Not Funny: The Pandemic

Gary Shteyngart in 2018, maybe in his house. (source)

Our Country Friends: published November 2

If anyone could write a comic novel about the pandemic, it would be Gary Shteyngart. In Our Country Friends, he almost did it. But when I think about it, the very funny parts, which he excels at, are funny about the world as it was before the Covid disaster. This novel covers the time period from the spring of 2020 until late summer. It was not a funny time, and my opinion is that the more the novel presented the era's illness and danger and isolation and horror, the less it could be funny. How sad is that?

I've read other things by Shteyngart: a couple of novels, a few New Yorker articles... and they mostly are very funny, especially about food and culture clashes. This book abounds in food and culture clashes, but those are things that endured at least for a while. His characters are a multi-ethnic group of 40-somethings, mainly connected through their New York high school background. They love to eat and also sometimes verge on being sex fiends when driven by isolation and fear. 

The central figure, Sasha Senderovsky is a Russian-American the same age and background as the author. Senderovsky loves to buy lavish and extravagant quantities of luxury food to feed to these friends, who have been invited to his lavish country house (sort of a dacha) to wait out the pandemic. 

At the very beginning, anticipating their arrival, Senderovsky goes into the small, gentrified village for provisions:

"First, he visited his butchers, two former catalog models from the city, now a husband and wife, who plied their trade out of a barn so red it verged on the patriotic. The two magnificent twenty-five-year-olds, all teeth and coveralls, presented him with a wrapped parcel of sweet and Italian sausages, glistening hamburger patties, and his secret weapon: lamb steaks that clung to the bone, so fresh they could only have been rivaled by a restaurant Senderovsky admired in Rome’s abattoir district. The very sight of meat for tomorrow’s cookout inspired in him a joy that in a younger man could be called love. Not because of the meat itself, but because of the conversations that would flow around it as it was marinated, grilled, and served, despite the growing restrictions on such closeness." (p. 4)

"...he sped to the liquor store in the richest village in the district, which occupied the premises of a former church. He bought two cases of Austrian Riesling at the south transept, another of rosé at the north, along with a fourth case of Beaujolais, wildly out of season, but a nostalgic wine for him and his high-school friends, Vinod and Karen. Ed, as always, would be the hardest to accommodate. Deep in the sacristy, Senderovsky picked out an eighteen-year-old bottle of something beyond his means, two bottles each of cognac and rye, and, to show his frivolous side, schnapps and a strange single malt from the Tyrol. The proprietor, a shaggy Anglo with a rosacea nose peeking out from his loosely worn mask, looked very pleased as he rang up the many purchases, his fingers clad in black disposable gloves. ... Senderovsky sighed and bought an extra case of the Riesling and two bottles of an artisanal gin he had never heard of. He could picture Ed pursing his lips around a glass and pronouncing it 'drinkable.' When the final bill, adding up to just over four digits, meandered out of the machine in many long spurts, Senderovsky’s hand could barely slalom through his signature. A special occasion, he consoled himself." (p. 5)

Later, more expensive groceries are purchased. Eventually, Senderovsky's friend Ed prepares some of this food, with special attention to a secret recipe for vitello tonnato:

"He prepped over the next hour, the vintage sixties Campari growing low in its bottle. He had blanched the sugar snap peas, one of the secret ingredients to his tonnato, and was now carefully charring them on the grill. The anchovies and tuna had been pureed and introduced into the mayonnaise, capers, lime juice, and, another secret ingredient, three quartered habanero chilis, then blended into a silky smoothness and strafed with kosher salt. The cold veal was then covered with cilantro leaves and pumpkin seeds, a dash of the pimento and citrus confit, and finally the creamy avalanche of the tonnato itself. By the time he was finished, his fingers burned with habanero heat, and he wondered if the dish wouldn’t offend the more timid palates." (p. 124).

That's just the beginning, but I'll stop the food talk here. You get the idea. There's also a lot of satiric cultural stuff. For example, Dee, a character whose modestly successful essay collection is titled The Grand Book of Self-Compromise and Surrender. Or Karen, whose vastly successful app called "Tröö Emotions" had been sold for a vast amount of money to "the pudgy-faced chairman of a happy-go-lucky Japanese bank." (p. 120). Also a lot of ethnic satire: the characters' families come from India, Appalachia, Korea, Turkey (along with a melange of other places), and of course Senderovsky and his wife's native Russia. They have predictable hangups about their mothers and all that jazz. There's also quite a bit about a precocious child who loves Korean pop music, but the less said about her, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

Quickly the book becomes dark, and then darker, as the threat of Covid sinks in and the dangers of social life become haunting. Obviously, readers of the novel right now when it's new will bring vivid memories of what they were doing (or more likely, NOT doing) in 2020, and how they survived. I liked the cultural and foodie parts -- that is, the elements of the book with roots in 2019 and before. Although the book is in fact about survival, I'm not comfortable with the essence: what it's like to be in a real pandemic. I'd rather forget.

Review © 2021 mae sander.

The Samovar and the Sugar Lump

The Merchant's Wife, Boris Kustodiev, 1918 (Wikipedia)

From "Flavors of Russia"

Russian people often remember the samovar  as a symbol of their love of tea. A large water-boiler that sat on a table top, a samovar used liquid fuel, charcoal, or (later) electricity to keep hot water ready at any time without using the stove. A small teapot with very concentrated tea would sit atop the samovar. To make a cup of tea, one would take some of the strong tea from the teapot and mix it with the boiling hot water from the larger vessel. Often, a spoonful of jam or a lump of sugar would be added to the cup. A guest might also be offered cakes or fruit with the tea. The samovar became widespread during the 19th century, and continued in popular use throughout the Soviet era up to the present.

From "A Guide to Zavarka," Food & Wine Magazine.

