Текст книги "Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking"

Автор книги: Anya von Bremzen

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

In return for the “yes” vote (at pseudoelections), the Kremlin gerontocracy kept commodity prices unchanged and guaranteed nominal social stability—steady employment that “pretended to pay” while comrades “pretended to work.” It also turned a semiblind eye to alternative economic and even cultural practices—as long as these didn’t blatantly violate official norms. As one scholar notes, by socialism’s twilight the only classes that took ideology at face value were professional Party activists and dissidents. They were an overwhelming minority. Everyone else eked out a daily life in the holes and crevices of the creaking machinery of power.

My own transformation from an alienated, shadow-eyed mess in my kindergarten days into a scheming, duplicitous junior Homo sovieticus occurred during Lenin’s jubilee year. In 1970 beloved Vladimir Ilyich was turning an immortal one hundred inside his mausoleum, and Rodina was celebrating with such unrelenting kitsch pomp, all the force-fed rejoicing produced the reverse effect on the popular psyche.

Having just moved to the Arbat, smack in the center of Moscow, we were besieged by a never-ending stream of tea-guzzlers. In the airy, multicornered kitchen that once belonged to my grandparents, people came and went, eating us out of the house—and treating us to a feast of jubilee jokes. The “commemorative Lenin products” series sent me into a paroxysm of private rejoicing. Items in the series:

Triple bed: “Lenin Is with Us” (a ubiquitous State slogan)

Bonbon: Chocolate-dipped Lenins

Perfume: Scent of Ilyich

Body lotion: Lenin’s cremains

Guidebook to Siberia: For those telling Lenin jokes!

My glee was so extravagant because my previous relations with Lenin had been so anguished. As Mom fought to exorcise him from my young mind, I furtively adored Ilyich at home, only to gag on him at the kindergarten, where Lenin-mania was crammed down my throat along with black caviar. The situation was tormenting, paralyzing; it had me throwing up almost daily. Until the populist carnival of jubilee humor liberated me from the schizophrenia of Lenin’s conflicting presence. Laughter magically shrank the whole business. Imagining Lenin’s squinty, beardy visage trapped inside a milk chocolate bonbon—instead of a raisin or cashew!—was somehow empowering. And how I delighted in seeing the local drunks slap a Lenin centennial ruble on a filthy liquor store counter, muttering: “My pocket ain’t no mausoleum. You ain’t lying around in there for long.”

As I grew older, the symbology of our Rodina began to resemble not a fixed ideological landscape but a veritable kaleidoscope of shifting meanings and resonances. By the time I was in third grade and seriously playing around with the various significations of my Young Pioneer tie, I’d made further peace with Soviet split-consciousness. Rather than a debilitating scourge, it seemed like a healthy Mature Socialist mind-set.

You didn’t embrace or reject Power, I’d realized: you engaged and negotiated.

At school I was also busy chasing after the most crucial Mature Socialist commodity: social prestige. I accomplished this by forging my own deep relationship with the mythical zagranitsa. We lived, after all, in a Moscow district swarming with embassy foreigners. Shamelessly I stalked their children. Sheyda from Ankara, my very first target, became my best friend and I enjoyed weekly sleepovers at the Turkish embassy on Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street, the embassy row near my house. I got myself in, too, with Neema and Margaret, daughters of the ambassadors of Ghana and Sierra Leone, respectively. Ghana—what a world superpower! So I thought to myself, slipping past the dour guard and into a private elevator that deposited me right in the Ghanaian ambassador’s sumptuous living room.

My life as diplomatic socialite left me flush with prestigious imported goods. Ballpoint pens, Donald Duck stickers, Smarties, Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit, and Turkish Mabel gum with a picture of a be-turbaned belle on a shimmery wrapper. Myself, I barely touched this stuff. Instead, in my own modest way I contributed to the massive Brezhnevian shadow economy. I sold, bartered, traded imports for services and favors. For three stale M&M’s, Pavlik, the most glamorous boy at my school, two years my senior, slavishly carried my knapsack for a week. With profits from selling Juicy Fruit in a girls’ bathroom at school, I treated myself to meals at House of Scholars, the elite Academy of Sciences clubhouse, where Mom sent me for dance lessons on Wednesdays. I skipped the silly ballet and made a beeline straight to the extravagantly marbled dining room. Once Mom came to pick me up early and the dance teacher reproachfully motioned her toward the restaurant. There I was, a proper black marketeer, at my regular corner table under a gilded mirror, enjoying a personal cocotte pan of wild mushroom “julienne.”

