the dead weight of felafal weighs like a nightmare upon the stomachs of the living

The title came to me in a bolt upon awakening from a heavy nap on Friday, after my little trip into Jerusalem, a little excitement for the eyes. The minibus in, twelve people: two Africans (presumably Ethiopian) who greeted each other in their own language but spoke Hebrew to the driver; one middle-aged woman in a long skirt and headscarf, one Hassid, and one old lady who moved over so the Hassid could sit alone and not touch any women, and the driver, wearing a yarmulke, all with authentic-sounding (though I never know) Hebrew; three American boys in yarmulkes, one of them spread out over one and a half seats, making loud English arrangements over his cell phone the entire way into town, another one graciously agreeing to sit cramped up on the floor in back behind the seats when it turned out there weren’t enough seats for the two American girls in long skirts who got on together; and me. In general, a fair representation of how things are, including the absolutely crawling all over the place quality of Americans, though a huge underestimation of Russians. There is a pretty well established set of self-identifying symbols here, as my aunt explained, that go way beyond something as universally noticeable as Hassidic dress. I mentioned that nobody wears hats here, even when it’s chilly. “That’s because the religious wear them”—married women are supposed to cover their hair, men obviously of all ages the head. Same with skirts: “And if a woman does wear a skirt who’s not religious, she wears a very short one, even if she’s of a certain age, just so there’s no mistake.”

Jerusalem sneaks up on you, appearing suddenly with full force around the bend, at once closed off with its endless off-white walls and spread open, ready for your contemplating gaze, a citty on a hill, poised for metaphor. I meet another aunt—actually my mother’s third cousin, in the category of people my grandfather calls, emphatically, “a very close relative!”—at noon near the Jerusalem bus station, which is mobbed with people trying to get through the one single bag inspection station at the front door and get to wherever they need to go for Shabbat. Public transportation stops when Shabbat starts, which means early at this time of year: the sun sets a little after four. This gave us around four hours to walk, return, catch another minibus, and make it home before it was time for other people, somewhere in the vicinity, to start lighting candles. We raced through the city, ran through the market, hurried through the curving lanes, stopping only to snap a picture here and there and pick a leaf off a tree in a cemetary. Smell this. Eucalyptis. And on a street. Smell this. Laurel. And off a bush. Smell this. Rosemary. Blooming, purply beflowered, supple leaved rosemary. Rosemary the likes of which my own Chicago rosemary has only seen in glossy movie star magazines; here, out on the street in broad daylight like an ordinary person, for all the world just like that, here in this mythic land.

We took the Arab side path from Jaffa Gate, amazing cloth, a man carrying two glasses of tea on a silver tray up the steps, embroidered dresses, a couple of Hassids, stairways cut at funny angles into the stone. Then through a bit of the Jewish part—kind of the same thing with a Hollywood touch, Americans sitting around drinking soda, rock music—and then to the Wall, where the guy manning the metal detector and checking our bags asked my relative if we were from Jerusalem. I am, she replied, but she’s not. “So what” she transated him as asking, “is she doing here then?” Well, you know. she answered, more or less, it’s like, the wailing wall. He shrugged, and his whole face shrugged with him: the universal shrug of the unimpressed Jew. Nu, so, the wailing wall. And then the bus stop outside it, next to where the old ritual baths were, whose dried remains still pockmark the area around the second temple. And then the bus ride back through Jerusalem, about as long as our original walk had been, down the hill from the temple and through Mea Shearim, the ultra-orthodox neighborhood, where everyone seemed to walk with a suitcase—on their way to spending Shabbat somewhere or other—and some clearly out of town men had already changed from their normal large wide-brimmed hats to the squat cylindrical fat fur-style tubes they wear for Shabbat.

My relative dropped me off at the station, bought me a quick falafel at the corner felafel stand from a man in a large yarmulke, and hurried off to buy some stuff for dinner and get home herself before the buses stopped running and before she broke a holy law—she’s religious herself. Waiting around for a minibus, I realize that I don’t have enough change left, only a large bill. I don’t know what the situation is with giving change on minibuses; wouldn’t do to get caught in Jerusalem after the sun went down. I hop back into the felafel stand to ask for change. Luckily before I get too far into my incomprehensible English, the yarmulked man remembers me and starts speaking Russian. Of course. Apparently the bus drivers give change, even for large bills. The next step is actually getting on a bus: the minibus stops are as mobbed as the official one. I finally manage to be close enough to the door of one of them, asking the girl next to me—clearly religious, with a black beret and a long skirt—where it’s going. The right place.