Samovars were useful and also decorative: they could be made of silver, brass, iron, or multi-color enamel. They were a valuable family possession. Russian-Jewish immigrants to the US in the 19th or early 20th century often brought their samovars with them along with precious Sabbath candlesticks and feather beds, used to protect the metal valuables. They thought these would become family heirlooms — but their assimilated American children stopped using them within a generation. Whether the tea came from a samovar or just a tea kettle, the Russians loved to make it sweet. (source)

Poor Jews in Eastern Europe drank tea, but really rich people could enjoy it with many more delicacies. Tevye the dairy man, first the narrator of a number of stories by Sholem Aleichem and later the hero of the musical "Fiddler on the Roof" put it this way:

They carried out hot samovars with glasses of tea, sugar and preserves, delicious omelets, fresh, wonderful-smelling butter cakes, and afterward all kinds of food, the most expensive treats, rich, fatty soups, roasts, geese, along with the finest wines and tarts. I stood off to the side and marveled at the way, kayn eyn horeh, the rich folks from Yehupetz eat and drink, God bless them. I’d pawn everything I own, I was thinking, if only I could be rich. The crumbs that fell off their table would have fed my children for a week, at least till Saturday. (Tevye the Dairyman, p. 53)

The Rubaneko Family and their samovar, 1918 (source)

Sometimes Russians drank tea from their saucer to cool it. Other Russian and Russian-Jewish people instead drank their tea from a glass or a tumbler. One customary way to drink tea was with a lump of sugar held between one’s teeth: the sugar melted slowly when one sipped the very hot tea. My father occasionally drank his tea this way (he immigrated from Russia as a boy, but he never had a samovar!) 

A brief memoir by Rachel Naomi Remen describes this:

On Friday afternoon, when I would arrive at my grandfather's house after school the tea would be already set on the kitchen table. My grandfather had his own way of serving tea. There were no tea cups and saucers or bowls of granulated sugar or honey. Instead he would pour the tea directly from the silver samovar into a drinking glass. There had to be a teaspoon in the glass first otherwise the glass, being thin, might break.

My grandfather did not drink his tea in the same way that the parents of my friends did either. He would put a cube of sugar between his teeth and then drink the hot tea straight from his glass. So would I. I much preferred drinking tea this way to the way I had to drink tea at home. (source)

Some Russian tea-drinkers also nibbled the sugar lump while drinking the tea. A quote from War and Peace:

Pierre took his feet off the table, stood up, and lay down on a bed that had been got ready for him, glancing now and then at the newcomer, who, with a gloomy and tired face, was wearily taking off his wraps with the aid of his servant, and not looking at Pierre. ... His servant was also a yellow, wrinkled old man, without beard or mustache, evidently not because he was shaven but because they had never grown. This active old servant was unpacking the traveler’s canteen and preparing tea. He brought in a boiling samovar. When everything was ready, the stranger opened his eyes, moved to the table, filled a tumbler with tea for himself and one for the beardless old man to whom he passed it. ... 

The servant brought back his tumbler turned upside down, with an unfinished bit of nibbled sugar, and asked if anything more would be wanted. 

This blog post is dedicated to Elizabeth at the blog Altered Book Lover, where each Tuesday many bloggers share memories, photos, or other ideas about a drink, especially tea. I've found this to be a very inspiring theme, that has been leading me to look at a variety of beverages and their cultural contexts in new ways. Blog post © 2020 mae sander, images as credited.

"Panic in a Suitcase" by Yelena Akhtiorskaya

"They met in Brighton, a neighborhood whose pulse Lamborg made a point to check at least once a year. Pasha professed ignorance, and it was Lamborg who ended up showing Pasha around leading the way to a restaurant-café that served the most delicate blintzes. A rheumatic finger pointed out that over there was the most sinus-excavating plov and here the airiest meringue, while two blocks up stood white vats of the crunchiest pickles. The only men Pasha knew with such an investment in the matter were grotesquely obese -- they ate all day long, did little else -- yet even they were less expert in the field. And here was Lamborg, a chopstick of a man, warning Pasha never to buy Korean carrot salad from Gold Label but only from Taste of Russia, which, on the other hand, used the worst dough for its frozen pelmeni. All in earnestness, not a hint of sarcasm, not a measly grin. ... The only gastronomic wisdom Pasha could muster was that it was truly uncanny how much the food here was like that in Odessa, the only divergence being in abundance. He kept at it until he'd talked himself into admitting how disturbing and pathetic he found Brighton, though he actually didn't feel one way or the other." (Panic in a Suitcase, p. 140-141)

Here's another book about Russian immigrants from the Soviet Union and its aftermath, about their typical complicated and agonized self-examinations, self-doubts, ambivalent feelings towards their own and their adopted countries, and their elaborate family dysfunctions. The novel also deals with Russians' love of poetry and poets and not least of all their complicated digestion and food ways. As do the other novels of these immigrants, this one reflects the tension of people whose expectations of a new land are almost -- but not quite -- fulfilled. They always know about another Russian who is living in a mansion with gold-plated everything instead of a cramped apartment in dumpy Brighton Beach, and when they write home sometimes they even claim that they've achieved this ideal.

The character Pasha -- himself a poet -- and his niece Frida are the main focus of the book, but Pasha's parents, his sister and her husband (Frida's parents), his wives and son, and a few miscellaneous friends all have a role. Pasha is a visitor to Brighton Beach, not an immigrant: he never decides to leave Odessa, and he continues to worship Russian poets, especially the exiled Brodsky. Frida is the opposite: she was such a small child when she left that she hardly remembers Odessa, and it's all new to her when she finally visits. What she finds, not surprisingly, is that the family there is just as mixed up, conflicted, quarrelsome, and dysfunctional as the Americans: maybe even more so.

