Trên TV đã từng giới thiệu về Zinovy Zinik, nhà văn Nga, tác giả một tập truyện hài, comic stories và những phác họa về cuộc sống ở bên ngoài nước Nga, At Home Abroad, xuất đầu năm 2008, bởi Tri Kvadrata, Moscow.

Cuốn sách mới ra lò của ông là một Hồi Ký, History Thieves: Tuyên Ngôn của thế kỷ 21. Bài điểm của Toby Lichtig trên TLS May 20, 2011. Mặc dù Do Thái, mặc dù bỏ chạy nước Nga, nhưng ông không chịu về Israel: Tớ đếch thích thằng cha, nhà nước nào phịa cho tớ một quá khứ.

MEMOIRS

Right to left

For thirty-five years, Zinovy Zinik has been a willing stranger. A Jewish Muscovite, barely aware of his Jewishness until he made aliyah to Israel in the mid 1970s, he lasted little more than a year before defecting to the BBC in London. Zinik's abandonment of his homeland was no wrench. Moscow may have been "the most entertaining prison in the world", but the youthful author had other fish to pickle. "I wanted to emigrate so I could experience the feeling of being an anonymous foreigner", he writes in his amusing new memoir, History Thieves. One of the many appealing things about exile for Zinik is the timelessness it brings, less in terms of new horizons than in access to the past. For the author, the émigré persona is one of eternal youth, "because the self-perception of the émigré is forever frozen in time, tied up with the moment of fateful departure".

Zinik is certainly in touch with his inner child. He begins the book with a rendition of a fairy tale from his youth, "Dwarf Long Nose", in which a young boy is punished for sneering at an ugly old witch by being turned into a "hideous dwarf', no longer recognized by those around him. Zinik uses this tale throughout as an allegory for exile ("in which you lose the sense of time and place until you wake up one day to realize that you have become irredeemably old and ugly"), while bearing firmly in mind the happy ending: the dwarf is eventually turned back into a "beautiful boy", like a "second coming". In keeping with the fabular tone is Zinik's urgent use of the coordinating conjunction "and", which he employs at the start of every paragraph in his book. The allusion is biblical, but the effect is deliberately childlike, a breathless, restless drive to spill a past rendered immediate in the telling. If we remained in any doubt about Zinik's sympathies, there is also his charming aside about "the inevitable clichéd question[s]" directed his way at social gatherings: "when, why and how did I leave Russia, and do I intend to go back?". He compares "the subconscious tendency in people to define strangers by their ethnic origin" to children being sized up against their parents. Noting the eye-rolling antipathy that this latter mode of discourse invariably brings, the author claims: "I am on the side of the children". 

Zinik views his own emigration as "an act of fabrication of my past", manipulating as it did his flimsy Jewish history ("I never heard a word of Yiddish or Hebrew spoken at home, never went to synagogue and never saw the Bible"). He perceives this not as hypocrisy but as in keeping with Jewish tradition: "Jewish history is always somebody else's history". At a state level, however, this becomes pernicious: "It is the appropriation of individual suffering by the collective will that turns a noble longing for nationhood into hideous state propaganda". Zinik observes that "the worst enemies of Zionism are cosmopolitan Jews", aptly noting that Stalin’s persecution of such Jewry, particularly between 1948 and 1953, sat happily with his "fondness for [Jewish] Palestine" as borne out by his "crucial" vote at "the 1948 session of the UN" (here the author presumably means the 1947 Resolution in favor of partition). "My theory", Zinik remarks, 'is that [Stalin] voted that way because he regarded Israel as the only country he could have escaped to if in need of political asylum." Zinik makes useful comparisons between Israel and modem Greece (a state founded on "the myths of the past"), commenting that Fascism (based on nostalgia) has endured rather better than Communism (based on a future utopia) because "its veracity will not be tested as time goes by", Although he steers clear of overt anti-Zionism, it is unsurprising that he didn't linger in Israel, a country that tried to "invent" the past "for me".

Around his wider reflections on race, identity and cultural memory, Zinik weaves a personal meditation on his distant past spurred by a series of Proustian prompts. He reconsiders his bickering family, his boyhood fears and fantasies. After leaving Israel, he arrives in England, where he is immediately reminded of everything he abandoned: "Driving on the left was linked in my mind to the Hebrew way of writing from right to left. I also detected the influence of the Judaic kosher laws in the stricttness with which hot and cold water taps were separated in British houses". A trip to Berlin reveals a house that once appeared to him in a dream: an image associated with his grandparents that turns out to be a former medical school at which his grandfather studied (Zinik concedes that he may once have seen a photograph of the building as a child). This coincidence imbues Berlin with a mythic quality for the author. It is an attractive place for him in any case, a city steeped in "someone else's history", a multivalent palimpsest in which "everyone [is]...  a kind of Jew".

History Thieves originated from a speech delivered by Zinik at the European Meeting of Culture Journals in 2009. It is a slight book, pleasantly ruminative and crammed with witty observations. If at times the author becomes a little too engaged with his own family history, there is inevitably a cool insight or droll aside just around the comer.

TLS May 20 2011