Savage Feast Page 3

  Ultimately, our friends wouldn’t go on to Israel; when they arrived in Vienna, the first document-processing point, they would declare their desire to emigrate to the United States instead. Israel pressured America to close the door to maneuvers like these, but without success: Everyone—the Americans, Jews and not; the Dutch, who represented Israeli interests in Moscow; the Austrians; even the religious refuseniks stuck in the Soviet Union who wished to go nowhere but Israel—supported freedom in this choice for Soviet Jews.

  The maneuver worked, in our case—soon the letter arrived from the Soviet visa office, summoning my father and grandfather, as the heads of their families, for the interview that would decide whether we’d be allowed to emigrate. But the situation had changed since we applied. In December 1979, the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Jimmy Carter grounded the arms reduction treaty, refused to send grain, and boycotted the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. The Soviets had nothing to gain from letting their Jews continue to go, and, just like that, the doors started closing. (That was always what we called them—“the doors.”) By the time my father and grandfather were called, they had been hearing about far more rejections than approvals. If permission to leave was denied, you became an official refusenik. (The term comes from having been refused permission to leave rather than a personal refusal to remain in the USSR.) But if you didn’t show up for your appointment, maybe the application would be thrown away, or stamped failure to appear, which, at everyone’s workplaces, the right gifts for one’s superior could transform into realized their mistake and a quiet return to previous positions.

  When my father and grandfather heard their names called, they looked at each other for a long time, trying to decide. If they slipped through, they’d get out to America. If not . . . there was no way to know. No matter what they could smooth over at work, their declaration of intention to emigrate assured them of a future of zero assurances. Their names were called again, people swiveling to look.

  They didn’t go in. The other thing this assured was that, instead of getting started in America as a toddler, I would spend my formative years in the Soviet Union instead.

  1945–1975

  I was born into a minor scandal. The first involved my father’s mother, Faina (fah-YEE-nah). Instead of crowding the maternity ward with everyone else, she went . . . cross-country skiing. It was a perfect day for it, the cold February sun glittering off the snowpack, taller than a man after four months of winter. (With us, half the year was winter.) It was scorching and freezing at once.

  My mother’s parents regarded this as an act of unpardonable self-indulgence. In their eyes, Faina was the Egoist. Instead of spending all her time making money to pass on to her offspring, she sang in a choir, performed calisthenics, and looked after herself. She wore teal, periwinkle, magenta, and lemon—never black. She refused to utter the word “death.” Did not believe in bad moods. In a Soviet version of Zen, she lowered herself into sleep by intoning the names of the major body parts: The shoulder is resting. The forearm is resting. The elbow is resting. In the choir, she would sing only from the front row. The front row was for the best voices and, while Faina’s was certainly . . . resounding, and without a doubt . . . enthusiastic, the truth was that her hearing wasn’t the greatest. Faina heard out the choirmaster’s delicate plea, then informed him that she would continue to sing from the front.

  Evacuated to the Soviet interior during the war, she had endured obliterating hunger and had watched her sister die of typhus. She wanted to live. My mother’s parents had endured no less, but their conclusion was different: they would live for their children. After my birth, they alternated between wishing Faina would come to her senses and offer more help and resentfully wanting her nowhere near. And yet, in a way, Faina was the one responsible for my appearance.

  Shortly after World War II, she had been set to marry a veteran. He was a serdechnik—a “heart man”—so he went to a sanatorium near the Black Sea; the mineral treatments were supposed to help. As on so many Soviet occasions, they did the opposite, elevating his heart rate until it gave out. This man had lost so much family in the war that it fell to his second cousin Boris to retrieve his body for burial. Boris did not want to go to the Black Sea. He had been fighting since 1939—a border skirmish with Japan; a winter war with Finland; then the global slaughterhouse of World War II—and had managed to survive with nothing worse than shredded hearing and galloping blood pressure until he was shot in the arm in the war’s final days. He came back to Minsk an artillery sergeant with a sling and a German cast-iron cooking pot. Everyone in his unit had gotten one—the Germans were evil, but they knew how to make things.