The tone of this novel is half ironic, half satiric, and half bitter (the halves overlap). The food the characters eat reflects these attitudes, which makes the book somewhat different from other Russian immigrant books where food can be an un-ironic pleasure. For example, they go to a seafood restaurant near an unsatisfactory cottage disappointingly not very near to a vacation lake for a meal that later sickens all of them:

"They all intentionally pointed to different items on the menu but got identical cramy shellfish dishes on giant plates too heavy to take part in their habitual plate-swapping ritual so they just threw white globs of mysterious seafood at each other, finding that their dishes didn't only look the same but tasted the same, too." (p. 77)

Stereotypes go both ways: when Frida lands in Odessa for her first return home since early childhood, and is picked up at the airport:

"A bottle of Coca-Cola awaited in the trunk of Volk's burgundy Volvo. It was practically steaming. From a vest pocket, Volk retrieved a stack of Dixie cups. Sveta Russian-dolled [sic] out the cups on the sun-blazed hood of the car, pouring until the brim caught the froth. They toasted in the parking lot. It was a superb parking lot. There was no painted grid delineating individual spaces, and the cars were strewn about as if abandoned by a giant child called to tea. Frida squinted into the distance, gulping her strange drink. It was a syrup made from the fur of an old grizzly, cooked up in a cauldron on the outskirts of town by a lady who mixed cat food into everything she touched ... " (p. 226-227)

I can't say I found this book as amusing or captivating or even as coherent as I've found several other Russian immigrant novels and other books about the most recent wave of new Americans. In fact, it was at times a bit tedious and unfocused and as in the above passage, overwritten. I prefer the work of Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, Anya Von Bremzen, or Boris Fishman to that of Akhtiorskaya.

© 2019 Mae Sander for mae's food blog

“Russian Cuisine in Exile”

"Cuisine is indeed a language, a tongue with the richest possibilities. It's full of epithets and metaphors, hyperbole and litotes, metonymy and synecdoche. It's not for nothing the poet Pushkin earned his place in the memory of generations as the author of the 'Pushkin-style potatoes' recipe, famed in Russian pubs..." (Russian Cuisine in Exile, p. 94)

A philosophy book.

Around thirty years ago, two Russian immigrants to New York published a book in Russian, titled Russian Cuisine in Exile. Through the years the book has been through many editions, published in many countries where Russians lived in exile.

Pyotr Vail and Alexander Genis seemed to be writing a book about food with many many references to the classics of Russian literature, political thought, art, and culture. These references were well-known to Russians, but not surprisingly, they are unfamiliar to even reasonably educated Americans who aren't Russian specialists. It's really a book with a very specific audience with a lot of specific references for the initiated. For example: Do Americans read Pushkin? Do Russian exiles keep reading Pushkin? According to the authors: "The émigré might switch out The Captain's Daughter [by Pushkin] for The Joy of Sex but no hot dog will ever replace a garlic sausage in his heart." (p. 93).

I think Vail and Genis (or V&G as they are called in the book) were really writing a philosophy book. The subject: what it was like to be a highly educated Russian in exile, having gone from extreme scarcity to extreme abundance when it comes to food, but maybe not in other areas of life. Many Russian immigrant writers clearly have read and absorbed V&G's messages. In his book Savage Feast, Boris Fishman's reference to it inspired me to buy it. I am sure Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya Von Bremzen also was influenced by it.

For us, the American reading public, Russian Cuisine in Exile didn't exist until a translation was published last year by several young American students of the Russian language. They created a beautifully designed edition, shown above, with lots of footnotes so that we outsiders can understand what Russian identity, especially their culinary identity, is really about. This book includes lots of images so we can visualize the food that seems to be under discussion. While almost every chapter does offer some sort of a recipe, it's all about much more than food. It's very funny, too, in places. A book with a limited audience has thus become accessible to a larger audience, maybe even including Americanized children of the original consumers of the book. Great work!

Rather than try to explain why this book isn't precisely about food when it's really about nothing but food, I'm going to offer a series of quotations to show you what I mean:

"You can argue about culture, ethnicity, and history until morning, but can there really be any controversy about dried fish?" (p. xi)

"Brewing tea is surprisingly simple. The only thing needed here is precision. Generally speaking, cooking is unlike any other art: diligence is more important than talent." (p. 4)

"Good cooking is a war between order and the amorphous nature of life. When you stand at the stove with a spoon in your hand (a wooden one, of course!), be warned by the thought that you are a soldier in the struggle with world anarchy. The kitchen, in that sense, is the front line." (p. 21)

"Mushrooms -- like some of our acquaintances -- occupy a middle-ground between plants and animals. Scholars still haven't decided if they have a soul." (p. 37)

"Yes, Russia is considered to be a backward, savage country.... But for the love of God, what does this have to do with Russian cuisine? Mao Tsetung was no Jesus Christ either, but does the reputation of Chinese cuisine suffer due to the Cultural Revolution? Did the world turn its back on sausage and Bavarian beer because of the crimes of the Third Reich?" (p. 45)

"If, according to Heraclitus, you never step in the same river twice, then it's even more impossible to make the same borscht twice.... Even a basic fried egg will melt from tenderness if you are making if for your beloved for breakfast. And that very same fried egg will turn into a dry crust if you're cooking it for a relative who's overstayed his welcome." (p. 93)

And a few examples of the very attractive layout of the book:

Of course I have an obligation to include a quote that mentions Mona Lisa:

"Nothing is worse than American bread. The difference between the two superpowers becomes clearest of all in how they relate to this food. we loved it. Wise Soviet political bureaucrats pronounced: 'Bread is the head of it all,' as they bought American grain. Americans were happy to share, because here bread is despised.... 

"The Russian (please note) scientist Timiryazev said that a hunk of good baked bread is the greatest accomplishment of the human intellect. That's what we're talking about. Not the airplane, not the Mona Lisa, but a plain loaf of bread." (p. 105)

Text © 2019 maefood dot blogspot dot com

"Savage Feast" by Boris FIshman

Boris Fishman's latest book, published last February, is Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table (A Memoir with Recipes). It has quite a few themes and characters in common with his autobiographical novel A Replacement Life -- tormented Russian immigrants in New York, fraught family dynamics, Jewish guilt, and mountains of traditional Russian food. (I reviewed it a few years ago -- link.) 

