"The Triple Whammy" and Other Russian Stories: A Memoir

Louis Menashe

Description

A captivating lifetime of personal and professional experiences by an American historian, film specialist and documentary filmmaker in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. The authors experiences as a radical in the turbulent 1960s, and his eventual disenchantment offer some precedents and perspectives to all those on the Left, Center or Right interested in the fluctuations of American politics. The vivid log of hopes and disillusions is related in a candid, non-academic style, and set against a panorama of history and politics in the late 20th century.

Sujets

• Former Soviet Union
• History of art
• Post-Soviet states
• Russia
• History of Europe
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 24 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780998147772
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

“The Triple Whammy”
and Other Russian Stories
 
A Memoir
 
 
LOUIS MENASHE
 
 

 
 
By the same author:
 
MOSCOW BELIEVES IN TEARS: Russians and Their Movies
EL SALVADOR: Central America in the New Cold War (Co-editor)
TEACH-INS, U.S.A.: Reports, Opinions, Documents (Co-editor)
 
 
Copyright © 2018 by Louis Menashe
New Academia Publishing, 2018
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system.
 
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958812
ISBN 978-0-9981477-7-2
 
Published in eBook format by New Academia Publishing/VELLUM
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 

An imprint of New Academia Publishing
 

4401-A Connecticut Ave., NW #236 - Washington DC 20008
[e-mail] - www.newacademia.com
 
 
 
For Sheila, Claudia, and David
 
And in Memory of John R. Anderson (1953-2012)
 
 
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler….
—Robert Frost
 
 
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
—Yogi Berra
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: Warsaw, 1962
I
IT WAS LOTS OF THINGS
II
SOVIET RUSSIA AND POLITICAL COMMITMENT
III
POLITICAL APPRENTICE
IV
¡VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN! ¡VENCEREMOS!
V
GRADUATE WORK AND OTHER TEMPTATIONS
VI
RUSSIAN STUDIES
VII
THE DISSERTATION: Me and Gooch
VIII
SCHOLAR? ACTIVIST? SCHOLAR-ACTIVIST?
IX
SOCIALISM ON THE HORIZON
X
THE WORM
XI
NEW DIRECTIONS?
XII
YES: A NEW DIRECTION
XIII
ONE THING LED TO ANOTHER: History Delivered in Frames
XIV
THE FILM CIRCUIT
XV
PERESTROIKA, UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
XVI
PERESTROIKA, UP CLOSER
XVII
FROM THE BOTTOM UP
XVIII
“THE THREE SISTERS” OF MINSK
XIX
SHERRY AND SAKHAROV
XX
THE TRIPLE WHAMMY
XXI
L’ ENVOI. I CAN’T COMPLAIN
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 1. The four fellow travelers in Paris, 1962 2. Lenin and Krupskaya poster 3. Housing construction, Cuba, 1960 4. Sheila at St. Basil’s, Moscow, 1962 5. With Leszek in Warsaw, 1962 6. Sheila with school kids, Moscow, 1962 7. My friend “Gooch” – A.I. Guchkov 8. Sheila, Louis and the toddler, Claudia, the Kremlin, 1968 9. Davey at bat, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, 1984 10. Lumbees and Russian students, Pembroke, N.C., 1986 11. Mini-course poster, “From Tsars to Yeltsin,” 1995 12. The author with students and their Stoli bottles, 1985 13. Gorbachev asks, “Have you restructured yourself?” 1989 14. Publicity card, Inside Gorbachev’s USSR with Hedrick Smith, 1990 15. Galina in Singapore, 2014 16. Alla and Natasha in London, 1997 17. Publicity card, In the Shadow of Sakharov, 1991 18. “Message to Man” Festival poster, St. Petersburg, 1995 19. Jury members, “Message to Man” Festival, St. Petersburg, 1998 20. Julia in Paris, 1999 21. “Professor Soap,” St. Petersburg, 1998 22. “Paco” at the Turkish International Film Festival, Istanbul, 2006 23. The Menashe family at home for Hanukkah, Brooklyn, 2014
 