She’s American. Of course. Early twenties, taking a post-wedding trip with her brand new but already visibly hen-pecked husband, who has a knee problem of some sort: “I’ll put the suitcase in the back. Michael, hold your crutches, I can’t take everything.” He sits at the window and doesn’t say a word the entire way, while she and I chatter away like hen-pecking wives. Except for the fact that I could probably pick her mother out of a crowd, so certain am I that she is reproducing her in oral intonation and romantic relationship, the exciting thing about her was that she, a girl who grew up in New York City and speaks flawless American English, also says things like “usually when I come to Israel I stay by my sister.” I spent the whole conversation trying to steer her back to the topic of guestmanship—not difficult, between the two of them they have quite a bit of family in Israel, it turns out—and to my delight she never once said “with.” It is perhaps the only unself-conscious Yiddishism I’ve ever heard from someone my age. I got dropped off at the American yeshiva down the street, and finished my felafel on the walk home, responding to my grandmother’s “Well, and, what will you have for lunch” by promptly falling asleep. Authentic Israeli felafel, it turns out, not only have strange spices that we don’t have there in America, but also come with french fries, deliciously over-salted, stuffed into the pita along with the felafel balls. And I laugh when my grandfather eats bread with pasta.

personal fronts and impersonal fronts

My grandmother is watching her Argentinian soap opera, dubbed into Russian. These first made it to Russia in the 1980s, I think, and they hit like crack cocaine. My mother remembers her great-aunt complaining about them in the mid-nineties, going into great detail to explain “the nonsense they’re playing here now” before looking at the time and hurrying off. But I thought you said it was such nonsense, my mother said. “Of course it’s nonsense, and you can’t miss a single episode! It’s terrible,” and she turned on the television. My grandfather reads the paper next to her. My mother is waiting for the water for the shower to heat up, reading Elaine Pagels on sex and morality in the Christian tradition. Outside my window someone is playing Hebrew rock and roll; last night it was Russian rap, the kind where you can hear that the back-up girls are naked.

So, today, another walk with my grandfather, this time with his hearing aid. The ear he hears with is on the same side as the arm he holds the cane with, so when you walk with him you’re next to the deaf ear, and when you want to say something you have to kind of talk around his head to the ear that hears, hence all the stopping and looking and not walking, I think. The ear he doesn’t hear with was on the other side of his head from the wound he got—I think it was the second wound. He was lying in the hospital where they were patching up his head, and he told the nurse he couldn’t hear anything with the other ear. The doctor looked at the ear and couldn’t see anything wrong, so he figured he’d get over it. Much later he found out that it was nerve damage from the wound on the other side of his head—so of course the doctor wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with the inside of the ear itself. The next time he was wounded he was in another hospital, and still couldn’t hear anything in that ear, but he didn’t say anything, even though he really should have: “at least they would have written it down, I would have gotten a free hearing aid.”

That next time was in a better hospital, which he got to by hook and by crook. He’d got some shrapnel in his bone from a wound to his leg, but since the field hospital couldn’t do an X-ray, they couldn’t take it out. They sent him on to another hospital closer inland, and when they got there two of his buddies who also had families in Moscow told him to get his papers, with the history of his wound, from the head doctor. He went in to the head doctor, who didn’t want to give them up. “Well, I started to talk him into it. ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!’ I said. That’s Dante, Anechka.” Finally the doctor gave him his papers, with a warning to say he’d stolen them himself if someone asked. He found the buddies, and together they boarded a frieght train headed toward a town in the Moscowly direction. There they got off and found a passenger train full of military men. They understood right away what was going on—two guys in uniform with arms in slings, another walking with a cane—and got them onto the train. “Right away people got up to make room for us. They spread out their coats,” here my grandfather chokes up a bit, as he’s prone to do when something moves him, which I think is a hereditary trait, actually, “because they could see that I was injured, and they lay me down on a seat. And that’s how we rode all the way to Moscow.”

