Boris Fishman > Quotes

“Tell me about the war,” he pressed cautiously. She smiled again and began, “Well . . .” The sentence ended there. Her tongue moved but no words emerged. He wanted to say, Tell me because I’d like to tell my grandchildren one day. Tell me because it happened to you, and so I should know. Tell me because it will bring me closer to you, and I want to be close to you. But he was fifteen years old, and he didn’t know how to express thoughts like these. He only knew that he wanted to know. He could tell that she would tell him anything but anything, only if he could stand it please don’t make her talk about that. And though he grasped how important it was for him to know— even if everyone in the family had acquiesced not to trouble Grandmother about it— he couldn’t bring himself to make her. So he said to her: “Forget about the war. Tell me about how you and Grandfather fell in love.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Even though they, each for his own reason, did not wish to end the conversation, they had come to the end of what they could say in peace, and said goodbye.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“No one was dead, but her son would not call just to call. She’d had to enter intimate terms with this new understanding in her life, like an illness.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“He chortled at himself in disgusted amusement. Then noted that he had been communicating with himself at a more frequent rate.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“In the end, even the other boys ddn't want it to be over - for two weeks they smoked, flirted, and drank, away from the eyes of their parents. And they learned how to do things. That country, with its chronic breakdowns and shortages, made resourceful improvisers out of the clumsiest hands. A quarter of a century later, at family gatherings in San Francisco and Omaha and Chicago and New Jersey and Brooklyn, we children had to marvel at the hands of our fathers: small, rough with work - sometimes cracked with it - the thumbs squat and broad. Whether molecular biologists, programmers, or taxi drivers, they could dismantle radios, singe potatoes in firepits, swim to the other side of the lake - oh, how these tense men untensed at the sight of a rural body of water - get a chandelier to hang from the ceiling, and strum a guitar. They still worse the mustaches and trimmed beards of their youth, and they were beyond the reach of American fashion. To us, their Americanized children, these men were rigid, frightened, and withdrawn. But you had to love their hands.”
― Boris Fishman, Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table

“Even an iridescent pigeon at Slava’s feet—as a flying creature, arguably prone to curiosity about the gentleman invading its airspace—was more concerned with a triangle of pizza on the ground, approaching it as shyly as a girl at a dance.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“One night, unable to sleep, I tiptoed into the hallway and overheard my grandfather telling a table of acquaintances about the expensive Armenian cognac with which he had once plied the surgeon who was going to remove my grandmother's gallbladder the next morning. They drank so much tat the surgeon was still drunk when he picked up the scalpel. The table roared, though my grandmother did not.”
― Boris Fishman, Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table

“Once again, you have sworn to yourself: You will go slowly. You will eat half - no, a quarter! - of what's shoved before you. You will leave feeling chaste, clean, ascetic, reduced. There is perhaps as little reason to count on this as there has been for the past hundred visits. As little reason as to hope that this will be the day when your conversation with your family will finally end in understanding instead of the opposite. Hope dies last, though. Was it not also Chekhov who wrote 'The Siren,' a seven-page ode to food in the Russian mouth - 'Good Lord! and what about duck? If you take a duckling, one that has had a taste of the ice during the first frost, and roast it, and be sure to put the potatoes, cut small, of course, in the dripping-pan too, so that they get browned to a turn and soaked with duck fat and . . .'

You come from a people who eat.”
― Boris Fishman, Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table

“They stood looking down Brighton Beach Avenue, Arianna waiting for a signal from Slava. He glared at the doomed souls wandering past them, their legs varicose and bent, the jowls swimming in fat, bellies hung over the legs like overripe fruit. (Had Otto made his way down here, to see firsthand what he was dealing with in his folders, or did he prefer to keep his distance?) Yes, they weren’t easy to be near. The mesh bags stuffed with discount tomatoes, the lumbering bodies heedless of traffic lights, the threadbare emporia that had to traffic in furs and DVDs and manicures to squeeze from the stone of this life the blood of a dollar. And these were the honest ones. After fifty years of Soviet chatteldom, they had come here to get fucked in the ass for a little bit longer before packing off to a spot at Lincoln Cemetery, even this impossible to acquire without money being passed under the table. They never even voted.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“A sack of salami, black bread, hard-boiled eggs, thick-skinned tomatoes, peaches, and apples: lunch on the beach. One afternoon, I was so dazed from the sun that I drained the water in the cup the adults had left out before they headed down to the water. But Soviet people didn't drink water with their meals - 'It'll just take up room in your stomach,' Faina had explained once - and I, smashed from the vodka, collapsed under the little table and was snoring like a hopeless drunk, sand in my mouth, when the big people returned.”
― Boris Fishman, Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table

