I kind of got distracted from Latin America and missed that Mexicans elected a Jewish woman as president. She’s far-left, so a lot of good it will do for Mexico. This is the kind of person who likes to chirp excitedly that she’s “a citizen of the world”, so you can imagine. But there’s value in having a person with a Jewish last name becoming Mexican president, so there’s value in that. Her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador appealed to his imaginary Aztec ancestry a lot but hopefully the new president being named Sheinbaum will spare us at least that kind of silliness.

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.

Now that Klara is older, we spend deeply enjoyable hours talking about outfits, accessories and what goes best with which item of clothing. I can’t describe the feeling, people.

I was experiencing extreme feelings of shyness at the need to contact one of the writers discussed in my book. After spending months tying myself in knots over the extreme discomfort of having to reach out, the author himself reached out to me with massive amounts of compliments to the book.

Nobody believes that I’m shy. My own daughter laughs in my face when I mention it.

This year’s cicada infestation in the Midwest is shocking. There’s a tree next to Klara’s school that cicadas really like, and the noise they make is like nothing I’ve heard before. It’s so loud that I can understand how a person can go crazy if forced to listen to it for some time.

Usually, you only hear cicadas. I had no idea what they even looked like until this year. But now sidewalks are strewn with them.

It’s a great nuisance.

No riots or vandalism in the wake of the Trump verdict, eh?

We’ve heard so much that MAGAs are the biggest terrorist threat to the country, yet they aren’t doing anything remotely as destructive as the ongoing pro-Palestinian riots or the BLM riots of several years ago. Actually, they aren’t doing anything destructive at all. People peacefully express their opinions and donate to their candidate’s campaign.

It’s a striking difference from their opponents.

Hey, before you complain about the American justice system, you need to know that within 24 hours this week two different courts in two different parts of Spain absolved child rapists based on the argument that child rape is normal in the rapists’ culture. The need for cultural sensitivity to “a vulnerable population” was cited as justification. Strangely, it never occurred to anybody to consider the raped girls a vulnerable population.

Here’s the link. It’s in Spanish but you’ll get the gist with Google Translate.