Extraction

I first remember being ashamed of my teeth at five. We were guests at the wedding of my second cousin to a man who looked like Tim Curry as Johnny LaGuardia. I was hopelessly in love with the groom, who, for a former Soviet Jew, had strangely white and perfectly straight teeth. While posing arm in arm with his bride for the wedding photographer, he playfully pulled me into the photo, tried to tease and tickle a smile out of me. I squealed, giggled, exasperated the photographer, until I heard Mama shout: “Zakroy rotik!” (“Shut your little mouth!”) Hide my rotting nubs.

My teeth had mostly become brown-gray stumps, full of dental caries — holes in the enamel. I had a sweet tooth, and we always ran out of sweets first. When we did, Mama appeased me with some of the peasant concoctions she’d had in her village: a teacup of gogol-mogol — raw egg, whipped with sugar; a bowl of “whipped cream” — sour cream, whipped with sugar; or “marzipan” — fresh lemon slices, coated in sugar. Always in the evening. Always in front of the television, learning English from some American sitcom. Mama struggled to cover the bitter or sour of these “sweets” with enough sugar. I always returned to the kitchen to add more, scooping the bone-white crystals from the china bowl by the spoonful.

I could hardly blame Mama and Papa, what with the food abundance in America, even for refugees like us on food stamps. When we lived in Ukraine, they waited on mile-long queues for what they were unable to grow, bake, raise, or butcher themselves. They were children of shtetls, Jewish ghettos; grandchildren of the Holocaust; great-grandchildren of the Holodomor — Stalin’s starvation, in the 1930s, of Ukrainian peasants who