“She breathed heavily, like a figure skater just off the ice.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“(“It is a blessing to die in the natural order.”—Sofia Gelman.)”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“the left hand trembling in an eternal so-so.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“They took a meandering route through the neighborhood, louche and gentrified all at once.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Leaving Russia or not, it seemed heretical to visit the capital without visiting Grandfather Lenin, and only Slava’s grandfather resented having to waste time on “that dead dick.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Only weariness remained. It was a special kind of weariness that descended rarely, according to internal chemical regimens he did not understand. It made striving difficult, but also falsehood.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“At the wheel, Hamid Abdul was trying not to watch them. Hamid, his immigrant brother. How Slava was exceeding his immigrant brief with this fine-skinned American specimen. See Slava take the milk of this American skin into his mouth, Hamid. Look at her fingers disappear from your rearview mirror. We are miscegenating with the natives, Hamid, we are assimilating, are we not?”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Stewed eggplant; chicken steaks in egg batter; marinated peppers with buckwheat honey; herring under potatoes, beets, carrots, and mayonnaise; bow-tie pasta with kasha, caramelized onions, and garlic; ponchiki with mixed-fruit preserves; pickled cabbage; pickled eggplant; meat in aspic; beet salad with garlic and mayonnaise; kidney beans with walnuts; kharcho and solyanka; fried cauliflower; whitefish under stewed carrots; salmon soup; kidney beans with the walnuts swapped out for caramelized onions; sour cabbage with beef; pea soup with corn; vermicelli and fried onions.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Her eyes blazed; she looked as if she wanted to strike him. He wished she would. Instead, a gust of something corrective swept her face clean, and again she looked loving.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“They stood looking down Brighton Beach Avenue, Arianna waiting for a signal from Slava. He glared at the doomed souls wandering past them, their legs varicose and bent, the jowls swimming in fat, bellies hung over the legs like overripe fruit. (Had Otto made his way down here, to see firsthand what he was dealing with in his folders, or did he prefer to keep his distance?) Yes, they weren’t easy to be near. The mesh bags stuffed with discount tomatoes, the lumbering bodies heedless of traffic lights, the threadbare emporia that had to traffic in furs and DVDs and manicures to squeeze from the stone of this life the blood of a dollar. And these were the honest ones. After fifty years of Soviet chatteldom, they had come here to get fucked in the ass for a little bit longer before packing off to a spot at Lincoln Cemetery, even this impossible to acquire without money being passed under the table.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“All the adults were beside themselves with the dislocation of what they were going through, by my grandmother's was of a different order. She had been separated from a sister who was her sole living connection to a family lost in the Holocaust. None of us had ever strayed from one another - ordinary people in the Soviet Union almost never traveled outside of it, and hardly even within it. But our genes also carried generations of anxiety about safety as Jews - if we went to the wrong place, or left the relative safety that came with community, the panic that set in was as intense in the person leaving as in the people being left. (My father left behind his brother and mother, but they weren't as close as my grandmother had been with her sister.) There must be no one for whom this is less natural to comprehend than Americans, whose country enshrines mobility as a national virtue - unless you ask African Americans about their elders, perhaps. It isn't only that Americans don't fear going from one place to another; it's also that thy don't fear letting each other go there and don't use guilt to discourage it, while those who go don't feel ashamed for wanting to.”
― Boris Fishman, Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table

“The bed was empty when he awoke. A note was taped to the bathroom mirror. “Did we? We should. XOXO.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“If you want a shortcut to the Eastern European experience, you must have yourself woken from the sarcophagus of a sleeper's ceiling berth by border guards in the night. You must have every light lit. You must be spoken to in a language you understand slightly, or not at all, depending on the kind of estrangement you want. Trains: To a European person, an Eastern European person, a Jewish Eastern European person, they call up cattle cars and extinction as readily as a megaphone in a pickup summons revolution to a Latin American. Emigration, evacuation, extermination, exile - in Russia, a train has carried the quarry. The platform, the engine's weary exhalation, a whistle's hoot and blare, 'the grey wet quay, over a wilderness of rails and points, round the corners of abandoned trucks,' as Graham Greene put it - if we are to speak of the things that divide the Russian mind from the American, we could begin here.”
― Boris Fishman, Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table

