Jonah and Sarah: Jewish Stories of Russia and America

By David Shrayer-Petrov and Maxim D. Shrayer

From the deceptively simple narrative (Apple Cider Vinegar, Hurricane Bob) to the surrealist story (Dismemberers) and the magical tale (Jonah and Sarah and Lanskoy Road), the tempo fluctuates, but throughout, Shrayer-Petrov seamlessly preserves familiar voices. The stories have a genuine feel of the setting and epoch—the Russian stories work as narratives of everyday life, while the American stories offer an accurate sense of an émigré’s alienation.

Like all good works of fiction, these stories take on a mythic quality and transcend time and place. Each carries and communicates to the reader an aura of mystery, the enigma of love, and a meeting of the Jewish past and present. Whether he invokes lyrical dialogue, gentle irony, or sharp polemical discourse, Shrayer-Petrov shows that he is a powerful presence in Russian and Jewish literature. For those interested in fiction about new immigrants to America or in the psychology of Jews in the two decades before the Soviet Union’s collapse, this collection is a must read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jan 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9780815607762

Book preview

APPLE CIDER VINEGAR

Last fall I went to the Tishinsky farmers’ market for apples. There were several markets in Moscow that I loved. There was the Leningradsky—solid and reliable, with stable prices, where you could always find homemade cottage cheese, crunchy pickles, and magnificent carnations; the Koptevsky—you went there to get potatoes, stock up on fresh wild mushrooms at a reasonable price, and buy greens; and the Tishinsky, which was the Moscow outlet for Smolensk and Belorussian produce, and the kingdom of the Antonovka apples.

I drove around the square in front of Belorussky Station, navigated the side streets that lead off Gorky Street, and pulled up to the Tishinsky. The crowd milling around the market gates was hungry to price out all that was available there—the potatoes, mushrooms, or cabbage—but the air was permeated with the scent of apples. It wafted over the market crowd and made nostrils flare at the thought of the crisp, sweet-and-sour pungency released like an explosion of life force at the first bite of an Antonovka.

I walked up and down the rows inside the green pavilions and under the plywood awnings erected outside. I took a close look at yellow-green, green-amber, amber-chartreuse, and golden apples, their cheeks swollen with juice. They were all Antonovkas. All these apples gave off the same unmistakable, intoxicating fragrance, like champagne. In the same way, all breast-fed babies, whether white, black, or yellow, carry the sweet aroma of mother’s milk. They are all babies. And all Antonovkas are Antonovkas—that’s all there is to it!

But I was still looking, still trying to find the right ones. After searching all the rows, elbowing my way through the crowd and getting my fill of discussions about prices and varieties, I stopped in front of golden Antonovkas the size of tennis balls, gloriously fragrant with the scent of new cider and just beginning to develop a delicate rosy hue. I stuffed a whole bag full and lugged the apples to my car. In the square by the public garden, strewn with a mosaic of leaves, I found my battered and scratched Zhiguli, a veteran of Moscow traffic, and was opening the trunk when I heard a familiar cheerful voice.

Hey! Long time no see! You never change, big guy!

I turned around. Of course it was her, Lusya, from Apartment 33 in our wonderful old building on Pravda Street. I had moved out of the building five years earlier to the area of the River Terminal. Lusya, the wife of the restoration artist Vasya Ksyondzov, was still the same gorgeous leggy blond, except she seemed to have filled out a bit. Statuesque, as her husband would put it. Lusya tossed aside her red backpack, from which bunches of parsley, chicken legs, scallions, and Lord knows what else stuck out, and threw herself at me with kisses.

Lusya!

Hey, big guy!

What a surprise! You’re the last person I expected to see.

Where did you disappear to? You’re a real Count of Monte Cristo!

Lusya, it’s great to see you. Let me throw your bag in the back seat. Where can I take you?

What? Have you forgotten where home is?

Oh, I’m sorry, Lusya, I wasn’t thinking straight. I just can’t get over running into you like this.

I had reason to feel confused and to lose my head. In a single instant everything came rushing back at me, everything connected with the building where I had lived for thirty-four years, and from which I had fled because of one incident directly linked with Lusya.

