“Think about your most embarrassing moment. Then multiply it many times. That’s what it feels like when your clients are losing money.” The latter is a paraphrase of Shelwyn Weston, a senior wealth manager at Goldman Sachs back in 1998. She was speaking to a class of new associates that I was part of, and what she said stays with me to this day.
It came to mind while reading Anya Gillinson’s beautifully written and remarkable new memoir, Dreaming in Russian. Gillinson’s life story is largely about her time in the United States, after she, her mother, and sister Liana exited the defunct Soviet Union. Writing about immigration itself, as in trying to make it in a new country, Gillinson observes that it is “a humiliating trial that exposes your most unflattering characteristics and your deepest weakness.”
Gillinson’s observation will stick with me as Weston’s always has simply because the two kinds of embarrassment introduce a new way of looking at a job and a decision. With immigration, we so often think of its impact on the country. It’s what immigrants do to us, or the most vulnerable, or to the cities and states they wind up in. Rarely discussed is the humiliation involved for those who love themselves enough to get to countries like the United States. There’s your humiliation it seems. Think about it.
U.S. culture is revered globally, as are U.S. products and services. A Polish immigrant recently told me that McDonald’s for his family in Poland was the stuff of Sundays and formal wear. In Africa to this day, the rare U.S. fast food place is where men hoping to impress a girl take a date. In other words, the U.S. is the cool kid to the world. The coolest.
Imagine then, what it feels like to arrive in a country you revere. You lack the money, the clothes, and most often the command of the language in the country you’ve long looked longingly at. Maybe Gillinson means something different, but that’s the point of books. No one reads the same one. In my case, Gillinson opened my eyes to another aspect of immigration: it’s not just that people risk their lives to get here (Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane has long said the act of getting here stamps “immigrants” as Americans), it’s not just that the decision to risk one’s life to get to the United States is on its own not very easy (the guess is that those who leave not infrequently were the stars from whence they came), and it’s not just that if you’re lucky enough to get here that you’re frequently bereft of possessions of any meaningful kind, it’s that once you’re here and so successful as to be living and working, that the existence itself is defined by routine embarrassment.
What’s interesting about all this, is that Gillinson’s humiliation upon reaching New York City was much more gold-plated. Consider her background. Crucial here is that her background explains her eventual arrival in the United States. Though Russian names are always confusing, Gillinson was born Anya Novikova in the Soviet Union of the 1970s. She was the daughter and granddaughter of prominent entertainers (her mother a concert pianist, he grandmother an actress, her grandfather Saul an entertainment impresario) on her mother’s side, and doctors on her father’s side. Her father, Arkaday Novikov, was known throughout the Soviet Union, and people would travel far and wide to Moscow in order to be treated by him.
Gillinson describes her father as “the architect of my life, the inventor of my character, my judge, and my true protector.” Her father was notable to Gillinson’s book for so many reasons, including that the United States was “the country of my father’s dreams and his greatest aspiration for me.” It’s a reminder that the Soviets, including Arkady, knew. Propaganda is only successful if it’s not needed. It’s like banks in a simplistic sense. They say about them that they lend to those who don’t need the money, and propaganda that actually works is an effect of there being no need for it.
This wasn’t true in the Soviet Union. Gillinson writes that “my father came to loathe the Soviet healthcare system. He saw bureaucracy, inertia, stupidity, lack of resources and negligence toward patients that was not personal so much as it was systemic.” To which more than a few readers will nod along knowingly. Well yes, central planning and its demerits. Except that Gillinson gives the reader more. And she does so in powerful fashion.
She writes that “those who fell out of favor at work and got fired were subject to arrest if they couldn’t get another job right away. This law was often used to intimidate dissidents.” Please think about the previous passage with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s (Gillinson swipes Dostoevsky closer to the end of book as popular with westerners for facile reasons…!) line about the alleged criminal element in Crime and Punishment top of mind; as in the extraordinary people “who have the gift or talent of speaking a new word in their environment.” In pre-Soviet Russia they had a chance because they were, well, extraordinary. In the Soviet Union of Gillinson’s time and before, anyone with an opposite idea didn’t dare utter it, particularly on the job.
