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.
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.
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