The new book has more food and guilt, fewer Russians, and far less of a plot, though there is some character development of the author (narrator), including a lot of details about his struggle with clinical depression. I enjoyed it but I don't have much to say about it. My favorite food passages in the book are almost stereotyped, but not quite:

"My grandmother didn’t know how to set the table for our guest— would Soviet food seem paltry next to the glories to which this former countrywoman now surely had access in American supermarkets? ... In times of uncertainty among kinspeople, lean on the Jewish regimen. Dill-flecked chicken bouillon with kneidels (matzoh balls, from matzoh baked and delivered by secret couriers at night); a chicken stuffed with macaroni and fried gizzards; the neck skin of several chickens tied together and stuffed with caramelized onion, flour, and dill to make a sausage-like item called helzel. For excess, there was deconstructed, or 'lazy,' stuffed cabbage— everything that would have stewed inside a cabbage leaf shredded and shaped into patties instead— and a chicken rulet: a deboned chicken layered with sautéed garlic, caramelized carrot, and hard-boiled egg, then rolled up and fastened for cooking with needle and thread." (Savage Feast, p. 58). 

There's an intriguing description of a soup I didn't really know about:

He was making ukha (oo-HA)— salmon soup; he had the salmon steak cubed and ready to go. Everyone thinks Russians eat borshch, but borshch is the Ukrainian mother soup. Russians eat it, too, but a Russian’s home soup is ukha. Root vegetables are all good, but without freshwater fish— pike, carp, sturgeon— Russia isn’t Russia. (Literally: Siberia survives on pike. There’s so much pike there, it’s dog food.) I had tried to explain to the lox lovers of the Upper West Side and the cedar-plank salmon eaters of the Northwest just what a thing ukha was, but they heard “boiled salmon” and tuned out. It was my mother soup. On a cold night, a bowl of ukha made things right for five minutes. We ate quickly." (pp. 181-182). 

On a visit to a town in Ukraine with Oksana -- the author's grandfather's home aide who becomes a kind of outsider-family member -- he attends a funeral meal for Oksana's mother:

"I felt a prisoner’s hunger. Oksana had made rabbit in sour cream, ribs with pickled cabbage, a radish salad, pickled watermelon, and a waiting table of cakes and profiteroles 'Ukrainian style.' An empty chair had in front of it a vodka-filled shot glass covered with a piece of black bread— a commemorative spot for Oksana’s mother. The in-laws had arrived from their town with gifts from the village: canned river fish, canned zucchini, tomatoes marinated and brined. Also a five-gallon plastic drum of spring water that I belatedly discovered to contain not spring water but moonshine, and a huge jar of beet juice that had been fermenting for more than a week." (p. 244). 

I particularly enjoyed this description of a Russian restaurant in New York:

"One Sunday night, a friend and I went through three rounds at a neighborhood bar and, gin in my head, I forgot to cross to the right side of Delancey Street when we walked past the restaurant. My friend was a Russian non-Russian like me, and we probably thought the same thing: Whatever affectation we’d find inside would at least share nothing with the studied scruffiness of a Lower East Side cocktail den circa 2015. Also, Russian food soaked up booze really well. 

"It was beautiful inside. Blood-red walls, soft light, decorative chaos: a pressed-tin ceiling, blocks of mirrors, photographs hung up with clothespins. And the menu was both familiar and not: bliny, but also cucumber-and-pomegranate salad; borshch, but also pistachio-and-fenugreek shrimp. The restaurant felt like nothing but itself, an elusive commodity in the city that has everything." (pp. 287-288). 

All in all, Savage Feast is a pretty good book, though not as interesting as some of the other books I have read about the Russian-Jewish immigrant experience in the US. It includes many recipes, though some are a bit repetitive, including a repeat of the exact words explaining why you roast a chicken at high heat and also of how you turn pancakes with your fingers. I have not tried any of the recipes, though they might be ok.

Copyright © 2019 Mae E. Sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com

"The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine"

As the Soviet Socialist Empire disintegrated, large numbers of Jewish refugees fled from their impoverished, discriminatory, and increasingly erratic life there, often taking young and impressive children with them. Now we know that among these children were a large number of gifted writers. These Russian emigrants, as I've noted before, offer us a variety of insights into how they adjusted (or didn't adjust) to their new schools, environments, material possessions, and to the problems of assimilation that their parents faced.

Rosa, the narrator of Alina Bronsky's novel The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is for me one of the least sympathetic characters of this newish literary school (if you can call it that). Bronsky's family left Russia for Germany, unlike most of the other immigrant writers I've read -- who live in New York, mainly. I don't know if this difference has anything to do with the unlikeableness of this character.

In the novel, Rosa's daughter Sulfia, Sulfia's daughter Aminat, her husband (who leaves her and she scarcely cares), and several lovers and other contacts all are seen through her self-absorbed, self-serving, and sometimes cruel eyes, and as a result it's also hard to be very sympathetic to them or to her. At least that's how I reacted. Rosa was raised in an orphanage where she learned Russian and forgot the tartar language, culture, and cooking of her vaguely remembered parents.

Most of the novel takes place in Russia, where food is scarce -- food scarcity is always an issue whenever you hear about life in Soviet times, of course. Rosa had a garden outside the city, and also, in her second bedroom, raised some sort of fungus that could substitute for tea. She stood in line to get oranges and other healthy food for her granddaughter. She used chocolate (sometimes stale) to bribe teachers and others. Sulfia, a nurse in a clinic, had big stashes of chocolate that she apparently received as bribes herself. And Rosa summarized their eating this way:

"We'd all had the same recipes here for a long time: noodles with butter, sausage with boiled potatoes, oatmeal with old marmelade, tea with rock-hard cookies. Those were the only foodstuffs you could get hold of without connections." (p. 138) 

Unlike most of the novels by Russian Jews, most of the characters in this one aren't Jewish at all; however, the second of Sulfia's three husbands is Jewish and Rosa tries to cook Jewish food for his family (he's a mama's boy).

