From Russia With Love
By MENACHEM WECKER
PAST IMPERFECT
318 Episodes from the Life of a Russian Artist
By Grisha Bruskin
Translated by Alice Nakhimovsky
376 pages. Syracuse University Press. $34.95.
It is an unwritten rule of sculpture that statues are supposed
to remain on their pedestals, much like children must keep their arms inside
the car. But Grisha Bruskin evidently did not receive the memo that day in art
school. His “Step,” from a
series called “On the Edge,” evokes the same sort of vertigo as Shel
Silverstein’s cover drawing to Where the Sidewalk Ends. Bruskin’s figure, dressed in a suit
and a trench coat with his hat in his hand, bolds steps off his podium. The
viewer gets to decide whether the figure will land safely or whether he is
about to plunge to his death.
If the figure in “Step” can be interpreted as leaving the (at least perceived)
safety of the pedestal for an uncertain future, the leap of faith might be a
self-portrait of the Russian, underground Jewish artist, who immigrated to New
York at age 43 in 1988. Even the title of his recent poetic memoir, Past Imperfect, suggests a repressive
past that Bruskin abandoned for a more perfect future, explains translator
Alice Nakhimovsky in the introduction. It also literally refers to the Russian
grammatical form of the “imperfectum,” she adds, or “a past that repeats itself
without conclusion, a past you can return to and hang out in.”
Bruskin’s past continued to repeat itself and to resurface in his life even
after he moved to New York. In one episode, he encounters a 93-year-old woman
named Valentina Aleksandrovna, who lives in Long Island in a “transatlantic
lost world” that seems to come straight from a Bernard Malamud
novel. Aleksandrovna has decorated her vacation house in a style that is
“indistinguishable from a Moscow dacha,” with “innumerable photographs of
Cossack captains...[,] icons, portraits of the Tsar-Father.” When told that the
Communist regime has collapsed, Aleksandrovna “whispered through her tears: ‘I
waited for this all my life.’”
As a child growing up in Russia, Bruskin experienced a lot of anti-Semitism. In
the episode entitled “For Being Honest,” Bruskin tells of “tough guys” who
corner him and his distant cousin Lyonka on a merry-go-round and demand to know
if they were Jewish. “I understood that if we said ‘yes,’ we’d be killed on the
spot. If we said ‘no,’ we would be shamed for the rest of our lives,” the young
Bruskin thinks. But when he admits to being a Jew, he does not become canonized
as another Jewish martyr worthy of mention in the fast-day prayers called kinot. “The ex-con reached into his
pocket and gave me a candy. ‘This is for being honest.’” In another episode, a
Jewish “invalid” named Serafima Moiseevna adopts an orphan named Valentin. The
adopted boy grows fond of asking his mother, “Moms! Hey, Moms! When we start
beating up Jews, Moms, will we beat you up too?”
Throughout the book, Bruskin approaches his topics, which range from tragic to
absurd to comedic, with a deadpan and often ironic manner. He remembers a girl
Sofa telling him of another peer, Isak, “There are Jews and there are Kikes.
You and me, Grisha, we’re Jews. But Isak is a Kike.” Elsewhere, he tells of his
mother crying when she remembers witnessing a Cossack cut off her aunt’s finger
to obtain a snugly-fit gold ring.
The night after his works sold for $500,000 in the 1988 Sotheby’s Russian art
auction that launched him to success, Bruskin and his wife Alesya found five
rubles in the street. “Should we pick it up or are we already rich?” Alesya
wonders. Bruskin tells her, “Take it just in case,” and indeed, “the Soviet
State would think up some way to appropriate such a large sum of money.”
Despite the many sad and shocking tales of anti-Semitism and KGB tyranny,
Bruskin and his friends pursue a hedonistic life full of alcohol and women.
Bruskin’s first kiss came in eighth grade, in art school. He offered to walk
home with the model, who was 18 and “very pretty,” according to the art
teacher. “As we said good-bye she suddenly gave me a real kiss on the lips,”
Bruskin writes. “Having received the first kiss of my life, nervously excited,
I returned home and ran right into the bathroom. Until morning I didn’t stop
brushing my teeth and washing my mouth out with potassium permanganate. I
thought that the kiss had left me with awful alien girl microbes.” A few years
later, Bruskin and his friends had come a long way when they spy on “healthy
girl athletes” showering. The girls notice the peeping Toms and threaten them,
but knowing the athletes would have to dress before giving chase, the boys take
their time in departing.
Bruskin’s other love affairs are equally dramatic. He was first betrayed by a
lover in nursery school, when he fell for the ash-blond haired Natasha. “Unable
to think up anything better, I proposed that we take down our pants together
and compare notes,” Bruskin remembers. But the couple was discovered and
punished with a day-long time out. “Natasha snitched to the teacher that I
started it and stopped talking to me,” he writes. “That was the first betrayal of
my life. I suffered greatly.” In another betrayal story, a girl Bruskin loves,
along with several of her peers, raid the teacher’s class register and read the
students’ biographies aloud: “‘Barinov, Russian!’ ‘Yashin, Russian!’ ‘Nazarov,
Tatar!’... ‘Bruskin, Jew!’” Grisha notices that the girls look at him
differently after that revelation.
Another “nice little girl” named Katya angrily calls our hero a Jew, but later
comforts him, “What are you so upset about? Jews and Stupidhead, they’re the same
thing.” Bruskin also falls “passionately” in love with his teacher Marya
Ivanova, whom he hails as his “ideal. Nobody on earth was wiser, kinder, or
more beautiful.” But when in the second grade, Ivanova dyes her “noble-looking
gray bun” an “unsuccessful brown,” Bruskin’s ideal dims and suddenly becomes “a
stupid, mean, semiliterate auntie with tiny needlelike eyes and a sharp
protruding nose.”
But even as Bruskin devotes a lot of attention to his childish crushes, he
devotes just one section to his first wife, titled “Down with Marriage! Up with
the Life of a Wild Wolf!” Bruskin attends a birthday party after having just
split with his first wife (the only detail she receives in the memoir) and is
“in a state of heavenly euphoria, basking in bachelorhood.” Yet, even as he
shouts down with marriage in favor of wild wolfhood, “Right away, my eyes lit
on a beautiful, graceful girl, my future wife, Alesya.”
When he first introduces Alesya to meet his great uncle and aunt, Iosif and
Rebecca, they accidentally mix up the date and arrive one day early, catching
the couple unprepared. Iosif feels under-dressed in his “handsome vest, with a
tie on,” so he runs to change into a jacket. Rebecca sternly eyes Alesya
without a smile, and asks, “Grisha, is this your life’s companion?” Bruskin
confirms that Alesya is indeed his fiancée. “‘Oh, what a sweetie!’ she
exclaimed, instantly melting.”
By nostalgically loving his imperfect past, Bruskin shares a lot with artists
like Marc Chagall
and with writers like James Joyce, who seemed to love Dublin more and more the
further away he traveled. The reader gets the impression that Bruskin’s
relationship with Russia follows his young unrequited love interests—he is star
struck, while she calls him a dirty Jew. This
imperfect past continues to shape the Jewish artist even after he arrives in
New York, and it is that phenomenon of the old world still informing the new
one that not only makes Bruskin’s poetic memoir such an enjoyable read, but
also makes his paintings and sculptures particularly poignant.