A Tragi-Comic Masterpiece

When my younger brother, Rick, and I were boys in Pomona, California, our mother and grandmother would tell us now and then about their life in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. They were sponsored by a small independent mission agency at a time when missions in China were flourishing, before the period in the mid-1930s when internal conflict between the nationalists and the communists, followed by war with Japan (pre-dating World War II), prompted many missionaries to come home. (Our mother had been born in 1922, in Philadelphia, during a furlough in the States.)

Shanghai had a substantial émigré community made up of people from a wild variety of places: wealthy exiles from Iran, “White Russians,” British soldiers stationed there, and so on. For some reason, I was particularly struck by the fate of the White Russians. I couldn’t have put it into words at the time, but their circumstances seemed at once tragic and absurd.

I thought about those White Russians in Shanghai as I was reading Alexander Voloshin’s Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood, “the first English translation of a 1953 mock epic of Russian émigré life.” Boris Dralyuk is the (brilliant) translator of the poem; he also provides a superb introduction, concise notes, and a handful of images. “Although the vast majority of the nearly two million people who fled the collapsing Russian Empire in the 1910s and 1920s wound up in Europe, Asia, New York, and San Francisco,” Dralyuk writes, 

a small number—no more than 5,000—eventually made it to Los Angeles. Here they tried to capitalize on the brief vogue for all things “Russian” (Cossacks and Roma ballads and impoverished nobles) by opening restaurants with names like the Volga Boat, the Russian Bear, and the Double Headed Eagle, and also, inevitably, by offering themselves up to the studios.

Voloshin was one of these, appearing as an extra in a number of films and getting screen credit for a few performances. One of the photos following Dralyuk’s introduction features “Voloshin as young Stalin in Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928).” It’s funny and creepy at the same time; Voloshin-as-Stalin has a pipe in his mouth, clamped at a jaunty angle.

To me it seems well-nigh miraculous that Dralyuk tracked down the obscure Russian edition (a “fragile, hard-to-find copy,” as he describes it). While “the stories and many of the lyrics in the book are little more than charming,” he writes, “the titular poem is a tragi-comic masterpiece.” I agree, and I hope you will check it out and form your own judgment. By the way, Sidetracked is published by Paul Dry Books, based in Philadelphia. You may recall my admiration for their work. The design of this particular book is witty, handsome, nay gorgeous: a book-lover’s delight. 

Also just out this month is Cat on a Hot Tin Woof, the latest installment in Peter Abrahams’s ambrosial series featuring Chet the Dog (my favorite literary canine, hands down) and Bernie Little; together they are the Little Detective Agency, based in Arizona. As you know if you have followed this column for the long haul, Chet is not a “talking dog”; rather, he is a narrating dog.

The primary case that occupies Chet and Bernie’s attention in this installment involves social media and the kidnapping of a cat, Miss Kitty by name. Miss Kitty’s owner, Bitty (a teenager), is bereft—not only because she genuinely cares for Miss Kitty but also because, with nine million followers, the cat is generating an enormous monthly income.

If you told me about this set-up, omitting the fact that the book in question was by Spencer Quinn, Abrahams’s alter ego, I would politely say “no thanks,” certain that it wouldn’t be my cup of tea. But Chet and Bernie are on the case, meaning that I’m ready to follow the story wherever it leads. 

On the morning after I emailed this column to my editor, one of the caregivers who helps with my wife, Wendy, asked me what a couple of my favorite books are. You must visualize the setting for this question: the good-sized upstairs bedroom Wendy and I have shared since we bought this house in 1995, one year after moving from Pasadena, California, to Wheaton, Illinois. There are a lot of books in this room—so many that the words “loony bin” (or worse) might pop into the observer’s mind.

I asked her what sort of books she enjoys, and she said that she has been reading some classic fiction (Wuthering Heights, for instance). I told her about the Chet and Bernie series, and a bit of the author’s backstory. She said this sounded like it might be fun. So I quickly went to my big closet, where all the Chet and Bernie novels are neatly stacked in order of publication, and fished out the first book in the series, Dog on It, from the bottom of the stack. True story.