Alef: The NEXT Conversation

A Coat For The Ages: Part II

Part II of A Coat For the Ages. Read Part I here.

…

By Ruvym Gilman

Honestly, I don’t know at what point I made the decision to distance myself from being linked with the Russians. Raised by my great-grandmother, Russian was my first language. I knew “Doktor Eybaleet” before I knew him as “Doctor Dolittle.” In their basement, gathering dust on the sagging shelving that interrupts the otherwise consistent wood paneled walls, my parents still have old VHS tapes of a droopy-eyed, tortured me, reciting little Russian children’s rhymes at a time when I couldn’t even run through the ABCs.

“Come on Ruvym, tell us the story again, the one about little boy drinking vodka at the fountain.”

To this day the same grandmother who brought the dooblyonkah into my life still rations out Russian food to me and my brother so that she knows we’re both eating well. And yet, there I was, still feeling incredibly uncomfortable with identifying myself as anything but good old, generic American.

I fled from them, the Dimas and Igors and Milas and Sashas. And probably, on some subliminal level, even my recent move to Park Slope was motivated by a desire to further dissociate myself from the Cyrillic specter that I kept trying, unsuccessfully, to shake. I mean, Park Slope doesn’t have Russians. It’s the epitome of mixed and mingled and artsy America. All independent ethnic vibes draining into the deep basin of writers in coffee shops wearing skinny jeans, hipster glasses, and Converse sneakers, with their bikes double-chained to the corner lampposts that stand laden with guitar lesson advertisements.

But I made the freshman mistake of forgetting that the F-train comes up from that same part of the universe I didn’t want to have anything to do with. One, perhaps, has a selective memory when the anxiety of apartment hunting throws a Craig’s List ad in your face where the price is right and twenty other people want the same spot which happens to be just a block from Prospect Park, so you frantically start calling the landlord to convince him why you’re somehow better for the place than all the rest of them – “I’m a nice Jewish boy with a good credit history. Check my credit history!”

It was on one cold, Park Slope morning, that I boarded the train in my dooblyonkah and threw my bag onto my lap. Pulling out my hardcover copy of “The Brother’s Karamazov,” I sighed as I flipped to the place where my expired Starbucks card nestled comfortably between the 200 pages I had already gone through and the 600 I had yet to explore. A part of me felt that familiar nagging to just give it up, to abandon this monolithic novel which seemed to be just somber religious morality tale about the virtues of the Orthodox Church and the majesty of the Russian Empire. But then there was that same stubborn voice that refused to give up on a book I had already invested several weeks of commuting in.

Off to my side I could hear some Russian chatter, two babushka-looking women in headscarves nodded to each other as their sausage-like cankles dangled suspended over the floor of the subway car. I rolled my eyes, trying to ignore the intonations that my ears automatically picked up and identified as familiar, when the outline of a man sitting across from me caught my eye. Slowly, as if sensing the inevitability of this encounter, I raised my head. What I met was a bright Russian face with rosy cheeks – the kind that Stalin has in all of those propaganda posters you see in history books – reading a Russian newspaper and wearing a coat that was a dead-ringer for my own.

I started cracking up. The man glared at me, annoyed.

“Shto?” (“What?”).

“Nice coat,” I said in Russian.

“Spaseebah,” he replied, and then returned to reading his paper.

As the train lurched out of the Smith-9th St. Station, the sun, suspended over the river, glared at us, and I was pulled back into the intricate familial drama of the Karamzovs, back into Dostoevsky’s tome, the weight of which was slowly making my legs fall asleep.

Photo by anthonygrimley, licensed under Creative Commons.

Tags: Old Country

Posted by Ruvym, Monday, November 9th, 2009, 5:30 pm, Old Country.