When they got off the train in Moscow they were promptly arrested by the NKVD (the proto-KGB). But they explained to the guy what they were doing, and “he understood our position. We had families in Moscow.” And so they got into the NKVD hospital, a very good hospital, and the volunteer on duty got the address from my grandfather and went right away to inform his family. His father and my grandmother got there as he was being carried out on a stretcher to remove the shrapnel from his leg. They waited until he was brought back and it was there, recovering from the operation, that he first saw his son, my uncle, who I guess at that point was about a year old or so—I’m having a little trouble getting a straight chronology on this. The next time he’d see him after this spell in the hospital would be after the end of the war.

He started recovering quickly after the shrapnel was removed, and when he could walk, my grandmother brought him a pair of black pants and a shirt. He’d sneak into the neighboring yard and change in the outhouse, and in the evenings they’d stroll together. One day as he was returning, the outhouse door went, according to my grandfather, bang. Someone burst in on him. Apparently someone had witnessed this strange man sneaking in and out of the outhouse night after night and had reported it to the authorities. What are you doing here? the man asked. “Changing,” my grandfather replied, with the exact same look of innocent amusement, I suspect, as he had this morning, sixty some years later, telling me about it.

The man dragged him out of the outhouse and, refusing to look at the papers that my grandfather tried to hand him, started walking him to the hospital, to get to the bottom of this, my grandfather all the way trying to talk him out of it, explaining that if they found out they wouldn’t let him stroll with his wife anymore, that he was going back to the front soon anyway, to just be a buddy why don’t you. When they got to the hospital and were swarmed by a group of war invalids who all said the exact same thing, they guy finally relented and let him go, and thus he was able to keep strolling with his wife all the way up until he was sent back to the front for the next three years. His delight at this great good luck, a hospital respite in Moscow that let him stroll about with his wife, shows clearly. My grandfather’s face, like mine, is an open field: bolts of emotion strike with perfect clarity, transforming the whole area in their image. And after the lightning of delight, a slower cloud of memory. “She was very lucky to have escaped, Anechka.” She’d been evacuated (as his wife, not as a refugee from Poland) from the town in western Ukraine where they’d met, shortly before it was occupied. After the war, my grandfather went back there once; all the Jews were gone. There’d been a wooden synagogue—of course as soon as he says “wooden,” you know where the story is going. The story walks us home.

about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters

We’ve gradually gotten into some slight storytelling mode over the last two days—I expect today to be considerably enhanced by the arrival, last night, of a repaired hearing aid for my grandfather. The social atmosphere is so dense, though, that it's difficult to write about it until it's compacted a bit.

Okay, it's compacted. My god, but not very much.

***
A friend of mine, an American, is reading a book on Chernobyl, a recent ethnography that cites people as saying, more or less, yeah a nuclear meltdown is bad, but it’s nothing compared to the famine of the ‘30s. The American friend asked where it was I came from in the Soviet Union, exactly, and responded to my Moscow with, “at least you’re not from the Ukraine!” And, well, at least I’m not; and certainly not from the ‘30s. Two days ago my grandfather of his own accord stumbled, in a story, onto his 1930s, which did take place in the Ukraine. My mother and I raised our eyebrows at each other; I’d told her abut the American friend. I think when you grow up with the dim assumption of horrible tragedy befalling everyone who is older than you, even as you yourself get only the milk and cookies of history, it's always a little funny to find out that other people don't have assumptions like that, and might even at some point find out about those tragedies for the first time – gaining, thereby, often a much more accurate, much less dim, understanding of them, but not really assimilating them as basic background.

