Four Tales

Four Tales Jake Marmer (bio) Keywords hybrid, Jake Marmer, Eastern Europe, Ukraine, immigrant, birch, writing, class, wealth, music, nostalgia AGAINST THE BIRCH (AND THE FIR) EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT to be a self-respecting Eastern European émigré writer, you must learn to long for the birch. Before you can even attempt to tackle the whole second-language issue, alienation, lost loves—you gotta take your first wobbly steps around the poeticized-to-death, they-bend-but-don’t-break, “oh under her window” birch tree. It’s the shibboleth, the rite of passage, an affirmation of having lived and lived again, elsewhere, and taking up the feather to write your big, nostalgic immigrant novel. Can I tell you something? I feel no nostalgia, nothing at all, and I never did. Even before this war in Ukraine started and these stories of mine needed immediate evacuation—and not nostalgia’s lukewarm soup of faux feelings. In the meantime, all over his memoir (an actual classic of émigré nostalgia, written, by the way, in part during World War II), Nabokov pines over birches & firs & his family’s fancy-ass estates, populated with barefoot peasant girls named Polina or Tamara, who lingered mysteriously in some doorway as he, barchuk (“the young master,” geez) was inhaling this or that scent while riding on his fancy-ass bicycle with a butterfly net. Let me tell you this: no one I grew up with back in Ukraine owned a butterfly net. Barchuk! Just that word alone awakens the old communist fervor in me. Nostalgia is for rich people in safety, or rather, those who were very rich once and are now moderately well off. I guess those who grew up poor but became rich and are now miserable can feel it too, and it’s not that different, feelings-wise—I just don’t really care. It’s all about the crossover, see, the grassy patch between classes. In that patch grow impenetrable, mean birches. Yes, mean and pompous: that’s why I hate them. A writer I admire once asked me: Why is it that you Eastern Europeans always cry at classical music concerts? The music reaches crescendo, and you can pretty much count on it. Sitting there, with your noble tears running down the cheeks. Some folks even bring kerchiefs knowing it will happen, too. Like they come expecting it. You want to cry? [End Page 17] Stay home and cry—why does it need to be in public like that? I didn’t tell him, but I will tell you: the types who cry at those concerts sit and think about birches. Me, I rub my eyes trying to stay awake and look cultured. One time, an old Soviet-style army choir came to the Lincoln Center and sang all the little folk songs my grandmother used to sing along with the television, and that really got to me. Good thing I didn’t go with my sarcastic writer friend but instead brought an American-born date who looked politely bewildered as I sat there, bawling all through the concert over aging, red-faced army dudes singing about the rowan bush and the little raspberries. Sometimes I turn off the news, and memories of Ukraine come and flood me and out of nowhere I am in tears, wrecked and sobbing into my dark glasses. But just because I miss something or fear it may be erased by rocket fire doesn’t mean I’m nostalgic. To be completely honest, I don’t even remember things enough to miss them: it’s just that there’s a spot somewhere in there that hurts because there once was a memory with tentacles of feeling and now there’s a void in its place. And when you’re walking through your immigrant mind, especially during the war, you’re bound to hit one of these voids, multiple times a day, and you never know when, and you can’t predict what kind of a void it is either. There are bottomless voids but also little puddle-like voideles, gamy and almost-fun voidies, hellish voidoids, whistling voidichkes, every which kind, filling the memory of my childhood, babysitting...