Girls say, ‘No! Is so cute.’ But I slice, slice.” He makes a slicing motion across the imaginary animal’s throat. I lean into my wife, for support, althoughshe is too strong to need it. “Then there is too much cat in village. So I take kitten and I drown. Drown, drown.” The dunking motions are articulated. “And then, of course, chicken comes and—”
Before the hen’s neck can be wrung, my wife and I look at each other with understanding. He is trying to assert himself. And to scare her. But beneath the blood of the martyred animals—for no good reason, I remember the Hebrew term for sacrifice,
korban—
lies a more prosaic truth. I am married now and even further apart from him. Someone else has come between us.
The Sheep Killer wants his son back.
“My first memory of when I was eight is that when I heard classical music, especially violin, I would cry sometimes,” my father says. “I would hide under the table and listen to the music and feel sad and cry. This is when I started to think about my father. I didn’t have memories because I didn’t really know him, but the sadness of not knowing him was tied in with the music. There was something about my father that I couldn’t remember. I started to buy records in a neighboring village, not a big assortment, but my first record was Caruso when he was singing his final aria from
Tosca
.” With a furrowed brow, with all the sadness and empathy he can muster, my father begins to sing in Russian:
“Moi chas nastal … I vot ya umirayu!”
The hour is gone … And I, desperately, die!
There is a photograph of my father at fourteen or fifteen, dressed in a full tsarist general’s uniform and wig, his eyes ablaze with the peaceful sadness I don’t think I have ever found outside of a handful of Russian novels or after a volley of strong cocktails. He has been cast as Gremin in the school production of Tchaikovsky’s
Eugene Onegin
. It is a difficult part for a young bass, but my father is known around his small village as Paul Robeson, after the African American singer barnstorming across the Soviet Union with his “Ol’ Man River.” “In my school I was a celebrity,” my father says. “Almost like you now.”
In an alternate universe, Russia is a kind and sympathetic democracy,my father is the famous opera singer he wished to become, and I am his adoring son.
Back at the modest three-story colonial in Little Neck, Queens, the Thanksgiving dinner is winding down. I think of something my father had told me when I interviewed him last. He was speaking of the war, of being a tiny kid who had just lost both his father and his best friend, Lionya. “I fed a dog somewhere,” he said. “You shouldn’t write that because people were dying in Leningrad, but I remember how I fed a dog with a butter sandwich my mother had given me, which I guess means I wasn’t starving.”
“Papa,” I say, “why don’t you want me to write that story?” Around the table, the family smiles and gives collective encouragement. It’s a fine story.
“I was ashamed because people were starving and I had a sandwich,” my father says. “But, yes, I guess you may put that in.”
My father sits at the head of a table before the carcass of an enormous American turkey. What he is ashamed of is the one act of decency I have yet encountered in all the tales of our family’s past. A young boy with a dead father and a dead friend bends down before a country dog and feeds it his butter sandwich.
And I know that sandwich. Because he has made it for me. Two slices of that dark, unbleached Russian bread, the kind that tastes of badly managed soil and a peasant’s indifference to death. On top of it, the creamiest, deadliest of American butter, slathered in thick feta-like hunks. And on top of that cloves of garlic, the garlic that is to give me strength, that is to clear my lungs of asthmatic gunk, and make of me a real garlic-eating strong man. At a table in
Before the hen’s neck can be wrung, my wife and I look at each other with understanding. He is trying to assert himself. And to scare her. But beneath the blood of the martyred animals—for no good reason, I remember the Hebrew term for sacrifice,
korban—
lies a more prosaic truth. I am married now and even further apart from him. Someone else has come between us.
The Sheep Killer wants his son back.
“My first memory of when I was eight is that when I heard classical music, especially violin, I would cry sometimes,” my father says. “I would hide under the table and listen to the music and feel sad and cry. This is when I started to think about my father. I didn’t have memories because I didn’t really know him, but the sadness of not knowing him was tied in with the music. There was something about my father that I couldn’t remember. I started to buy records in a neighboring village, not a big assortment, but my first record was Caruso when he was singing his final aria from
Tosca
.” With a furrowed brow, with all the sadness and empathy he can muster, my father begins to sing in Russian:
“Moi chas nastal … I vot ya umirayu!”
The hour is gone … And I, desperately, die!
There is a photograph of my father at fourteen or fifteen, dressed in a full tsarist general’s uniform and wig, his eyes ablaze with the peaceful sadness I don’t think I have ever found outside of a handful of Russian novels or after a volley of strong cocktails. He has been cast as Gremin in the school production of Tchaikovsky’s
Eugene Onegin
. It is a difficult part for a young bass, but my father is known around his small village as Paul Robeson, after the African American singer barnstorming across the Soviet Union with his “Ol’ Man River.” “In my school I was a celebrity,” my father says. “Almost like you now.”
In an alternate universe, Russia is a kind and sympathetic democracy,my father is the famous opera singer he wished to become, and I am his adoring son.
Back at the modest three-story colonial in Little Neck, Queens, the Thanksgiving dinner is winding down. I think of something my father had told me when I interviewed him last. He was speaking of the war, of being a tiny kid who had just lost both his father and his best friend, Lionya. “I fed a dog somewhere,” he said. “You shouldn’t write that because people were dying in Leningrad, but I remember how I fed a dog with a butter sandwich my mother had given me, which I guess means I wasn’t starving.”
“Papa,” I say, “why don’t you want me to write that story?” Around the table, the family smiles and gives collective encouragement. It’s a fine story.
“I was ashamed because people were starving and I had a sandwich,” my father says. “But, yes, I guess you may put that in.”
My father sits at the head of a table before the carcass of an enormous American turkey. What he is ashamed of is the one act of decency I have yet encountered in all the tales of our family’s past. A young boy with a dead father and a dead friend bends down before a country dog and feeds it his butter sandwich.
And I know that sandwich. Because he has made it for me. Two slices of that dark, unbleached Russian bread, the kind that tastes of badly managed soil and a peasant’s indifference to death. On top of it, the creamiest, deadliest of American butter, slathered in thick feta-like hunks. And on top of that cloves of garlic, the garlic that is to give me strength, that is to clear my lungs of asthmatic gunk, and make of me a real garlic-eating strong man. At a table in
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