'It Was a Good Moment of Remembrance'

Out of the aether after twenty-six years came an email from Mikhail Iossel: “Greetings -- and apologies for writing out of that metaphoric nowhere.” In May 1999, Mikhail was a writer-in-residence at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and I was a reporter for that city’s newspaper. He had just been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and I interviewed him and wrote a story which begins: 

“Within two years of leaving his native Russia to live in the United States, Mikhail Iossel wrote a story about a sensitive, bookish boy growing up in Leningrad in the 1950s and 1960s.”

 

The boy accompanies his grandmother on a hunt for mushrooms in a birch forest outside the city. As an adult he describes the fungi – “an indispensable vitamin source during the winter” -- with lyrical precision and regret for the ones he had to leave behind: “. . . I could just as well have imagined them, and then convinced myself, as I have often done since, that imagination is the best and most reliable source of recollections.”

 

Mikhail arrived in the U.S. in 1986 and his story about the young gribnik (mushroom hunter) was collected in Every Hunter Wants to Know: A Leningrad Life, published by W.W. Norton in 1991. I quoted Mikhail in my story: “When I came here, I was in despair. I had left my country. You had to deal with the notion you could never return. Depression, disillusionment, romanticism.”

 

He wrote last week in his email: “I came across your blog by accident. . . . I was glad to see your name -- and to know you’re maintaining a daily (apparently) literary presence of many years, decades, in cyberspace. So I just wanted to say hello to you, over time and space. It was a good moment of remembrance.”

 

I remember Mikhail as a friendly, welcoming guy, free of academic stiffness or arrogance. Our interview turned quickly to conversation, which is always the goal. We talked books and Russia. I quoted him as saying: “When you read my stories, you might be reminded of Chekhov or Babel or Hemingway. My language is direct and lapidary but rhythm is very important. I read my stories aloud to myself.”

 

Mikhail taught himself English. He writes in it – an accomplishment that recalls such linguistic border-crossers as Joseph Conrad (Polish to English), Vladimir Nabokov (Russian to English) and the Irishman Samuel Beckett (English to French). He was born in 1955, two years after the death of Josef Stalin, in a city that changed its name three times in the twentieth century: from St. Petersburg to Petrograd, then to Leningrad and in 1991, back to St. Petersburg. His family kept a well-stocked library, including the Russian classics, Mark Twain, Jack London, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Mikhail started writing as a boy, won several writing competitions, and began learning English at twelve or thirteen.

 

Because his family was Jewish and anti-Semitism was rife in the 1970s in the Soviet Union, Mikhail’s academic options were limited. “There was an unofficial list of schools and we all knew where we could and could not go,” he said. “Jews were not welcome in the humanities.” Instead, the budding fiction writer got a master’s degree in physics from the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute. He went to work as an engineer in the same field as his father, nuclear submarines, and joined a group of young dissident writers, Club 81, who published in samizdat. “Conditional non-freedom,” he told me, “is very conducive to human development.”

 

In the U.S., Mikhail graduated with an M.A. in English/creative writing from the University of New Hampshire and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford. Before moving to Canada in 2004, he taught creative writing at four universities. He’s now an associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. He has edited and written several books, most recently a collection of stories, Love Like Water, Love Like Fire (Bellevue Literary Press, 2021). In September, Linda Leith Publishing will bring out his next story collection, Sentence.

 

“I wanted to limit the scope of my self-expression,” Mikhail told me in 1999. “Samuel Beckett said he began to write in French because he knew too many words in English. In Russian, I’m too fluent, too many words, too much emotion. Writing English is an exercise of a mechanical nature, like a crossword puzzle. Forget untrammeled emotion.”

 

In 1998, he founded Summer Literary Seminars, an independent international literary program with conferences in Russia, Kenya, Lithuania, Italy and elsewhere. He’s now in Nairobi, directing a writers’ retreat. In a subsequent email, Mikhail wrote to me: “I’ll never be a Quebecker, either. Time flies with an ever-growing acceleration.”