We used to be great friends, Vasya Ksyondzov, Lusya, and I. After work I would stop in at the one-room apartment where I lived as a bachelor. It was really just a shabby hole-in-the-wall: half-clean, half-furnished, and never really livable. I went there to wash off the dust from the bronze and silver I used all day to plate vases, pitchers, and goblets intended as gifts. I would grab something quick to eat and dash over to the Ksyondzovs’ place. I usually showed up later than their other friends, because the GUM department store, where I worked as an engraver, closed at nine o’clock. By the time I got home, cleaned myself up, and was ready to go back out, it was almost ten. Then I would go up to their apartment, settle into my favorite rocker in the corner under the date palm, and spend the entire evening listening to Vasya Ksyondzov’s friends, all genuine artists who belonged to the Moscow Artists’ Union, or at least to the Artist’s Fund, argue furiously.

I never made it as an artist. I didn’t have enough imagination, education, persistence, or even daring. I never got beyond sketching antique plaster busts with empty sheepish eyes and equally sheepish curls. The flowers I painted deserved to be put in the trash even before a vase or pitcher could be drawn in beneath them on the paper. And the people or animals in my pictures . . . never mind those incorporeal creatures! The only thing I was good at turned out to be calligraphy. Vasya Ksyondzov, a man both gentle and resolute, once told me this:You know what, big guy, if you’re born to be an artist, then to hell with it all, go hungry, live in poverty, suffer, go out of your mind. It will all work out in the end. One day you will be recognized. Fame and money will come to you at once. But you, you know I love you like a brother, and am sorry to have to say it, but you are a calligrapher. You should have been born before the first Russian printer, Ivan Fyodorov! And since that’s the way it is, why should you suffer, tormenting yourself and waiting for the impossible, when you can and must have the good life tomorrow? You will never be famous, it’s true, but you will make a good living.

And so I began to do inscriptions, engrave greetings, and transfer to glass, metal, or porcelain someone else’s words, exotic scripts. In short, I became a good, honest craftsman. No, I didn’t tear myself apart and didn’t feel in any way inferior to the real artists. I had no complexes whatsoever. While the Ksyondzovs’ crowd were arguing about their idols and pariahs, about realism versus surrealism, about their work and luring rich clients to their studios, I sat quietly in the shadow of the date palm, like a pilgrim who has walked under the blazing hot sun all day and reached an oasis. I sat there and listened to the evening babble, as pacifying as the eternal murmur of a brook.

The Ksyondzovs put little Seryozha to bed by nine o’clock. When I came in he was usually asleep, his light already out. I would kiss his chubby little nose. He didn’t wake up, but he knew that I had been there all the same. In the morning there would be a clown dancing near his crib, or a camel slowly chewing a thistle. Or else a balloon blimp hovering near the ceiling. On Sundays I took him for a walk to the park in the Maryina Roshcha area to give the Ksyondzovs a little time off.

Occasionally just the three of us, Lusya, Vasya, and I, spent a quiet evening together. We would have some wine, a glass or two, just to whet the appetite, and eat sandwiches, which Lusya put together masterfully. Anchovies with grated cheese, roast beef with parsley and cucumber, hard-boiled eggs and lettuce, salmon with black currant chutney, and many others that I no longer remember. Then we’d have tea and just talk about life. I talked about routine things, about my department store. I warned Lusya when to come to the store and whom to see if a shipment of Western-made goods was expected. Lusya recounted the endless personal histories of her female colleagues at the editorial offices of Comet Publishers. Endlessly different and inconceivably identical: love, marriage, a baby, divorce, a self-absorbed lover, agony over the passing of the best years. Or: love, marriage, living with a man she no longer loved because by then there was a baby, and yet another unfaithful lover. It is a terrifying thing for a couple to rip apart the fabric of a marriage, moth-eaten though it might be by mutual reproaches and wrongs, and then stand there naked before the world. It is also terrifying to break up with a lover—will the next one be any better? All of Lusya’s stories were full of passion, intrigue, and violent endings. The kind of thing you’d go to see in a movie.

Vasya would cheer us up with his glittering success stories. Everything always turned out for him. He restored a painting by an old master so well that it was immediately sought by the best museums. His work brought both acclaim and money. He played regularly with filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov—a pool shark—and never failed to win. Foreigners brought him gifts of special Dutch brushes out of gratitude just for permission to observe how Vasya Ksyondzov cleaned gritty dust from the surface of an old painting undergoing