  At home, Boris learned that both of his parents had been killed, no trace of the bodies. But a younger brother was alive in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, more than two thousand miles away, where he had married a Russian woman. The Russian woman had a widowed younger sister. Millions of men having died in the war, almost any would do, so it was there that Boris wanted to go. But, reluctantly, he took the train for the Black Sea instead; awkwardly, he had to go down with Faina, his cousin’s young wife. Boris—stout, of medium height, mortified by all the hair on his body—was shy around women. But the Black Sea wasn’t much closer than Central Asia; they talked the whole way. There was a sturdiness to the young woman, a flushed radiance. By the time they reached the Black Sea, Boris wasn’t sure about Kazakhstan anymore.

  After they married, they lived in a single room attached to the furniture factory where Boris got work as a carpenter. The heat came from a wood-fired furnace. That was where the German cooking pot spent most of its time. Their free hours revolved around the procurement of things to cook in it. The store called Fruits and Vegetables never had fruit, and only three vegetables—cabbage, potatoes, and beets—so their garden supplied everything else. They bartered with the neighbor, who owned a cow, for butter and milk. The store called Bread had bread. The meat plant down the road had beef. Mushrooms they picked in the woods behind the furniture factory. All of it was what would later be referred to as organic—alternatives had not occurred to anyone—and both seasonal and local, as refrigeration was rare.

  In the iron pot, Faina made meatballs from ground beef and pork, braised with caramelized carrots and onions, served alongside buckwheat dolloped with butter. The stew called solyanka—cabbage and slippery jacks braised at low heat; the combination, earthy, smoky, and nutty—was like eating the woods. Even breakfast came from the pot: Boris sometimes took their two sons (the younger one was my father, born in 1953) to the furniture cafeteria for pancakes—puffing through all their little pores and slathered with sweet buttermilk—but for herself, Faina loved to reheat leftover borshch.

  Solyanka (Braised Cabbage with Shiitake Mushrooms) (v)

  Time: 2 hours

  Serves: 6–8

  Solyanka (so-lee-AN-ka) is more commonly known as a soup, but this recipe makes a side dish so hearty, it’ll easily work as a vegetarian main. Slippery jacks, the mushrooms my grandmother used in Minsk, aren’t commonly available in America, but shiitakes are, and they make a very suitable substitute. For a more venturesome re-creation of that woodsy, just-picked taste—mushroom hunting is a religion in my part of the world—seek out a mix of shiitake, king trumpets, and hen-of-the-woods (maitake) mushrooms.

  2 pounds shiitake mushrooms, stemmed

  2 tablespoons kosher salt, plus additional to taste

  6 bay leaves

  1/4 cup vegetable oil

  1 large or 2 medium onions, chopped

  6 garlic cloves, divided (3 diced and 3 put through a garlic press)

  1 large or 2 medium-size carrots, grated

  1 small to medium-size head green cabbage (2 pounds), cored and roughly chopped

  1/2 cup tomato paste

  2 teaspoons sugar

  11/2 teaspoons allspice

  2 teaspoons ground coriander

  2 teaspoons caraway seeds

  Pile the mushrooms into a big p
ot and cover with water. Add the 2 tablespoons salt and 3 of the bay leaves. Bring to a boil and boil for 15 minutes. Drain and set aside.

  While the mushrooms are boiling, in a large, deep sauté pan, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until golden brown. Salt to taste. Add the diced garlic and cook, stirring, for 30 seconds. Add the carrots and cook until nice and soft. Add the cabbage and remaining 3 bay leaves and cook, stirring occasionally, until wilted. Salt to taste.

  Mix the tomato paste with 21/2 cups water and a big pinch of salt. Add to the wilted cabbage along with the sugar, spices, and pressed garlic. Bring to a boil. Lower the heat and let gently simmer for 45 minutes with the lid slightly ajar.

