Tens of thousands of Soviet Jews have settled in the United States in the past three decades, but few have left as lasting an impression as Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart.
For many years, his parents considered him a “little failure” because he did not take their advice and become a lawyer. Instead, much to their consternation, he drifted into creative writing and worked as a para-legal, not amounting to much, as far as they were concerned.
I suspect they’ve changed their minds about their son, who goes by the name of Gary Shteyngart these days.
Shteyngart, you see, is no mere scribbler. He has written three acclaimed novels — The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story — that have been translated into 28 languages. And now he has produced a memoir, Little Failure (Random House), that is by turns witty, thoughtful and funny.
Even by his parents’ most exacting standards, he can no longer be regarded as a “disappointment.”
In Little Failure, Shteyngart traces the arc of his life from Soviet Jew in Leningrad to new immigrant in the New York City borough of Queens. “Coming to America after a childhood spent in the Soviet Union is equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor,” he writes in a passage formed on the anvil of inspiration and originality.
Little Failure, in essence, is a family saga.
His mother, a piano teacher, and his father, a mechanical engineer, fared reasonably well by Soviet standards. Shteyngart’s father’s ancestors on both sides were Ukrainian Jews who hailed from the shtetl. One of them, a Red Army soldier, was killed in 1943 defending the motherland. Shteyngart’s mother, on her father’s side, was a Russian Orthodox Christian descended from 12 generations of clergymen.
As he tells it, a single incident in a greasy Crimean cafeteria sealed their resolve to emigrate. “Over a bowl of tomato soup, a stout Siberian woman told my mother of the senseless beating her 18-year-old son had endured after his conscription by the Red Army, a beating that had cost him his kidney.”
Having decided that this fate would not befall their dear son and only child, the Shteyngarts left their jobs, sold their 500-square foot flat and shipped their glossy Rumanian furniture, plus a Red October upright piano, out of the country.
En route to their new home, they stopped in Vienna, staying in a rooming house frequented by prostitutes. The Shteyngarts, accustomed to an austere lifestyle, were pleasantly surprised by the abundance of the West — bananas in winter, marinated gherkins in jars, shop windows crammed with a wide assortment of goods, and no shortages of toilet paper.
Shteyngart, in particular, was in rapture over Knorr soup: “Somehow this little packet of Knorr has produced enough mushroom soup to feed three refugees.”
Having opted not to board an El Al flight straight to Israel, they chose to immigrate to the United States. “The letters from their relatives in New York have been emphatic: ‘The streets here are paved with gold. We can sell leather jackets at the flea market.'”
Before their departure from Austria, Shteyngart’s father was interviewed by two CIA agents who asked what his role at a military technology factory had been.
“Of course, my father had never been anywhere near the sensitive military stuff. He had been known to conduct ‘disruptive pro-Zionist and anti-Soviet conversations’ about Israel and the 1967 Six Day War, possibly the most glorious six days of his life, until one day his boss called him in and said, ‘Fuck your mother Shteyngart, you can’t do anything right! Get out of here!'”
They arrived in America in 1979, when New York City was bankrupt and crime-ridden. They gradually adjusted themselves to their new milieu, but there were bumps along the way, including Shteyngart’s circumcision and a Publishers Clearing House scam that led his parents to believe they had won $10 million in prize money.
Shteyngart writes about these episodes with humour and charm, enticing a reader into the web of his narrative.
Although his parents were gainfully employed, they were torn by fear. As he puts it, “They don’t spend money, because they live with the idea that disaster is close at hand, that a liver-function test will come back marked with a doctor’s urgent scrawl, that they will be fired from their jobs because their English does not suffice. Seven years in America, and we are still representatives of a shadow society, cowering under a cloud of bad tidings that will never come.”
Shteyngart’s parents expected a lot from him, maybe too much. He received a respectable 83 percent average in his high school report card. But to them, 83 percent was sub-par, a grade falling short of Harvard or Yale admission standards.
He chose to study at Oberlin College, an institution that, he hoped, would allow him to lose his virginity.
As Little Failure reaches its denouement, Shteyngart has been initiated into sex and is finishing his first novel. “I feel my life shifting irrevocably. All those tectonic plates that once shuddered against each other are finally aligning to make a permanent surface …”
The “little failure” is turning into a full-fledged literary force. Shteyngart relates this story with panache and elan.