In 1932 my grandfather's family managed to get into a Jewish collective farm in Crimea. His father had a cousin there who got them in. Not as bad as the Ukraine, but also "not sweet." He and his older brother Kolya decided it wasn't the place for them -- "I needed a profession! What was I going to do there?" -- so they escaped to Har'kov', a largely Russian industrial city in Ukraine, and joined a factory of some sort associated with a school of some sort -- where they manufactured during the day and studied in the evening, supposedly. Places like this, factories, had rations, so if you could squeeze in somehow you might get at least enough food to live on. It's unclear how they did squeeze through, though from the sounds of it Kolya had excellent social skills, was always involved in some sort of life-saving enterprise -- unlike my grandfather, who was a bookworm and always wanted to be in school. My grandfather adored him, and still does. It was several years after he went missing at the front that the rumors they were getting—someone said he had been shot by his own men, not unknown treatment for Jews in Russian companies, someone else just that he had been shot—converged heavily enough on his death that they decided to assume it.

The factory had a long, dark barracks full of beds, and at the end of the room was an empty stove. It turned out that factory rations differed depending on the normal criteria that you'd expect: the ones with named for Stalin got food and wood; others got nothing or close to it. All the other boys in the plant were Russian except for the two of them ("Russian," of course, means "not Jewish" -- probably there were Ukranians as well), but nonetheless "our relations were very good."(1)

At that time Har'kov' was busy building a new section of the city (he named it, so I guess it's something one ought to know). At night the boys would take turns going out to the sections just being built and breaking down fences or whatever they could find that was breakable, to get wood for the empty stove. At this point my grandfather was around 15 or 16. He got into this part of the story because somehow he mentioned that when he applied to the Jewish mathematical school in the mid-30s, the examining teacher asked him what language he was more comfortable speaking, and he said Russian -- he'd been living with the Russian boys for two years already and hadn't been speaking Yiddish. But in the ‘20s he'd been in a Jewish school (a "7-year") where his literature teacher would take him to Ukranian schools to recite Yiddish poetry; he recited well. Then my uncle came in and the story was interrupted. "More tomorrow," my grandfather said.

I've heard parts of this story before -- I have it recorded from last time. It's not pretty, and it's not very coherent in the same way my grandmother's Holocaust escape isn't. Somehow when people talk about how they survived world-class tragedies it always sounds muddled. I have a feeling for why it is, but I can't quite get a hold of it. It's a number of things, I guess. One is a disjuncture of empathy, the way that a person you can normally get, somewhat even from the inside, could have lived through something you won't ever be able to really understand with your gut. Another is the difficulty of imagining a situation with radically different necessities and assumptions: we just don't talk about the actual necessities of survival, ever, in the normal course of things. What does it mean to live on half a loaf of bread and a plate of soup a day, and still be working in a factory and going out at night in the Russian winter to break down fences to burn? There are systems there too, patterns for survival, kinds of luck you have to have -- you have to not get sick in the middle of the famine, obviously, you have to not get a very bad splinter that gets infected when you're out stealing wood, I don't know, you have to not have a crisis in a crisis situation -- but they're so different from the patterns we're used to that it looks from the outside like chaos.

It's like when I was in Russia in 1992 and everything was falling apart, there was hyperinflation, and people were simply not getting paid for months and months at a time. What does it mean not to have been paid since January in June? One woman told me it meant "I can't buy butter for my son," which I, a butterlover born and bred, found a powerful description. But somehow they were still living -- there were other protocols for acquisition than salaries. A mother who was still getting her pension; a particularly active garden; friends who shared; a son -- in that, butter, case -- who was taking advantage of the onset of capitalism by buying beer cheap at the store and selling it dear at the train station, and who was, at sixteen, making more money than both his parents put together, much to their dismay because they were, in his contemptuous phrase, "Soviet people." But it's hard for me to think of these other protocols myself, I need them enumerated one by one.

And then there's just the way that it is a muddle, that the only way that people live through things like this is to muddle through. Everything depends on chance encounters -- my grandmother, abandoned on her way East in a park in some city into which the German army would shortly march, was spotted by someone who recognized her and decided to admit to it, even though it was probably not very convenient, and sent in the right direction. I wonder if part of the reason it's so difficult to understand is that it's difficult not to treat the ultimate survival of the people in front of you -- especially if they happen to be, as in the case of grandparents, the conditions of possibility for your own existence -- as a teleological necessity rather than a conglomeration of coincidences that were much more likely, statistically speaking, not to have happened. It's difficult to treat your relatives as unlikely; even more difficult to treat yourself so.

