1 We will be Russians in America . . . Here's the thing: When I was thirteen and a gangling yardbird in my father's pigsty, a dried turd's throw from the village of Yanofska in Ukraine's fertile steppe where the czarist arseholes permitted the occasional Jew to farm the farm he actually owned, I would set aside a fistful of minutes after evening chores to have a conversation with my smug conscience, whom I identified as a he because the voice in my mind's ear sounded suspiciously like the snarly rasp of my childhood nemesis Leon Litzky, the crippled classmate who broke his ankle kicking an extra point extra hard; the blood-spattered son of a bitch once attacked me with his wooden crutch when I refused to autograph the cast on his leg. My conscience, like Litzky, was a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian. If I said night, you could count on him saying day. If I opined that, given my natal horoscope, I was destined to become famous, he'd snap, his lower lip curling in contempt, that I was born under a shooting star and would definitely become infamous. If I argued the merits of permanent revolution (a notion already vexing my acne-scarred adolescence), Litzky's soundless laughter would tickle my ear as he claimed the only permanent things under the sun were the Russian Orthodox Church and Jew-baiting and masturbation, that and the grim reaper death. If I boasted of earning a second in the Realschule gymnasium in Odessa, I could hear his scornful snort in my ear. Considering the competition, Bronshtein, you should have waltzed into a first. When I reminded him that I didn't know how to waltz, he'd retort with a manic laugh, Get a life, Bronshtein, learn to dance. I never did learn to dance. On this particular Saturday morning, the thirteenth day of January in the third year of the Great War, 1917, as the coal-powered rust bucket of a tramp steamer Montserrat , seventeen days out of Barcelona, slowed to pick up the harbor pilot and then slipped past the Trojan horse the wily French offered to a naive America, I'm talking about the colossal statue of a female of the species misnamed Lady Liberty, I made the mistake of boasting I'd escaped from the czar's Siberian prisons not once but twice (the second time across a thousand miles of frozen tundra on a luge drawn by reindeer). My conscience, a tough cookie who flattered himself he was my better angel, whispered in my ear, You escaped, Bronshtein, but you abandoned your wedded wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, the mother of your two little girls, Ninushka and Zinushka, stranding all of them in Siberia to fend for themselves. The wife encouraged me to save myself, I protested. The wife in question, an educated comrade who read Marx cover to cover before you knew the book existed, obviously loved the husband more than the husband loved the wife, he retorted. The wife in question, I explained, was reading an English translation of Ovid's "Remedies for Love"--which instructed women on how to fall out of love--and Aleksandra, taking her cue from this home-wrecker Ovid, announced that she had fallen out of love with me. She moved on so I moved out and on. All that is water under the bridge. Hoping a change of subject would put the conversation onto more positive terrain, I mentioned that I was excited to be setting foot in the New World. Litzky, as incorrigible as a myopic mule, could barely swallow his exasperation. Having been spit out of Russia and Austria and Switzerland and France and, more recently, Spain, of course you're excited to come to America. But is America excited to have a Menshevik like you-- I cut him off to set the record straight: There was a time, I informed my nemesis Litzky, when I saw myself as the Menshevik, with a foot in both factions of the chronically befuddled Social Democratic Labor Party, who could reconcile the crabby Mensheviks with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's cranky Bolsheviks and bring unity to the revolution that inhabits the old man's daydreams and nightmares. But I read the handwriting on the wall: We were wasting precious time and energy looking for unity. The war raging in Europe, the threat of President Wilson and the Americans joining in that war, the wilting of the czar if Russia should hopefully lose the war, required bold action, not shilly-shallying over commas and colons in a desperate quest for a middle ground. Truth is, I suspect I have become more comfortable identifying with Lenin's Bolsheviks than his Menshevik enemies. Despite his faults, I plunged on before my putative better angel could interrupt my interruption, despite his egomania, despite his explosive temper, despite his cantankerous rudeness and quarrelsome certitudes, despite his rancid breath and his squinting Mongolian eyes and the utter absence of a saving grace we identify as humor, Volodya--yes, yes, Lenin and I are on a first-name basis--Volodya, as I was saying, has the balls to get the lumpenproletariat off their collective asses. I admit we don't always see eye to eye-- Eye to eye! That's the understatement of the century. From the minute you looked up the exiled Bolshevik supremo in London--that was right after you escaped from Siberia in 1902, cap in hand you knocked on Lenin's door in Holford Square, if memory serves--you