The Man Who Ate the World (11 page)

Instead, in celebration of the other species in there, I order the “fillet of carp in the Jewish style with ruby jelly.” What arrives is a solid chunk of cold, skin-on fish, complete with bone, itself stuffed with more minced white fish. There is beetroot jelly on the plate and a little horseradish, and the moment I taste it all I am a child again, though not in a good way. For what I am eating reminds me, in a visceral manner, of a dish my mother used to cook, one that I always hated. But the sudden taste memory goes so much further than that.

For days, wandering Moscow, I have been intrigued by the Soviet-nostalgia menus of pickled vegetables and smoked fish, of cakes made with poppy seeds, and now this lump of dense carp on the plate before me. I have been intrigued by it all because every single one of those tastes has been so familiar and therefore a reminder to me of what I really am:
not the savvy cosmopolitan Londoner. Not the Englishman, raised on Dickens and Shakespeare, soothed by Edward Elgar and Vaughan Williams. Instead, I am just a big-bellied peasant of Jewish stock, with a taste for chicken fat, salt beef, and new green pickles, who happened, by good fortune, to end up living a bloody long way from here.

When I was thirteen years old I was Bar Mitzvahed and, though I recall none of the Hebrew I read that day in synagogue, I do remember the dessert that we ate at the party afterward: It was blintzes stuffed with thick, sweetened cream cheese. There were also, after dinner, platters of fruit-laden Danish pastries. There were biscuits and outrageous cream cakes and, with the coffee, chocolates, both plain and milk.

This suggests the main course had been fish of some kind, for, while my parents didn’t give a damn about religious observance, even they would not go so far as to bust Jewish dietary laws by serving milk and meat together at a Bar Mitzvah. My mother, to be fair, was so antagonist toward any form of religious observance, she would quite happily have foregone the whole affair. However my father, though no great believer, insisted that we would only regret that which we hadn’t done. He told us that afterward we could decide for ourselves if we wanted to take Judaism further.

He was the one who made sure I got to Hebrew classes and who, pressing into service his experience in the menswear trade, chose my outfit for the big day: houndstooth trousers, white ruffled shirt, black velvet jacket, and a flowing red silk cravat held in place by a silver ring. It was not a good look for a fat thirteen-year-old; I appeared to have taken fashion tips from Tony Curtis in his plump 1970s phase.

It is curious that it should have been my father who took responsibility for my Jewish education because, while he gave me the knowledge, it is actually from my mother that I take almost all my Jewish identity,
though only because she fed me. I have always thought that I am almost entirely Jewish by food, and have long joked that I worshipped at my mother’s fridge. She made a mean chopped liver, and there was always matzo in the house to spread it upon, not just at Passover.

She knew how to boil a fowl to make the most soothing of chicken soups, and liked to fry eggs with wurst, a kind of beef salami that always stained them pink. Most of all, she made gefilte fish, both boiled and fried. The boiled, which she loved, I hated. The mix of sweetened white fish (in some recipes ground almonds are added, giving an unpleasant crumbly mouth feel) would be formed into balls, boiled, then allowed to cool and served with a clear fishy jelly. I thought it was disgusting, a creation that should go from pan to bin without troubling the plate, and it was that dish that the stuffed carp at Sirena most reminded me of.

Her fried gefilte fish, though, was something else, the crisp, salty exterior giving way to light fluffy insides. The only peculiarity was that my mother insisted it should be eaten cold rather than hot. This was a relic from the days of observance that she so firmly rejected. Fried gefilte fish would have been made in advance of the Sabbath, and then eaten cold when cooking was forbidden. We ate bagels and onion platzels, garlicky new green pickled cucumbers (which she sometimes made herself ), and salt beef, which ideally came with its own ribbon of amber fat.

When I left home, and moved even farther away from my roots, I came to think that the only thing that defined me as a Jew was my love for these dishes. All of this food marked my family out as Ashkenazi Jews, who came from the Pale of Settlement, those parts of Poland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, and Byelorussia, annexed in the late eighteenth century by Catherine the Great of Russia (a country that, until that point, had been closed to Jews).