***

In the meantime I've gone for an hour-long "walk" with my grandfather, which means twice up and down the parking lot with him on my arm, mostly standing still to talk. He's deaf enough that he needs to look at you very closely when you are talking, and so I think he assumes that other people need to look at him very closely when he's talking, too, so basically he can't talk and walk at the same time, at least not while he's making eye contact. This time toward the end I figured out that if you don't look at him but look down or ahead, he actually will walk and talk at the same time, but you have to keep nudging him along.

The father's cousin in the Crimean collective farm was someone who had taken advantage of the New Economic Policy after the civil war, when they allowed limited private enterprise. He'd opened a store, bought a house, done well, but realized in time to save his life that the tide was turning and that the NEPmen, as they were known, were about to get dispossessed and then something, killed or sent to camps. After his house was expropriated and he was shoved into a little apartment with his wife and five children and parents in law, he sold the store and took his family to the Jewish collective farm in Crimea, returning a few years later to enroll others, including my grandfather’s family. By the time they got on the train to go there—he’d enrolled “a whole train-car full of people”—all they had on them to eat were some onions. Onions! At the first stop in Crimea the train was met with a delegation of Jews bearing food, a loaf of bread for each family—“five or six kilograms, a huge loaf of bread! Well we got to that loaf pretty quickly and ate it all”—and other things. Good living, Crimea, comparatively speaking.

After my grandfather and his brother ran away from there to Har'kov' and attached themselves to the factory with the empty stove, there were some very hard times -- "I don't remember at all what we ate. I just remember seeing my brother begging a man who was driving a truck of bread, 'Uncle, give us a piece of bread.' But of course he couldn't; he’d have to feed everyone; everyone was hungry." The factory was not called Stalin but "Hammer and Sickle," in Russian "Serp i Molot," which the people there called "Smert' i Golod," which translates to "Death and Hunger" but rhymes. Their parents were doing okay for a while, so well that they even started raising a pig -- "Well, they'd rejected God, the Soviets" -- but then there was nothing to feed the pig with so they killed it and sent Kolya and my grandfather a care package of grain of some sort and lard from the pig. They cooked the grain in water in a jar and ate it with the lard "instead of bread. It was awkward to eat it during the day when everyone could see, so we waited until they were all asleep. We finished the whole package in one night." And then he doesn't remember how they lived.

Finally, Kolya managed to get them enrolled in a factory called Stalin, and they ran away from the empty stove. At the factory named Stalin they got a daily ration of a certain weight of bread, usually a loaf and a little more. They ate the little extra and sold the loaf, and with the money bought tokens for the factory dining hall, and with what was left over bought things to send to their parents. Ah! and this is why when he took the test to get into a four-year school, where the teacher asked him if he preferred Russian or Yiddish, after he'd finished, the director of the school came in. It turned out that she had been in charge of the Death and Hunger factory-school, from which eventually all the boys had run away in their various directions, for which she'd gotten in trouble. So when she recognized my grandfather she said, "I don't need this hooligan in my school!" and that was that. Good thing too, actually: "What would I have eaten for four years?"

By this time his parents had joined them in Har'kov', with his little sister, who was going to school (she now lives about a half hour's drive away from here). He wanted to keep going to school so he joined up with another factory-school, and then got into the university nearby. He was taking his exam and the teacher was walking around to see how people were doing, and he noticed that my grandfather had done everything right except one problem, which he hadn't touched. What's the matter? I don't know what it means, my grandfather explained. "You see Anechka, our education was a haltura" -- the best translation I can think of is "a mess of half-assedness." The teacher explained what the symbols meant -- sine of what angle and so on -- and my grandfather got it. So he entered the university and got a stipend of forty rubles a month, which he handed over to his mother, and passed all his exams but never went to half the lectures because he'd skip months of class at a time to help his father, who was working as a painter, to support the family.

This is the one point in the story where he expresses real regrets: if he’d lived in the dormitory, if he’d—he doesn’t put it this way—abandoned his parents, he’d have been able to attend all the lectures. He really wasted his university years, going around working for his family. I find it interesting that the one thing he finds extraordinary enough to regret is the one thing that to me seems completely obvious: everything else, the famine, the war, the antisemitism, these are all historically specific occurrences. Your reaction to them depends on the specific conditions and possibilities that you found yourself in or managed to find out. But staying out of school to help make money to support your family seems to be a universal characteristic of impoverishment, whether your poverty is specific to you or, as in their case, just a fact of living in that society. To me it’s the least remarkable thing about the whole story.

