In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

157 7 Napoleon at San Marino The summer when we first came to the West from the Soviet Union, we were poor and thirsty to see the world. And we were not living according to our means. In Ladispoli my parents and I were renting a perfectly middle-class apartment with a view of the sea while entire refugee families shared tiny airless rooms that opened onto dusty courtyards. And we weren’t saving a penny when many others, our own relatives included, economized. What could they have saved up in two or three months of living in Italy like misers? A thousand dollars, two thousand—perhaps a down-payment on their first American car? A beat-up Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra instead of their own daily Tyrrhenian Sea rising and falling outside the windows? It was impossible to be living in Ladispoli, where even a suntan had a shade of refugee anxiety, without being reminded of how little had survived of the tangibles of our Russian past. And conversations like the one my father and I had with the Roubenis on the terrace of their rented villa didn’t help either, unearthing some of my father’s old fears about living in America. By the very end of July we had finally made up our minds about moving to Providence, where we had Jewish-Russian friends who had emigrated in the 1970s, before the Soviet exit doors slammed shut. The knowledge that with the assistance of our friends the Rhode Island Jewish community was making arrangements to welcome us, that an apartment was being rented for us on the first floor of a frame house on a quiet residential street, that we now had a bit more than the vaguest idea of the whereabouts of our American future—all of this calmed us down. I should rather say it calmed us down only for two or three days, until my mother announced that her sister, niece, 158 Baggage and my grandmother were all coming with us to Rhode Island. Once before, when we had received permission to emigrate, my mother had put her foot down and told a KGB officer she wasn’t leaving without her sister and her family; this time she said it to father and me. If the KGB officer had acquiesced, how could we not? “But tell them to get rid of the trunk,” my father said. “I’m not touching it again. Lord knows what will be in it this time.” Mother called father a heartless egoist and me an ungrateful grandson and nephew, but accepted the condition—as little family baggage as possible. The Jewish community of Rhode Island had agreed to embrace three more refugees from Soviet captivity (“Did you have running water in Russia?” a Jewish social worker in Providence later asked my mother). In the spirit of family harmony all six of us—my parents and I, my grandmother, my mother’s younger sister, and my elevenyear -old cousin—signed up for a bus trip. The bus was to leave Ladispoli early in the morning and take us to Florence, where we would spend most of the day. We were to stay the morning of the second day in San Marino and by the evening arrive in Venice, where we would spend the night and part of the third day, returning to Ladispoli late in the evening. “In some ways, rogues of different nations resemble one another,” said the Russian émigré painter and poet Semyon Krikun. The name of the person who operated the refugee bus excursions out of Ladispoli was Aleksey Nitochkin. An ethnic Russian, in the 1970s he had emigrated from Leningrad with a Jewish wife. They went to New York by way of Vienna and Rome, just as we did. In New York, as Nitochkin claimed, he earned a Ph.D. at Columbia, writing a thesis on Eastern patristics. He told the refugees he did it all “on his own,” a “man from the street,” a “guy from the asphalt,” as he liked to put it, and the refugees both believed him and didn’t. Nitochkin said he was a professor of theology for six years at a college somewhere in upstate New York, but academic politics didn’t agree with him—academic politics and jealous colleagues. So after not getting tenure he divorced his first wife, married an Italian woman he’d met in graduate school, and moved with her to Rome in search of new freedom...

Share