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  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
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      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
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      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
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      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
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      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
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      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
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      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
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      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
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      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022
  • Issue #25 Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Art Spring 2023 >
      • David Carter Spring 2023
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      • Ryota Matsumoto Spring 2023
      • Leah Oates Spring 2023
      • Eve Ozer Spring 2023
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      • Esther Yeon Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Poetry Spring 2023 >
      • Emma Bolden Spring 2023
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      • M. Cynthia Cheung Spring 2023
      • Flower Conroy Spring 2023
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      • Satya Dash Spring 2023
      • Rita Feinstein Spring 2023
      • Dan Fliegel Spring 2023
      • Lisa Higgs ​Spring 2023
      • Dennis Hinrichsen ​Spring 2023
      • Mara Jebsen ​Spring 2023
      • Abriana Jetté ​Spring 2023
      • Letitia Jiju ​Spring 2023
      • E.W.I. Johnson ​Spring 2023
      • Ashley Kunsa ​Spring 2023
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      • James Fujinami Moore Spring 2023
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      • Heather Qin ​Spring 2023
      • Wesley Sexton ​Spring 2023
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      • Sydney Vogl ​Spring 2023
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      • Marina Hope Wilson ​Spring 2023
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      • Jules Wood Spring 2023
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    • Issue #25 Fiction Spring 2023 >
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    • Issue #25 Nonfiction Spring 2023 >
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  • Issue #26 Fall 2023
    • Issue #26 Art Fall 2023 >
      • Alexey Adonin Fall 2023
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    • Issue #26 Poetry Fall 2023 >
      • Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo ​ Fall 2023
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      • John Peter Beck Fall 2023
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      • James Kimbrell Fall 2023
      • Casey Knott Fall 2023
      • Stephen Lackaye Fall 2023
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      • John Muellner Fall 2023
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      • Joel Peckham Fall 2023
      • Natalia Prusinska Fall 2023
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Fall 2023
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2023
      • Hilary Sallick Fall 2023
      • Kelly R. Samuels Fall 2023
    • Issue #26 Fiction Fall 2023 >
      • Abbie Barker Fall 2023
      • Eric Rasmussen Fall 2023
      • E.P. Tuazon Fall 2023

Daniel Schifrin

The Pushkin Chronicles

Puzinkin
“Pushkin, Puzinkin, go to sleep
Pushkin, Puzinkin, don’t you weep…”

 
**

 
A Life of My Grandmother in Seven Authors
Leo Tolstoy
“Much earlier than most, I understood that Levin was the hero of Anna Karenina, not Anna. It was the only thing on which my mother and I agreed.”

Heinrich Heine
“‘At first I was almost about to despair, I thought I never could bear it — but I did bear it. The question remains: how?’”

Alexander Pushkin
“Would you like to hear my theory? After each great poem was born, he tried to kill himself with a duel. If he survived, he would write again. If not, it was time…”

Rainer Maira Rilke
“In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke said that a true writer would get up in the middle of a night to write down his thoughts. But here I am, in the middle of the night, writing down someone else’s thoughts.”

Agatha Christie
“I would never speak in this way, really, but I do wonder: What would it be like to kill someone in the English countryside? Oh, it’s horrible! And they are so polite out there!”

Franz Kafka
“I’ve spent my whole life not reading Kafka.”

God
“In my heart of hearts I know that God is the loneliest of creatures. Why else would He have brought this world into being?”

 
**

 
Ping-Pong
My grandmother ran a foster home for 17 years. In the basement she had a ping-pong table where she took the quietest and stubbornest children. When I was 12 I asked her why.

“What they wanted to say was always hiding underneath what they didn’t say. I was severely educated, in the German model. My parents never said anything without a footnote hanging in the air, which I was expected to see and understand. And so I imagined each kid’s ping as a test of whether I could see the footnote explaining who they were, and why they were here. I always beat them though, and somehow – afterwards – they knew that I understood them. Someone else, someone with academic training, might interpret our game differently. Our regional manager, for instance. He couldn’t stand the back and forth, the pregnant air of conversation unspoken, and when he visited always told me to stop. That particular game went on for years. Sad to say, I never got to the bottom of him.”