  Add the drained mushrooms and cook for another 10 minutes. Salt to taste.

  Let cool, and serve.

  Cooking was a kind of torment for Faina—she could not do two things at a time, so while the gas was on, she stood by it like a flag lashed to its mast, staring, stirring, and tweaking. She made rolled crepes with ground beef and caramelized onion; chopped liver from freshly killed chickens; forshmak (minced herring, caramelized onion, hard-boiled egg, grated apple); and raisin-studded muffins dusted with confectioners’ sugar. Her buckwheat was buttery, but her strudel was chaste—diced apple, apricot, raisin, and plum did all the flavoring.

  My father’s best friend was his father. Often, Boris picked the boy up from kindergarten and they went to the old Polish cemetery—Belarus now being Soviet rather than Polish, it had been turned into a park, but you could still see the old stones peering out, like half-drowned swimmers. There, Boris brought out a newspaper bundle with a beef patty, a large red tomato, and several pieces of black bread, and father and son chewed together in silence. Once, Boris pulled out a gift of a small vest and straw hat. My father wore it to school every day. His classmates jeered, but he didn’t care. He was used to it. They made fun of him all the time because he was Jewish. “The boy is Jewish,” his teacher’s report-card assessment always began.

  Sometimes Boris was imponderable. Once, a teenager in the play yard kept taunting my father—“kike, kike!”—so he ran home and told Boris. Boris got out a metal rod and had the older boy, now weeping, pinned under his knee—he would have killed him—when a passerby shouted, distracting Boris, and the boy squirmed out and ran off. My father watched, stunned. Boris didn’t look at him, only tousled his hair before coughing into his sleeve and going inside. Because of his war injuries, his blood pressure was always too high. There was no medicine for it, so he endured terrible headaches and hours in bed with a cold compress over his forehead.

  My father couldn’t wait for their weekly trips to the steam baths—unlike Boris, who was so embarrassed by the fur on his body that he wouldn’t go to the doctor because it meant removing his shirt. He pruned the hair with scissors. My father didn’t ask why Boris had so much hair when almost everyone in the steam baths did not; whether that meant he’d have it, too. There was so much love between them, but not the kind where you could ask too many questions.

  After tenth grade, Boris and Faina told my father that he had all the education he needed—he should get work. Through a friend, he got a spot as a barber. Barbers wore white smocks, preferable to stained overalls down in the mine shaft, but my father couldn’t do it. You had to stand there and do the same thing over and over, and banter about the same false, vacant subjects. He could go back to school, but what was the point? You couldn’t get a job without a connection, and even then, being Jewish kept you from going very far.

  One afternoon in December 1972, my father, now nineteen, was crunching through the snow with an old friend who had to return something to his cousin. My father said he’d wait downstairs—he didn’t like meeting new people, especially in such a well-appointed building in the center of the city. But it was below freezing, and the friend got him upstairs. There, my father couldn’t help staring. The apartment was enormous. The parquet floor gleamed. A massive wall unit tinkled with crystal. The shelves groaned with books, the cupboards with multiple sets of dishes. The walls were painted with abstract lines of color, then the fashion.

  The young woman who greeted them had huge black eyes, the whites around the pupils so white they were blue, and two pigtails like cables. How warmly she was dressed. She, in turn, saw a young man with a handsome mustache, folded into a flimsy, short jacket. She wanted to give him a warm one. She didn’t know he wouldn’t have wanted it. He didn’t like wearing too many layers—they made him itch.