PR OLOGUE: Warsaw, 1962
“Moskva?,” I asked.
“V Moskvu,” answered the old guy in uniform, with a nod, a smile, and his eyes really twinkled. He stood outside a train door, welcoming us.
My god, I thought, the attendant is right out of a Russian novel, and I’m about to board a Russian train. Is that Anna Karenina on the platform?
The Soviet Union, the Great Promised Land, here we come, at last! How exciting! How fulfilling! How validating! And how primitive was my Russian. I wanted to know if we were boarding the right train, and I thought to show off: I used Moskva , as the Russians call their capital, not “Moscow,” as we call it. The old attendant confirmed the destination, but put it in correct grammatical form, and with the proper case ending on the noun; yes, the train was heading “ to Moscow ”. Neat, but my facility in Russian grammar with its declensions and case endings was just starting. The Spanish and French I knew had none of that.
No matter. We were on our way, four fellow travelers , in both senses of the term: I, an NYU graduate student, a budding Russianist or, if you will, given the times, Sovietologist ; my wife Sheila, just out of graduate school in Social Work; Betty Ofsevit, another Social Work student on her way to a degree; and her husband, Stanley, ditto. The young American Left—in New York, at any rate—had an affinity for the help professions, and Social Work was a leading choice. Although the political sympathies of these four pilgrims were in sync, only Stanley could boast authentic “Red Diaper” credentials – his parents were in, or very close to, the American Communist Party—and Stanley’s outlook and opinions had a harder edge than ours on most issues. Sheila and Betty came from Lower East Side lower middle-class families with pronounced labor-union sympathies. Nothing in my family background pointed to Russia or to politics, much less Left politics. The strongest identity of my Brooklyn family, also lower middle class, came from their Sephardic origins, especially since their birthplace was the venerated “Mother of Israel,” the “Jerusalem of the Mediterranean”— Selanik/ Salonique/Salonica or, after the Greeks took back the city from the Turks and insisted on its original name, Thessaloniki . One day, that Sephardic identity would grip me too, coexisting with other leanings, be they Left-political, or Russianist-professional. But what put me on that train to Moscow the summer of 1962?
 
 

I
IT WAS LOTS OF THINGS
I’m always thinking of Russia
I can’t keep her out of my head.
I don’t give a damn for Uncle Sham,
I’m a left-wing radical Red.
— H.H. Lewis
 
 
Paul Richardson, the Publisher and Editor of Russian Life magazine, describes an incident during his first visit to the USSR in 1982 – he spurned an offer of black-market icons in favor of swapping his down coat for two shapkas (fur hats) – that triggered his “Russophilia disease,” which he describes this way:
“A disproportionate interest in tsars, commissars and any author whose last name ends in ov, oy, or sky; a strange affinity for potatoes, dill and vodka; a grudging acceptance of the role of Fate and Serendipity in one’s life; and an irrational tendency to argue about things from the Russian worldview, while simultaneously realizing that such arguments are often ridiculous.”
Not a bad description of the Russophilic disorder. For Harlow Robinson, a distinguished scholar of Russian language and music, David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago was a trigger. Its cinematically reconstructed Russia, he writes, “seduced me utterly and forever,” setting Robinson on the Russianist path.
Several things that captivated the novelist Elif Batuman led her to “end up spending seven years…studying the form of the Russian novel…” There was her infatuation with Maxim, her Russian violin teacher. “Tatyana’s Dream” from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin played a part, as did Anna Karenina , “a perfect book.”
For me, as with Batuman, no one incident, no single seduction or epiphany put me on the Russian road. It was lots of things . And they took shape long before my first trip to the Soviet Union.
People always assumed that since I wanted to go into Russian studies I must have Russian family roots. I still get the same reaction today when I identify my calling. No; I’ve had to explain otherwise. Having Russia in their family backgrounds was true of many of the friends of my youth, mainly those Jewish friends whose parents and grandparents came from the guberniyas of the old Russian Empire, from Byelorussia or Ukraine or the Baltic regions. There was even some Russian spoken in their households, in addition to Yiddish. My people were from another part of the world, the Graeco-Turkish realms of the Eastern Mediterranean, and Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, was the language at home. Russia, Russians, the Russian language meant little to me as a youngster, save for their association with the Soviet Union, a powerful, inescapable presence in the America of the Cold War I grew up in.
It so happened that in the Williamsburg neighborhood I called home, decades before sections of it turned ultra-hip and gentrified, there was a Slavic, non-Jewish population – Ukrainians and Poles mainly, but some Russians too, among whom there was Nick and John. We learned from the street that his name was Nick, but he was better known by all simply as Russian , as in “Hey, Russian , do you want to play some stickball?” Unlike the sport in other precincts of Brooklyn, stickball as it was played in Williamsburg’s P.S. 50 schoolyard called for a tennis ball pitched to a softball bat. In one of those games with me behind the plate without a mask, Russian swung at a pitch, didn’t connect, and the bat flew straight back out of his hands on the follow-through. BAM ! The tip of the bat barrel met my forehead right between the eyes. My forehead swelled immediately, black and blue and the subject of concern and conversation for many days. It occurs to me now, as I write these lines, that Russian’s errant bat also possessed some peculiar, metaphorical significance, pointing to a future that bound up my fate with Russia and Russians. Thanks, Russian .
John Hooz, the other Williamsburg Russian I knew, had a strong Russianizing impact on me, through no overt intent on his or my part; the cumulative Russian effect came from a series of little things between me and him. He was a close friend, from elementary school through Eastern District high school, through our college years and after, but his being Russian didn’t concern me or even him in the first years of our friendship. Was he Ukrainian? Byelorussian? Great Russian? From the Baltic region? He had the fleshy face, the blue eyes, and the straight blondish-brown hair of many Lithuanian men I have met. I didn’t care or even know about such national distinctions then, and I suspect t