it the memory of my grandmother’s famine; my grandfather’s black-marketeering to get us the “deficit” goods that, in his view, we deserved no less than the political VIPs; all the family arguments that paused while we filled our mouths and our eyes rolled back in our heads. Food was so valuable that it was a kind of currency—and it was how you showed love. If, as a person on the cusp of thirty, I wished to find sanity, I had to figure out how to temper this hunger without losing hold of what fed it, how to retain a connection to my past without being consumed by its poison.

  There’s nothing surprising about the idea that trauma—the aftereffects of being dehumanized and slaughtered, of lives made of terror even in peacetime—travels from one generation to another, not least because, if undealt with, it mutates, so that you grapple with not only your grandmother’s torment but what that torment did to your mother. All the same, it rattles you to learn, after devouring your own food year after year—a free country, sunlight outside, friends waiting, homework done—about the way your grandmother fell upon her first loaf all those years ago, like an animal. Nothing’s changed. Not even the way her proxies, themselves once victims of her pushing, push food at you even after you manage to summon, from somewhere, a modicum of brief self-control at the table on Avenue P. You scorn them for not managing to let go of three and six decades of grim lessons from that place, but have you managed much more despite leaving as a child? At least you’re trying.

  In Chekhov’s letters—he was alone among the nineteenth-century Russian literary greats in having been born into the peasant class, with its servility and self-abnegation (his grandfather was a serf, Russia’s version of the feudally bonded)—you read: To be a writer, “you need . . . a sense of personal freedom. . . . Try writing a story about how a young man, the son of a serf . . . brought up venerating rank, kissing the hands of priests, worshiping the ideas of others, thankful for every crust of bread . . . hypocritical toward God and man with no cause beyond an awareness of his own insignificance—write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop.” You have to admit that you don’t know how to write that story.

  He wrote the letter at twenty-nine—your age in 2008 as you cross West Ninth Street and your grandfather’s apartment building finally appears before you, the ornamental patterning of its straw-colored brick giving way to the usual south Brooklyn vestibule of cracked mirrors and peeling paint in almost-matched colors. You know what’s upstairs: polenta with sheep’s milk feta and wild mushrooms, pickled watermelon, eggplant “caviar,” rib tips with pickled cabbage, sorrel borshch, Oksana’s wafer torte with condensed milk and rum extract.

  Once again, you have sworn to yourself: You will go slowly. You will eat half—no, a quarter!—of what’s shoved before you. You will leave feeling chaste, clean, ascetic, reduced. There is perhaps as little reason to count on this as there has been for the past hundred visits. As little reason as to hope that this will be the day when your conversation with your family will finally end in understanding instead of the opposite. Hope dies last, though. Was it not also Chekhov who wrote “The Siren,” a seven-page ode to food in the Russian mouth—“Good Lord! and what about duck? If you take a duckling, one that has had a taste of the ice during the first frost, and roast it, and be sure to put the potatoes, cut small, of course, in the dripping-pan too, so that they get browned to a turn and soaked with duck fat and . . .”

  You come from a people who eat.

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  1988

  What to cook in a Nazi cast-iron pot in a furnace in Minsk after the war

  What to cook to get your not-even-son-in-law the grade that he needs

  What to cook when meeting your son’s wealthy girlfriend

  The door of the sleeper sailed open, breaking the tu-tum-tu-tum of the wheels on the track, the medical blue of the overhead light panels dispelling the secretive blue of night on a train. Two uniformed men filled the doorway. My grandmother—the next compartment held my mother, father, and grandfather—lowered her swollen legs to the floor. In her sleeveless nightgown and the pink net in which she preserved her hairstyle at night, she looked too intimate next to the uniformed men. “Dokumenty,” they said, the word just like the Russian.

  If you want a shortcut to the Eastern European experience, you must have yourself woken from the sarcophagus of a sleeper’s ceiling berth by border guards in the night. You must have every light lit. You must be spoken to in a language you understand slightly, or not at all, depending on the kind of estrangement you want. Trains: To a European person, an Eastern European person, a Jewish Eastern European person, they call up cattle cars and extinction as readily as a megaphone in a pickup summons revolution to a Latin American. Emigration, evacuation, extermination, exile—in Russia, a train has carried the quarry. The platform, the engine’s weary exhalation, a whistle’s hoot
and blare, “the grey wet quay, over a wilderness of rails and points, round the corners of abandoned trucks,” as Graham Greene put it—if we are to speak of the things that divide the Russian mind from the American, we could begin here.

