{"id":20981,"date":"2011-09-19T12:38:28","date_gmt":"2011-09-19T16:38:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=20981"},"modified":"2018-12-17T12:12:05","modified_gmt":"2018-12-17T17:12:05","slug":"our-little-americanka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/19\/our-little-americanka\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Little Americanka"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometime in the last few years, my sixty-five-year-old father, a Soviet mathematician who spent the first fifty years of his life in Moscow, began speaking to me in English.<\/p>\n

That I can\u2019t recall when exactly this happened makes the shift seem, at least in retrospect, both gradual and sudden. One day he was correcting my Russian, his laughter once ascending into a taunting squeal as I attempted to casually use the swear word svoloch<\/em> (along the lines of \u201cscum\u201d) and mistakenly said slovoch<\/em>, which, if it were an actual insult, would mean \u201cworder.\u201d Another day, not much later, during what must have been an argument, I couldn\u2019t find the Russian words to describe whatever I was feeling, and I remember my father, calm and patient, saying, \u201cSay eet een English, my luv.\u201d Then last week, a voice mail: \u201cHi. It is me. Call me back please.\u201d When I return his call, the voice that I know to be father\u2019s asks, without the sharp edges that used to define his accent, \u201cHave you ever been to the Hamptons? Nice place.\u201d<\/p>\n

When we moved to the States, I was ten; my father, forty-eight. What this meant was that I lost my accent by the time I started high school while my parents still pulled up to the gas station attendant and said, \u201cFool up regular.\u201d I spent whole afternoons then explaining to my mother that \u201cze\u201d and \u201czat\u201d were nothing like \u201cthe\u201d and \u201cthat.\u201d That no one in America hung Persian rugs on their walls as decoration. That boiled potatoes were not dinner. When my haughtiness was amusing, they called me \u201cour little Americanka;\u201d other times they looked at me with unrecognizing dismay\u2014there was a stranger in their home, or, worse, a traitor. <\/p>\n

Now something similar was happening to my father. The rugs dropped to the floor. Have you ever been to the Hamptons? Nice place.<\/em> It was like watching a teenager discovering and appropriating the world around him: his acquired affectations so familiar, so endearing in their transparency and then irritating for the same reasons. Our little Americanetz<\/em>. I missed the charming clunkiness of his beginner\u2019s English that always sounded wiser in its flaws. \u201cVooman has soft, bootiful hands,\u201d my father once said to me. \u201cMan vork so vooman keep soft hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently, I heard about that mythical vooman<\/em> again, not from my father, but from my television screen, uttered by the mother of a twenty-three-year-old heroine named Diana on the reality television show Russian Dolls<\/a><\/em>. \u201cThe vooman have to be all,\u201d says Diana\u2019s mother, a bleach-blonde prophet stirring a steaming pot of borscht. \u201cThe vooman have to be housekeeper. The vooman have to be good wife. The vooman have to be vooman.\u201d<\/p>\n

The show, created by two young women (not voomen<\/em>) in their twenties, Elina Miller and Alina Dizik, who immigrated not to Brooklyn but the tamer Russian immigrant enclave of Chicago, is currently airing on the Lifetime channel. Following the show\u2019s August premiere, my cousin had taken to posting quotes from the show on his Facebook page, spoken in the kind of English that required the show\u2019s editors to institute subtitles: \u201cYou look a little bit lose weight,\u201d says another character\u2019s mother, later adding, \u201cI so proud from you.\u201d (Though not for being a \u201clittle bit lose weight.\u201d) I took the bait. I tuned in.<\/p>\n

There is a wonderful symmetry to the show: it follows three waxed, dyed, and needlessly painted bachelorettes (Diana, 23; Anna, 22; Anastasia, 26) and three witty Brighton Beach matriarchs (Renata, 47; Sveta, 47; Marina, 34). There are men too, but their role is to open their wallets a lot and their mouths little. Like Bravo\u2019s Real Housewives franchise, the show is about status, here measured by the radiant hue of fruity drinks and tautness of animal-print garments. These are not women, but voomen<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I asked my cousin out to drinks. Though we are the same age, my cousin Dmitriy is older in American years, having arrived in our Coney Island high-rise three years before me. As my seasoned guide to the square block radius that was sold to us as America, he took me to a deli on my second day in this country and showed me how to order a sandwich. \u201cYou can get anything you want on it,\u201d I remember him saying, \u201cor, all<\/em> of it.\u201d (Or, as Russian Doll Anastasia says, \u201cThis is America dammit and I have options.\u201d) That same week, after a trip to the aquarium, we sat on a bench on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, watching the old men play chess in the December chill and ate order after order of onion rings until our stomachs hurt.<\/p>\n

This time we met at a bar in Grand Central, not far from the Manhattan bank where Dmitriy now works as a mortgage broker. Our favorite character, we quickly agreed, was Anna, a \u201cmodel\u201d who lives with her family in a two-bedroom apartment in Brighton Beach, where her bed is a clumsy pyramid of cheap stuffed toys and her grandmother, Beba, sleeps on the couch. At twenty-two, resourceful Anna already has a career to fall back on, running a modeling school for newly arrived Russian girls; she is at once fairy godmother, pimp, and naturalization bureaucrat.<\/p>\n

