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Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table (a Memoir with Recipes)
by Boris Fishman
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My father's best friend was his father. Often, Boris picked the boy up from kindergarten and they went to the old Polish cemetery—Belarus now being Soviet rather than Polish, it had been turned into a park, but you could still see the old stones peering out, like half-drowned swimmers. There, Boris brought out a newspaper bundle with a beef patty, a large red tomato, and several pieces of black bread, and father and son chewed together in silence. Once, Boris pulled out a gift of a small vest and straw hat. My father wore it to school every day. His classmates jeered, but he didn't care. He was used to it. They made fun of him all the time because he was Jewish. "The boy is Jewish," his teacher's report-card assessment always began.
Sometimes Boris was imponderable. Once, a teenager in the play yard kept taunting my father—" kike, kike!"—so he ran home and told Boris. Boris got out a metal rod and had the older boy, now weeping, pinned under his knee—he would have killed him—when a passerby shouted, distracting Boris, and the boy squirmed out and ran off. My father watched, stunned. Boris didn't look at him, only tousled his hair before coughing into his sleeve and going inside. Because of his war injuries, his blood pressure was always too high. There was no medicine for it, so he endured terrible headaches and hours in bed with a cold compress over his forehead.
My father couldn't wait for their weekly trips to the steam baths—unlike Boris, who was so embarrassed by the fur on his body that he wouldn't go to the doctor because it meant removing his shirt. He pruned the hair with scissors. My father didn't ask why Boris had so much hair when almost everyone in the steam baths did not; whether that meant he'd have it, too. There was so much love between them, but not the kind where you could ask too many questions.
After tenth grade, Boris and Faina told my father that he had all the education he needed—he should get work. Through a friend, he got a spot as a barber. Barbers wore white smocks, preferable to stained overalls down in the mine shaft, but my father couldn't do it. You had to stand there and do the same thing over and over, and banter about the same false, vacant subjects. He could go back to school, but what was the point? You couldn't get a job without a connection, and even then, being Jewish kept you from going very far.
One afternoon in December 1972, my father, now nineteen, was crunching through the snow with an old friend who had to return something to his cousin. My father said he'd wait downstairs—he didn't like meeting new people, especially in such a well-appointed building in the center of the city. But it was below freezing, and the friend got him upstairs. There, my father couldn't help staring. The apartment was enormous. The parquet floor gleamed. A massive wall unit tinkled with crystal. The shelves groaned with books, the cupboards with multiple sets of dishes. The walls were painted with abstract lines of color, then the fashion.
The young woman who greeted them had huge black eyes, the whites around the pupils so white they were blue, and two pigtails like cables. How warmly she was dressed. She, in turn, saw a young man with a handsome mustache, folded into a flimsy, short jacket. She wanted to give him a warm one. She didn't know he wouldn't have wanted it. He didn't like wearing too many layers—they made him itch.
Several days later, my father, Yakov, called to ask the young woman, Anna, if he could return on his own. He caught a ride on a street-washing truck, flowers in hand. She loved flowers, so he brought them every time he came—pansies if the season was right, because in Russian pansies are called "Anna's eyes." In this home, there was momentum, initiative, energy. The family had relatives in Moscow, where Anna had been sent several times for a taste of life in the capital. Unlike Yakov's parents, who didn't have friends—on holidays, a handful of relatives came and sat at the table in silence—hers interacted with everyone from pickpockets to ministers. Their salon chairs—he was a barber and she a manicurist—hosted African students, Czech functionaries, Armenians with thick beards. At home, the refrigerator was full, and so were the closets. The only reason the family didn't have a car was that Anna's father, Arkady (ar-KAY- dee), found it easier to maneuver among his contacts by taxi. Every day was built around these barter journeys—deficit food, doctors on call, doors for Anna to walk through when she needed it. Sometimes the currency was simply a "well-covered" table.
From the book Savage Feast by Boris Fishman. Copyright © 2019 by Boris Fishman. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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