Remember, in the words of Gillinson unemployment “was a crime in the new workers’ heaven” of the Soviet Union, so people just got along as best they could. Translated, the extraordinary largely kept their mouths shut. Imagine the horrors of that. No freedom to be, say, or do differently. The agony. And then the agony further explains why the Soviet Union didn’t just fail because central planning always fails, but because stagnation and decline is the certain consequence of the suffocation of those with talent who might otherwise speak “a new word.” Again, the agony of having the mindset of an entrepreneur but with no way to express these opposite views. They’d become – yes – criminal.
No wonder Anya’s father wanted out. He most certainly was a criminal in the Dostoevsky sense. This was his solace of sorts, but also crucial for the many who were treated by him. Gillinson writes that away from the opposite thinkers like her brilliant father, “people would rather drink urine in hopes for a cure than adhere to a medical treatment coming from an educated doctor.” A profession that couldn’t innovate by design was stuck in decline and the result was substantial “distrust toward medical science” within the citizenry. Shades of what shamefully happened in 2020 when doctors near monolithically bought into the notion that the taking of freedom and the crushing of the U.S. economy were necessary to mitigate the effects of a spreading virus. Sorry, but wealth is the greatest enemy that death and disease have ever known.
All of which brings up a quibble with the author. She mentions the coronavirus at a couple of stages in the book, and with good reason as readers will see. What didn’t ring true was this freedom-loving author’s accepting lines like “she succumbed to COVID like so many millions of others.” About my quibble, let me be clear with my belief that easily the worst excuses for the lockdowns in response to the virus were the initial ones: hospitals weren’t ready for all the sick people who would get the virus by living freely, along with 2 million+ Americans would die if they were allowed to remain free. Utter nonsense. And that’s not a scientific or medical statement, that’s just a comment that if the virus had been at all like what the experts said it was with highly limited knowledge, Americans would have locked down on their own. Translated, the more threatening anything is, the more superfluous is the government’s response.
My quibble will come in three questions: Why didn’t the author express horror at was done, and as being of a piece of what happened to doctors in the old Soviet Union whereby dissenting opinion was muzzled? Second, does she really think the virus was the catalyst for millions of deaths, or was it largely a factor in the deaths of frequently older, rather unwell people, including her former stepfather, Ed McCauley? Three, how interesting to imagine what her rebellious father would have thought. As he’s rightly written about in heroic fashion, I’d like to think he would have found the lockdowns and the attempted suffocation of dissent (in America, no less!) as thoroughly tragic, and for being that way, wholly inimical to positive health outcomes.
This is important because Anya’s father most certainly was a rebel. He was operating a private medical practice out of his fancy apartment despite it being “a sin against socialism to be in business for yourself.” Yet how lucky the people were that he was actually practicing medicine that he uniquely intuited relative to what was taught and allowed. Still, it raises an obvious question of how he was able to practice despite doing so privately in such a public way, all the while practicing so differently. The freedom-lover in Novikov courageously chose to be free where freedom was largely non-existent.
Gillinson indicates that he avoided major trouble mainly because “everyone in Russian had trouble breathing.” Translated, communism is dirty, it’s smoky, and according to Ed Crane (Cato co-founder mentioned earlier), communism smells. And with so many people sick, including family members of Politburo members, “they needed him more than he needed them.” Which brings up another interesting, but also crucial anecdote from this wonderful book.
Gillinson is clear that her father did not like talking money with patients. When asked about payment, he would reply “I don’t get involved in such matters,” then leave the room. What’s important is that he knew they had to pay, “otherwise they would not trust him.” Yes!!! It’s not just that central planning, collectivism and force result in the production of what no one wants, it’s that people instinctually don’t trust what is free. No thanks. Prices or payment signal something about the value of the good or service. Though the range of payments to Dr. Novikov was surely all over the place (I kept wishing Gillinson would indicate how often the pay was in U.S. dollars?), they all paid. Prices are communication, and they live even where they’re being crushed.
Gillson herself would frequently be the one who would take payment, as the doctor was training her “in the forbidden science of capitalist economics.” Yes, but capitalist economics is as natural as breathing. Governments to varying degrees suffocate the patient, and communist governments kill, but what’s natural never dies precisely because it’s natural.
