I was thinking about this book for some reason today. I read it in college. I found it to be a surprising sort of page-turner—surprising in that it’s doesn’t exactly have a suspenseful, action-packed plot to propel you through its pages. Rather, I found its central characters oddly endearing. I wanted to know what happened to them, and I kept reading out of the same impulse that might lead you to, say, Facebook stalk that intriguing friend-of-a-friend who came to visit one weekend. The same impulse that explains why you still have that one friend’s number in your cell phone, even though you haven’t spoken to them since college and they probably don’t even have that number anymore.
The other reason I kept reading the book was because I think it helped me understand a little bit of my heritage. My family has scarcely been in this country for a century; my great-grandparents, like so many other Russian Jews, fled the Pale of Settlement in 1912 for what I’m assuming would have been a more welcoming environment. As a child, all I knew of their way of life was piecemeal—we had their samovar sitting on our coffee table, some stories from my grandfather, and some sepia-toned photos of dour-faced, swarthy individuals looking as Old World as can be in their dark, draped clothing. I used to take in these items and look at my grandfather, who loved watching game shows and drinking Seagram’s, and my father, who could not have been more Midwestern white-bread middle-class, and wonder—when did it stop being important? In that I mean, at what point along the way did all that heritage get left behind? Being Jewish was clearly something so dear to the identity of my great-grandparents that it must have partially inspired them to pack up and move halfway across the world; cut to a only few decades later, and my father can speak barely a lick of Hebrew/Yiddish/Russian. We assume we may have relatives in Russia somewhere, but we don’t even know from which town our ancestors left.
Maybe this is something which will mark a generational divide—this inability to grasp the concept of certain important pieces of information being lost to time and not being automatically archived for later use in some data cloud. Either way, I’ve always been fascinated by the assimilation process, and I think this book maybe helped me visualize how that unfolds over time.
