Little Failure Read Online Free PDF Page B

“You storing food away for the winter, Semyon?” I knew my father would swallow that insult whole, then, in the space of two hours, metabolize it into rage (“I am still the big one!”), the rage and humor that are our chief inheritance.
    The ethnic cable is on, advertisements for shady Brooklyn dentists and new Queens wedding halls struggling to pump out the joy. I feel my father’s stare needling my right shoulder. I can calculate his stare from almost any distance on earth.
    “I’m not afraid of death,” he says apropos of nothing. “God is watching out for me.”
    “Mmmm,” I low. A new Russian soap opera set in the Stalin era comes on, and I hope that it can move our conversation in a different direction. When we had just arrived in America, my father used to take me for long walks around leafy Kew Gardens, Queens, trying to teach me the history of Russian-Jewish relations through a series of vignettes he liked to call
The Planet of the Yids
. Whenever I sense him falling down the rabbit hole of depression, preceded by him acting out something violent or phallic (cue the cucumber), I like to move us back to the past, where neither one of us is guilty of anything.
    “This is interesting,” I say of the show in my best American “Hey, let’s be friends” kind of voice. “What year was this filmed, do you think?”
    “Don’t mention the names of my relatives in the book you’re writing,” my father says.
    “I won’t.”
    “Just don’t write like a self-hating Jew.”
    Loud laughter from the dining room: my mother and her sister in their natural mirth. Unlike my father, an only child, Mama and Aunt Tanya come from a relatively large family of three daughters. Tanya can be overly sweet and has a strangely American conviction that she is somehow special, but at least she does not come across as depressed. My mother has the best social skills of the bunch, always knowing when to bring people into her orbit and when to push them aside. Had she been born in the American South in the proper era, I think she would have done well.
    “Da, poshyol on na khui!”
Tanya, the youngest, is shouting over the din of the television.
Well, let him go to the dick!
And my mother is laughing a naughty middle child’s laugh, so happy that her sister is here in America and she has someone to say
khui
and
yob
and
blyad
with. Their seven-year separation—Tanya was allowed to emigrate from Russia only after Gorbachev took power—was unbearable for my mother. And because I spent my youth as a kind of tuning fork for my parents’ fears, disappointments, and alienation, unbearable for me as well.
    “I don’t have any friends,” my father says in response to the laughter from the dining room. “Your mother doesn’t allow them here.” The first part is certainly true. I am curious about the second.
    “Why not?” I ask.
    He doesn’t answer. He sighs. He sighs so much I think he inadvertently practices his own form of Kabbalistic meditation. “Well, God be with her.”
    Lying next to my father is a VHS tape entitled
Immigration: Threatening the Bonds of Our Union: Part II: Treachery and Treason in America
, produced by an outfit called American Patrol in Sherman Oaks, California. (Why does the extreme right wing like colons so much?) I’m wondering what the trigger-happy members of the American Patrol would make of my father, a Social Security–collecting Osama bin Laden–looking Semite sitting on a couch in an ethnic Queens neighborhood, his dining room stinking of immigrant fish, his house flanked by a Korean family on one side, an Indian clan on another.
    “We are living different lives,” my father says, astutely. “And it makes me sad.”
    It makes me sad, too. But what can be done? I used to be more forthcoming with my father, and, consequently, I used to hate him. Now I know just how much pain I can inflict, and do inflict, with each book I publish that does not extol the State of Israel, with each