Alef: The NEXT Conversation

A Coat For The Ages: Part I

By Ruvym Gilman

Two Novembers ago, my grandmother expressed grave concern about the warmth-retaining qualities of my winter clothing.

“No, no, no. You need good coat,” she said in response to the laundry list of items I’d gone through on request. “You come by, Misha make you nice coat.”

The following week, I found myself at a store in Midtown Manhattan’s fur district where my grandmother and grandfather had gone in-house after two decades of running their own store just across the street. With the popularity of fur dipping (“no one has class anymore”), unseasonably high temperatures brought on by global warming (“always something new they try to scare you with”), and my grandmother’s growing desire to retire in the face of my grandfather’s stubborn insistence on maintaining the business (“he gives me such a headache, you know, everyday telling me some new nonsense”), the decision was made to close up shop and take a small space on the second floor of a fellow-Russian’s business.

As I pushed open the metal gating – my grandmother buzzing me in from her little perch over-looking the show room, her two hands on the door remote, aiming at me like a Phaser, violently pressing down its central button with her thumbs – I glanced across the street at the store that used to be theirs. A new awning announced “The World of Fur” and somberly stripped the block of the subtle and chic poetry that was once “Julia’s Furs.

“Misha, my grandson is here,” she called to the store’s co-owner so he could begin taking my measurements. “He is a master,” she added after finally descending the stairs and giving me a kiss on the cheek, “a coat like this, the quality, you never had.”

“Ruva!” my grandfather shouted from the perch, interrupting my grandmother’s enthusiasm over Misha’s coat-making abilities.

“One minute! Let me talk to him please.”

My grandfather dropped his head and scurried back into his fur-laden den.

“You will see,” she said, finally breaking into the Russian I had been expecting since coming in, “people will talk about this coat.”

The “dooblyonkah,” as it was later known amongst my friends, did indeed become the conversation item my grandmother predicted it would become, except not for the reasons I had anticipated. Because as much as I appreciated the classy 3/4-length brown leather, double-breasted, fur collar design, to everyone else it underlined something that they saw but which I never considered – “dude, you’re so Russian.”

I had no idea what about the coat made me particularly Russian, but the comments made me cringe. Practically speaking, I’m American – born in Queens, high school on Long Island, college and law school in Manhattan – so I didn’t see why my identity had to be burdened by the unfortunate facts that my family happened to be from the former Soviet Union, or that I now owned a dooblyonkah. But the ethnicity mongers thrived on Russifying me, and attaching all the complimentary assumptions that came packaged with the title. My poor Russian-speaking skills and my occasional mispronunciation of English words added to my being Russian in their eyes, with no further complexity to consider. I thought it a cruel joke, that little sputtering of a “European” accent that peeked out whenever I started speaking too fast, and which, for some unknown reason, started occurring more frequently as I got older.

I knew that if I couldn’t avoid being Russian to them, then at least I needed to make it a priority to separate myself and my assimilated, Americanized ways, from the ethnic tackiness of “Brighton Beach Russians,” as I liked to call them. It was that particular association that frightened me perhaps more than any other. Them, the ones for whom every other friend was Russian and only Russian music blasted from the car stereos, with the men comfortable in their gold chains hanging over wife-beaters and shrub-like chest hair, donning Adidas striped track suits, while the women strutted around in tight, low-cut sequined dresses and turquoise-lacquered, patent leather high heels on the boardwalk down at Coney Island, everyone knowing that back at home a foyer lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and a bathroom of black marble and gold trim awaited them.

Read Part II here.

Photo by Ti.mo, licensed under Creative Commons.

Tags: Old Country

Posted by Ruvym, Monday, November 9th, 2009, 4:30 pm, Old Country.