"I decided to make gefilte fish and vorschmack, and for dessert tzimmes. I'd be making all of these things for the first time in my life, which excited me. The vorschmack turned out to be the same as an appetizer I'd made every New Year's Eve for years. I put chunks of brined herring, moistened white bread, onion, and a large apple through a meat grinder and grated hard-boiled egg yolks with vinegar. The gefilte fish turned out to be a sort of cold fishcake that took hours of my time only to taste like nothing at all. I didn't think the effort was worth it." (p. 100)

Finally Sofia's third husband, a German visitor, took the family to Germany. His profession: food writer! He's writing about Tartar cuisine, but despite her efforts, Rosa has nothing to contribute to him -- her family recipes were all forgotten, though she tries to convince him that she has secret expert knowledge. After he dies she reads through his draft of a book on Tartar cuisine and learns about her own heritage, which she had lost in the orphanage. In his notes she reads

"Pechleve -- a layered dessert... Kystybyi, also called kuzimak, is a sort of pierogi made of unleavened dough... Katyk denotes curdled milk that the Tartars heat for a long time in a clay pot. It is sometimes finished with the addition of cherries or red beets... For the filling of gubadia, a baked layered pie made for festive occasions, they sometimes use qurut, a uniquely processed dried yoghurt." (p. 246)

And finally, Rosa found in his notes: "It is proving practically impossible to write a cookbook about Tartar cuisine." (p. 247) I felt as if she should have channeled Vonnegut: "And so it goes."

One of many year-end articles in Forward was "The Year of the Former Soviet Author," which briefly mentioned Alina Bronsky along with a list of other Russian emigrant writers. Several of these I've already read like Gary Shteyngart, Lara Vapnyar, Anya Ulinich, Boris Fishman. I think I'm hooked, as I added several other authors and more books by the ones I've read before to my list, including Bronsky (whom I don't really regret reading) and Olga Grjasnowa.

“What Happened to Anna K.” (with spoilers)

What nerve would it take to repurpose Anna Karenina into a 21^st century novel?!

What Happened to Anna K. is a novel that just exactly does that. Author Irina Reyn takes advantage of the extremely traditional and constricted ways of the Bukharian-Jewish-Russian immigrant community in Rego Park, Queens, as a setting for her parallel to Tolstoy’s novel. I think she pulled it off, and I admire her accomplishment.

For Reyn’s Anna: “Bukharians remained exotic ... even if her own mother had been an exiled Bukharian in Moscow, so happily Sovietized that she had no desire to return to Uzbekistan.” Anna’s cousin Katia, in contrast, has a father (Anna’s uncle) who’s also Sovietized, but her mother married him directly from her home in Samarkand.

When they all get to New York, the two families join a community whose values are a perfect setting for Reyn’s nineteenth century novel that takes place in the present. Anna wonders how her fellow-immigrants could be “so pious, so earnest, especially compared with Russians whose post-Soviet cynicism drowned out religions, politics, nations.” But they are. (p. 39)

Anna is a complex character with ambitions and a great need to get out of Rego Park, out of Queens. At the beginning of the novel, she’s 37 years old and has had a job and an apartment on her own in Manhattan for ages, after having graduated from one of the NY public colleges. At the desperate urging of her parents, she finally agrees to marry a rich Russian without much in common with her. Her husband offers oodles of possessions and elegant clothing, dinners at expensive restaurants, and all the trappings of new wealth. She has a little boy named Serge, not Sergei like Tolstoy’s Anna’s son. Serge is named for Serge Gainsbourg, because Anna K. is a fan of French culture and film. But all in all, Anna is NOT HAPPY!

Cousin Katia, many years younger than Anna, is a simple character, a conformist who almost fails all her classes at college. She’s just not that bright. Her reputation has been ruined among the Bukharians by some mean boys, and so she dates an older totally American Jewish writing instructor (only an adjunct) – against all the norms of family etc.

Just on the occasion when Katia believes that her boyfriend will propose marriage, hoping her family will accept her terrible departure from their norms and expectations, Anna swoops in, steals the boyfriend’s affection, and moves in with him, abandoning her husband and child. Just like Tolstoy’s heroine, Anna accepts being an outcast from her community. Of course they live in his tiny Manhattan apartment, not in a palace like Tolstoy’s Anna, but the disapproval and isolation she experiences is just as severe.

Katia, meanwhile, accepts the next Bukharian to come along, a nice dull guy who has had a crush on her since high school, who works in a pharmacy, and who satisfied community requirements except that of course rich is better than lower middle class. Her life is rather simple: as her parents wished. Katia’s husband’s only saving feature is that he’s even more obsessed with French films than Anna. Little Katia has no understanding of his interest. The lives of Katia, her husband, and Anna continue to intertwine as the novel progresses. I’m sure you can guess what finally did happen to Anna K.

Food plays a creative role in this novel, as it did in the other Russian-Jewish-New York-immigrant books I’ve recently reviewed (here, here, here). It only took until page 29 to get to “plates of Salat Olivier, vinaigrette, herring, and smoked fish” – in this case served at a fancy French restaurant called Fabergé, beloved by the Russians. The French part? “Bottles of Merlot on the table, the hors d’oeuvres (rather than zakuski) that peppered the lazy Susan, the coq au vin (easily mistaken for roasted kuritza) glistening as the centerpiece.” And on p. 231, almost at the end of the book, Americanization takes the form of “Okra in Baklazhanovaia ikra? Shrimp in Salat Olivier? Chocolate chips in rugelach? Why not?”

I don’t even know all the referenced Russian dishes, but I like the way that Reyn connects foods with multiple cultural experiences – there’s lots more of this. Particularly I liked the way that in a writing class Anna once took, her peer-critics loved her “memory piece” -- but “More ethnic details, the class sighed, more food, more indigenous scenes.” (p. 25) The instructor is an amusing caricature of a not-so-successful writer who teaches others what he isn’t so good at himself. Also, he’s a precursor of David, the writing instructor who is Anna’s downfall. And, we see, according to received wisdom, ethnic-based writing must include food!