A romantically mysterious illness, social prestige, a thriving black market career—to say nothing of hopscotch on the ruins of an ideology. This is what my mother proposed to take me away from. But I loved her. And so for her sake I said an insincere Brezhnevian “yes” to her emigration plans.

In May 1974, Mom resigned from her job to avoid compromising her colleagues and handed her emigration papers to an OVIR clerk. The clerk was an anti-Semitic Slav with a luridly ironic surname: Israeleva.

Mom was not optimistic. The big problem was Naum—him and his fancy “intelligence worker” past. “You’ll never be allowed out!” thundered Dedushka, apoplectic at her announcement that she wanted to emigrate. He wasn’t bluffing. Applicants with far fewer “classified” relatives nevertheless joined the ranks of otkazniki (refuseniks), those bearded social outcasts (and dissident heroes) who were denied exit visas and thereafter led a blacklisted life with no work, no money, and a nonstop KGB tail. On the required “parents’ consent” form Mom had forged Naum’s signature; when asked to describe his job, she put down a vague “retired.”

I suppose OVIR was missing some teeth on its fine-toothed comb. In July, Mom and I came back from the polyclinic in the drenching rain to find Dad holding an opened OVIR envelope.

“September,” he blurted out. “They say you’re to leave by September!”

For once, Dad looked shaken. When the rain stopped he took me to an ugly, overlit shishkebab restaurant where a band blasted even at lunch. He told me not to forget him, to write. His unsardonic tone jolted me. Embarrassed by this sudden expression of fatherly sentiment, I silently wrestled with the tough, sinewy meat.

The next two months unfolded as a stagnant slog through red tape. How they tortured us pitiful would-be refugees! Lines to unregister from your “dwelling space,” lines to notarize every legal scrap of your former life. And the money! In a final stroke of extortion and humiliation, the State charged a huge tariff to relinquish Soviet citizenship. All told, emigration expenses amounted to the equivalent of two years’ salary. Mom scraped together the cash by selling art books sent by Marina, her school friend now in New York. This was a loan—she’d pay Marina back later in dollars.

Fra Angelico, Degas, Magritte: they financed our departure. “Imagine, Anyutik!” Mom would exclaim, lugging the high-priced volumes to a dusty secondhand book shop. “Soon—soon we will see the originals!”

The exit-visa process had transformed Mother, I noticed.

Anguished tears, sorrowful regrets—she wasn’t interested. Her vision of departure was not so much a sad, extended farewell as a curt removal; an amputation, surgical and painless, of her forty years as a citizen of our glorious Rodina. Amputation might even be too grand: maybe she regarded her past as a Soviet wart that would simply fall off. Or imagined a quick death by injection and a resurrection in another future and dimension, the unimaginable tam (there) where she’d felt she belonged ever since Lucien of Meknes held her hand during the International Youth Festival. Even I, the cynical black marketeer in the family, couldn’t fathom how a woman so delicate, who unfailingly wept at the exact same passage of War and Peace, and fainted—literally fainted—at my dad’s infidelities could show such resolve in so tragic a circumstance. I don’t think I saw Mother cry once.

This severing of the past included its physical remnants.

The spiteful Brezhnevian Rodina allowed us three suitcases per person. Mom took two tiny ones for the both of us: a semisvelte black vinyl number and a misshapen eyesore resembling a swollen, decaying brick. Studiously she ignored the detailed “to take” lists circulating among Jewish traitors to Rodina. Things for personal use; things to sell while at the transit points of Vienna and Rome. The latter included handcrafted linens, Zenit cameras, matryoshka dolls, and wind-up toy chickens that apparently enjoyed enthusiastic demand at flea markets in the Eternal City. Also hammer-and-sickle souvenirs, for which sentimental Italian communists forked over decent lire.