  One of the guards peered at the identity cards. My grandmother winked at me: Everything will be fine. I didn’t know what to think—I hadn’t been told where we were going, though all the tears on the farewell platform didn’t bode well. I was nine, too young for my own card, so I shared the photo on my mother’s. The guard brought the card to my grandmother’s face, the edge nearly grazing her cheek. What his doing that reminded her of, I couldn’t imagine.

  “Kde matka?” the guard said. The first word was like the Russian—gde: “where”—but the second was a coarse variant of our “mother.” At home, we used only “mama”—its stiffening into the Czech matka somehow enclosed all the badness of the preceding twenty-four hours: my mother weeping on the train track in Minsk; the drunks slouching up and down the platform in Warsaw; being on this train instead of in third grade, which had started ten days before; the gold necklace concealed under my shirt; the emptying out of our apartment.

  I started crying: quiet, polite tears, a good boy. My grandmother moved next to me and took my hair in her hand, the skin doughy and flimsy at once. Only then did she point the guards next door. They left, keeping the card. We heard the next compartment slam open, the muffled sound of familiar voices. Rummaging in her purse, my grandmother brought out a soft caramel candy and nodded to say it was okay, though it was night. I uncrisped the waxed wrapper and laid it on my tongue, waiting for it to melt a little before chewing. We rocked a little with the train, which hurtled through the night without concern for our trouble. After a while, the voices receded. My father appeared in the doorway, his eyes small and sleepy. “It’s okay,” he said. “The identity card has to stay with the mother.”

  Everyone was too shaken to go back to sleep. The illicit hour, the close call, the candy—I was filled with a sense of adventure. My grandmother boiled water for tea. The five of us, two adults per berth and me on my grandmother’s knees, drank it from West German tea cups, cobalt with gold trim, that she and my mother had babied into our luggage. They were among the things we were told might sell well in Vienna and Rome, our transit points en route to America, but until then they were ours, and we sucked at their hot rims through the caramels on our tongues.

  We’d never touched the West German teacups at home. Never sucked on candy with tea at four in the morning. Never encountered men in uniform on the other side of the door and come out of it fine. My elders had been spurred out of the fixity of their lives—what life was more fixed than an ordinary person’s in Soviet Minsk?—by two forces greater than the stability they’d painstakingly built up despite being Jews: my arrival in their lives, and the unlocking of the Soviet border. So, in the train, their dread mixed with giddiness, the compartment shaking with laughter as my grandfather made lewd comments about the guards and my grandmother hissed reprimands at him because I was right there.

  When the tea was done, glances were exchanged. The glances said: Did our celebration have to end so quickly? Were we not something like free people? In the skewering, overly intimate tone my father sometimes used with his parents-in-law—to defuse the tension that had always existed between them, to pretend they were on better terms than they were, to poke fun at the way my grandmother’s iron hand always saved the best for the child—he pointed at the oilcloth bag with the food and said, “Will the store put something out on the shelves?” My grandmother stared at him with heavy eyes. Now they were really bound to each other forever. She followed his gaze to the window. If you squinted, you could make out an indigo stripe blurring all the black at the far edge of the horizon. So call it breakfast.

  Out came rolls of salt-cured salami, a basket of hard-boiled eggs, a block of hard cheese, towel-wrapped cucumbers, tins of sprats, sardines, cod liver, and salmon. And a loaf of dark sourdough Borodinsky rye, sweetened with molasses, made with coriander seeds, finished with caraway. Borodinsky was our national bread—and we had eight hundred breads. The widow of a Russian general who had perished at the Battle of Borodino in 1812, the story went, had set up a convent whose nuns invented Borodinsky as a mourning bread, hence the dark, slightly charred top and the coriander seeds, to resemble grapeshot. We didn’t know that it was made from American wheat; Soviet wheat was too poor and fed only cattle. As always, we needed the Americans for the original innovation, but our version surpassed the original. A Soviet bureaucrat had explained it to a newspaper: American bread was “unusual,” he said. “There’s a lot of air in it.” Here was a Soviet bureaucrat telling the truth! In the hand, Borodinsky was as dense as a goose-down pillow, but in the mouth it was like soft flesh, giving.

  My grandmother tapped my shoulder—she was holding a peeled hard-boiled egg with a snowcap of mayonnaise. Over it, she dusted some salt, disposing of the last bit over her shoulder as per superstition. Using our kitchen knife, baubles suspended in the Bakelite of its curved handle—it had come, too—she hacked the end off the loaf but held it away and sawed down a softer slice; an adult would chew on the crust. I knew we had taken food with us, but this appearance of it exactly as it would have looked in the kitchen at home felt like magic. I departed the Soviet Union as I’d lived in it: my ears “cracking,” as the Russian had it, because I was chewing so hard.

