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National Public Radio pronouncement that does not bind me in covenant with his famous God. Would it kill me, I think, to tell him right now:
You are still the big one, Papa
?
    I am the small one, forever, and you are the big one
.
    Would that make it right between us? There he was at the dinner table before his depression set in, still high on family feeling and a little bit of vodka, rushing over to serve me first, ladling in the mushroom soup, extra heavy on the onions, that he makes special for me. “Sour cream?” he asks me. “Yes, please.” “Bread? Vodka? Cucumber?” Yes, yes, and yes, Papa. The rest of the table might as well not exist for him.
    “He loves you so much,” a girlfriend I brought to the family table once told me, “but he doesn’t know how to express it. Everything he does and says comes out wrong.”
    I want to stay with him and make him feel better. I want to finish watching the Russian show on TV. Finish off the cucumbers and the soup choked with the mushrooms he has picked himself in a dense upstate forest. “Forty dollars each mushroom would cost in the store!” my mother is yelling at my cousin who is failing to partake of the dense fungus. “And still he won’t eat it!”
    I want to have a family. I want to laugh, and also be awed by Aunt Tanya’s postmodern let’s-get-it-over-with-and-really-start-drinking Thanksgiving toast: “God bless America
whatever
.”
    I want to be there when my mother, usually so in control, has cut herself three times in the course of preparing her “French.” Are her hands shaking? Is her eyesight failing? She looks so tired today. Will she recover in time for the manic burst of cleaning and worrying that will accompany her into the night? Is God watching out for us?
    I want to close my eyes and feel a part of the cornucopia of insanity swirling around the table, because that insanity has alighted on my shoulders as well.

    But I also want to go home. To Manhattan. To the carefully constructed, utterly inoffensive apartment that I have wrought to show in part that the past is not the future, that I am my own man. This is the creed I have made for myself: Day Zero. A new start. Keep the rage in check. Try to decouple the rage from the humor. Laugh at things that are not sourced from pain. You are not them. He is not you. And each day, with or without my parents’ presence, my creed proves to be bullshit.
    The past is haunting us. In Queens, in Manhattan, it is shadowing us, punching us in the stomach. I am small, and my father is big. But the Past—it is the biggest.

    Let’s start with my surname: Shteyngart. A German name whose insane Sovietized spelling, eye-watering bunching of consonants (just one
i
between the
h
and
t
and you got some pretty nice “Shit” there), and overall unattractiveness has cost me a lot of human warmth. “Mr., uh, I can’t pronounce this …
Shit … Shit … Shitfart
?” the sweet Alabama girl at reception giggles. “Is, uh, a single bed okay for you?”
    What do you think, honey
, I want to say.
Do you think a Shitfart gets to
share
a bed?
    All my life I’ve tried not to think of that misspelled “Shteyngart” as a pungent waste product of history. The correct name had to be Steingarten, or Stone Garden, which is as beautifully Zen as a German Jewish name can get, a name offering the kind of serenity and peace that none of my Hebrew ancestors had surely ever experienced in their short, explosive lifetimes. Stone Garden. As if.
    Recently I found out from my father that Shteyngart is not our name at all. A slip of the pen in some Soviet official’s hand, a drunknotary, a semiliterate commissar, who knows, but I am not really Gary Shteyngart. My family name is—Steinhorn. Meaning “Stone Horn.” Though I was born Igor—my name was changed to Gary in America so that I would suffer one or two fewer beatings—my Leningrad birth certificate should have welcomed into this world one Citizen Igor Stone Horn. I