Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story

1. Of Goat Milk and Marble Lions

3 1 Of Goat Milk and Marble Lions Somet ime in t he middl e 2000s I had a double dream, in which my father taught me poetry and fishing. Although the dream was about my Russian childhood, it was spoken in English. I was in our house in Chestnut Hill, where Karen and I lived from 2001 to 2011. It was in the spring, and definitely before Karen’s first pregnancy and the birth of Mira. In the dream I’m eight, a second grader, and my father and I are sitting in his den at a coffee table that looks like a World War I airplane. Pencils and a stack of paper are in front of us. My father shows me the basic classical meters, improvising various lines effortlessly, like a conjurer, creating seamless verse out of the mundane objects that surround us in the room and outside the windows: trolleybus, hospital, potholes, starlings on power lines. I like the four-foot iamb better, it feels like clay under my fingers, its verses want to be caressed. “Try a trochee,” says my father, and it sounds like “try a truffle,” try the chocolate of verses and you shall forever crave it, crave its taste upon your lips. Then I try a line of trochee, and it tastes like pure honey, pure nectar of delight. “Now add the rhymes, my dear,” says my father loud and clear, “rhymes are signatures of style. But remember, son, you never should let your rhymes appear too clever, or decay, or go stale.” Then he leaves me in his office and I scribble down an opus, “Going Fishing with My Dad.” I can hear he is making Turkish coffee in the kitchen and conversing with my mother. “Ready?” asks my father sternly. “Ready,” I reply and tremble, for I know he is fair. Then the colors grow dimmer, Moscow winter melts away. We’re now in Estonia, we’re fishing on a river that on approach from the highway glistens like a wet grass snake and then vanishes without a 4 | The En d of Chil dh o od trace, tucked away deep inside the valley. This is our river, and for years my father and I would drive here for the day from the coastal resort of Pärnu where my parents and I stayed for a month, sometimes two, in the summer. The steep high bank of the river, where we leave our car, is freshly mowed. Hayricks stand like sentries of our peace. We always catch fish in our river. And we’re always the only ones around, just the two of us and the symmetrical hayricks reflected in the river’s surface. We already have a pail full of standard European freshwater fare: bream, tench, roach, crucian. I rotate the pail, examining our catch, and I think of the evening, of how my mother would coat the fish in flour and pan-fry it in sunflower oil. Then a brief rainstorm interrupts our fishing, and we leave the rods and find shelter under a nearby hayrick. It’s not simply a rick but a makeshift mowers’ cabin. Inside, the fermenting air smells of our nearing return to Moscow, of the end of summer, of the brevity of miracle . The rainstorm passes and we crawl out of the rick, find our wet rods, hook on fresh worms, and cast our lines. Then my father lets out a victory sound and pulls out a golden fish bigger than any we’ve ever caught. The fish isn’t a carp. It’s a fish of some unknown or rare species, with perfectly chiseled scales which glitter in the afternoon sun like my mother’s wedding ring, like onion domes, like hundreds of thousands of gold teeth that were ripped from the mouths of murdered Jews. The golden fish has gray, unblinking, plaintive eyes framed by round tortoise-shell glasses. The bridge of his refined nose has a bump. My father unhooks the fish and holds him on the palm of his open hand, and the fish’s thin bloodless lips start chewing on some words in a throaty language. Father’s left hand trembles, and he drops the fishing pole from his right hand and cups it to support the fish that rests in his left hand. “We must let him go, son,” says my father. “He’s the last one of them. The survivor.” I was born on 5 June 1967...