And generally: “Everything dear to you.”

Our mini-luggage held: one little blanket, two sets of cutlery, two bedding sets, two bowls with pink flowers made in Czechoslovakia, and by way of a “dear object,” one terra-cotta Georgian flower vase of massive ugliness. We owned barely any clothes, and no boots; I had outgrown mine, and Mother’s leaked badly. But she didn’t forget an empty mayonnaise jar—the tara for my urinalysis. What if they didn’t have suitable glassware at American clinics?

“Anything dear to you?” Mother asked.

I wasn’t sure.

There was my collection of imported chocolate wrappers that I groomed and smoothed out with my thumb and kept inside Giliarovsky’s Moscow and Muscovites. But why bother toting along these capitalist totems when I’d be residing where many, many more could be had? I adored Dedushka Naum’s clanky medals, but he’d never part with them, and neither would customs allow them through.

To my surprise, I thought of my reviled school uniform. Brown, thigh-length, woolen and scratchy, worn under a black pinafore. The dress was dry-cleaned once a year, if at all. But every week, in a domestic ritual replayed across each of our eleven time zones, Soviet moms unstitched the white lace collar and cuffs and sewed on fresh ones. My mother always did this on Monday nights, simultaneously stitching and chattering away on her black telefon. We’d sit in my parents’ room around the low three-legged Finnish table. Dad was usually gluing together the broken tape on his reel-to-reel magnitofon. I watched Vremya, the TV evening news. “Turn it down,” Mother would hiss as Donbas metallurgical workers dutifully overfulfilled Five-Year Plans, and rye sprouted lavishly in the Ukraine, and bushy-browed Dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev locked in eternal embrace with bushy-cheeked Fidel.

The TV weather report, set to a bittersweet pop tune, would last an eternity. In Uzbekistan, a sunny twenty degrees centigrade. In Kamchatka, a snowstorm. Leningrad region, intermittent precipitation. Vast was our Socialist Rodina!

How could I ever confess to my parents that I felt secret pangs of pride at this vastness? That it stung me now, the thought of going to bed for the rest of my life not knowing if it was going to rain in the Urals?

I went into my room and unfolded my school uniform. It was too small. A new school year had just started but I, newly minted Zionist enemy, wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to my friends. I pressed the dress to my face, inhaling its institutional reek. I didn’t despise the smell as Mom did. From one pocket I fished out a fragment of Juicy Fruit in silvery foil. From another, my crumpled scarlet Young Pioneer tie.

Propelled by a sudden nostalgic patriotism I turned toward the door, ready to announce to Mom that I wanted to take the tie—but then stopped. Because I knew what she’d say.

Nyet, she’d say plainly.

Mom also said nyet to a farewell open house. And she wouldn’t allow relatives at the airport—only Sergei. The plan was to bid goodbye to close family at my grandparents’ house two nights before leaving and spend our last evening with Dad.

At our farewell dinner in Davydkovo, the Frumkin clan was in fine form. Babushka Liza had cooked her usual gloppy food for two days; Uncle Sashka got drunk, Aunt Yulia was late, and Dedushka Naum, well, he bellowed and he raged—on and on.

“My own daughter—a traitor of Rodina!”

Then, shifting from accusation, he wagged an ominous finger: “Nostalghia—it’s the MOST HORRIFYING emotion known to mankind!”

Naum had apparently confessed Mom’s treason to his benefactor, the venerated Baltic commander Admiral Tributs. The World War II great man was reassuring: “When she’s over there, starving and cold, begging us for forgiveness, we will help her to return!”

Dedushka relayed this with glee. “You’ll come crawling back,” he shouted, “on your knees, across our Soviet border! You’ll kiss our beloved black Soviet earth!”

Cousin Masha and I kicked each other under the table: everyone knew that heavily armed men and snarling German shepherds patrolled the Soviet border. No, there was no crossing back.