Then a job in western Ukraine, then my grandmother, and then, two weeks after they "formalized" their marriage, the war. When he came back from the war in 1946, with four wounds and a mound of medals, nobody would hire him. He looked for work for six months before a friend introduced him to someone high up in the educational bureaucracy -- "a shining individual" -- who told him to go to such and such a school and to say that he had sent him, and that had told him that they were in need of a math teacher. "He knew they were scum, of course." He went and found two people there, the director, a Party member, and another older administrator, another "shining individual," nonpartied, who later told him that after he had introduced himself and been asked to wait outside, the director turned to him and said, "What do we need this Jew for?" But had hired him after all, upon being shamed by the shining individual, reminded of the service at the front and, probably more importantly, of the importance of the man who had recommended him. And so also because of this scum, we are alive.

All the time we've been standing out in the parking lot, various people have been passing by; some exchange "Shalom" with us, others stop and chat in Russian. As we get to these last paragraphs, standing already near the door, a swarthy guy in a yarmulka walks in and out of the house a few times, taking out the garbage, carrying things to his car. I smile and nod at him the way we have been at everyone, but he just stares at me and walks a little closer to us each time he passes. Stares on the way out, stares on the way back in, and stares on the way back out again. On his last trip out the guy in the yarmulka is still staring, walking an arm's length away, making a sucking sound with his teeth that sounds like halfway between a catcall and a spit; then sits in his car revving it for so long that we can smell the gas on the walk up to the house. And of course I think, as I nudge my grandfather along to get out of the glare and out of the gas, Fucking Jews.



(1) During the ritual questioning about my life “on the personal front” yesterday, we finally arrived, after the various information about profession and heritage, at the question of whether the relevant parents were cognizant of my being Jewish. To my insistence that “In America they don’t give a spit” [that’s a literal translation], my grandfather recalled with glee the time when he’d asked my brother how many of his college friends were Jewish and my brother had replied, “I don’t know.” Can you imagine? A country where you wouldn’t know if your friends were Jewish! It was a marvel. Of course my brother was lying; but it was in the service of a point.

the holy land

My teeth are a little slimy feeling but otherwise everything seems fine. I’m sitting at my grandfather’s desk in the room with two windows, both of them sealed at the edges with masking tape. In front of me, the window looks out onto variously colored concrete that differentiates parking lot (grey) from sidewalk (red and black striped), and behind the concrete a small playground with a sand-and-grass base; out of the window to my left I can see a very small bulldozer with no behind to speak of carrying shovelfuls at a time of dirt from the corner of the parking lot somewhere very far away before returning for more. It makes around one trip every two minutes, lending an automotive punctuation to the morning. My grandparents, similarly sized, are sitting next to each other in the living room, so still and with postures so similar that you might have bought a male and female version from the doll series reading grandparents: torso twisted roughly twenty-five degrees to the left of center, right shoulder somewhat slumped and left shoulder somewhat lifted, head bent a bit to parallel the angle of the book and eyebrows raised as if to say, “You don’t say!” My mother’s getting dressed in the next room over, having emerged from the shower in the regulation padded dressing gown with small flower print. I, a rebellious child who only eats half her oatmeal, will wait to shower until we get back from the store, where I am hoping I can procure a toothbrush.

My plane out of Chicago was a couple of hours late—apparently they couldn’t get out of wherever they were coming from—so by the time we landed in Newark, there was less than half an hour left of my original three hour layover. I jogged from the gate to the airport train, tapped and jittered annoyingly from terminal A to terminal C, got a mysterious reprimand from the headscarved African American woman who checked my identification for security at terminal C (“Hold your head up, Anna.”), and didn’t bother putting anything away after security but sprinted like a track and field tenth grader to the gate, holding my laptop and passport in one hand. “Are you coming from Chicago?” the lady checking tickets at the empty gate called out as I ran up. “Your mother’s waiting for you on the plane.” “Ah, Bairn-shtain?” the man checking in stragglers on the plane pronounced it Russian-style, as they all do here, and crossed me off his little list. “Your mother is waiting for you.” And so she was, down the other aisle, standing up and waving both hands. We piled in and faced each other so thoroughly that it was only as we were disembarking ten hours later that the man in the window seat—who had somehow managed to leave it and return to it without either of us noticing—could ask what language we were speaking, and whether this was our first time here.

