Free The Mathematician’s Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer

little apartment became an English-only zone. I am perhaps one of a handful of Russian citizens, well, former Soviet citizens to be precise, whose true first language was English. This was part of his plan, for me to speak as if I were an American, without even a trace of an accent. Where did he get the books and tapes for this major effort at subterfuge? I don’t know to this day.
    My father insists that at the age of three I spoke English with the casual, lazy tongue of an American sitcom child actor, but I find this hard to believe. At any rate, all those years in the little Moscow of the United States—my parents’ Madison bungalow, with its frequent Russian visitors receiving my mother’s kindness—partly reversed my father’s hard work. Today most everyone knows I’m an immigrant from the second I open my mouth.
    I will explain later exactly how my father and I defected. Again, it’s nothing I remember. But I am told that I was ecstatic to come to a land where everyone spoke “my language.” I was happy, of course, to see my mother. What child wouldn’t be?
    As I write this, I am a little past sixty years of age, and the fact is that my happiness over my arrival in this country has never left. I consider myself a very fortunate man. Where would I be in Russia today? Nowhere enviable, no doubt. But here I have much for which to be thankful. Like my mother, I possess an intense patriotic fervor. Sometimes I cry at baseball games when I sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” along with everyone else. My hyperpatriotism is one of the few things I share with most of my old Southern neighbors.
    But my mother’s patriotism, wed to her extreme antipathy toward the Soviet Union, possessed her to do things well beyond crying while singing about our great country. She wanted to share her patriotism for the wonderful USA with more Russians, as many as she could convince to abandon their Soviet home. This meant that just about every Russian citizen who managed to reach our modest city during the Cold War would encounter my mother and her larger-than-life presence. They would receive a speech from her that changed frequently in its particulars but always contained the same message: defect and stay in the paradise of America.
    Whenever there was a Russian cultural event, we would be there. A ballet. A circus. A concert. A poetry reading. Russian ice skaters in tacky costumes dancing to Frank Sinatra. Some of these performances, even the highest of the high, on the part of Russian artists were painfully comical. For example, the Moscow State Symphony came to Madison when I was eight or so and played in the university stock pavilion, the only place large enough to house the thousands of music lovers excited about the prospect of hearing a world-class orchestra. The venue, of course, smelled like the barn it was and, worse yet, in the middle of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, with the strings bowing vigorously and the cymbals crashing, a nearby train with perhaps one-hundred-plus cars’ worth of coal and whatnot whistled its presence. The conductor, infuriated by the disturbance, stopped the orchestra in mid-measure, and waited a full five minutes for the train to pass. The orchestra never returned to our humble city.
    We would drive to Chicago—my father gleefully speeding down US 20, then years later even more happily driving on the brand-new racetrack called I-90—to see Russian performers. These trips had only a little to do with cultural enrichment. My mother was on a political mission. We would always find a way to talk to the performers.
    My mother’s Russian was impeccable, the Russian of the elite, educated class. Russia, a country that for decades was supposedly about classlessness, is perhaps the most class-aware country I know. Accents, diction, and grammar provide a sharp dividing line and always have. Backstage at intermission or after the show, the sincerity and expert basis of my mother’s pronouncements to