Just this week, I’ve read two reviews of yet another book from the Russian-Jewish-immigrant community -- what the New York Times review by John Williams calls “Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s brilliant and often funny first novel, ‘Panic in a Suitcase.’” Will I read it? I don’t know. Maybe I’ve had enough of this genre!

"Little Failure" by Gary Shteyngart

">Look. Hear. Taste. Smell. Feel." So reads the status line in computer games composed by a pre-adolescent Gary Shteyngart and his best friend. It could be the motto of his memoir, Little Failure. His life is a sensory experience, colorful, buzzing, savory, aromatic. (p. 204)

Shteyngart's memoir describes food constantly. Even in comparison to the other Russian food books I've written up recently, it's amazingly full of observations about what he ate in Russia, in New York, and during his transition on the way. Anecdotes about food -- often very funny-- offer effective support for his presentation of a difficult childhood and complicated later life. Although he was only around 6 years old when he and his parents arrived in New York, his childhood memories are very detailed.

Characterizing his current life as a writer in New York at the beginning of the book, he mentions how he courted "gastric disaster by eating two portions of Wall Street vindaloo." Working on his first novel he had "learned the Irish pleasures of matching gin martinis with steamed corned beef and slaw at the neighborhood dive." (p. 4-5)

About his early life in Russia, he says "The hunger is strong in me. And it is strong for meats. 'Doctor's kolbasa,' a soft Russian mortadella substitute; then, as my teeth grow in complexity, vetchina, or Russian ham, and buzhenina, dangerously chewy cold baked pork, a taste of which will linger on the tongue for hours." He loves sweetened condensed milk: "'Milk, whole, condensed, with sugar' might be the first five words I try to read in Russian." (p. 23)

His memories zigzag back and forth from his present and recent past in New York to his childhood in Russia and his school days in New York. Various events trigger the memories -- a family Thanksgiving dinner, for instance, with "a garlicky, wet turkey... and a dessert made out of a dozen matzhos, a gallon of cream and amaretto liqueur, and a tub of raspberries." (p. 27)

Hunger stalked his past, both his own and that of his grandparents and great-grandparents, who lived in the shtetls of Belarus and Ukraine. In the Ukranian town of Chemirovers, he mentions, "my father's paternal grandfather was killed for no good reason in the 1920s. My father's grandmother was left to fend for herself and a family of five children. There was not enough to eat." (p. 33)  He describes what his mother, his grandmother, and his father fed him as a child -- and how their background included incredible hard times during wars, persecutions of Jews, shortages of food and other goods, and outright famines, even as they migrated to Leningrad, the big city.

He hints at the level of antisemitism his family experienced up until their departure in the late 1970s, as well as at ordinary problems with living in the Soviet Union. Just before they left, his mother was buying ham, and complained more uninhibitedly than usual about being given only fat. The clerk, stereotyping her, says "When you move to Israel they'll slice the ham for you without fat." His mother, in her first "brave and truthful words ... in thirty years of careful Soviet life," answers "Yes... but all you will ever have is the fat." Irony all around, notes Shteyngart. (p. 47)

New York, in contrast offers the adult Shteyngart a meal at "the View, the revolving restaurant of  the Marriott Marquis in Times Square" where he and his parents celebrate his mother's birthday with "something truffled." While eating, his father tells Shteyngart how Russian bloggers dislike his first published novel, insulting him and pretending to be joking. (p. 39)

Shteyngart doesn't spare us the standard memories of terrible-quality Soviet food; for instance, cheese. He includes the standard mention of endless lines: "before yoga," he says, "waiting in line for an eggplant for three hours could constitute a meditative experience." (p. 70) But his memoir isn't just another standard retelling of the immigrant's experience -- I only mention the originality and how I enjoyed it, I'm not going to try to reproduce it. As he describes his childhood and family background, he makes one understand how he became a ferocious patriot of Soviet Russia, and how these feelings had to be overcome as he understood their history and their new reality.

A humorous and remarkably original area is his description of the family's experiences adapting to Western food. Despite the frequency with which I've heard how others did this (both in writing and from acquaintances) I enjoyed the details he chose, such as the Knorr mushroom soup packet they prepare and eat in Rome, first long stop on their journey west and his father's comparison to real Leningrad forest mushrooms in soup with sour cream... "Already the nostalgia." (p. 85) 

After a bit of assimilation into Orthodox Jewish New York, he enjoys his father's tale called "Planet of the Yids" where a "Hebraic corner of the Andromeda Galaxy [is] constantly besieged by gentile spacemen who attack it with space torpedoes filled with highly unkosher but oh-so-delicious Russian salo, which is salted raw pork fat, lard, a lumpy cousin of the French suet." (p. 142)

When Shteyngart describes his high school and college years in the second half of the book, there's more about his quests for sex and friendship and about drugs and alcohol than about food. I haven't finished the book: I expect to finish on a plane tonight. So I thought I would write about only what's done. I'm really looking forward to the rest, and will update here if there's something unexpected in the rest of the book -- I don't think I've seen a reference yet to Salad Olivier.

"A Replacement Life" by Boris Fishman

"Berta conveyed her condolences the only way that she could. Two foldout tables in Grandfather's living room heaved with plates rimmed in gold filigree: duck with prunes; pickled watermelon, potato pancakes with dill, garlic, and farmer cheese. A dropped fork or a glass emptied of Berta's trademark cranberry water sent her bulleting into the kitchen with startling litheness."

Mourners ate well in Boris Fishman's book A Replacement Life. Slava, the main character, in response to seeing this table, thinks back to other meals at one of the same tables, prepared by other helpers than Berta, "uniformly ambrosial, as if they all attended the same Soviet Culinary School No. 1."

