Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story

Interlude: Readers’ Reports

238 INTERLUDE Readers’ Reports Whil e pur suing publ ic at ion of my poems in periodicals, I also attempted a more wholesale approach. I had assembled a typescript of a poetry collection. It was originally called End of August, but I later retitled it Herd above the Meadow, after the title poem about horses and the steppe. The logical first choice was the publishing conglomerate Molodaya gvardiya (Young Guard). Young Guard had a separate editorial office set up for working with “young authors.” “Young and younger authors” might have said it better, since in the Soviet Union one’s literary youth could be defined loosely, and writers in their late thirties were in some cases still branded as “young.” The editorial office for young authors not only handled individual collections but also sponsored the so-called “cassettes,” volumes in which first collections by four or five authors would be put out under the same cover. Back in October of 1986 I had made an appointment with a senior editor , Galina Roy, a puff-pastry of a lady who kept looking to her right and left before she would say something in a soft, perfumed voice. She asked where I went to school and seemed encouraged by the fact that I wasn’t another “humanist” or a student at the Moscow Literary Institute, where future professionals were being trained and mostly messed up. Roy took my manuscript upstairs to have it stamped and “registered,” as was the standard in those days. I would be hearing from them in about a month, after the reader’s report came back. A part of me—the part that to this day refuses to believe in so-called collective wisdom—was buoyant with hope as I left the editorial office. In te rl ude: Rea der s’ Repor t s | 239 In early January, the mailwoman wearing my mother’s old paisley jacket brought a large grey envelope to our door. The manuscript was returned to me with a perfunctory note from G. Roy and her boss S. Rybas. Wishing me to persist in mastering “the Russian poetic tradition and richmost culture,” the editors echoed the enclosed, three-page reader’s report. Although it wasn’t vicious in tone, the report contained certain coded expressions. It hinged on three points. One was the author’s “youth and inexperience,” and needing to study with the “masters.” Since I was nineteen years of age, this part was neither here nor there, platitudinal. Lines and phrases from my poems were quoted piecemeal, and the reviewer might have been correct in some of his criticisms. The more disturbing part of the report spoke of the absence of values, life experience, world vision, and spiritual “accumulations” in my manuscript. Maxim Davydov, the reader claimed, has a “vague idea of ethics.” To support this point, he quoted lines describing the woman’s body and openly speaking about desire and sexuality. From the report, I remembered the phrase “a complete abandonment of the ethical foundation.” Something in the diction of the reader’s report made me think of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign of Stalin’s last decade, when Jewish artists and writers were targeted as “bourgeois nationalists” and “rootless cosmopolitans,” both un-Russian and unpatriotic. The poison was spilled in the closing paragraph. “In Russian poetry,” the reader stated, “there are many to learn from.” Incensed by the rejection, I charged Young Guard like a young bull. This time I ran past the office of Galina Roy and stormed into the office Svyatoslav Rybas, who was Roy’s boss. A novelist, Rybas belonged to the right wing of the Russian nationalist movement within official Soviet literature . He was one of those burly, mustached, physical Slavic men who tend to intimidate intellectuals and Jews with macho body language and raucous voice. “I’ve come to file a formal complaint,” I said, tossing the manuscript and reader’s report on Rybas’s desk. “What about?” Rybas asked, eyes unswerving. “This is a classic case of Grand-Russian chauvinism,” I blurted out. “Are you referring to what’s in your manuscript?” Rybas asked again, baring his teeth. 240 | The Sh or t Go odbye “You know very well that I am referring to the treatment of me by your editorial office and your reader’s report. You just don’t want to let any Jews in, do you?” I felt my voice...