America: Igor Shteyngart

Igor Shteyngart: For Jimmy Carter had made a bargain for wheat exports and refuseniks. Russia gets the grain it needs to run; America gets the Jews it needs to run: all in all, an excellent trade deal, Shteyngart writes. Soon after the family arrived in New York, they realized that Igor, Frankensteins assistant, wouldnt cut it in a new land and they settled on Gary to reduce schoolyard beatings. It didnt help, according to The Star. Thats because they arrived as adults. Shteyngart, now 41, was old enough to remember a Russian toddlers atmospheres, cuisine and fairy tales, but young enough to be entranced by America and its delicious junk food, ease with language, and entrancingly stupid pop culture. It was a country that wouldnt admit him unless he also became American and Oh, Failurchka , darling Soplyak ! The words mean Little Failure and Snotty. Such were the diminutives bestowed by two harsh loving parents on a tiny snuffling asthmatic called Igor Shteyngart. The family emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979 accompanied by what Shteyngart says was the same chorus sung by the Cossacks, Stalin and the Germans: Run, Yid, run! Shteyngart, author of three famous and funny novels The Russian Debutantes Handbook , Absurdistan , and Super Sad True LoveStory has written Little Failure , a memoir about the eternal immigrant experience and his subsequent life. Many do. But most writers who immigrate to Canada write about ye olde homeland: villages, huts, caste, monsoons. The paved streets of Brampton are not of interest to them. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.