He thinks of "Stewed eggplant; chicken steaks in egg batter; marinated peppers with buckwheat honey; herring under potatoes, beets, carrots, and mayonnaise; bow-tie pasta with kasha, caramelized onions, and garlic; ponchiki with mixed-fruit preserves; pickled cabbage; pickled eggplant; meat in aspic; beet salad with garlic and mayonnaise; kidney beans with walnuts; kharcho and solyanka; fried cauliflower; whitefish under stewed carrots; salmon soup; kidney beans with the walnuts swapped out for caramelized onions; sour cabbage with beef; pea soup with corn, vermicelli and fried onions." (Kindle locations 318-331)

Feasts of Russian foods were served in the homes of immigrants who had fled from Soviet collective life to freedom in New York, or so it might seem. The Brooklyn where they lived "was as ugly as the rows of apartment blocks they had left behind in the Soviet Union. Perhaps that was why they lived here." (loc. 4665)

The other day, I mentioned how Soviet food plays such a large role in numerous recent books by Russian-Jewish-American authors. Obviously, A Replacement Life is no different. Eventually Fishman gets to everyone's favorite Soviet dish, salad Olivier: "Galochka, who was setting a plate of herring in oil on a lacy tablecloth, looked up. The girls were working with daunting facility. One was setting the table with gold-rimmed plates, another following with filigreed thimbles, and a third unloding powls of salad Olivier and boiled potatoes." (loc. 2376)

Along with the food lots of vodka and other strong drink flow, as the events of the story proceed. Food is only one reflection of the attitudes expressed by Slava's relatives and their extended circle of relations and lifelong friends and friendly enemies, old rivals, and arms-length loved ones. Slava gets into the middle of their complex nets. At the beginning of the story, he's temporarily escaped them, but the death of his grandmother and the mourning rituals (including the food in the first quote) bring him back.

Though he has a mainstream job and a 100% American girlfriend, the novel begins when Slava is suddenly enveloped in everything about them, particularly in the stories of their past. Just as his grandmother dies, the older members of this Jewish immigrant circle have all found out that they might be eligible for reparations money from Germany -- if they can prove that they suffered in certain ways during World War II. Slava is enlisted to tell their stories and to embellish or even outright invent them if that's what it takes. Everyone suffered, but they weren't necessarily in a Concentration Camp, didn't necessarily fit the stringent criteria required to qualify for the money.

Slava tries to help them create narratives that will be convincing and fit the criteria -- not necessarily honestly. What really happens as he works with them is that after years of silence, a large number of stories are suddenly brought out of hiding -- especially the stories of Slava's grandmother that she never told while living.

As Slava does his research, also looking up information in the library, he becomes aware of much that had been suppressed, as well as dealing with his conscience about the dishonesty in what he's doing. The result is a very penetrating treatment of the history of Soviet Jews in World War II. Perhaps Fishman's readers are familiar with the stories of Jewish city or village dwellers who tried to join the Russian or Belarusian or Polish partisans against the Nazis, but were often rejected or betrayed by the Christian partisans. Perhaps these stories are news to them. (I heard a number of lectures on this subject a couple of years ago, and was fascinated by what Fishman created out of various historical elements.)

It's a very interesting tale, with lots of vivid characters and lots of connections between modern life and history. You could look at it as a study of memories and personal history and how grandchildren find or might find out about their seemingly ordinary grandparents. Or as a story about what's true and what's made up. I'm not going to belabor any of this. It's a readable and enjoyable book -- and by the way, it's very funny.

The New Magic Barrel

Russian-Jewish immigrants are writing some really fascinating books these days! Here's a new one, published this week: Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel by Anya Ulinich. Since I preordered it, I was able to read it yesterday. I'm not really accustomed to reading graphic novels, so I probably read too fast -- but I completely enjoyed the story of Lena Finkle's efforts to find love in a baffling world, and the visual nature of the presentation.

Almost every book by Russian-Jewish immigrants that I've read has a lot of food themes. Anya von Bremzen's Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking and Lara Vapnyar's Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love focus almost entirely on food in various contexts.

Here's one fun thing about Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel: the author doesn't get all nostalgic about Russian foods. The title character/narrator and her lover  -- a not-Jewish man from a wealthy American family who hates money -- go out for very cheap Chinese dumplings. They eat burritos and pizza, also very cheap. But no Salad Olivier! No cabbage in any form! No Soviet food!

I'm impressed that Ulinich's character  is so assimilated in so many aspects of her life -- but still focused as well on her childhood in Russia. I enjoyed everything about her love stories and about her relationships with her two husbands, her Russian lover from her childhood (who keeps showing up again), her rich American lover, her less successful OKCupid dates, and her all-too-Russian mother and all-too-American daughters. I appreciated her references to classic Russian and other literature, including obviously to Bernard Malamud's Magic Barrel. The foods are a detail, but they reinforce the theme of how thoroughly American her life has become.

I want to follow up with more Russian-immigrant fiction. Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan and some of his New Yorker stories were great, and I want to read his more recent books. A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman also tempts me.

Cuisine without Food: Addendum

Book of Tasty and Healthy Food by Anastas Mikoyan, translation pub. 2012

Anya Von Bremzen, in her memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (see my post from yesterday) described the Soviet cookbook for good communist homemakers, first published in 1939. Its attributed author, Anastas Mikoyan, was commissar of food of the USSR. Of course the book's directives about how much to eat, what foods were healthy, and how to serve the food (and beverages like vodka, wine, juice which belonged at every meal) were examples of the myth making and wishful thinking of Soviet officials. Von Bremzen also explains  how new editions constantly had to be produced in order to remove references to disgraced and disappeared leaders like Stalin.

I was amused to find that this book was translated into English recently -- see Book of Tasty and Healthy Food.

Soviet peas from Book of Tasty and Healthy Food

Cuisine without Food

I read the Kindle edition,
so I never actually
saw this dust jacket.

In Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing, Anya Von Bremzen compresses the last 100 years of Russian history into a few representative meals. Tales of eating are punctuated by descriptions of several eras of scarcity and outright famines.