And yet, I found watching the show that there was something enviable about Anna. Rather than being lost between two worlds, as we were, she had found a way to straddle them, seizing opportunity offered by her new land\u2014she would be buzinessvooman!<\/em>\u2014with goods from her old one.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a little jealous.\u201d I told my cousin. The expression on his face grew tense, serious.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou want to be \u2026 like them<\/em>?”<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, not exactly like them<\/em>,\u201d I said, \u201cbut they are sort of \u2026 more Russian than us.\u201d (Anna would know how to properly use the word svoloch<\/em>, or any other Russian expletive for that matter.)<\/p>\n

Dmitriy considered this. \u201cBut they don\u2019t live in America,\u201d he said. \u201cBrighton is where we went because we had to. You\u2019re not supposed to want to stay there.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the show premiered, Russian-American viewers waved their fists around in articles written about the show in newspapers here and abroad, over what they saw as an inaccurate portrayal of Russian immigrants: the stereotypes, the materialism, the vulgarity. Most of us <\/em>are not like them<\/em>, was the popular sentiment. They don\u2019t live in America \u2026 You\u2019re not supposed to want to stay there. <\/em><\/p>\n

That Russians are known to be a resilient people is due, in no small part, to the immigrant\u2019s evolved, practically Darwinian ability to adjust values and tastes when necessary. As our country back home had yet to settle on a post-Soviet identity\u2014 \u201cRussia is like a woman in a state of perpetual hangover,\u201d one Muscovite told me, his BMW racing along Tverskaya, \u201cshe is impossible to love.\u201d\u2014we happily subscribed to the stability offered by the early-nineties America of the grinning Clinton. As Russian Doll Renata says, \u201cIn America I learn you are what you say you are.\u201d And we became patriots. We shed our accents. Our parents put their money into banks. The summers we spent at Russian bungalow colonies in the Catskills, a sad substitute for the dacha, ended. We traded in traditional zakuski of rye bread, cucumbers, and beef tongue for onion rings. We begged our parents to take us to Florida, to see the friendly mouse. Have you ever been to the Hamptons? Nice place. <\/em>At some point, it became about us<\/em> and them<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And here were the Russian Dolls, eating zakuski on Brighton Beach nearly twenty years after immigrating. In the first episode, Diana asks Anastasia for advice. The dilemma? Her parents want her to marry a Russian man, but she is dating a Spanish guy named Paul. \u201cJust tell your mom his name is Pasha,\u201d says Anastasia, the all-knowing minx. This, when all the Pashas have been changing their name to Paul!<\/p>\n

The exchange reminded me of Abraham Cahan\u2019s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto<\/a><\/em>, a novel about a Russian Jewish immigrant who arrives on the Lower East Side and promptly changes his name from Yekl to Jake. Soon enough he becomes hostile to other less-adjusted immigrants, nicknaming them Greenhorns. When his wife Gitl joins him America with his son Yossele, they too are not spared from his harsh words:<\/p>\n

For several minutes at a time, while kicking his treadle, he would see, reddening before him, Gitl\u2019s bandana kerchief and her prominent gums, or hear an un-American piece of Yiddish pronounced with Gitl\u2019s peculiar lisp\u2014that very lisp, which three years ago he used to mimic fondly, but which now grated on his nerves and was apt to make his face twitch with sheer disgust \u2026 Ah, may she be killed, the horrid greenhorn.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gitl, played by Carol Kane in the 1973 film adaptation Hester Street<\/em>, is the original Russia Doll. In the end, her tightrope walk between heritage and modernity is a graceful one. The final scene shows Gitl emerging from the divorce proceedings in the Rabbi’s office as the victor and Jake\u2014seeing his horrid Greenhorn<\/em> without her \u201cbandana kerchief\u201d and in the arms of a traditionalist named Bernstein\u2014 as \u201cthe victim of an ignominious defeat.\u201d At some point we all became Jake; but what happens when we want to go back to Yekl? Will he still be there?<\/p>\n

My father who used to be Mikhail, but is now Michael, hasn\u2019t seen Russian Dolls<\/em>. My mother, who used to be Yelena and now goes by Lena, watched the show after I asked her to. She too loved the coquettish Anna and her mountain of stuffed toys. \u201cWhat are they going to do, make a show about computer programmers?\u201d she said, a retort to the critics. She changed the subject. She was enjoying the Russian translation of a book that she had just uploaded to her Sony reader. \u201cHave you heard of Eh-leeza-bez Geel-bert?\u201d She said this in Russian.<\/p>\n

Irina Aleksander is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.
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Sometime in the last few years, my sixty-five-year-old father, a Soviet mathematician who spent the first fifty years of his life in Moscow, began speaking to me in English. That I can\u2019t recall when exactly this happened makes the shift seem, at least in retrospect, both gradual and sudden. One day he was correcting my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":150,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1160],"tags":[3931,3937,3935,958,3930,938,3936,3934,3932,2275,3942,3938,447,3933,3939,3941,3940],"class_list":["post-20981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-television","tag-abraham-cahan","tag-alina-dizik","tag-brighton-beach","tag-brooklyn","tag-carol-kane","tag-chicago","tag-elina-miller","tag-elizabeth-gilbert","tag-hester-street","tag-immigration","tag-lifetime-channel","tag-real-housewives","tag-russia","tag-russian-dolls","tag-soviet","tag-yekl","tag-yekl-a-tale-of-the-new-york-ghetto"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOur Little Americanka by Irina Aleksander<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 19, 2011 \u2013 Sometime in the last few years, my sixty-five-year-old father, a Soviet 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