PROLOGUE

Where I’m Calling From

This is a book about love. The next 338 pages are dedicated with that cloying Russian affection that passes for real warmth to my Beloved Papa, to the city of New York, to my sweet impoverished girlfriend in the South Bronx, and to the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

This is also a book about too much love. It’s a book about being had. Let me say that right away: I’ve been had. They used me. Took advantage of me. Sized me up. Knew right away that they had their man. If “man” is the right word.

Maybe this whole being-had deal is genetic. I’m thinking of my grandmother here. An ardent Stalinist and faithful contributor to Leningrad Pravda until Alzheimer’s took what was left of her senses, she penned the famous allegory of Stalin the Mountain Eagle swooping down the valley to pick off three imperialist badgers representing Britain, America, and France, their measly bodies torn to shreds in the grasp of the generalissimo’s bloody talons. There’s a picture of me as an infant crawling over Grandma’s lap. I’m drooling on her. She’s drooling on me. The year is 1972, and we both look absolutely demented. Well, look at me now, Grandma. Look at my missing teeth and dented lower stomach; look at what they did to my heart, that bruised kilogram of fat hanging off my breastbone. When it comes to being torn to shreds in the twenty-first century, I am the fourth badger.

I’m writing this from Davidovo, a small village populated entirely by the so-called Mountain Jews near the northern frontier of the former Soviet republic of Absurdsvanï. Ah, the Mountain Jews. In their hilly isolation and single-minded devotion to clan and Yahweh, they seem to me prehistoric, premammalian even, like some clever miniature dinosaur that once schlepped across the earth, the Haimosaurus rex.