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least one will, poignantly, “lose her mind,” according to my father, and die before the war even gets properly started.
    Polina, or Babushka (Grandma) Polya as I knew her, arrives in Leningrad in the 1930s when she is fourteen years old. In three novels I have written about the immigrant experience in the final years of the twentieth century with a sense of righteous ownership. But my parents came to this country stuffed with advanced degrees and keen to master the universal language of English. As for me, I was merely seven and expected to succeed wildly in a country we thought of as magical but whose population did not strike us as being especially clever.
    But back in the 1930s my grandma Polya is a true immigrant. She comes to Leningrad as a Yiddish- and Ukrainian-speaking teenager, without knowledge of Russian or city life. Somehow, she gets herself admitted to the Teacher’s Technical College, a two-year school, where a kindly instructor takes pity on her and helps her master the tongue of Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. I always thought that both of my grandmothers struggled against the despised Jewish accent, the
Ghhhh
sound in place of the strong Russian
RRRRRR
, but when I bring it up with my father, he says emphatically: “Your grandmother
never
had a Jewish accent.” Still, whenever I try to flaunt my hard-perfected English, whenever my new language comes pouring out of me, I think of her.

    After finishing the teachers college, Grandma is sent to work in an orphanage, known euphemistically as a children’s home (
detskii dom
), in a Leningrad suburb. Stalin’s Great Purge, a political bloodletting with few equals in human history, is hitting its peak, and some of the Soviet Union’s finest people are being shot outright or packed ontotrains and sent eastward to the labor camps. Other fine people are allowed to starve to death in their homes. The children of the tortured and the dead are often sent to the “children’s homes” that dot the land, and Grandma Polya, by age seventeen, is already employed as a teacher and disciplinarian. By the age of twenty she is the deputy director of the orphanage. She is murderously tough as only the daughter of a murdered Jewish coach-inn owner can be, but if I, her grandson, can attest to one fact that I know is true beyond all others, it is this: She loved children.
    As my grandmother is settling into life in the big city, the great Jewish express from the Ukrainian countryside delivers up to Leningrad my grandfather, Isaac Stone Horn, who has by now been rechristened Shteyngart. Grandpa Isaac is from a village close to Grandma Polya’s, and the humid ties of Judaism bring them together in the cold imperial capital in 1936. Some fifty-five-odd years later I am at a seminar table at Oberlin College. Our small class, with its combined $1,642,800 of annual tuition and fees, is dutifully discussing the travails of that mysterious but glorious working class we’ve heard so much about, but what I’m not quite realizing is that my grandpa Isaac was an honest-to-goodness common worker, and I, by extension, am the grandson of an honest-to-goodness common worker.
    In the late 1930s Isaac is toiling at a leather factory in Leningrad, making soccer balls, volleyballs, and belts. He’s self-educated, a socialist, loves singing and books and Grandma Polya. Out of that love, my father, Semyon, is born in 1938, a year and ten days before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
    The world surrounding new Soviet citizen Semyon Shteyngart is about to set itself on fire.
    “Oni menya lyubili kak cherty,”
my father says of those fleeting few years when both his parents were alive.
They loved me like devils
. It’s an inelegant statement from a man who can veer between depression and anger and humor and joy with Bellovian flair. It’s an unverifiableStatement as well. After all, how could he remember? So let’s say this: It’s a belief, and a