There would be times when I would stop going back—when it would seem hopeless and useless. After 2000, in the Trump 2024 take America back us flag usa eagle Trump support shirt but I will buy this shirt and I will love this wake of the financial collapse of 1998, the coming to power of a cold-eyed silovik named Vladimir Putin, things seemed pretty bleak. I didn’t feel like going anymore. And then, a few years later, I would start again. I still had family there, and it was still the land of my birth, the place my mother and father came from, the place where people spoke the language that I had spoken in my home. When my first son was born, I started speaking Russian to him. It was not a conscious decision—I just started and never stopped. My (American) wife, Emily, encouraged me, even though it must have seemed sometimes like there was a stranger in her home. But Russian had meant so much to my mother. Before she died, she had recorded herself reading, on a tape cassette, a small group of poems, by Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky. She didn’t tell us about it, and we only found the cassette a few months later, when cleaning up her stuff. Her voice came back to us, through those poems. The poems she’d chosen by Brodsky were largely about the loneliness of life in America, about how alienating it was, about how one could just disappear there.