In the meantime there were many important things to discuss. For one thing there was the matter of airplane food, which tastes almost decent, it turns out, in the “Hindu” version, and which has also sometimes a decent fruit version. I was discouraged from eating what was called chicken and handed a sandwich from David instead. Which brought up David’s fruitcakes—the most delicious fruitcakes ever, a justification of the concept of fruitcake. We were carrying one for my aunt and uncle, and one for us and my grandparents. Really, it’ll make you understand why people eat fruitcake, my mother assured me. Mmmmm! I can’t wait.

Then there were the presents. Various presents for various relations, and then presents from other people’s relations—a collection of pills for my grandparents’ neighbor whose sister in Brighton Beach had gotten the prescription that she, the neighbor, needed, but wasn’t sure how best to send it. To send it by post cost money. But to send it with my mother was dangerous: it was a big crime to transport medicine from country to country, and she did not want to put my mother in danger. My mother got in touch with the sister’s daughter, thinking that she may be a little less risk-averse, but got the same story. “When you go through customs, the first question they always ask you is, ‘Are you carrying any medicines?’” the sister’s daughter insisted. It was a very dangerous undertaking. Perhaps they should just forget about the pills. After several telephone calls, my mother finally convinced them with the reasoning that, since they were only sending to her, it wasn’t international; and as for her, she was taking it across the border of her own free will. Finally, the day before she was leaving, she got a package with some pills, the names carefully ripped off the labels.

Then there was sleep.

Then there was passport control, always a thrill in Israel. We went up together, so I barely had to talk. “So, you immigrated from here to America?” “No, from Russia to America. My parents came here.” “When did they come here?” “1991.” “And when did you go to America?” “Long ago.” “When?” “1980.” “So, you never lived in Israel with your parents?” “No.” “Why not?” “Well…” “Why don’t you make aliya?” “Well, it’s difficult.” “Why difficult? Your parents are already here.” “Yes, but my husband is American.” “So bring him too.” “Well…” You wonder what this line of questioning accomplishes. Certainly it does not get you any new information about whether my mother is a terrorist, or sympathizes with Palestinians, or is likely to overstay her visa and stay on here as an illegal migrant laborer—presumably the sorts of things that someone in a passport control booth would be worried about. I can imagine that he sometimes gets a mother-daughter team who look vaguely like us but reply enthusiastically that, yes indeed, they are planning to make aliya just as soon as everything is settled with the pregnant sister in Jersey. But if the people he talks to have, like us, no plan and no desire to move to Israel, it’s difficult to imagine these questions inspiring them to change their minds. It strikes me, actually, as a recognizably Jewish approach to a situation you don’t approve of: the passport controlman sounds like nothing so much as my grandmother, pushing a plate of oatmeal at me and telling I’m too thin, I need to eat. I don’t eat it, of course, because I’m not hungry; nu, but okay, at least she tried. She knows she’s in the right, anyway. So nu, okay, we can enter the country. At the end of the interview he glanced at my passport. “You were born in Moscow?” Surprised. “Yes.” “How old are you? Twenty?” Which is kind of a funny question for a person holding your passport to ask, now that I think about it.

It didn’t occur to us until we were waiting for our luggage that my suitcase probably goes to the gym less regularly than I do, and had probably not run fast enough to catch the right plane. When it failed to arrive I went to file the claim, which involved taking the piece of paper with my name and the contents of the suitcase written on it over to one of the people at customs and having him sign it. The person I accosted was busy actually scanning the insides of other people’s actual luggage and had no time to waste on my virtualities, signing my piece of paper without looking at it and sparing himself the details of my addictions (“slippers, coffee, coffeemaker”) and my medical procedures (“suture removal kit”). I then took my paper back over to the girl at the desk, just barely slipping through the mob that was closing in on her from all sides, and in return got a phone number in English just before she disappeared beneath the Hebrew-speaking mass.

