As intensely rigid as I am in my private life, I’m a model of fluidity in my professional life. I have now effectively abandoned my activities as a paid translator to be an unpaid professor in Ukraine.

But if you want to see people who are really not rigid, get a fill of the creators of borscht-flavored ice-cream:

By the way, the difference between how Jews and non-Jews make borscht in Ukraine is that Jews add sugar to it. As the saying goes, the life of a Jew is bitter enough, so it makes sense to sweeten every dish.

An excellent question! Thank you for asking it.

Whenever I travel to Europe, I feel geographically grounded. It’s very hard to explain but it’s like the time zone is finally right. My body knows that this is where I’m from and reacts accordingly.

That’s the body, though. As for the soul, I have the soul of an Anglo person. I always did, and that’s why I felt extremely out of place back in Ukraine. I didn’t emigrate “in search of a better life.” I was making an exceptionally good living in Ukraine back in the 90s. But it felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. I spoke, read and wrote English before any other language, and maybe that is what did it. I feel most at home, comfortable and understood among Anglophone people.

I left Ukraine in 1998 because I couldn’t look at what was happening. People were shitting away (pardon me, but I feel this very strongly even now) their historic chance of becoming something. And I didn’t want to watch them do it.

Today I turned back towards Ukraine in large part because it seems to me that America is shitting away its own historic mission and advantage. And once again, I don’t want to look. This is truly the best country in history, and instead of celebrating that and making sure it remains so, we are doing everything to unmake it. I’m very hopeful it’s a temporary glitch. When I talk to people in Ukraine, I feel like the biggest of Grinches, crushing their illusions about what America is. Of course, it’s best to know reality but we could all change what our reality is shaping up to be.

N never perceived himself as European because that’s not a thing in Russia. He’s not a group person at all, so I can’t pin any collective identity on him. But from the European side of me, I want to say that America was built by Europeans and should be proud of its great European heritage. On the other hand, Europeans should remember that America is the best that they’ve done and act accordingly.

I wanted to read something recent, and Wolf at the Table is that, having been published only a couple of months ago. The novel is about Myra and Alec, siblings from a large Catholic family. There are other siblings but they are accidental to the story of Myra’s incapacity first to notice that her brother is a serial killer and then to do something to stop him. The universe sends her innumerable signals about what’s going on but she’s too weak and indifferent to take action.

To keep the plot going, Rapp uses every favorite trick of American novelists which makes the novel sound like a parody at regular intervals. There are heiresses eager to throw themselves at every passing loser, rapey Catholic priests, amazing job opportunities and marriage prospects strewn around the path of a doped-up paranoid schizophrenic, and a whole lot of baseball. Rapp writes well but excludes from much of the story the only character who is not completely pathetic. Everybody else is so weak, bumbling and immoral that the character who’s a serial killer almost looks good in comparison. He, at least, has some agency and isn’t just floating around aimlessly.

What I’m sure the author did not intend is the novel’s depiction of the degeneration of a hard-working, religious, and Republican-voting family with many children. The siblings depart from their religious roots and become either antisocial / criminal or sad / pathetic. All they can produce among them by way of progeny is one psychotic son. Who, in turn, produces another psychotic child. The only sibling of the bunch who seems to have a normal life married a rich Jew. But that’s the character we hear very little about because the novel concentrates on the death of Catholicism and its aftermath.

Once again, a visitor comes to my office, sees this:

and joyfully exclaims, “Ah, you teach Russian!”

It took three statements to the effect that I’m a professor of Spanish to get the fellow off the topic of when my imaginary Russian courses are scheduled next Fall.

On the positive side, he’s placing the flag in the right geographic region, so that’s progress.