 
**

 
You and I
I have to tell you something. When I was your age there was “me,” and also “the other me.” These were quite distinct characters. I even had two journals, which I called “you” and “I.” The first one, that is, “you,” I might allow to be read one day. It was written in Russian, and is mostly reflections on literature. The other one, in German, was about all the other stuff. You can’t imagine what “I” said about me. This journal was hidden inside my mattress, and even the first me wasn’t allowed to see it. I told someone about this once, a young woman I met at the art museum in Antwerp, but she laughed. This was in the winter of 1923.

 
**

 
Love in a Minor Language
Lonely, studying abroad, I once asked my grandmother for romantic advice. I had met a girl from Spain, and she didn’t understand me.

“Our courtship took place in French,” she wrote back, “all by letter, and focused almost exclusively on the recent death of my father. That’s how I fell in love with him. Your grandfather, I mean. When things got bad, I just translated everything we discussed back into that peculiar language spoken only by us, and only for a little while.”

 
**

 
Balagan

1.
I want to become a writer, and my grandmother tells me this story. “But first you have to understand that my cousin, who was also my aunt, moved to Israel with her grandparents. From the other side of the family. Which explains everything.”

2.
“It works like this. You walk into the house and put down your glasses who knows where. Ten minutes later you need to read the mail, but you can’t find them. ‘Where’s my glasses?’ you shout. Your aunt answers, ‘On the balagan!’ Balagan is Hebrew for ‘chaos,’ and Polish for ‘wooden house,’ and Russian for ‘whorehouse.’ What your aunt means to say is that balagan is the place where everything changes, where something is always happening, where you need your glasses most desperately, but where you will miss the most important thing anyway, because it’s happening upstairs, in a private room, where you have no business. No one understands this better than your aunt. But this is irrelevant, you’ve got me off track…you still need to read the mail, and right now you are merely shuffling the bills from back to front.”

3.
When you finally visit your aunt, after many years, she barely recalls her own name. It’s summer, and she is fanning herself outside her broiling cottage, hardly more than a wood shack. Then you remember the story from your grandmother, so you ask, kind of slyly, “Aunt Zsa Zsa, where’s the balagan?” She laughs, like you’ve finally come to your senses, and she answers with a girl’s voice: “When we lost something in our house, we turn a glass upside down. Immediately afterwards, the object is found. And the place the object is found is the balagan.”

4.
I tried this at home. I don’t have to tell you how the story ends. I walked into the house, the bills stuffed into my jacket pocket, my glasses left God knows where. I begin to straighten up. When it was time to find my story I took a glass from the cupboard and turned it upside down, which was followed by a crash and a pop, as if my grandmother were still alive and making fun of my aunt’s accent – “which was, it has to be said, all over the place.” It’s possible, it’s likely, that I misheard my aunt’s instructions, for when I finished my investigation both the glass and my glasses were broken to pieces.

 
**

 
Pushkin’s Secret Journal
“I finally found my journals,” she told me. “I’m pleasantly surprised with what I wrote about Pushkin when I was a girl. Everything else, unfortunately, has to go.”

“Will you translate something for me?”

She looked at the yellowed paper with a terrifying blankness.

Finally she spoke: “That’s the thing with Pushkin. You can’t translate him. How to explain this in English?”

 
**

 
Von Clausewitz Plays Scrabble
For years I thought “Von Clausewitz” was just a funny name Grandma called me when we dueled over the chessboard.

Towards the end we switched to Scrabble; each turn was 20 minutes, but when she pulled the trigger on her tiles the most surprising words came out. Once, late in the evening, I thought I had the jump on her. I told her that “you can’t have Clausewitzwithout…” and here I spelled out C-L-A-U-S-E. “You know, like a phrase.”

She stared at me over her glasses: “I know what a clause is.” We burst out laughing. Only then did she lay it all out: Q-U-A-G. “You know, short for quagmire.”

Much later, I found this in Von Clausewitz’ “On War”: “War is an area of uncertainty; three quarters of the things on which all action in War is based are lying in a fog of uncertainty to a greater or less extent. The first thing needed here is a fine, piercing mind, to feel out the truth with the measure of its judgment.”

Her chessboard is put away, but the Scrabble tiles still spill out every Sunday afternoon. I stir the pieces around with my finger, like a spoon in tea, until the old card table has a new white skin.

