Gary Shteyngart - Little Failure

THIS AREA UNDER SURVEILLANCE OF UNIFORMED PATROLS AND CAMERAS should definitely deter the people who don’t look like us from stealing our fake-jewel-encrusted siddur.

As the evening settles over Deepdale Gardens, my father and I stroll through the courtyards — alive with pansies and hydrangeas and lilies and daisies — like two newly minted lords of the realm. Father is very nice to me on these walks, although sometimes as a joke he likes to sneak up to me and give me a podzhopnik , a little side kick in the ass. Ow, stop it! I say, but it’s okay because it’s a love kick and he’s not angry, just playful. When he is angry, he’ll shake his head and murmur, “ Ne v soldaty, ne v matrosy, ne podmazivat’ kolyosa ”—roughly, You won’t make it as a soldier nor a sailor nor a polisher of car tires — which is what Stepfather Ilya, Goebbels to his friends, used to say to him when Papa was growing up in a little village outside Leningrad. I guess I know that what my father means is that I am not good at physical activities such as carrying more than one grocery bag at a time from the Grand Union to his waiting Chevrolet Malibu Classic, but the Russian phrase is so archaic and convoluted that it easily misses its mark. Well of course I won’t be a soldier or a sailor or a gas station attendant. At the very least, I’ll be a corporate lawyer, Papa.

But then there are the good times, when my father will open up the vast larder of his imagination and tell me a story from a long-running series he calls The Planet of the Yids ( Planeta Zhidov ). “Please, Papa!” I chant. “ Planet of the Yids! Planet of the Yids! Tell me!”

In Papa’s telling, the Planet of the Yids is a clever Hebraic corner of the Andromeda Galaxy, constantly besieged by gentile spacemen who attack it with space torpedoes filled with highly unkosher but oh-so-delicious Russian salo , which is salted raw pig fat, lard, a lumpy cousin of the French suet. The planet is run by Natan Sharansky, the famous Jewish dissident. But the KGB can’t leave him alone, even though he’s light-years away, and keeps trying to sabotage the planet. And always, just as it seems it’s curtains for the Yids—“the goys have burst through the Shputnik Shield and into the ionosphere!”—the circumcised ones, led by the fearless Captain Igor, manage to outsmart their enemies, à la the Bible, à la Leon Uris’s Exodus , à la us. For this is, of course, our story, and I crave it almost as much as I crave that forbidden salo , which you can’t really buy at the Grand Union anyway, almost as much as I crave my father’s love.

We have walked the lengths and breadths of Deepdale Gardens, past the FAA Air Traffic Control Facility down the street with its five skyscraper-sized antennas, past the playground where Papa has let me sink in one basketball more than him to win yet another “close” game, past the hydrangeas of our cooperative Eden, and up the carpeted stairs of 252-67 Sixty-Third Avenue. Since we have tasted the forbidden fruit of the Publishers Clearing House, our mailbox is filled to overflowing with offers from around the country for one S. SHITGABT and his family, not to mention the latest issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine . We won’t bite again, but those bright fat envelopes tell our story, too.

We are living on the Planet of the Yids.

We have already won.

*Technically, the roof belongs to the Deepdale Gardens Cooperative.

The author in his favorite (and only) shirt pens the masterpiece “Bionic Friends” on an IBM Selectric typewriter. The chair is from Hungary, the couch from Manhattan.

JUST BEFORE PUBERTY BEGINS in earnest, I come down with Dissociative Identity Disorder, evidenced by “The presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states, [with] at least two of these identities or personality states recurrently [taking] control of the person’s behavior” (DSM-5).

At least two? I’ve got four! To my parents and Grandma Polya I am Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart, disobedient son and beloved grandson, respectfully. Very respectfully. To the American teachers at SSSQ, I am Gary Shteyngart, strange salami-smelling boy with some aptitude at math. To the Hebrew teachers at SSSQ I am Yitzhak Ben Shimon or some shit like that. And to the children, to my fellow pupils in their Macy’s regalia, I am Gary Gnu the Third.

If a psychiatrist had been present (and why the hell wasn’t she present?) to ask me who I was, undoubtedly I would have answered with my slightly manicured but still thick Russian accent, Doctor, I am Gary Gnu the Third, ruler of the Holy Gnuish Empire, author of the Holy Gnorah and commander of the Mighty Gnuish Imperial Army .

How do things come to such a pass?

In 1982, I decide that I can no longer be me. The name “Gary” is a fig leaf, and what I really am is a fucking Red Gerbil, a Commie. A year later the Soviets will shoot down Korean Air Lines flight 007, and the topical New York pop-radio station 95.5 WPLJ will play a parody of the hit song “Eye of the Tiger” by the important American rock band Survivor, only instead of “Eye of the Tiger” the song will be renamed “The Russians Are Liars.” (“As those Communist killers / try to sleep late at night …”)

And as awful as those lyrics are, I can’t stop singing them. In the shower beneath our amazing frosted window opening out on the Deepdale Gardens parking garage, in my father’s car on the way to SSSQ, both of us morning-moody and unfriendly, even beneath the slurs and swipes of my classmates. The Russians are liars, The Russians are liars, The Russians are liars .

The Soviet leadership are liars; that much I now understand. Latin Lenin in Moscow Square was not always on the up and up. Fine. But am I a liar? No, I am truthful most of the time. Except when one day after one Commie comment too many, I tell my fellow pupils that I wasn’t born in Russia at all. Yes, I just remembered it! It had all been a big misunderstanding! I was actually born in Berlin, right next to Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld, surely you’ve heard of it.

So here I am, trying to convince Jewish children in a Hebrew school that I am actually a German .

And can’t these little bastards see that I love America more than anyone loves America? I am a ten-year-old Republican. I believe that taxes should only be levied on the poor, and the rest of Americans should be left alone. But how do I bridge that gap between being a Russian and being loved?

I start to write.

Papa’s space opera, The Planet of the Yids , is high on my mind when I open up a Square Deal Composition Notebook, 120 pages, Wide Ruled with Margin, and begin my first unpublished novel in English. It is called The Chalenge [ sic ]. On the first page “I give aknowlegments [ sic ] to the book Manseed [probably sic ] in this issue of Isac [ sic ] Isimov [ sic ] Siance [ sic ] Fiction magazine. I also give thanks to the makers of Start [ sic ] Treck [ sic ].”

The book, much like this one, is dedicated “To Mom and Dad.”

The novel — well, at fifty-nine pages let’s call it a novella — concerns a “mistirious *race” which “began to search for a planet like Earth and they found one and called it Atlanta.”