I’m reading a novel titled Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart. I knew he was Soviet the moment I saw the book cover. Vera, or Faith is a play on Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor. Vera was Nabokov’s wife’s name. And the word vera means faith in Russian.
I decided to read the book because I’m curious about Soviet immigrants in America. Shteyngart is older than me, he was born in 1972 but he was brought to the US as a little boy. This means that his parents must have gone through hell to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union.
What I find shocking is that Shteyngart is very woke. Like Commie-pinko-prays-at-the- handmade-altar-of-Ilhan-Omar woke. Really out there. And he’s a Soviet Jew. Soviet Jews are all right-wingers. They were so beaten down in the USSR that they all have conniption fits at a whiff of wokedom. That’s the main difference between an American Jew and a Soviet Jew. The latter one is mega-MAGA while the former one is oy-vey-let’s-BLM-today.
Again, though, Soviet Jews are high-IQ. Maybe Shteyngart figured out that, what with being a white dude with a non-PC identity, he ran a snowflake’s chance in a real workplace to get published, so he faked himself up some lefty beliefs.
It’s also possible that the American education system managed to brainwash the dude so thoroughly.
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“the word vera means faith in Russian”
Is it also a woman’s name in russian? For no particularly good reason I’m reminded of an old Polish song (that I didn’t even really like…) called Nie wierzę Wierze…. which means “I don’t believe/trust Vera”
wierzę – I believe (or trust in some contexts0
Wierze, dative case of Wiera – (meant to be a russian woman’s name – Vera), in everyday speech final -ę is pronounced the same as -e so wierzę and Wierze are pronounced the same. wierza is also the dative of wiara (faith).
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Three of my grandparents’ daughters were called Vera, Lyubov and Nadezhda. Faith, Love and Hope. It must have annoyed the other 3 sisters to have random names that didn’t connect to the trio.
Usually, Sophia is added to Vera, Lyubov and Nadezhda. But I can’t imagine anybody in a Donbass countryside naming a child Sophia.
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“can’t imagine anybody in a Donbass countryside naming a child Sophia”
Why? Zofia the Polish version has always been popular (no equivalents of the ones you mentioned… unless you count Nadia which, like Natasza, counts as a separate name in Poland…
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“counts as a separate name”
Sorry for spamming the thread but this kind of thing (comparing names in similar languages or in polycentric languages) has long been fascinating to me.
I remember being surprised when I found out that names that are common in some Spanish speaking countries are rare in others (until I tried to remember the last American I had met named Nigel or Anthea (hint: none)).
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Or Neil. I love this name. And it existed in the pre-revolution Russian Empire. Unfortunately, there are no Neils in the US. A lot of Jaydens, Braydens and Jaylas, though, which gets a bit confusing.
Ian is also very British but there aren’t any in the US.
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Kid, you have to find a few Gaels in North America; there are lots of Nels among the Irish, and many Ians among the Scots.
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Around here we only have third-generation Italians who are obsessed with being Italian and third-generation Germans who despise being German. 😆😆😆
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Neils
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Sophia belongs very much to the West of the Donbass. Or at least in very urban areas. It’s not native to the countryside in the East of the country.
My Jewish MIL was Sophia. But Jewish, urban. Not a Ukrainian peasant.
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Based on my limited observations, if the child was brought into the US at a young enough age and the parents actually wanted to give the child “a normal American childhood” and did not go an extra mile to “preserve the language” by putting the kid into some Russian or Jewish school, and did not do anything in particular to protect them from “wokeness”, then the child most often than not would end up left-wing by the standards of this blog.
All kinds of brainwashing are actually easy, not only the woke one. I had a Jewish friend whose family moved to the US when she was about 14-15 in 1988. We tried to keep in touch and exchanged some (physical) letters. Her letters got weird very quickly… She started writing how bad she feels for us back home every time she looks into her refrigerator (because we must have been hungry… in 1989, and in our part of the FSU where she spent all her prior life), then she asked me if I became an antisemite by any chance (because I must be experiencing some sudden intense antisemite brainwashing that must have changed me in half a year), etc.
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Shteyngart explains his wokefication very clearly in “Little Failure”. Much of it resonates with me and my school experience even though he’s about 10 years older than me.
-YZ
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I got a feeling from the novel that it’s his way of rebelling against his Soviet parents. Which at his age is sad.
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Interesting…
I do not think my protest against my parents contributed much to my limited wokeness (I have been relatively libertarian, “everything depends on you, you just have to work harder” kind of person when I arrived to North America at age 27, and then I toned it down), but my protest against my parents and childhood Soviet intelligentsia environment in general definitely has been along the lines of “these people of questionable moral compass and psychological health think they are good people just because they are mildly anti-soviet in private”…
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One would think that a writer in his fifties would have resolved his fixation on his parents years earlier. Because if he’s still not his own person at this age, then when?
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This is a high-IQ person in his fifties. How is it possible to avoid having all sense of humor and all inherited cynicism and see the movement of “black girl magic” and “girl cock” as anything but very ridiculous? He’s a Russian speaker, in spite of having left so young. How is it possible to be a Russian speaker and not have a well developed sense of humor?
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I had to shed my Soviet sense of humor over the course of high school in order to be able to function in society
then again, I am not a writer
-YZ
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I understand what you mean. Americans are wonderful people but clinically earnest. All of the problems of the contemporary American society are a result of that earnestness.
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Not all Soviet Jews are right wing. Masha Gessen is woke. Many of my friends/peers growing up, though not prominent writers, are also woke.
it’s the old generation (60+) that’s too cynical to believe anything
-YZ
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Dude, you are breaking my heart here. I thought at least one group of people was immune. If they wore a pioneer cravat or a komsomol badge and even that didn’t innoculate them, what will?
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I’m talking about those of us who immigrated before experiencing that stuff (me). Or only experienced it briefly and had positive experiences (few years older than me.
There’s also the factor that Soviet Jewish millenials need to become woke in order to attract romantic partners outside of our own shitty immigrant group.
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I can’t imagine a person who wasn’t part of the party elite having a positive experience in Soviet schools or kindergartens.
My father’s strongest memory from being 8 was the terror of being asked his last name on the playground. He knew that it was not a good last name to have, so he invented that his last name was Orlov.
Of course, my mother’s Ukrainian last name was also unacceptable and had to be changed. We were defective by virtue of our ethnicity. How do you experience that and agree to once again be defective by virtue of ethnicity?
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Because the dumbass American Jews assure you that Jews aren’t white and antisemitism is not going to be tolerated….
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The chief prosecutor at Mandela’s trial was Jewish, despite the anti-apartheid movement being dominated by Jewish Communists.
The apartheid regime was under orders by the US/UK to hold back in the trial, unlike Israel, which seems to get a blank check.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n16/r.w.-johnson/rivonia-days
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