Unlike childhood memories in the majority of food memoirs, the most vivid memories of this book were not of tastes that the writer experienced, but rather of dishes from literature and news reports that she and her family only imagined. If their pizza was a miserable piece of bread “smothered in ketchup and gratings of Sovetsky cheese” they imagined the original from their contraband copy of Family Circle. (p. 134)

One huge irony of life for all the decades of Soviet history was how the communist leaders were eating incredible luxury food while the poor starved. The disasters of harvests ruined by foolish policies and the war years were the extremes, but there are many other examples. Soviet candy, for example, came in two identically packaged versions made by the Red October Chocolate Factory. Candy that you bought (sometimes, if you waited in line) in ordinary stores was vastly inferior to the same brands sold in stores for communist nomenklatura. (p. 172)

Even the title "Mastering the Art..." of something that wasn't much of an art, but mainly the act of a desperate person, is ironic, riffing on the Julia Child title.

Thinking of my own madeleines from
Costco: not Anya's poisoned madeleines,
not the cliche of  many other writers,
and also not quite like in France.

Cliches from food memoirs here take on new twists, made ironic by hunger and longing. Proust’s madeleine memory has been used so often that many writers' references to it hardly use the actual source. Von Bremzen doesn’t bother too much with the original – she calls her own preface “Poisoned Madeleines.” She uses this term to capture the “epic disjunction” and “unruly collision of collectivist myths and antimyths” of her Soviet childhood (from birth in 1963 to emigration in 1974) and the life of her mother who was born in 1934. Through irony the author consistently dodges any sort of self-pity or whining.

She also refers specifically to rather formula-driven Russian emigre memoirs: "My First Supermarket Experience was the anchoring narrative of the great Soviet epic of immigration to America. Some escapees from our socialist defitsit society actually swooned to the floor (usually in the aisle with toilet paper)." The author relates various amusing first-supermarket experiences of the Russians she knew, wrapping up. "Mom ... roamed Pathmark's acres with childlike glee. 'She-ree-ohs ... Ri-seh-rohnee ... Vel. Vee. Tah ... " She murmured these alien names as if they had been concocted by Proust, lovingly prodding and handling all the foodstuffs in their bright packaging, their promiscuous throwaway tara [i.e. packaging and receptacles, of which there had been a shortage in Russia]."(p. 199)

Her discussions of Soviet-era "Provansal" style mayonnaise and the jars (tara) that it came in are priceless: "If, as Dostoyevsky supposedly said, all Russian literature comes out of Gogol's story 'The Overcoat,' then what Gogol's garment was to nineteenth-century Russian culture, the Provansal mayonnaise jar was to the domestic practices of Mature Socialism." (p. 183)

Of course she also discusses that other cliche of Soviet mayonnaise memories: Salad Oliver, which can never be understood in America because it features not only mayo but also canned peas. "A precious heirloom of our non-idyllic socialist pasts, the Olivier recipe gets pulled out from the memory drawer to commemorate a particular moment in life." (p. 176)

 

A still life by Casimir Malevich: Von Bremzen names
him as one of the cultural contributors to Soviet Russian
life in the 1920s.
The author's cultural and social descriptions
add to the liveliness of the book.

Von Bremzen uses her own memories of food and events as well as her mother’s memories and political opinions along with impressive historical detail characterizing each decade of the past century starting in 1910. She uses the experiences of her relatives, such as her grandfather who was a spy during World War II and her father whose job for many years was as a member of a huge lab responsible for constantly restoring or re-embalming the corpse of Lenin.

Because her mother's family were Jewish and her father's family not, the book encompasses both Jewish and non-Jewish Russian experiences -- including some of course ironic (of course) remarks about gefilte fish. In this respect I can also relate the stories to those of several Russian emigre families I have known.

I learned an amazing amount of history from reading this book. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that this book made somewhat familiar history come alive for me, by linking to the many personal stories of Anya Von Bremzen's family, her conflicted feeling about Soviet heros like Stalin and Lenin, and her adventures in returning to the disintegrating Soviet Union and its successors several times in the 80s, 90s, and 00s.

Von Bremzen has had a long career writing cookbooks, magazine articles, and
published recipes, such as this one from Food and Wine. 
Her first cookbook, an enormous tome titled Please to the Table, appeared around 20 years ago.

I must read this!

In today's New York Times Food Section I read a review of several books by Lara Vapnyar, a Russian immigrant to New York whose fiction is centered around food. [UPDATE: I ordered the book right away, read and enjoyed it. The photo shows it with some broccoli I cooked in its honor!]

I love books that work this way: using food to illuminate the characteristics of life here and there, like Stealing Buddha's Dinner and others. This one reminds me of what I learned from my friend Natasha, originally from Russia -- now Israeli, from interviewing some Russian immigrants to Ann Arbor, and from my sister's friend Luda.

Here is the reviewer's summary of a couple of the stories and their food themes: "A young woman, trapped in Brighton Beach by her immigrant parents’ expectations, finds her place at the family table by sitting down with a knife to make Salad Olivier. It is the Russian party dish par excellence: a mound of hard-boiled eggs, canned peas, pickles, potatoes and meat, diced and bound with a tangy mayonnaise. For particularly swanky occasions, the salad is covered with aspic." Yes, Natasha made us a salad like this.

I had already read another Times excerpt from Vapnyar's work: Pot Luck - Food - Eat, Memory. It included sentences like these: "Asparagus was another mystery. I didn’t know it as a child, but once I started reading adult novels set in 19th-century Russia or 20th-century Europe and America, asparagus seemed to be the primary food a literary character would eat. I would read the asparagus pages over and over, trying to conjure a picture of it. The descriptions were maddeningly incomplete. The author would go on and on with his boring psychological insights, mentioning asparagus only in passing. Nobody I knew had ever seen asparagus. I couldn’t even find it in the huge Household Encyclopedia that had pictures of various fruits and vegetables I had never tasted, like mango or kohlrabi. I constructed an image of asparagus from bits of novelistic description. To me, it was green, expensive and exquisite, and it had a stem and a head, with the head being the juiciest part."

Also, the Times book section offers readers the first chapter of her book Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love. Now I'm even more eager to read the stories of this author.