Howard Chaykin: Conversations

RRRRRRED[sup(2)]

116 rrrrrred2 Paul Gravett / 1988 From Escape #14, 1988, pp. 10–12. reprinted by permission of Paul gravett (www.paulgravett.com and www.escapebooks.com). Howard Chaykin’s twisted sense of humor crackles through the satirical farce of American Flagg!, which he has just exiled to a consumerized soviet Union; Moscow gripped by an absurdist glittering neon-lit future. He grew up in new york during the Cold war, but now lives in the perpetual summer amid the jacuzzis and valley girls of glendale, California. Howard Chaykin—Cowboy or Cossack? “i don’t mind, just so long as i can wear the boots.” Howard Chaykin: I’m convinced there’s Cossack blood in me, because I’m a nice Jewish boy with high Cossack cheekbones. My family on both sides were raped by Cossacks. On my mother’s side my grandmother was Austrian of Russian and Polish ancestry, my grandfather was Polish, and on my father’s side both were horse-traders from Odessa. Both sides were of anarchist socialist leanings, “street-thinkers” is what they were called into the twenties. By the time I was growing up in the fifties in New York, that socialism had deteriorated into an FDR socialism and ultimately the family became a bunch of bleeding heart liberals, which is what they are today. My father was a vet, my mom was a second-rate band singer in third-rate bands. Basically we thought Republicans were on a par with the Anti-Christ, and most Democrats were acceptable as long as they didn’t espouse any religious beliefs. We forgave Jews for their religious beliefs in politics, but the concept of a Jewish Republican was patently absurd. Paul Gravett: You grew up during the Cold War years. How was Russia perceived then in America? HC: For my family and me there was the problem of the dichotomy of the So- paul gravett / 1988 117 viet Union on the one hand as the supreme apotheosis of Leftist thought and on the other with its remaining holdovers of Stalinism and anti-Semitism. I had my bar mitzvah the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis and by that time, it wasn’t so much the Soviet Union perceived as an evil empire in my home, as much as Kennedy representing the best we could expect of the American political process. Also bear in mind that at twelve and thirteen you can’t find a more conservative bunch. If you gave kids the vote, they’d all vote for Nazism immediately, because they’re really impressed with uniforms and shiny black boots. In the debating clubs in junior high school, we’d have these long discussions about nuking the Soviet Union. We were indoctrinated by every possible means into believing—and I don’t say this damningly, this is not American self-hatred, this is just the way it was—that it was an accepted world view that everybody in the world wanted to be an American, that we were of an envied society, being an American was the highest goal anyone could achieve. Bear in mind, I was living on welfare at the time so there was an irony there. But even on welfare, our standard of living was considerably higher, as we perceived it, because we were fed on the idea of material goods. With the emblemology of these two monolithic world powers, we knew which side we were on. I believe the only way you can deal with politics in popular terms is to trivialize it to a human scale. I’ve insisted that the real issue of the Cold War for my generation was not to be nuked to kingdom come before we lost our virginity. PG: What is your fascination with Russia? HC: The first character I ever created was a Russian spaceman when I was sixteen years old at high school. His first name was Nikta, not Nikita. I love the music. I’m fascinated by the physical look and scale of the country. One of my favorite novels is a very minor western novel written in the early seventies called The Cowboy and the Cossack about a cattle-drive across Siberia in the summer of 1888 with eighteen Montana cowboys and eighteen rebel Cossacks . I have an obsession with Russia and a fear of visiting there. I’ve never been further East than Italy. Going there would be satisfying some fantasies and destroying others. As for my research, it all pre-dates...