The main, beautiful point about Gillinson’s father is that in addition to thriving where it was illegal (their Moscow apartment was “imperial,” “five rooms with high ceilings and huge windows”), in addition to loving America from afar, in addition to being a remarkable father, Arkady Novikov “challenged the absence of freedom in every way he could.” Oh wow, how I hope Gillinson’s story reaches a wide audience. Crane (Cato again) would view her, but especially her father, as “a hero of the revolution.”
Which is why it’s so tragic how her father died. He was murdered in New York City, the greatest city in the country of his dreams. A botched robbery attempt by some sick criminal. Galina Novikova, Anya’s mother, returned to the Soviet Union to give her worshipful-of-dad daughter the horrible news. It’s a cruel world, and Gillinson’s world was forever altered.
It brings us briefly to Gillinson’s mother. Having been married to her own Zeus who would eventually bring her to the U.S. in the right way, suddenly she had to navigate a life without Arkady, and soon enough without the money that his not-so-hidden work provided them. They were the elite, yet suddenly they would have to get to the United States for the “humiliation” that is part and parcel of being an immigrant.
A hero in this story is Soviet refusenik Marik who was already living in New York, and who knew Arkady in medical school. Marik had savage qualities (he would eat an onion like an apple) that plainly revolted these refined people, but Gillinson is clear “we needed a Marik in our life” because “his plan was to build a life with us.” It all begs for a memoir by Gillinson’s mother. She knew she was stepping down as it were, but she made a noble choice for everyone.
Eventually it didn’t work with Marik, only for a dashing bar owner by the name of Ed McCauley to enter the picture. He lived on 85th & 3rd in the apartment building made famous by The Jeffersons (look it up!). Galina eventually married him (McCauley “getting married was a heroic mistake” – she has such a way with words), which similarly was marrying down in a variety of ways, but when you think about it, how remarkable. A Russian Jewish immigrant with two daughters would likely lack confidence as she endured the difficulties of being an immigrant, but somehow she had that special something. The view here is that in general, immigrants have that special something. My question amid all this was whether or not Galina felt cheated? What was her mindset?
At the same time, Galina’s story, the fact that she was noticed at an Upper East Side bar in the first place, raised questions. Not bad ones, just questions. This is a 278 page memoir spanning decades, which means so much is going to be left out. This is important mainly because as desperate-sounding as their arrival to the U.S. was, almost right away this displaced family was spending time with elites, including bold-faced names like Denise Rich. When Galina wanted to get Liana (Gillinson’s younger sister) ballet instruction during her short-lived stint in New York, she called Mikhail Baryshnikov. They knew people.
Notable about the time around when Arkady was murdered (June 24, 1990), the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. This is of importance since upon collapse, property was privatized. This included their fancy Moscow apartment that was soon rented by a British businessman working for an American company. As in they had income. Eventually the apartment was sold, and a smaller one purchased for Gillinson’s sister (a very sad story), yet her mother continued to live and socialize in elite Manhattan circles. It’s a long way of saying there’s a bigger story to tell. Here’s hoping Gillinson has more books in her.
For now, there will be lots of questions simply because the book shifts. Once a family story, it logically becomes more about Anya herself. In particular, some failed relationships. There was Daniel Roitman (“I never loved him but was rather in love with the feeling of being in love with him.”), there was Eddy #2 (Eddy #1 being her mother’s McCauley) who reveled in the alleged nobility of his socialism relative to the evil rich, but who was, “like Marx himself, a scrivener with a wealthy benefactor.” As always, Gillinson puts things so very well.
Most important of all, there was the courtship by Sam Melzer, and eventual marriage to same. Of fairly prominent upbringing in Long Island (one grandparent lived in a grand apartment at Sutton Place), Melzer will perhaps ring true to readers. In business on his own, and always doing business, it’s apparent that neither Gillinson nor anyone who knew him could ever really figure out what business he was in. And they couldn’t because he seemingly couldn’t describe his business.
Meanwhile, Gillinson herself was going the law school path via Pace, a (by her own admission) lower-tier place to study the law. Law school and what followed (including several New York Bar fails) is depressing, as is Sam’s path. What was hard to get is that he was so frugal on his own (much of their courtship he lived on Long Island), his business was going nowhere, but they decide to have one, and eventually two kids. Their existence was dreary, and included a live-in babysitter in at one point, a one-bedroom apartment. Think about it.
