Mallory's Camera

TaxBwana-ed till after lunch; came home, knocked out the end of another Remunerative Project.

After that, I was exhausted.

Tried to tromp, but it turned out I was too tired to tromp, so instead, I watched more episodes of My Brilliant Friend.

My Brilliant Friend is good.

Very, very good.



I was brought up by my mother.

Her people were Polish and Ukrainian Jews.

Though by the time that Judaism had seeped down three generations from those Galitzianers fleeing pogrom and conscription, it had translated into what would be called secular Judaism—meaning: My mother peppered her conversation with Yiddish expressions and understood the value of an education but never set foot in a synagogue.

I’m a lot more Jewish than my mother was.

###

My father’s people were Southern Italian.

My father walked out on me when I was three months old, so I didn‘t have much of a relationship with him. Not nearly enough to shape me in any real sense.

And yet it is undeniable that I have what you might call a Southern Italian temperament—quick to resentment, slow to forgiveness, and with a laser-sharp focus on other people’s jugulars.

Those things didn’t come from my upbringing. I didn’t learn them.

They’re innate.

I don’t know much about the biology of behavior, but it seems to me that I must have inherited those traits.



Here’s my doppelganger from My Brilliant Friend.

She has my face.

That’s what I would have looked like at the age of 35 had not Emidio DiLucchio (interestingly, Ancestry.com has the spelling of that name as “Di Luechio,” which is one way to preserve that Italian “cch” hard C, I suppose) not booked that one-way ticket on an anonymous freighter bound for Ellis Island some time in the 1880s.

She’s an actress, of course. And the Neapolitan gene pool being portrayed is somewhat north of my own Companese/Sicilian roots.

Still.

That brutal domestic life in the Neapolitan slums. Those perpetual screaming matches. The physical violence.

I recognized that on a very primal level.



Of course, I identify with the titular character, the fiery, defiant Lila.

That would have been me if Emidio hadn’t gotten on that boat.

See that snarl? See the way her left eye is beginning to narrow into a squint?

I do those things instinctively. The squint in particular (I’m told) is extremely unnerving—I’ve been doing it since I was a very young child, moved by the unfairness and injustice of my life not to feelings of helplessness but to feelings of icy, implacable rage.




But Emidio did get on that boat.

Thus I am able to view parallel lives at a safe distance—and do people’s taxes in between binge-watching!

Go me!!!!!

Did want to make note of the conversation I had yesterday with Yelizaveta Solovyova (not her real name) whose taxes I’ve been doing for five years now.

Yelizaveta Solovyova is a charming woman who married an American in the late 80s and is now an American citizen although she does go back to Russia once a year to visit her aged mother.

“Wait,” I said. “You went back last year?”

“Yes, of course,” Yelizaveta Solovyova said. “My mother is 95 years old. I must see her while she is still on this earth to be seen.”

“But, I mean. How did you do that? Isn’t it impossible to get to Russia from here now?”

Yelizaveta Solovyova laughed. “Oh, it is easy. You take the flight to Finland. Helsinki. Then you catch the bus to St. Petersburg. Is a 12-hour bus ride.” She shrugged philosophically. “You do what you need to do.”

Yelizaveta Solovyova reports that life in St. Petersburg is pretty much the way it always was. Items in stores are a little bit more expensive. But only a little bit. “They’re more expensive here,” she said.

She assured me young men are not mutilating themselves en masse to avoid conscription—as I had somehow imagined they were based on one or two Mainstream Media stories I’d read.

As to the moral underpinnings of the war, Yelizaveta Solovyova was agnostic. “It’s not as simple as Americans think,” she said. “The nationalists are a political faction in the very corrupt Ukrainian government. There are just as many Ukrainians who want to be part of Russia.”

I don’t exactly buy her explanation.

But it does give one something to think about.