And then, one by one, we turn the letters over.

 
 
--
Daniel Schifrin writes fiction and journalism; he’s been a curator for SFMOMA. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford and has done radio interviews for KALW and KQED.

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  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
    • Masthead
  • Submit
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Submit Here
  • Features
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  • Book Reviews
  • Previous Issues
  • Blog
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  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022
  • Issue #25 Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Art Spring 2023 >
      • David Carter Spring 2023
      • Annabel Jung Spring 2023
      • Ryota Matsumoto Spring 2023
      • Leah Oates Spring 2023
      • Eve Ozer Spring 2023
      • Emily Rankin Spring 2023
      • Esther Yeon Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Poetry Spring 2023 >
      • Emma Bolden Spring 2023
      • Ronda Piszk Broatch Spring 2023
      • M. Cynthia Cheung Spring 2023
      • Flower Conroy Spring 2023
      • Jill Crammond Spring 2023
      • Sandra Crouch Spring 2023
      • Satya Dash Spring 2023
      • Rita Feinstein Spring 2023
      • Dan Fliegel Spring 2023
      • Lisa Higgs ​Spring 2023
      • Dennis Hinrichsen ​Spring 2023
      • Mara Jebsen ​Spring 2023
      • Abriana Jetté ​Spring 2023
      • Letitia Jiju ​Spring 2023
      • E.W.I. Johnson ​Spring 2023
      • Ashley Kunsa ​Spring 2023
      • Susanna Lang ​Spring 2023
      • James Fujinami Moore Spring 2023
      • Matthew Murrey Spring 2023
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2023
      • Heather Qin ​Spring 2023
      • Wesley Sexton ​Spring 2023
      • Ashish Singh ​Spring 2023
      • Sara Sowers-Wills ​Spring 2023
      • Sydney Vogl ​Spring 2023
      • Elinor Ann Walker Spring 2023
      • Andrew Wells Spring 2023
      • Erin Wilson Spring 2023
      • Marina Hope Wilson ​Spring 2023
      • David Wojciechowski Spring 2023
      • Jules Wood Spring 2023
      • Ellen Zhang Spring 2023
      • BJ Zhou Spring 2023
      • Jane Zwart Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Fiction Spring 2023 >
      • Eleonora Balsano Spring 2023
      • Callie S. Blackstone Spring 2023
      • Daniel Deisinger Spring 2023
      • CL Glanzing Spring 2023
      • Janine Kovac Spring 2023
      • Jeremy T. Wilson Spring 2023
      • Richie Zaborowske Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Nonfiction Spring 2023 >
      • Kalie Johnson Spring 2023
      • Amanda Roth Spring 2023
  • Issue #26 Fall 2023
    • Issue #26 Art Fall 2023 >
      • Alexey Adonin Fall 2023
      • Jian Choi Fall 2023
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2023
      • ​Anna Maeve Fall 2023
      • Jason Reblando Fall 2023
    • Issue #26 Poetry Fall 2023 >
      • Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo ​ Fall 2023
      • Christopher Ankney Fall 2023
      • Magdalena Arias Vásquez Fall 2023
      • John Peter Beck Fall 2023
      • Mihir Bellamkonda Fall 2023
      • Benjamin Bellas Fall 2023
      • Michael Carson Fall 2023
      • Kevin Clark Fall 2023
      • Aaron Coleman Fall 2023
      • Mark DeCarteret Fall 2023
      • Denise Duhamel Fall 2023
      • Brandel France de Bravo Fall 2023
      • Tina Gross Fall 2023
      • Amorak Huey Fall 2023
      • James Kimbrell Fall 2023
      • Casey Knott Fall 2023
      • Stephen Lackaye Fall 2023
      • Cynthia Manick Fall 2023
      • Savannah McClendon Fall 2023
      • John Muellner Fall 2023
      • Mollie O’Leary Fall 2023
      • Joel Peckham Fall 2023
      • Natalia Prusinska Fall 2023
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Fall 2023
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2023
      • Hilary Sallick Fall 2023
      • Kelly R. Samuels Fall 2023
    • Issue #26 Fiction Fall 2023 >
      • Abbie Barker Fall 2023
      • Eric Rasmussen Fall 2023
      • E.P. Tuazon Fall 2023