Seducing the Demon by Erica Jong

Author:Erica Jong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

The first time I came to Venice as an adult, it was after a trip to Russia, then the Soviet Union. The Soviet trip was purgatorial, as Soviet trips tended to be in those days. It was a literary junket organized by the late Harrison Salisbury. Robert Bly, Gwendolyn Brooks, Susan Sontag, Studs and Ida Terkel, Irving and Jean Stone, Arthur and Alexandra Schlesinger, Harrison and his wife, Charlotte, were the American guests.

Harrison, who was a one-man cultural exchange maven, invited us to meet our Soviet counterparts and tour the parts of the country we especially wanted to see. Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrey Voznesensky were promised, among others.

The wonderful Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks and I shared a double-decker sleeping compartment from Moscow to Kiev, but we didn’t sleep. We stayed up all night talking about poetry or reciting it to each other. Robert Bly wandered from compartment to compartment, playing his balalaika.

When we arrived in Kiev, we were paired up with our translators, who were clearly also reporting to some lowly apparatchik at the KGB about everything we said and did. That was also standard in 1983.

Matrons in black guarded each floor of the hotel and impounded our keys and passports.

For most of the day we sat in meetings, wearing headphones in which we could listen to endless droning speeches in Russian or English. Every hour or so we were summoned into the hallway for frozen shots of vodka, which I guzzled (not abstaining then), and gray greasy beluga in buds of butter, which we perched on toasted pumpernickel crescents or ate with spoons of abalone shell. What beluga it was! Could Marx have known that the best beluga would be reserved for Party members and their guests?

At lunchtime, there was another three-hour food orgy with more beluga caviar, borscht, mystery meat and icy vodka. For dessert, there were pastries and sweet Georgian champagne.

Susan Sontag, who was nothing if not pragmatic about her career, toasted “the kitchen staff that prepared the meal.” Clearly she had been here before and understood the full spectrum of appropriate Communist behavior.

Only at night, when the vodka flowed even more freely, did my sloe-eyed translator break down and weep.

“Soviet Union no good place for womens,” she whispered. “Men drink too much wodka, become why-o-lent.”

Studs Turkel would roam the city with his tape recorder trying to collect impressions of life under Communism, but an overenthusiastic comrade confiscated his machine.

During a performance of the opera The Bartered Bride, my translator lushly whispered to me, “Dat is fate of all Russian womens!”

The sense of being constantly spied on, the compulsory toasts, the never-ending drunkenness got to me quickly. It was a country I couldn’t wait to leave but was afraid would never release me. I went to Odessa in search of my Russian relatives but never found any—even with my translator’s help. I assumed my mother’s family, the Mirskys, had perished in pogroms or fallen into a ravine in Babi Yar or emigrated. Jews of my grandparents’ generation couldn’t wait to get out of Russia.

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