In second grade, I was captivated by the main character in Goncharov's novel Oblomov. A self-indulgent aristocrat, Oblomov spent his life contemplating life's problems from the comfort of his cozy, well-heated bed. A shameless gourmand, sensualist, and lover of physical comfort, he was the perfect Soviet anti-hero, a symbol of decadence, corruption, and sloth. I was seduced by his roomy velvet robe, the descriptions of his sumptuous meals, and his life of unhurried, contemplative leisure, and chose him as my favorite hero for a class presentation. Shortly after that unfortunate outpouring of admiration for a class enemy, my parents received a stern phone call from my elementary school principal, who was worried about the kinds of moral values I was being taught at home.
"This is the book you should be reading," my grandmother said, handing me a red hardcover with a picture of a man in uniform on the cover.
"This is a true story about survival," she emphasized. "It's based on fact, not fiction."
When I looked at her skeptically, she said, "He was a real man! You should look up to someone like him if you want to grow up to be a real person one day!"
Translated from Russian as The True Story of a Real Human Being, it told the story of Alexei Maresyev, a pilot whose plane was shot down behind enemy lines near Stalingrad during World War II. Wounded in both legs, he crawled for weeks through the forest, scavenging food and supplies from the corpses of German and Russian soldiers left behind on the battlefield. His perseverance paid off, and he was found and rescued by some Russian peasants who slaughtered their last chicken to make him a nourishing broth to save his life.
Both of Maresyev's legs became gangrenous and had to be amputated at the field hospital where he was treated. Eventually he returned to battle, learning how to fly a plane with two prosthetic legs. However, his spiritual rebirth did not take place until he learned how to dance again with the help of one of the nurses. In my nine-year-old mind, Maresyev's story morphed with that of "Rusalka," the Russian Little Mermaid. Each of them suffered an enormous amount of pain with each step they took, but their determination to walk was what made both of them human.
After reading the book, I began to prepare myself for the day when I, too, would have to undergo a trial like the ones endured by the Little Mermaid and the Soviet pilot. I had a recurring dream in which I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, swinging my legs over the edge, only to discover smooth stumps, amputated above the knee. But I ran into an obstacle in my plan: it was hard to practice living without legs. So instead I settled on not using my left arm. I knew very well that this was a cowardly compromise, since giving up my right arm would be much harder, but I decided this was just the start.
"What's wrong?" my mother asked when I ate dinner without using my left arm for several days in a row.
"Why is your arm hanging limp by your side? Did you break something?" she worried.
This was a wrinkle in my plan. She noticed because I kept putting the soup spoon down to turn the pages of a book I always had propped up in front of me during dinner. I had to show her my arm was working fine and drop the dinner routine to avoid her suspicions. Outside the house I continued to practice when I carried the mesh tote with milk bottles to the glass recycling center or when I used one hand to tie my shoelaces. All of these tests seemed small in comparison to what Maresyev went through, but I planned on building my endurance gradually to be ready for when my time came. It did come eventually, but not in the way I had imagined.
It was the '90s, and Gorbachev's Perestroika was gradually leading to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The "Battleship Potemkin" of the unwieldy Soviet state had sprung several leaks by then. For the first time since the '70s, Jews were allowed to apply for asylum and leave the country. My father, sensing the opportunity, began to plot our escape. But while Gorbachev conveniently removed many of the legal obstacles in his way, he had a much more immediate and more difficult problem to overcome. Unlike Gorbachev, my grandfather was not ready to give up on the Communist dream. He remained loyal to the regime that freed him from the suffocatingly narrow existence of the Jewish shtetl in Ukraine where he was born, made him a journalist, and sent him to Kazakhstan to develop the virgin steppes of Central Asia into the "bread basket" that would feed the rest of the country.
My grandfather and I were inseparable in those days. He was the one who took me on long winter walks and rubbed my ears with the fur lining of his shearling gloves when they appeared frostbitten. We used my grandmother's lipstick to give both of us clown faces that would not wash off for weeks. He showed me how to take apart his Leica camera from his early reporter's days, and he was the one who taught me how to read.
"Do you want to go live far, far away from here?" he asked me.
"Will we still be together?" I answered, sensing a trap.
"Probably, but there is no way to know for sure," he said, looking at me sadly with his one good eye.
Since my brother was born, I secretly delighted in the symmetry the six of us formed together. The balance of our hexagonal family structure was perfect, and I was determined to keep it that way forever.
My grandfather died suddenly of a heart attack in the middle of the night. He went into the hospital for a routine check-up provided to elite members of the Communist Party and never came back. I was the last one to speak to him. He called to ask for his passport in order to be discharged the next morning. He was buried the next day, according to Jewish law. Overnight I lost my best friend and ally. Shortly after the funeral, we started packing our belongings and getting ready for our departure.
Immigration is a form of amputation—a severing from people, places, language, memories, and everything familiar. What is nostalgia if not a phantom-limb syndrome, an ache of loss and absence that never fades? The conditions of our release from the USSR stipulated it would be irreversible. Once expelled by the state, like a diseased organ, we were never to return. We were the gangrenous leg, cut off from the body politic. But ironically, we were the ones who survived, and it was the body from which we were severed that disintegrated only a few short years later.
