A One Generation Society: Paradise Lost?

A few semesters ago, I had a student in my lit class. Call him Paul. Nice guy, somewhat engaged with the material, often enthusiastic about lectures and even class discussions, though when I asked a specific question, it usually turned out that he hadn't quite finished doing his reading for class.

After twenty years of teaching, I don't remember all my students. But Paul sticks in my mind for a couple of reasons. First, he was just the kind of student I like to get in my general education classes -- a student who won't go on to major in literature or even the humanities necessarily, but who seems to enjoy being exposed to Russian literature. He learned something, and his world got a little bigger. That's what general education is all about.

But there's another reason I remember Paul. It turned out that for him, the subject matter wasn't entirely new. Towards the end of the semester he told me: "I really love listening to you talk about Russia and Russian lit. You remind me of my grandmother."

Ugh. His grandmother? 

Baba-Yaga
flying in her mortar, sweeping with her broom

Turns out -- and I hadn't guessed it from his surname -- that Paul was a third-generation American. His grandparents had emigrated from Russia in the seventies, perhaps when his dad was a little boy. So he grew up hearing the names Pushkin and Lermontov, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, Tsar Nicholas, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Stalin. His grandmother may have recited poetry to him, or read him Russian fairytales at bedtime. When I talked about Baba-Yaga or Anton Chekhov, it all rang a nostalgic if vague bell for him. These were not his writers. This was not his history. It belonged to an older generation, and for him my class was a way to connect with those relatives for whom it had been real. 

I remembered Paul this week because I'm reading a set of essays by Vail and Genis (see previous post about their Russian Cuisine in Exile). The book is called Lost Paradise -- or perhaps Paradise Lost, Потерянный рай. It is a fascinating analysis of the emigre society, of their experiences in and with American culture. Sometimes called "third wave emigres", this group of mostly Jewish Russians began to arrive in the U.S. in the mid- seventies, and according to one scholar eventually numbered about half a million people. Vail and Genis relate their experiences, and though I know this history, a few of their stories surprised me.

Language Russian emigres who came to America knew something about America. Many had learned English in school or on their own; many knew and loved American literature -- Faulkner, Hemingway, even early Philip Roth. But as Vail and Genis describe it, they could not get their minds and tongues around American English. Initially intending to embrace the country that had accepted them, they foundered on the rocks of pronunciation -- their own, and that of the people they encountered. V&G assert that "even grandmothers were able to speak some rudimentary Italian to shopkeepers after a few weeks at the transit point in Rome," but they struggled to be understood in the places they landed in the U.S. This is one reason that emigre literature--newspapers, book publishing, poetry--continued to flourish. Frustrated with English and Americans, they retreated to their own cultural production.

Mass Culture Russians who were headed to the U.S. knew that America was the land of "mass culture." They had seen some American films, listened openly or secretly to American jazz, and even paged through a copy of Playboy while they were still in the Soviet Union. So they thought they were prepared for mass culture. What struck V&G therefore was not so much the existence of mass culture, but its quantity and ubiquity. Who knew, they ask, that there was so much of it?! In Russia Playboy had a different context--the context of dissident culture. Now it was just soft porn.

Everyday life The thing about living in a culture is that you don't necessarily notice all its moving parts. V&G note, for example, Americans' obsession with the weekend. In Soviet Russia not every profession had a five-day work week, and "days off" could happen in the middle of the week rather than at the end. Attitudes toward work and leisure differed, too, so encountering the sacred American weekend -- with its barbecues, and its yard work, and its churchgoing, and so on -- was a real shock. 

As an American who has lived in Soviet Russia, I have to say that these are all issues I encountered too. The Russian they spoke over there was not always the Russian I spoke, and I couldn't always make myself understood, in part because of cultural issues. I laugh at the thought that the "penetration" of mass culture into American lives made it difficult for emigres to break in. For us "foreigners" Russian life can be so culturally encoded that we never quite get what anyone is talking about. Entire populations can rattle off stanzas of poetry and long dialogues from films, not to mention singing the songs of underground bard poets or knowing that when Swan Lake is playing on the television, it may be that another historic event has happened -- a leader dead, a war beginning, etc. These are the elements of Russian--linguistic culture, mass culture, byt--that make cultural fluency a very high bar for Americans who study Russia. 

But the most poignant comment in the book so far has been about the artificiality of Russian emigre society ... because the average age of its "citizens" was about fifty years old. As V&G put it: "our children are already not emigres, they are Americans, so we are a one-generation society."

Lost paradise, or paradise lost?

They call the book Lost Paradise, I think, because it was impossible to understand while living in Soviet society that they would miss the feeling of belonging. They were outsiders, as V&G emphasize -- in many cases Jewish, in some cases dissidents, in others curious about the West and about how the rest of the world lived, anxious to escape from behind the Iron Curtain to see that world. 

But when they arrived, they only gradually began to understand that the things they valued -- from Pushkin to fairytales, from the Russian language to the addictive quality of being dissident -- were no longer relevant, or at least wouldn't be in the next generation.

We, like the Russians, think of our life as conditioned by generational conflict. The sons rebel against the fathers, the daughters don't want to be like their mothers. But then we settle into middle age when those differences fade and shared experiences and values become more important. What if you were cut off from the previous generation as you reached that point, and were unable to communicate with the strangers you called your children?

Paradise Lost, indeed. "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven," wrote John Milton. When you've lost your homeland -- even deliberately -- you must come to terms with that "own place." The original paradise was a one-generation society, at least initially. But this reversal -- a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven -- is just the paradox Vail and Genis were grappling with in their book.

My student Paul wouldn't understand. But he did enjoy peeking into his grandmother's lost paradise, if only twice a week for eighty minutes at a time.