“Now, in the conference room, he felt the familiar sensation of being in the presence of information obvious to all but himself.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Before they began to see each other regularly, her eyes were filled with a smirking amusement, which irritated him—she was making fun of him, his nose buried in work. Belatedly, he understood that smirk to have been an expression of self-protection, because soon it gave way to tender excitement, even admiration. And periodically to worry, to a futile intent on restraint—the two of them were moving so quickly. It was different now. When Arianna’s freckled lids, the left with its divided birthmark, opened from sleep, they would gaze upon Slava with doubt and dread.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Slava, working in concert with the philosophy of the nation that had taken them in—good works as the by-product of self-interest—was able to give the descendants at the table, the children and grandchildren, the gift of knowing, at last, the unknown corners of their forebears, all because the forebears stood to make money. How cheaply they fell—the heart’s greatest terrors for a bushel of euros. Slava wasn’t a judge: He was a middleman, a loan shark, an alchemist—he turned lies into facts, words into money, silence into knowledge at last.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“I learned to baby the rabbit in sour cream, tenderer than chicken and less forgiving of distraction, as well as the banosh the way the Italians did polenta. You had to mix in the cornmeal little by little while the dairy simmered - Oksana boiled the cornmeal in milk and sour cream, never water or stock - as it clumped otherwise, which I learned the hard way. I learned to curdle and heat milk until it became a bladder of farmer cheese dripping out its whey through a cheesecloth tied over the knob of a cabinet door; how to use the whey to make a more protein-rich bread; how to sear pucks of farmer cheese spiked with raisins and vanilla until you had breakfast. I learned patience for the pumpkin preserves - stir gently to avoid turning the cubes into puree, let cool for the runoff to thicken, repeat for two days. How to pleat dumplings and fry cauliflower florets so that half the batter did not remain stuck to the pan. To marinate the peppers Oksana made for my grandfather on their first day together. To pickle watermelon, brine tomatoes, and even make potato latkes the way my grandmother made them.”
― Boris Fishman, Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table

“Sometimes we ate raw onions like apples, too, I wanted to tell her. Sometimes, the tin foil held shredded chicken petrified in aspic. A fish head to suck on! I was filled with shame and hateful glee: everything I was feeling turned out at the person next to me.

I was the one with an uncut cow's tongue uncoiling in the refrigerator of his undergraduate quad, my roommates' Gatorades and half-finished pad Thai keeping a nervous distance. I sliced it thinly, and down it went with horseradish and cold vodka like the worry of a long day sloughing off, those little dots of fat between the cold meet like garlic roasted to paste.

I am the one who fried liver. Who brought his own lunch in an old Tupperware to his cubicle in the Conde Nast Building; who accidentally warmed it too long, and now the scent of buckwheat, stewed chicken, and carrots hung like radiation over the floor, few of those inhabitants brought lunch from home, fewer of whom were careless enough to heat it for too long if they did, and none of whom brought a scent bomb in the first place. Fifteen floors below, the storks who staffed the fashion magazines grazed on greens in the Frank Gehry cafeteria.

I was the one who ate mashed potatoes and frankfurters for breakfast. Who ate a sandwich for breakfast. Strange? But Americans ate cereal for dinner. Americans ate cereal, period, that oddment. They had a whole thing called 'breakfast for dinner.' And the only reason they were right and I was wrong was that it was their country.

The problem with my desire to pass for native was that everything in the tinfoil was so f*****g good. When the world thinks of Soviet food, it thinks of all the wrong things. Though it was due to incompetence rather than ideology, we were local, seasonal, and organic long before Chez Panisse opened its doors. You just had to have it in a home instead of a restaurant, like British cooking after the war, as Orwell wrote. For me, the food also had cooked into it the memory of my grandmother's famine; my grandfather's black-marketeering to get us the 'deficit' goods that, in his view, we deserved no less than the political VIPs; all the family arguments that paused while we filled our mouths and our eyes rolled back in our heads. Food was so valuable that it was a kind of currency - and it was how you showed loved. If, as a person on the cusp of thirty, I wished to find sanity, I had to figure out how to temper this hunger without losing hold of what it fed, how to retain a connection to my past without being consumed by its poison.”
― Boris Fishman, Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table

“He thought about doing what she had done that day several weeks before, when he had to leave for the library. Ask for five minutes, peel off her clothes, and push her down on the bed. She had shown him that you could impose on each other this way; the other would impose another time. Love was not equality but balance. On the bus ride back to his side of the borough, he had felt used but closer to her. However, he couldn’t imagine doing the same thing now. The doleful corollary to her rule was that this kind of imbalance was possible only when the rest was steady. It had been in their first week, but less so the more time they spent together, a dismal irony. He rose and got dressed.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“They kissed slowly, the human traffic of First Avenue taking them into its indifferent arms, the city’s special combination of curiosity and resentment.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life