locked horns. You accused him to his face of being dictatorial, of not trusting the workers to bring Socialism to Russia. He called you a Judas and accused you of spouting puffed-up phrases arguing absurd theories. Hellfire, you loathed him last time the subject came up. The next to last time also. I am having third thoughts, goddamn it. For Vladimir Lenin, revolution in Russia is an end; for me, it's bound to be contagious. But before we can argue about where and when the revolution ends, it has to begin. And if someone can rouse the lethargic Russian proletarian to revolution, who am I to quibble over bad breath. Okay, okay, I stand corrected. But you don't answer the question, Bronshtein: Is America excited to have one of Lenin's clammy Bolsheviks wash up on its shores? Will they even let you in when they discover you are the famous--ha! I should say the infamous!--Leon Trotsky hoping to ignite the fuse to world revolution here in America? God's nails, enough's enough: This keen as mustard conscience of mine had a genius for getting my goat. I could tell when he got my goat because my teeth hurt. Right now, my teeth ached. In a panic--I had made my way to the vestibule of the New World hoping to start again from scratch--I told my nemesis Litzky to piss the hell off. And off he sulkily pissed, leaving me with the illusion that brought me to the New World: That revolution in America might just be imaginable. And imagine it I did. That isn't so much another story as the heart and soul and gut and prostate and intestines and testicles of this story. I even fantasized about the headline: Russian Jew Trotsky Ignites Socialist Fuse in Capitalist America. If only. Litzky's singsong Will they even let you in? rang in my ears. As much as it distressed me to admit it, my conscience had a point. I had made it past security to board the Montserrat in Barcelona, along with my longtime companion and bedmate, Natalya Sedova, and our two sons, nine-year-old Sergei and eleven-year-old Lyova, using counterfeit documents in the name of Zratsky, Sergei, that listed my occupation as writer, which is more or less how I had managed to keep food on the table since being expelled from Russia ten years before. Several of the articles I filed from the Balkan Front for a small Russian émigré newspaper had been picked up by leading French and German dailies, and though the byline credited "from wire dispatches" and not the war correspondent Leon Trotsky, the embarrassingly trivial sum they paid for reprint rights eventually trickled down to yours truly. The brutal Balkan War had, I am the first to admit, left its mark on me. I still associate the smell of tobacco with lice--soldiers, refugees, journalists like me took to sprinkling precious tobacco on their clothing to get rid of the typhus-bearing lice. I still have the occasional nightmare of visiting hospital wards swarming with young soldiers with self-inflicted wounds--they would shoot off a finger or a toe, careful to fire the bullet through a loaf of stale bread so as not to leave telltale powder burns on the wound. I could feel the deck plates vibrating under the worn soles of my boots as the Montserrat backed its engines and eased up to Pier 8 on the river east of Manhattan Island. We could hear the muffled shouts of sailors winching in lines. Sergei, in his stockinged feet, climbed onto his bunk to peer out the porthole and gaze in wide-eyed open-mouthed wonder at the mountain range of buildings silhouetted against the yellowish gleam seeping like a smog over Manhattan. "Come look, Papa," he exclaimed. "Some of the buildings must be twelve stories high--oh my gosh, they're scraping the bottom of the sky." "Resist the temptation to be whelmed by tall buildings," I said. "They are built on the skeletons of workers. And they can be a pain in the neck, literally, if you gape too long at the roofs." "Papa, is it so that we waste one-third of our life sleeping?" "There are some who say we waste two-thirds of our life awake." "Who's right?" "Depends." "Depends on what?" "What you're doing during the two-thirds you're awake." "And what should we be doing?" "You should be making revolution." "What's revolution, Papa?" "Lev!" Natalya exclaimed. Over the loudspeaker the ship's bells sounded the hour. "Six bells," Lyova said brightly. "What time is that, Papa?" When I told him it was three in the morning, he laughed uneasily. "My gosh, I've never been up this late!" "Three in the morning is so late it's early," I remarked. I savored the delicious sensation of threading my fingers through my son's frizzy hair. " Rannyaya ptashka lovit chervyaka --it's the early bird that catches the worm," I reminded him. "I don't eat worms." Lyova was worried that his failure to eat worms would annoy me. "I am planning to be a vegetarian when I grow up," he told me. "If you grow up," I said. "Bite your tongue, Lev," Natalya said under her breath. "Me, also, I don't eat worms, Papa," Sergei declared brightly. "Our children don't eat worms," I informed Natalya with a straight face. "Thank the lord for small miracles," she muttered. "Will we be American in America?" Lyova asked. "We are Russian," I instructed him. "We will be Russian in America." Excerpted from Bronshtein in the Bronx by Robert Littell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