Throughout the centuries of wandering, the Jews had been famously good at adapting the local culinary traditions to the demands of their religious dietary laws, and because they settled for so many centuries in the lands of Mittel and Eastern Europe, and became so established, they appropriated an awful lot of what was there. As a result, many of the
things that I had always associated with the Ashkenazi—the use of soured cream and dill, of caraway and poppy seed, the chicken soups and dumplings and pickles—were really just the foods of the Slavic peoples (minus, tragically, their love of all things pig, a relationship I have since put a lot of effort into rekindling).

In London, where I grew up, my taste for schmaltz—literally, for chicken fat—was the last remaining vestigial stump of all those historical and geographical associations. My need for a regular fix of salt beef on rye was like the phantom itch from a long-ago amputated limb. My wife, Pat, who is not Jewish, hates this stuff and says I would, too, were it not for the cultural attachments. She also says that Jewish cuisine is an oxymoron. On this we are agreed. The word “cuisine” suggests finesse, and if there’s any finesse in Jewish food, it isn’t being done right.

A few years ago a cousin decided to trace our family tree and, though I had not looked at it in any detail, I had brought the documents with me on this, my first trip to Russia. It begins with my ancestor Boruch, born near Lublin, Poland, in 1796, a major achievement of genealogy for the Jews who, notoriously, can claim thousands of years of collective history but none of the paperwork to back it up.

From Boruch it works forward through nine generations to describe a family, mostly unknown to one another, which now spans the world from London to Jerusalem, from Canada and the U.S.A. to Brazil and Argentina. My line of the family comes from Josef Boruchowicz, my mother’s grandfather, who was born in Sarnaki, Poland, in 1882 and died in London in 1942, having changed his surname to Berk. What intrigues me most is not what happened to the ones who left Poland but what happened to those who stayed. Obviously, large numbers were murdered during the Holocaust. The accounts of the fifth, sixth, and seventh generations, who were still living not far from Lublin at the outbreak of World War II, are littered with the names of concentration camps like Sobibor and Majdanek. At least eighteen of my relatives on this side of the family were killed by the Nazis.

Then there are the ones who survived, and their offspring: the children
of Icek and Valentina Sherman, Tanya and Ira, who now live respectively in the Russian cities of Kurgan and Nizhniy Tagil; the children of Rita and Boris Gillman, Edik and Gennady, and of Moisey and Sima Sherman, all born in Slavuta in the Ukraine, and where the extended family lives still. The “what if?” school of history can be terribly unconvincing, because of the myriad possible outcomes to any given situation. But here, spread out on the counterpane of my expensive hotel bed in my expensive (if free) hotel suite in Moscow, was a clear path I genuinely could have followed. Had I been on another branch of this family tree, the funny Jewish food I liked to force upon my wife would not have been an occasional culinary diversion. It would not have been the focus of my fragile cultural identity. It would just have been dinner, and for some reason I found that terribly chilling.

A
wet weekday night and I am in an expensive black four-wheel drive, barreling past a line of stationary traffic on the outskirts of Moscow. Next to me is Katya Dovlatov, daughter of the late Sergei Dovlatov, a highly regarded Russian writer who was forced to emigrate, unpublished, to the U.S. in the 1970s and who only found a Russian readership in the nineties, long after his death. The car we are in, and its driver, have been borrowed from Katya’s flat mate, an executive with the oil company British Petroleum, who is away on business (for in Moscow, all executives have cars and drivers on twenty-four-hour call). Katya says nothing as the car speeds past the other vehicles, but leans forward a little in her seat to see what awaits us. This spur of road ends at the motorway, where we find a single policeman, holding back the traffic. I feel Katya stiffen in her seat.

Our driver, Alexi, winds down the window, and barks something at the policeman who stares back at him impassively.

“He’s telling him that we are foreigners and that we are late for dinner,” she says with a bitter laugh. Katya left the USSR when she was eleven, and lived amid all the other Russian émigrés in Queens—her
accent when she speaks English is pure New York—where her father edited the Russian-language newspaper The New American and wrote stories for
The New Yorker.
She first revisited Moscow shortly after the collapse of communism and, after studying Russian literature in London, has increasingly made Moscow her home.

Now she runs a charitable foundation in her father’s name, though she makes no attempt to hide the fact that the way the city operates drives her nuts. On our journey we had seen big black cars simply drive down the pavement to escape the traffic, and others, with blue lights flashing, driving on the wrong side of the road. “Under Yeltsin anybody could get a blue light for $20,000,” she told me. “Now you still have to pay, but they only go to certain people.” This, she says, is a city that functions according to status and it does not surprise her that the driver should be trying to get us onto the closed motorway by intoning our position as foreigners with restaurant reservations. It’s usually a killer combination.

