The Gift

O gosh! A friend gave me a book as a birthday present saying it was an indulging gift. Given my love for Jews (deducted, I suppose, from the fact that I’m married to a very handsome Jew and like Hungarian authors many of whom happen to be of Jewish origin), he gave me a book ‘written by a New York Jew fascinated with the Russian Jew-written literature’.

I half-expected to get something about the famed friendship between Joseph Brodsky and Susan Sontag, for it would be unreasonable to hope for any revelations about Mandelshtam from an American Jew – you have to be an ancient Greek from Voronezh to fully understand his poetry.

But you never get what you expect even if you don’t expect anything. The author turns out to be a Turk born in New York and raised in New Jersey, and the closest she gets to the Jew-written Russian literature is this:

Many times I had been told that Hungarian was related to Turkish, that the Hungarians and Turks descended from the same Altaic peoples, that Attila the Hun was Turkish, and so on. When I went to Hungary, however, I discovered that Hungarians do not share these beliefs at all. ‘Of course we have some Turkish words in our language,’ they would say. ‘For example, handcuffs’.

Well, the moral: Never explain your gifts.