David Lyalin's Blog - Posts Tagged "memoir"

Q: How did it all begin? Was there a key memory or story that sparked the idea for the book? What was the “end of the thread” you pulled on—the one that unraveled a tangle of memories? How did the idea to write a book first come about?

A: I had never written prose before. But I had always written a lot for work: scientific articles, reports, memos, analytical briefs. For over thirty years now, I’ve written all of those in English—writing in Russian had become a thing of the past. And I’ve always read a great deal, though lately, less and less in Russian. In my past and present life—on both sides of the ocean—people praised my utilitarian writing style for its clarity and logic.

When the pandemic hit and everything felt uncertain and unsteady, I felt an urge to share some family stories with my daughter—and especially with my grandchildren, whom I hadn’t seen in many months. That desire, combined with an unjustified confidence drawn from compliments on my professional writing, somehow nudged me into trying my hand at prose. Naturally, I began writing for them in English, and my first story—My Yiddish—took me three or four months to wrestle onto the page. But that experiment convinced me that to write about those long-ago times in Russia, I had to use Russian—the language in which everyone I was writing about had thought, spoken, and felt. Including me.

To my surprise, writing in Russian again—after a break of three decades—turned out to be much easier than I expected. Within about half a year, fitting it in between work obligations, I had written the first six stories. My family and close friends, including my daughter—a professional writer—liked them (or at least, that’s what they told me). And that’s what really mattered! These and the later stories—or rather, their early versions—were published in the online journals Notes on Jewish History (Заметки по еврейской истории) and Jewish Heritage (Еврейская старина).

Then came the question of translation. My grandchildren—the very ones to whom this book is dedicated—don’t speak Russian. And if I wanted them to be able to read it one day, I had to translate it. That turned out to be much harder than I expected. Translating prose into a non-native language—even one you speak reasonably well—isn’t just about conveying meaning. It’s about recreating tone, preserving humor, wordplay, cultural nuance. But I wanted my grandchildren to read my translation—with all its flaws, but also with my personal choices, emphases, and explanations. And that’s how the stories in this book became bilingual.

About Tales of a Grandfather Who Once Upon a Time Was a Grandson Himself

Weekly Question #2 — How the Stories Came Together

Question: Your book is a collection of short stories, but the main characters are your ancestors, relatives, your family—so the text doesn’t read like a mosaic, but rather as a continuous, unified narrative. Characters reappear from one story to another quite naturally, as if dropping in to visit each other. When you were writing, did you envision the stories as parts of a whole, or did each one have a life of its own?

I didn’t have any overarching concept for the book at the beginning. The mosaic of these stories gradually, step by step, came together into a single, connected narrative—a collection. When I was working on a particular story, I was fully immersed in it and wasn’t thinking about what might come next. But looking back, I can see that there was a certain logic to the sequence in which the stories were written.

I began with the story My Yiddish, which, in one way or another, touches on five generations of my family. The next stories were about my grandfather. His unusual life—his fantastic fate—had always captured my imagination. That’s how The Clocks, The Execution, and Glimmers of Memory came about, one after another. But of course, writing about my grandfather would have been unthinkable—impossible—without also writing about his Nyamochka, my incomparable grandmother. The story The Brother served as a kind of bridge, connecting the tales about my grandfather to the short novella The Grandmothers, where my other grandmother—my mother’s mother, strict and formidable—appears quite naturally as well.

And of course, what family stories could leave out one’s parents—especially parents as remarkable as my mother and father? The story The Victory served as a kind of transition from the generation of grandparents to that of my parents. Seven Stories About Mom holds a truly special place for me in this family mini-epic. Although the book is dedicated to my grandchildren, I wrote it in large part for my mother. Because this book—and every story in it—means infinitely more to her than to anyone else, simply because they were written by me, her son. Because, as I wrote, I was constantly thinking of her and, as always, silently consulting her in everything I did. Because she, with the endless patience of an old-school teacher, listened to me read the drafts over the phone and, as always, firmly and wisely guided me in the right direction. I’m profoundly grateful that my mother—unlike my late grandmothers, grandfathers, and father—was able to read all of my stories and even gave them her blessing.

For a long time, I couldn’t imagine how to write about my father. His larger-than-life personality simply refused to fit into the Procrustean bed of a short story. I was convinced that any account of his life would require an academic, multi-volume format—but in the end, I pragmatically decided to limit myself to sketches, outlines, and contours. That’s how the story Dad: The Contours of a Biography came to be. Interestingly, it’s the only story in the entire collection that my mother accepted immediately and without a single comment.

As you can see, despite the absence of an initial concept, I’ve just walked you through the chronology of how the stories were written—and I believe there was a certain inner logic to that sequence. But when it came to arranging the stories in the book, I took a more systematic, organized approach: I wrote the titles out on individual index cards and spent quite a while laying out the whole solitaire, trying one sequence and then another, until I finally settled on the order presented in the book. And that, I suppose, is the full extent of any systematic, conceptual approach—if one can even call it that—that went into writing this book.

📖 Read more: Tales of a Grandfather Who Once Upon a Time Was a Grandson Himself 🌐 Publisher’s page

Question: You write about a wide range of family events—some of them quite tragic. How difficult was it to revisit those moments from the past? Or did the process turn out to be more joyful than painful?

Naturally, since these stories are deeply personal, the full spectrum of emotions was present as I reflected on them and put them into words. If I had to name the most intense experiences… it was deeply painful to write about my grandmother—now, even as an older man, I still haven’t come to terms with her untimely passing. And it was especially natural and uplifting to write the stories about my mother.

Question: How interested are your children and grandchildren in the history of your family? No doubt they’ve heard from you stories about the family’s past—but since they live in a different country and a different society, how engaging and understandable to them is everything that happened to the characters in your stories?

Let’s start with the general and move to the particular. This is a fairly typical pattern that repeats from generation to generation: when people are young, they couldn’t care less about family history—and then, alas, by the time they’re interested, there’s no one left to ask. It felt important to me to break that chain of forgetting.

Right now, my grandchildren aren’t really into it. Just as I, at their age, had no interest in family stories. Even my daughter—very much an adult now—isn’t quite ready for them either. But I hope that when the grandchildren, or their mother, reach the “right” age, this book will come in handy. And if not for them—then for the great-grandchildren.

Question: How did your loved ones react when they first read the stories?

All of them—with surprise and approval.
And at the same time, each in their own characteristic way:

— My daughter, a professional writer and English-language poet, responded with great delicacy.
— My mother—with admiration. After all, for every mother, her Neanderthal is still her beloved Neanderthal.
— My wife—with endless patience and unwavering support.
— My sister—stoically accepted yet another one of my whims, as any younger sister properly should.

As for those who are no longer with us—I’ll find out their reaction later, when we meet again (see the ending of “My Yiddish”).