Marring our intimate family tableau was a houseguest, Inna, a distant relative from Chernovtsy. Sixteen and pimply, Inna had two enormous black braids and a lofty desire to work for the KGB when she graduated from high school. As Dedushka calmed down and tears coursed along Babushka Liza’s doughy cheeks, the KGB wannabe, who despite her ambitions was on the slow side, suddenly gasped in comprehension. She leapt to her feet and proclaimed that she could not share the table with a traitor! Then she barged out the door, braids swinging. On our way down we saw her on the landing, being groped by a non-sober neighbor.

But the true heartache was Baballa.

Mom concealed our departure from her until the very last month, and when Babushka Alla finally heard, she went pale as a ghost.

“All my life I’ve lost those I love,” she told Mom very quietly, lips trembling. “My husband in the war, my grandma in the gulags. When Anyuta was born I got my joy back. She’s the only thing I cherish in life. How can you take her away?”

“To save her life,” Mom replied gravely.

To avoid more heartbreak, Mother pleaded with Baballa not to see us off on our departure morning. Baballa was there all the same. She sat on a bench outside our apartment house, wearing her usual blue pencil skirt, striped blouse, and a hastily applied smear of red lipstick. She was fifty-seven, bleached blonde, six feet tall, and gorgeous. Hugging her, I caught her familiar whiff of Red Poppy face powder and Belomor cigarettes. Shyly she pressed a bottle of vodka and a tin of black caviar into Mom’s hands.

As our taxi drove off I saw her sink onto the bench. That was my last image of her.

At customs we were prodded and questioned, our puny luggage turned inside out. They confiscated Mom’s letters from Lucien, along with a green spray can of Jazmin, a classy imported deodorant.

“That’s your luggage?” said the feral blond passport official, eyeing our two dwarf suitcases. “Veyz mir,” he taunted in a mock Yiddish accent.

I walked backwards for a few steps, waving to Dad, who stood on the other side of the chrome barrier. He was making a “write me” sign with his hands. On the stairs leading up to the departure gate I caught another glimpse of him through the glass. He seemed small and hunched, suddenly, desperately gesticulating to Mom. I tugged at her sleeve but she just kept marching up—a five-foot, hundred-pound elf looking like a miniature sergeant in her hand-sewn khaki skirt suit. I thought of Orpheus, how he glanced back and screwed everything up, and I stopped looking at Dad.

On the plane I was on my ninth plastic tumbler of free Pepsi when they made the announcement. “We have just left Soviet territory.” I wanted to sit there with Mom and ponder the moment, but my bladder was bursting.

Six months later. The elfin woman trudges along the edge of a highway, ahead of her girl, who’s just turned eleven and is now the taller of the pair. Fordi, Pon-ti-aki, Chev-ro-leti. Woman and girl have been learning the names of the different cars that go roaring past, only catastrophic inches away. Apparently there are no sidewalks in Northeast Philadelphia. At least not on the road that leads from the Pathmark as vast as Red Square to their drab one-bedroom on Bustleton Avenue, its ceiling even lower than a khrushcheba’s, its wall-to-wall carpet the murky, speckled gray of crushed hope.

It’s an obscure, foggy night—humid although it’s almost December. The woman has on a flimsy hand-me-down parka, courtesy of her school friend Irina, who helped sponsor her American visa. The girl wears a little-old-lady-style belted coat with sleeves way too short and a bedraggled synthetic fur trim. Both woman and girl are panting, hugging the guardrail as they laboriously trudge. Their arms clutch a paper grocery bag each. Occasionally they put the heavy bags down, slump on the guardrail, and shake their tired arms. Lights glare poisonously through the fog. It starts drizzling. Then raining. The girl struggles with her coat to shield her grocery bag, but it breaks anyway. Squishy loaves of white bread and trays of thirty-nine-cent chicken parts tumble onto the road’s edge. Cars slow down, honk—offering rides? The girl—me—is silently crying. For so many reasons, really. But my mother—the woman—stays cheerful, unperturbed, scrambling to snatch a box of blueberry Pop-Tarts from the oncoming traffic and stuff it into her bag, which is still holding up, miraculously. Clasping the grocery bag with one arm for a moment, she shoots an awkward wave back at the honking cars, shaking her head “no” to a ride. They can’t see her smile in the dark.