We arrived in New York in January of 1989, and the Berlin Wall came down that same year. The echoes of the collapse of the communist regime reached us in a muffled way, preoccupied as we were with figuring out the circumstances of our new life. Often it felt like learning how to walk again with prosthetic legs. The dissolution of the Soviet Union seemed both impossible and inevitable, but we did not mourn it because deep down we could not believe it had really vanished. Its presence loomed so large in our minds, where it continued to exist untouched by historical forces, its actual demise made little difference to us.
Preparing for departure meant shedding decades of memories, experiences, and belongings. The state allowed each of us to bring two suitcases, one piece of gold jewelry—including wedding rings—and one hundred dollars each in currency. The delicate Japanese porcelain tea set, hundreds of sepia-toned photographs taken at Soviet resorts on the beaches near Odessa, commemorative crystal vases and ashtrays, a bust of Pushkin, a cobalt blue penguin-shaped decanter, needlepoint cushions stuffed with horsehair, and other household ephemera had to be disposed of and dispersed. All of these objects vanished from the house, carried away by an ant-like procession of neighbors who came to our door for days. Even the orange linoleum my father had put down as part of his home-improvement project was stripped from the floors, leaving behind naked, cold cement.
I was blindsided by the pain of separating from my home, friends, and familiar surroundings, but the loss that affected me the most was having to give up our books.
My grandfather, who was an editor of Tselinogradskaya Pravda, had collected an impressive library of rare first Soviet editions of Russian classics. His collection ranged from humble wartime volumes printed on smudgy newsprint to splendid luxury editions that came out after the war ended. Like all the other members of the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia, our library proudly displayed the collected works of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Sholem Aleichem, Theodore Dreiser, Dumas père et fils, among many others.
Each book was carefully stamped by my grandfather with his custom-made oval stamp that said "Personal Library of F. M. Fayda" in blue ink. I watched the stacks of books dwindle, rare and out-of-print editions carried away by greedy bibliophiles lustily rubbing their hands over their newly acquired treasures. I was glad my grandfather was not around to witness the looting. Now that his books were gone, his death finally became real. I locked myself in the empty armoire where his sports jackets and tweed coats used to hang and cried until the movers came to take it away.
What does one bring on a journey into the unknown? The only book I chose to bring with me to America was my Russian copy of The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury—a field guide of sorts.
While my parents focused on packing "practical" things like wooden matryoshkas, army medals, and other Soviet kitsch they heard could be sold in the West, the only thing my grandmother insisted on taking were two iron glass holders she and my grandfather had received as a wedding gift in 1934.
At the Domodedovo airport in Moscow, our suitcases were thoroughly searched by border patrol agents.
"What's this?" asked the young agent at the gate as he rifled through our luggage.
"These kikes paint their gold and platinum to look like steel—to pull the wool over our eyes," the older agent spat, venom in his voice.
Everyone froze.
I held my breath, both wishing for and fearing the delay of our departure. The glass holders had to be taken away and X-rayed to make sure they were not illegal contraband, causing us to nearly miss our plane for West Berlin. My father's rage at my grandmother's foolishness rivaled that of Polyphemus, but like Odysseus my grandmother refused to leave without her lifelong companions. The glass holders came back clean. The border patrol agent who accused us shrugged his shoulders in disbelief and let us board the plane with our worthless junk in tow. The regime held us in its grip one last time and then suddenly released us.
Every time I touch those glass holders, I think of Proust, who wrote about "the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object..." These ordinary objects were salvaged from the wreckage of history. What use would they be to us in our new life?
When my grandmother passed away in Brooklyn, my mother found a note by her bedside in which she asked to be buried next to my grandfather. She died on the Fourth of July—her own "Independence Day." Later that summer the four of us—my mother, father, brother, and I—made a return journey with her ashes to the country we had left forever more than 20 years earlier.
Our return did not undo the pernicious prophecy made by the regime. We would never be able to return to the country we had left, not only because it ceased to exist, but because, as all exiles know, traveling back in space is not the same as traveling back in time.
We found my grandfather's grave at the small Jewish cemetery outside of town. It was a warm, sunny day in late August. The rabbi recited prayers as the workers lowered the urn into the ground behind the gravestone. All of a sudden it became overcast, and the rain, which began as a drizzle, turned into a thunderstorm. In a hurry my father opened the gate, and all of us huddled under the awning built over the grave to seek shelter.
Now that the first set of nesting dolls that had contained us all was gone, we felt vulnerable and exposed. Our parents were now the next line of defense, standing between us and the néant. But for a brief moment the original family symmetry was miraculously restored.
It suddenly flashed through my mind that this was probably the last time that the six of us would ever be together again. I was cut to the quick by this realization and struggled to hold back my tears.
In the end the Soviet system did not manage to stamp out my decadent leanings. After I found Proust's novel at the Seaview library in Canarsie, I knew which camp I belonged to for life. I was destined to spend my life looking back at the past instead of keeping my eyes firmly fixed on the future.
This way of being does not end in triumph and does not lead to a decisive victory over the past. What I learned over the years is there might be another mode of existence that does not require me to let go of and learn to live without what I lost. My grandmother showed me we can treasure things for what they mean, not what they are. If we figure out how to do that, the souls trapped within them may finally be set free.