Tonight it makes no difference. Our driver is “fined” the equivalent of £10 ($20, in reality, a bribe to keep him out of the judicial process), and we are told to wait in line. Then, out of the darkness, its red and blue lights flashing against the wet surface of the empty motorway, comes a police car moving at serious speed, a thick mist bursting from its back wheels. A few seconds later comes the reason for this traffic jam: a long, shiny black limo, low to the road, the flag of the Russian Federation flying on its bonnet. President Vladimir Putin is being driven to his country residence outside the city and, as always happens when he makes the journey, the security services have shut down the motorway to let him get there as quickly as possible. His people must wait.

Katya watches him speed past. “Welcome to the Rublevskoye Highway,” she says.

Rublevskoye, she tells me, is the Beverly Hills of Moscow, only with less taste, and more Armani; once a place of modest country dachas, forty-five minutes outside the city, it is now where the seriously rich live in their enormous houses, behind high walls “patrolled by scary men with Kalashnikovs.” It’s home to the politicians, and the oligarchs, and
the New Russians for whom money is just a way of keeping score. Recently a new shopping mall was opened alongside the highway. It is populated only by the likes of Prada and Ferrari, Maserati and Gucci, temples to luxury built out here on a wooded hillside, a short drive in the Merc away from the compounds. It is also home to our destination, an Arkady Novikov restaurant called Tsarsky Okhota, or Tsar’s Hunt.

I play with the idea that Putin would have regretted making us late for our table, had he known, for cooking and food are a part of his heritage. In his authorized biography,
First Person
, published in 2000, he revealed that his grandfather was a chef who had been brought to Moscow to cook at one of Stalin’s dachas and that, as a boy, he also prepared food for Lenin. But you only need to look at Putin, at his skin the color of porridge and that waxy sheen he has, to know he doesn’t do food, not even Novikov’s burrata or his arugula, shrimp, and Parmesan salad. Quietly, the Wolkows like to boast that the Kremlin orders their sushi to go, but then sushi has always been the fallback for rich people who like to pretend they have taste when they have no interest in eating at all.

No, the last real eater in the Kremlin, the one who would have understood our eagerness to get moving, was Putin’s predecessor. Boris Yeltsin apparently liked a bit of food with his vodka. He was a man of prodigious appetites and he often liked to satisfy them at Tsar’s Hunt; photographs of Yeltsin and Jacques Chirac eating like tsars hang on the walls. If it’s good enough for two presidents, it must be good enough for us.

When it first opened, Tsar’s Hunt sat alone with only the trees for company, a faux hunting lodge in a perfect setting, but development is fast out here, and now it is adrift on a tundra of tarmac, with a shopping development on one side of the car park and an apartment complex across the road. Inside, though, the fantasy is intact. There is a waterwheel and a babbling stream that you cross on a little bridge. There is, naturally enough, a wishing well, and the walls are hung with animal heads and antlers and furs, because many creatures had to die to furnish this place.

Everything is panelled in dark wood, and the waiters are dressed as Cossacks, which I find unnerving. Once I became a father, my wife
would often suggest we go camping. She was sure the kids would enjoy it, and I was sure that I wouldn’t. I told her Jews didn’t do camping, that the last time my people had camped was when they were fleeing a pogrom and that, if ever I found myself under canvas, I was sure the Cossacks were coming. I thought this was very funny.

Now, though, I am being served by a bunch of them: big, stern men, with short-cropped blond hair, solid brows, and smile-bypasses. I decide it is best to get the orders in quickly in the hope that they might go away. At Katya’s insistence we avoid the £50 ($100)-a-head buffet, and choose instead some zakuski (from the Russian verb
zakusit
, “to take a little bite”), the Russian “tapas” that traditionally start every meal. We order a plate of sliced pig fat, and another of Russian charcuterie, which is almost the same thing. We have assorted pickled mushrooms, a basket of uncut vegetables (starring a whole skin-on onion), and another of bread, including toasted borodinsky, a coal-black rye bread with heavy molasses flavors which Katya tells me to rub with a cut clove of garlic. I do as I am told.