“Come, isn’t this an adventure, Anyutik?” she exclaims, trying to cheer me up. “Aren’t Americans nice?”

At this particular sodden moment, of the multitude of things I so sorely miss about Moscow, I miss our avoska bag more than anything else.

And the precious trusted mayonnaise jar—the one we bore to Vienna, then Rome, then Philadelphia? I’ve been missing it, too. Because that Mature Socialist totem has vanished from our lives forever, after Mom, almost straight off the plane, rushed me to see a world-renowned scleroderma expert.

The fancy American hospital where he worked turned out to be barren of diversions and character: no instructive syphilis posters, no patients carrying matchboxes with stool samples and Provansal vessels with urine—along with chocolates and Polish pantyhose—to the bribe-expecting receptionist. No nurses screaming “Trakhatsa nado menshe!” (You should screw less!) at gonorrhea sufferers.

The scleroderma expert was himself an immigrant from far-away Argentina. When Mom detailed our desperate Soviet medical odyssey to him, he shocked her. By laughing. He even summoned his colleagues. The nurse, the new resident, the head of Dermatology—everyone shook with laughter, asking my bewildered mom to repeat again and again how Soviet doctors treated my scleroderma with penicillin and moomiyo goo and healing mud from gaudy Odessa.

Baring his big horsey teeth, the guffawing doc explained at last that childhood scleroderma was an entirely harmless version of this normally fatal disease. It required no treatment at all.

“Welcome to the free world!” the doctor congratulated my now-laughing mother and me as he escorted us to the foyer. When we stepped back out onto the humid Philadelphia sidewalk, Mom was still laughing. Then she hugged me and sobbed and sobbed. The mayonnaise jar, our indispensable socialist artifact, went into an outsize American trash can. Ahead of us was an era of blithely disposable objects.

And Pathmark.

My First Supermarket Experience was the anchoring narrative of the great Soviet epic of immigration to America. Some escapees from our socialist defitsit society actually swooned to the floor (usually in the aisle with toilet paper). Certain men knelt and wept at the sight of forty-two varieties of salami, while their wives—smelling the strawberries and discovering they lacked any fragrance—cried for opposite reasons. Other emigrants, possessed by the ur-Soviet hoarding instinct, frantically loaded up their shopping carts. Still others ran out empty-handed, choked and paralyzed by the multiplicity of choices.

The Jewish Family Services office where we collected our meager refugee stipend resounded with food stories. The stories constituted an archive of socialists’ misadventures with imperialist abundance. Monya and Raya complained about the flavor of American butter—after smearing floor wax on bread. The Goldbergs loved the delicious lunch meat cans with cute pictures of kitties, not suspecting the kitties were the intended consumers. Vovchik, the Odessa lothario, slept with his first American shiksa and stormed out indignant when she offered him Triscuits. Desiccated cardboard squares! Why not a steaming bowl of borscht?

Mom, who was smarter than Orpheus and never once looked back after heading up the ramp at Sheremetyevo Airport, roamed Pathmark’s acres with childlike glee. “She-ree-ohs… Ri-seh-rohonee… Vel. Vee. Tah…” She murmured these alien names as if they’d been concocted by Proust, lovingly prodding and handling all the foodstuffs in their bright packaging, their promiscuous, throwaway tara.