The next day would be an adventure of homebound maneuvering. I called the airline, who had an English line with a number that supposedly went with the driver. I called the number and spoke in English to a guy who was not the driver, but who could give me the driver’s number, but “the driver does not speak English.” So the guy called the driver for me, and I called him back; the driver would be here around two thirty. Around two thirty we get a call; it’s the driver, he speaks a little English, he’s lost. Actually, everyone gets lost here; the doctors who get called out for my grandparents’ emergencies get lost. We’re trying to figure out how to direct him here, I say something to my mother, and hear the driver call into the phone, “A vi po ruskii govoriti, nu chtozhe mi golovou morochim? (Oh you speak Russian! What are we messing with our heads for?)” It was a satisfying moment, in an aural cinematic kind of way, but even as a Russian speaker he was still lost and still incapable of giving a decent description of where he was. Finally my mother lulled him into admitting that there was a store right across the street from where he was parked, and we ran out of the house and down the little hilly lawn that leads down to the street where he was, as my mother had kind of suspected, standing, right across from the Russian store we buy all our food from. (So now, halfway through the story, I can brush my teeth.)

But that was all the next day. Now we’re still at the airport.

Outside, in the airport, my mother waited for me with my cousin, who had that day become father to a second child, a baby boy. The first child, a little girl, was with my uncle and aunt, who brought her to my grandparents’ soon after we got there. She walked in all curls and cheeks, carrying a doll on each arm. One doll was dressed in pink. Its name was “Masha.” The other doll was dressed in blue. Its name was “Bebi Boy.” When she saw the real Bebi Boy in the hospital the next day, we’re told, she was delighted, and started wheeling him around and playing with him until it was time for him to go, at which point she became incensed that someone was taking her dollie away.

This morning, while my mother was still asleep, the husband of the neighbor with the sister in Brighton Beach came by to pick up the medicine. Someone handed him the plastic bag my mother had sleepily picked out from her collection, and a small silver-colored tiara with a fur-lined base. For his great-granddaughter. “Were there any dresses?” He asked. “There were supposed to be some dresses for the little girl as well. Could you check to see if there were any dresses?” I went to my mother’s room. No dresses, I reported back. He twisted the handles of the plastic bag.

“That’s a shame.”

“There were supposed to be some dresses.”

“For Purim, you see, she likes to dress up. They were supposed to send a couple of dresses for her.”

We diverted him onto other topics, our newborn great-grandson. He has six great-grandchildren already: one grandson has one child, one granddaughter has two, and another granddaughter, she married a religious guy, so they have three. My mother got up. He thanked her, then asked again about the dresses. No, she repeated, no dresses; but they said they’d send another package with someone else. All she was taking were the pills and the crown. He got up and thanked her again, seemingly trying to think of what an appropriate counter-favor would be—offering to send something to America?—and made his exit. We started our morning milling about, me with an updated version of the familiar wrangle over how much breakfast I’m supposed to eat. My grandmother has been strictly warned not to force food on me, so now my grandfather tries to force food on me while my grandmother scolds him, it’s like the same piece with an extra instrument: we’re exploring a more complex harmonic structure.

The phone keeps ringing with five-minute conversations to welcome my mother. One of these lasts suspiciously long, with my mother apparently interrupted at every sentence until she bursts out in a kind of howling laughter that you wouldn’t quite know what to make of. She hangs up. It was the woman with the sister in Brighton Beach. They’d opened up the plastic bag, but instead of a bottle of pills they had found inside it a big biscuit of some sort. So they had figured, logically enough, that her sister in Brighton Beach had taken all the pills and baked them into this big biscuit, to hide them from the customs agents. They had taken to and destroyed the biscuit, reducing it to crumbs. But they had found no pills. So, it seems that they had thought better of it and decided not to send the pills after all?

A little while later the husband came by again to pick up the right bag, and he was smart to come and go quickly, because I don’t think my mother will ever forgive him for the destruction of her fruitcake. “Biscuit, indeed!”