Novelist Boris Fishman shunned his heritage – until a fiery internship in the kitchen of a New York restaurant
In 2014, a Russian restaurant named Moscow57 opened near my apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. Manhattan was full of Russian restaurants, both classics such as Samovar and parvenus such as Mari Vanna; but the main distinction, as I saw it, was in their flavours of poshlost– kitschy nostalgia and arriviste vulgarity, respectively. And now places like these had set up shop on my walk to the subway. I started taking the other side of the street.
I had grown up going to Russian restaurants. In 1988, when I was nine, my family immigrated from the former Soviet Union to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where the Italians were slowly giving way to Chinese and Russians. My only wish was to transform myself from Boris to Bobby and shed every sign of my heritage, but I was too young to say no when my family packed off to places like the National Restaurant in Brighton Beach, the heavily Russian neighbourhood in Brooklyn, for somebody’s birthday. (Somebody had a birthday all the time.) There, seated at banquet tables worthy of Rabelais, we gorged on fried potatoes with morels, sturgeon, quail and duck liver, and watched elaborate floor shows – dancing girls, costumes, smoke – stunned by the food and the spectacle. I’d had enough for a lifetime.
Food having been scarce in Russia, for many the prospect of serving it to another can be almost erotically satisfying
I began to feel desire again: for writing, for food, even family. My resistance had obscured how much I loved my origins
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