Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration

Interlude Literature is Love

178 interlude Literature is Love Soon after arriving in Ladispoli, we discovered a Russian lending library at the local Jewish refugee center, which wasn’t really a refugee center but a suite of catacombic rooms outfitted with two or three file cabinets, a fax machine, and a copier. Two Iranian Jews in aviator sunglasses took over the rooms and used them in the manner of a private office. Nobody knew what their business was; nobody asked questions. A slothful JIAS official from Rome visited once a week to sit in his cubicle and smoke; sometimes a lady friend on killer stiletto heels accompanied him. The refugees received their cash allowances at the local bank. Instead of serving as office clerks and cordial librarians , our Jewish-Iranian brothers (who, as it later turned out, were indeed brothers) discouraged us from coming in, and it was rumored that one of them once called a Jewish woman from the Belarusian town of Gomel “an unclean whore,” except how could she (a) hear it when muttered under the Iranian’s breath; and (b) understand it when spoken in Farsi. But the anti-Iranian resentment grew among the Soviet refugees. The lending library wasn’t even a room but actually five bookcases. The JIAS must have purchased a book collection from some émigré widow in New York and shipped it to Ladispoli without even bothering to check the titles. Why else would there have been, alongside stories and novels by émigré classics Bunin and Aldanov, a reprint of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, issued in Paris in the 1920s? It was a predictably random assortment of books and incomplete runs of the New York–based magazines The New Review (Novyi zhurnal) and Aerial Ways (Vozdushnye puti). Besides fiction, nonfiction, and some poetry, there were also various books of the sort the émigrés of the post-1917 “First Interlude: Literature is Love 179 Wave” continued to reissue in the places of their dispersion. Among them was a copy of The New Complete Dream Reader. Daniil Vrezinsky, the playwright’s son and former Gulag inmate who had helped us find our apartment, took me to the lending library on my second day in Ladispoli. There he found on the shelves a copy of Spring in Fialta, Vladimir Nabokov’s third Russian collection of stories. The brownish cardstock cover was ripped and missing two corners, but the volume was otherwise in sound shape. “This is the original 1956 edition,” said Daniil, stroking the cover. “Chekhov Publishing House. New York. Worth a bit of money. These beasts will destroy it.” The ex libris on the inside cover had been scraped off, probably in haste; the top part with the former owner’s name and a logo were missing, but the bottom third of the sticker had survived. On it was an address in Rego Park, New York. At the time I had no idea that Rego Park was a section of Queens and vizualized it as a small town somewhere on Long Island. It makes me happy to taste these words as I type them: While reading Spring in Fialta I experienced love. As far back as I remember it, my father liked to repeat Nabokov’s motto, “Literature is Love.” Father used Nabokov’s words as an epigraph to a memoir-novel that he wrote in the mid-1980s in Moscow, after surviving a heart attack caused by KGB intimidation; it was a tribute to his literary youth in Leningrad during Khrushchev’s Thaw. Already in America and in graduate school, I realized that the quote came from the very beginning of chapter 7 in the novel Despair, which Nabokov wrote in 1933 in Berlin. My father had been quoting Nabokov’s aphorism incompletely. In the Russian text it goes like this: (Literally translated from the Russian , the sentence reads: “At first, the epigraph, but not to this chapter , but in general: literature is love for people.”) In 1936 in Berlin Nabokov himself translated Despair into English, and it appeared in London a year later. The opening of chapter 7 in the translation leaves out “love for people”: “To begin with, let us take the following motto (not especially for this chapter, but generally): Literature 180 Baggage is Love.” The opening of the chapter remained unchanged in the second version of Nabokov’s English translation; it was published in America in 1966 and...