Meanwhile, I steered the supermarket cart behind her like a zombie. I hated the Pathmark of Northeast Philadelphia. It was the graveyard of my own zagranitsa dream, possessed of a fittingly funerary chill and an otherworldly fluorescence. Shuffling the aisles, I felt entombed in the abundance of food, now drained of its social power and magic. Who really wanted the eleven-cent bag of bananas if you couldn’t parade it down Kalinin Prospect inside your transparent avoska after standing in a four-hour line, basking in envious stares? What happened when you replaced the heroic Soviet verb dostat’ (to obtain with difficulty) with the banal kupit’ (to buy), a term barely used back in the USSR? Shopping at Pathmark was acquisitioning robbed of thrills, drama, ritual. Where did blat come into play, with its savvy maneuvering of social ties, its camaraderie? Where was envy and social prestige? The reassuring communal ochered’ smell of hangovers and armpits? Nobody and nothing smelled inside Pathmark.

A few weeks into our Philadelphia life, I began to suspect that all those cheery disposable boxes and plastic containers piled on Pathmark’s shelves were a decoy to conceal the dark truth. That American food—I hesitate to say it—wasn’t exactly delicious. Not the Pop-Tarts that Mom served cold and semi-raw because nobody told her about the toasting part. Not American sosiski, hot dogs sour from nitrates. Definitely not the yellow-skinned thirty-nine-cent chicken parts bandaged in plastic. These made me pine for the bluish, Pravda-swaddled chicks Baballa brought back from her elite canteen at Gosstroy. Those had graphic claws, a poignant comb, sad dead eyes, and stray feathers Grandma burned off with her clunky cigarette lighter, filling the house with a smell like burnt hair. We enjoyed the chicks once a month, as a defitsit treat.

When our Jewish Family Services stipend ended, Mom worked cleaning Philadelphia houses, a job she pronounced “fascinating!” Then she landed work as a receptionist at a hospital, which required her to ride three separate buses. Her shift began at noon and brought her home past ten, when I was already in bed. Tactfully she spared me the details of standing in all weather at unshielded bus stops. I, in turn, never told her how I felt coming back to an empty, ugly apartment from the dreaded Louis H. Farrell Elementary School, with only our hand-me-down grainy black-and-white TV for company. When Dinah Shore came on, I wanted to howl. She was the human equivalent of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that came with my free refugee school lunch. All squishy, pseudofolksy whiteness, with an unnatural, cloying coupling of sugar and salt.

I spent most of my first afterschool hours slumped on our shared mattress, nose in books from the two boxes of them Mom had had slow-mailed from Moscow. The bottle-green Chekhov, the gray Dostoyevsky—breaking off from their color-coordinated collected works, I tried to practice Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons on the battered secondhand piano Mom had bought for me with a handout from Clara, her American aunt. But the notes under my fingers produced only tears, the wrenching reminder of our old Arbat life. And so I paced in dazed agitation, from the bedroom, past the TV to the piano, to the kitchenette and back. And yet not even in my worst homesick moments could I admit to missing Rodina with any sincerity. Sincerity, it seemed, had been bled out of us by the cynical Brezhnevian seventies. Which added a layer of denial to homesickness.

Rodina-Urodina. A Motherland that rhymed with “ugly hag.” A scarlet-blazed myth that flipped into an ironic gag. Historically the word—denoting one’s birthplace, from the root rod (origin/kin)—had been the intimate, maternal counterpart to otchizna (fatherland), that resoundingly heroic, martially tinted noun. The Bolsheviks banned Rodina, suspicious of its folkloric entwining with nationalism. Under Stalin it resurfaced in 1934, aligned now with official Soviet patriotism. In World War II it was mobilized full force—feminized further—as Rodina-Mat’, literally “motherland-mother,” to be defended to the last by its sons and daughters. Grassroots patriotism swept the nation. But by my childhood, like all “meaningful” words, Rodina had acquired a cartoonish bathos. Even if treason to the motherland was a criminal offense.

Come to think of it, there wasn’t a single word for the country we’d never see again that I could use with any authentic nostalgia. Soviet Union? Pining for anything with Soviet in it was politically incorrect since the word evoked the lumbering carcass of the official regime. Rossiya (Russia)? That too was tainted with the saccharine kitsch of state-certified nationalism: all those swaying birch trees and troika sleds. And so I resorted to sovok or sovdep—bitterly sarcastic slang for the land of the Homo sovieticus.

