excerpt from a ting.

...I’ve listened to historians explain how the Csarist army conscription/pogrom narrative from my grandfatjer’s generation is really a perpetuated myth. An overblown tall tale. How closely Morris Bober’s flight from Russia in Bernard Malamud’s book The Assistant resembles the story of Zeyda’s escape does not deter me from thinking of the story again and again as an evergreen well of pride in my American character.

In the story there is a young man who needs to leave. If he’s caught escaping he is killed, if he stays, another type of death awaits. Hiding beneath a bale of frozen hay (growing taller and more frozen with each retelling), he rides all the way to the port at St. Petersburg to take passage on a ship. He alights at a port where Old Glory waves him in. He’s left everything and everyone behind. He’s takes a new name coded with priestly DNA and a Yankee swagger. He opens a business, builds a life, and through the small berth where he first docked, an American family eventually springs. He leaves America only twice in his life, both times to visit Israel.

Zeyda’s story—of the stranger in hunger for a haven—humbles me most because of how it mirrors that original American narrative (sans the slavery and Indian slaughter) that compelled the some of the first pilgrims to come over. Through him, I am able to subvert the cynicism I feel about the true weather of the New World and what it represents as an idea. Had I been given more time with him, I might have felt more American growing up. More grateful. Until the summer, I’d never felt like each place I saw as an American, I was waving to him from there. From the margins of the timelines, the edge of the twentieth century back to the nineteenth, I’d never before fluttered back to him like a scrap of paper taken by the wind...