Little Failure Read Online Free PDF

Out of political consideration perhaps. Pain and betrayal and howling and tears. First, it’s Uncle Electric Current; now it’s the Baltic poultry. The world is harsh and inconsiderate, and you can rely only on your family.
    And then the memories begin to flood in. And then I become who I was always meant to be. Which is to say: someone in love. Five years old and completely in love.
    His name is Vladimir.
    But that will have to wait.

The Ukraine, 1940. The author’s father, bottom row, second from left, being held by the author’s grandmother. Just about everyone else is going to die soon
.
    T HANKSGIVING 2011. A three-story minor colonial in Little Neck, Queens. What a class-obsessed Britisher might call middle-middle-
middle
class. My small family is gathered around a reflective orange mahogany table—product of Ceaușescu’s Romania, dragged against all common sense from Leningrad—on which my mother will soon serve a garlicky, wet turkey kept gurgling beneath a sheet of plastic wrap until the moment it is presented and a dessert made out of a dozen matzohs, a gallon of cream and amaretto liqueur, and a tub of raspberries. What I believe my mother is aiming for is a mille-feuille, or, in Russian, a
tort Napoleon
. The result is avaguely Passover-based departure from pastry reality. In deference to its point of origin, she likes to call it “French.”
    “But the best part is the raspberries which I grew myself!” my father shouts. In this family, points will not be awarded for quiet or solemnity; in this
mishpucha
everyone is always angling for a turn at Mr. Microphone. Here we are, a tribe of wounded narcissists, begging to be heard. If there’s only one person actually
listening
it is me, and not because I love my parents (and I love them, too, oh, so terribly), but because it is my job.
    My father rushes up to my cousin and mock punches him in the stomach, shouting, “I am still the big one!” Being the big one is important to him. Several years ago, drunk off of turning seventy, he took my then girlfriend (now wife) to his vegetable garden, where he handed her his biggest cucumber. “Here is something to remember me by”—he winked, adding—“I am big. My son is small.”
    Aunt Tanya, my mother’s sister, is ranting about Prince Chemodanin, who, she is convinced, is one of our progenitors. A
chemodan
is a suitcase in Russian. Prince Suitcase, according to Aunt Tanya, was one of old Russia’s illustrious figures: a faithful correspondent to his fellow prince Leo Tolstoy (although Tolstoy rarely wrote back), a thinker, an aesthete, and also, why the hell not, a groundbreaking physician. My cousin, her son, who is always about to go to law school (as I was always about to go to law school at his age), whom I actually
like
and also worry about, is talking excitedly about the prospects of libertarian candidate Ron Paul in perfect English and confusing Russian.
    “We’re a good, normal family,” my mother suddenly announces to my fiancée.
    “And of course Prince Suitcase was also a brilliant doctor,” Aunt Tanya adds, assaulting my mother’s “French” with a teaspoon.
    I join my father on the couch in the living room, where he is seeking shelter from the extended family. Every few minutes Aunt Tanya bursts in with her camera, shouting, “Come on, get closer! Father and son, okay? Father and son!”
    My father seems depressed and aggrieved, more so than usual. Today I know that I am not the full source of his unhappiness. My father is very proud of his physique and, conversely, critical of mine, but on this Thanksgiving he does not look as rod thin and athletic as usual. He is gray-bearded and small, not fat by any means, bearing as much weight as a seventy-three-year-old man who is not a Burmese peasant should bear. Earlier, the father of my cousin Victoria’s husband, one of the few Americans that have thankfully diluted the all-Russian cast of my family, had poked him in the stomach saying,