Such linguistic calibrations didn’t concern Mother much. After all, she’d spent most of her adult Soviet life as a spiritual émigré, yearning for the imaginary Elsewhere she envisioned as her own true Rodina. Occasionally she’d admit to missing the tart-green antonovka apples, a fairly neutral Nabokovian gesture. And once, only once, when she heard a song about Arbat, our intimate old Moscow neighborhood, she burst into tears.

Myself, I had neither accepted nor rejected our socialist state. Instead I constantly played the angles, with its values and countervalues, its resonances. From this all-encompassing game I’d created my childhood identity. So now, along with the unmentionable Rodina I was mourning the loss of a self.

My name, for example.

Anna, Anya, An’ka, Anechka, Anyuta, Nyura, Niusha. What a menu of nuanced social meanings and linguistic attitudes available within my own single name. And now? I wasn’t even Anna (my official passport name). I was a Philly-accented Ee-ya-nna—the sonorous, open Russian “A” squished and rubberized like the Wonder Bread of our exile.

Bread. I missed Moscow bread.

Standing at the fridge, dragging a slice of Oscar Mayer bologna onto a slice of spongy whiteness, I’d mentally inhale the voluptuous sourdough tang of our neighborhood bakery by the tree-lined Tverskoy Boulevard. There, manipulating in my small grip a giant two-pronged fork attached by a grimy string to the wall, I’d poke and press, testing for freshness, the dark burnished loaves arranged on their tilted worn-wood shelves under a slogan: BREAD IS OUR SOVIET WEALTH—DON’T BUY MORE THAN YOU NEED!

We had arrived in Philadelphia on November 14, 1974. A few weeks later, we noticed people appearing downtown in drab uniforms, singing and clanging bells beside red buckets under puzzling signs for a “Salvation Army.” To this day, “Jingle Bells” and “Joy to the World” pierce me as the soundtracks of émigré dislocation.

I had stopped believing in Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) when I was six and we still lived in Davydkovo. My neighbor Kiril and I stayed up past midnight waiting for the promised arrival of our Soviet New Year’s version of Santa in his long flowing robe. I had on a tiara of snowflakes and a satiny costume gown Mom fashioned for the occasion from an old dress of hers. The doorbell rang at last. Ded Moroz himself swayed on our threshold, majestic and glassy-eyed. Then all six feet of him collapsed face-first into our khrushcheba’s tiny foyer. The next morning he was still there, snoring, still in his robe but with his beard now detached and crumpled under one cheek. A dead-drunk Ded Moroz wasn’t the worst. The really awful ones screwed up the gifts parents had given them in advance—delivering rubber-smelling inflatable beach balls, for instance, to the family who’d bought expensive East German toy sets.

But I loved Soviet novy god (New Year’s) anyway. The harsh scent of pine on our balcony where our tree awaited decoration. My small mom teetering on a tall wobbly stool to reach the high closet for the box of our New Year’s ornaments, swaddled in coarse pharmacy cotton. By the last week of December, the State dumped long-hoarded delicacies onto store counters. From Praga Dad carried home the white box of its famous chocolate layer cake; Mom’s avoska bulged with sharply fragrant thin-skinned clementines from Abkhazia. And eagerly we awaited Baballa’s holiday zakaz, the elite take-home package of defitsit goods from Gosstroy. You never knew what each year would bring. I prayed for the buttery balik (smoked sturgeon) instead of the prestigious but disgusting canned cod liver.

Philadelphia had no snow our first December. Worse, fellow émigrés gravely warned one another against putting up Christmas trees, since Jewish-American sponsors liked to drop in on their charges to deliver mezuzahs or bags of used clothes. Our generous sponsors went ballistic at the sight of an evergreen, sometimes even reporting the blasphemous refugees to Jewish Family Services. Many ex-Soviet citizens didn’t realize that their Jewishness was now a religion, not simply the “ethnicity” declared in the fifth entry of their surrendered red passports. The sponsors in turn had no clue that Christmas was banned in the USSR—that the trees, gifts, Ded Moroz, and general cheer were the secular socialist hooray to the new year.