Eventually Sam’s business fails, at which point Gillinson becomes the primary breadwinner via her soul-crushing document review work as an unlicensed, and eventually licensed lawyer. Why didn’t she skip law school and stay at Morgan Stanley? Similarly, it never made sense that someone from Sam’s prominent network or his family itself never picked him up? Evidence they didn’t was Sam’s eventual joining of a group referred to as “the Wolfpack” which, according to Gillinson, “all shared one common bond: failure.” As always, a way with words. Even when sad.
Sam’s descent would be tough on any marriage, but especially their marriage. It brings up an aspect of Gillinson that some will take offense to: she’s blunt about her disdain for feminism and what she deems its myriad discontents. As she puts it, “the natural order of things is for men to be strong and women to be soft.” She believes harmony is disturbed when these “honest laws of nature” are messed around with. Gillinson is plainly writing about the United States.
While she doesn’t “argue with a woman’s right to choose, or the right to have an equal opportunity with man. They should, if only to prove to themselves and to the world that they are not as good as men in many things they so brazenly claim to be.” Gillinson’s view is that nature trumps fads, or theory, or feminism, that “Two female hormones control women’s life: estrogen and progesterone.” She believes these factors loom powerfully large and explain the need within women to jump off the corporate path. Childrearing is a must for them, that even Vladimir Lenin “could never eliminate in women the instinctive desire to be women.”
Reading all this, I found myself wondering why Americans are so different in this regard. This isn’t me taking sides, but it is me saying Gillinson has a point that’s worthy of discussion. About the previous sentence, nothing about it is a call to put women in their place, or anything of the sort. In my case, it’s unwelcome to imagine American women as the halting, worshipful kind. Men need a kick-in-the-ass, lots of them. Still, the essential value of Gillinson’s view can be found in her adopted Manhattan. As she describes the bar that Ed McCauley once owned, each night women “would perch themselves like spiders and patiently wait for their male prey.” Sorry, but it’s a fair description of New York in the fall, winter and spring, and the Hamptons in the summer. The tension between women for the few good men is palpable.
The bet here for why the tension has grown so much is the sexual revolution. It was terrible for women because it gave men who desire choices too much choice. And it allowed men to act like children in pursuit of endless choice. Where does Gillinson stand on this? It’s hard to say, but she’s clear in her view that women are in many ways the author of their misfortune and their disappointment about men, marriages, or lack thereof. She wants women to assert themselves, but instead says they “take themselves far too seriously to play the role of seductress,” not to mention her view that “few things in a relationship depend on a man” as is. Readers can decide, and in deciding, they might have questions of Gillinson herself?
Her memoir is such an uplifting love letter to the U.S. and her Manhattan. She refers to the latter as “the glittering island of the pursuit of happiness.” Amen! At the same time, could she have been the seductress and did she want to take responsibility for her marriage to Sam when he was suggesting leaving wildly expensive Manhattan, and did she feel responsibility for the relationship not just when he was failing on the job, but also failing as family man as “the Wolfpack” took up more and more of his time? My conclusion from this is that respect is earned, and this includes a man’s respect from his wife. Maybe it’s the American in me, but it seems impossible to expect so much from women if the men in their lives aren’t trying.
Ultimately, it seems Gillinson agrees? A friendship struck up by the charming British head of Carnegie Hall (her mother brought her to an after-party there) led to a close friendship, then an affair, and eventually the dissolution of two marriages. Anya’s last name is her second husband Clive’s last name. She’s asked if she would have fallen for Clive if he weren’t how he was, and she’s refreshingly clear that “I fell in love with all of Clive, as he appeared to me when we met. If I had met him when he was a musician in the orchestra, I might have found him charming but no more than that. Few pay attention to a greenish bud; they wait for it to bloom into a succulent rose.” Well, yes. For women to play seductress and to make the relationship what it should be, men must do their part.
It’s a long or short way of saying that in falling in love for the second, or realistically first time, Gillinson arguably discovered the American woman residing within her all along. Read this spectacular book to see if you agree.
Repubilshed from RealClear Markets