  Several days later, my father, Yakov, called to ask the young woman, Anna, if he could return on his own. He caught a ride on a street-washing truck, flowers in hand. She loved flowers, so he brought them every time he came—pansies if the season was right, because in Russian pansies are called “Anna’s eyes.” In this home, there was momentum, initiative, energy. The family had relatives in Moscow, where Anna had been sent several times for a taste of life in the capital. Unlike Yakov’s parents, who didn’t have friends—on holidays, a handful of relatives came and sat at the table in silence—hers interacted with everyone from pickpockets to ministers. Their salon chairs—he was a barber and she a manicurist—hosted African students, Czech functionaries, Armenians with thick beards. At home, the refrigerator was full, and so were the closets. The only reason the family didn’t have a car was that Anna’s father, Arkady (ar-KAY-dee), found it easier to maneuver among his contacts by taxi. Every day was built around these barter journeys—deficit food, doctors on call, doors for Anna to walk through when she needed it. Sometimes the currency was simply a “well-covered” table.

  Anna’s mother, Sofia, could knock out tsimmes, a carrot casserole that in her execution was savory rather than sweet; tseppeliny, potato pancakes humped with ground pork, named after the German dirigibles that crossed the sky during World War I; babka, a potato casserole studded with chicken-skin cracklings. Sofia brined her herring—after hacking off the head and tweezering the bones like a jeweler—with not only peppercorns and onions but coriander and cinnamon. She made cherry, plum, and raspberry jams so thick, a spoon would stand up in the jars. One of the house specialties involved a thick slab of polenitsa bread slathered with “the noise,” the foam sent up by the jam as it boiled away.

  Maintaining this existence required unflagging exertion. One day, Yakov proposed a walk, but Anna had to go to the dry cleaners, then visit the back door of a private food depot, then a woman who dealt in vacation vouchers. Yakov felt queasy about a life made from secret favors, but maybe being in this place was good for him. He felt pushed in a way he never had at home, where he had been provided for and kept safe, but nothing more. And if he made more of himself, maybe Anna’s parents might look upon him less disapprovingly. He applied to a technical college specializing in telecommunications, studied hard for the entrance exams and passed, earning a junior position at a telephone exchange pending graduation.

  “Now that you’re in,” Arkady said over dinner one night—the four of them always ate together; Arkady wasn’t impressed by the telephone exchange, but you had to start somewhere—“you need a ‘warm’ person inside. You understand what I’m saying?” My father nodded vaguely. “Someone who likes a well-covered table. And wants to help as a way to say thank you.” Arkady mimed a hand giving the top mark on a grade sheet. “You find him, I’ll feed him.”

  Everything inside Yakov objected, but he decided to try. Eventually he spotted someone who seemed pliant in the right way—the safety instructor. He stumbled through the invitation, but men like the safety instructor knew their way around such conversations, and helped by accepting quickly. That left the question of what to cook.

  Sofia decided against Jewish dishes. She made cabbage rolls stuffed with ground pork and rice, braised in a quilt of crumbled rye bread and sour cherry jam; and karbonat, a garlic-spiked pork tenderloin. Pork tenderloin was a deficit item—the right thing for the safety inspector to notice. Sofia stewed the hell out of it in a zinc-gray pot embossed with factory a
nd model identifications that made it feel like a part of some engine. The lid closed over the rim with a distinct, plaintive peal that tolled all through the house and said, Soon you will be licking your fingers. Sofia served the karbonat with crispy potatoes and scallions. The assembled drained one bottle of cognac, then another. Like American hurricanes, Soviet grades went from 1 to 5, with 3 passing. The safety inspector gave my father a 5.

  Stuffed Cabbage Braised in Rye Bread and Sour Cherry Jam

  Time: 2 hours

  Serves: 6

  Why would anyone braise cabbage rolls in bread and jam? Well, we didn’t have tomato paste and raw sugar in the Soviet Union, and this was my grandmother’s way of lending a sour-sweet depth to a standard. The pork and jam are sweet; the Borodinsky (or similar sourdough rye) is earthy; and the cabbage, cool and vegetal, cuts through both. (The cooking time below will leave the cabbage al dente, so that you’ll end up with a dish at once pillowy and toothsome.) This recipe uses brown rice, as its nuttiness goes well with the other ingredients, but feel free to substitute your rice of choice.