A Russian Immigrant by Maxim D. Shrayer

Author:Maxim D. Shrayer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Published: 2019-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

BORSCHT BELT

In 1988, at the end of May, Simon Reznikov turned twenty-one. Having reached the legal drinking age for the second time (it was eighteen in the Soviet Union), he felt that immigrant time was moving forward while also flowing backward. Simon and his parents celebrated his birthday in the tower of a fairy-tale castle overlooking Narragansett Bay. Having already been new Americans for ten months, the Reznikovs had become well versed in the geography of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. And they had already been to Boston at least three times, and to New York City once. These great cities beckoned them, former Muscovites, with the promise of deliverance from their providential existence, where Simon’s father was cut off from the Russian literary community and his mother from a big city’s music scene, and where Simon pined after his world of Moscow friends.

After moving back home from campus, Simon spent a week looking for summer jobs. He needed to save up enough money to pay for the two months he was planning to spend in France the following summer, between college and graduate school. One job fell into his hands from a dormmate who had been waitressing at the Brown Faculty Club and took him to meet the manager.

“Can you balance a wine bottle on a tray?” asked the manager during the interview. In the 1970s, she had been crowned Providence Beauty Queen.

“I can,” Simon answered, his prior restaurant experience limited to working at a coffee shop.

He got the job, purchased a white shirt, polyester black trousers, and an adjustable bowtie at Sears on Main Street, and joined the motley brotherhood and sisterhood of the Faculty Club waitstaff. The group included the Portuguese common-law wife of a Jewish chef, a twin brother and sister whose Polish parents ran a funeral parlor in southern Rhode Island, a melancholy Puerto-Rican girl who was majoring in urban planning and had a Coca Cola dependency, and a charismatic bearded drifter from Pittsburgh who zestfully recited the tsar’s titles. Emperor and Autocrat of All Russia . . . Tsar of Astrakhan . . . Tsar of Georgia . . . Prince of Estland . . . Lord of Turkestan . . . Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and so forth. The tips at dinners and weddings were generous, but the former Miss Providence demanded the kind of daily adoration Simon couldn’t muster. And so he wasn’t getting enough work at functions.

A trail of job ads and phone interviews brought him to The Bonnets, a private beach club on Narragansett Bay, where a pair of Providence restaurateurs ran an overpriced summer steak-and-lobster establishment. For some reason, the owners hired Simon on the spot, probably calculating that after a day of sun and sea the WASP-y clients would mistake his lack of garrulousness for dry European humor and take pleasure in his “Boris-and-Natasha” accent. The owners, who made their waitstaff lie about “fresh swordfish” (frozen) or “fresh tarragon” (dried), were correct about Simon’s appeal to the beach club clientele.

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