  We had been supposed to leave in 1979, right after I was born. Jews had been leaving the Soviet Union in fluctuating but significant numbers since the mid-seventies. By now, the story of why—the persecution of Soviet Jews by their government and fellow citizens—is perhaps well known. The Russian Empire gained most of its Jewish subjects only when it annexed parts of Poland in the eighteenth century. Jews were foreign and, as with minorities in many other places, kept this way through geographical isolation and professional restriction. Things got marginally better after late imperial reforms, and this somewhat improved coexistence carried into Bolshevik rule. At first, the new regime genuinely pursued a more egalitarian order—there were so many Jews in Communist ranks because they believed in the ideal—so that Russians (and Belarusians and Tatars and Poles and others) not only lived alongside Jews peacefully in Minsk in the 1920s and ’30s, but sometimes knew Yiddish, the Jews’ language.

  All that changed with the war—it was as if Hitler had lost the war but won Stalin on the Jewish question. Paranoid and more concerned with centralization, fealty, and ideological homogeneity than ever, Stalin was planning a nationwide Jewish pogrom when he died. When a state begins to sponsor prejudice of this kind, its people listen, and Jewish life during the Soviet period was one of discrimination at best and physical danger at worst. (The steam baths my father and I visited every week stood on a street named for a seventeenth-century Ukrainian genocidaire of Jews, among others.) Things stayed this way until the 1970s, when a rising number of Soviet Jews managed to get out, thanks to nearly two decades of effort by Soviet refuseniks and American activists, and to the fact that the Soviet Union needed things. By the late 1970s, it had depleted its treasury to get ahead of the States in missile technology; meanwhile, the 1979 wheat harvest was disastrous. The USSR needed grain, and it needed the U.S. Congress to authorize an arms-reduction treaty. So that even though 1978 had been an especially oppressive year for the refuseniks—Natan Sharansky, perhaps the best known, was finally tried after more than a year in detention—in 1979, the doors opened.

  The Soviet Union hardly wanted its Jews, but their departure presented two problems. First, brain drain: Many were the scientists and engineers who kept the USSR on pace with America. Then: How to grandstand to the world about the quality of Soviet life if people wanted to leave? Above all, the Soviet Union would not hand a victory to America. The Minsk Jews with apartments in desired locations—Lenin Prospect, Victory Square—got let go more easily. The rest the authorities discouraged however they could: They levied massive fees for renouncing
citizenship and for the free educations the prospective emigrants had received. The higher the degree, the more money. My mother would owe four years of her salary. My grandfather chuckled at my father: “Good thing you didn’t listen when we pushed you to go for more school.” My father nodded evasively. “Good thing,” my grandfather kept on, “I know how to make sure there’s five grand stashed away when you need it.” My father didn’t argue. “Some people fly, and some people crawl,” my grandfather tried. My father only shrugged.

  Families were denied exit unless the entire extended family—which sometimes included ethnic Russians, who usually had no desire to go—agreed to leave. So that those wishing to depart would think again about where they were going, the KGB murdered several Soviet émigrés in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, among them a woman we knew; she had just written home marveling at all the lovely old ladies walking around San Francisco with flowers in their hatbands. The television showed nothing but Skid Row in Los Angeles, defaced subway cars in New York, gangs of blacks on the streets, police nightsticks over stonelike Indian faces, and bodies rolled into drunk tanks like chattel.

  Diplomatically, the face-saving solution went like this: Soviet Jews had religious brethren in Israel, the land of the Jews. For the humanitarian purposes of family reunification, the state, magnanimously, would release them. Soviet Jews almost never had brethren in Israel; Israel’s postwar population arrived from elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. But that didn’t matter. A Soviet Jew wishing to leave got word to someone who got word to Israel, where an office invented an Aunt So-and-so in the city of Be’er Sheva who’d suddenly been afflicted by an inability to go on without her Soviet relatives. Sometimes things got mixed up and it was “Aunt Be’er Sheva” or “Uncle Haifa” whose name appeared on the invitation, but neither we nor our Soviet jailers knew the difference. There was no equally worked-out channel for getting our names and biographical details to the Israelis, however, so friends who had already gotten permission to leave sewed a little paper with the information into the elastic of a pair of underwear.