The New Yorker, June 24, 1996 P. 134
Ruth Puttermesser, a New Yorker in her sixties, was now as old as her father was when he had fled the brutish Russia of the czars, leaving behind parents, sisters, brothers. In the 3 decades since her father's death Ruth had almost forgotten she had Russian relations. During perestroika, Ruth received an anxious telephone call from Moscow from Zhenya, her first cousin. "Save my child!" Zhenya cried in German. Her daughter Lidia needed to come to New York on refugee status. Lidia arrived in New York in the middle of October and took up residence in Ruth's living room. She had a boyfriend named Volodya back in Russia, and she seemed to mock everything around her including Ruth. She told Ruth that she wanted to clean for other women in New York. Since Lidia had been a biochemist in Russia, Ruth suggested something better as a permanent career, but Lidia just laughed. Her main goal seemed to be to get money quick. She had brought many Russian medals and dolls and souvenirs with her to sell. When Ruth took her to the supermarket, Lidia thought it was an exhibition hall. Lidia got a job cleaning for Varvara in 5-D. She showed a complete lack of interest in gaining permanent status in America; when she and Ruth went to the agency, Lidia and the agency volunteer got into a shouting match in Russian. Lidia brought home Peter Robinson as her new boyfriend. She had met him while selling her Russian medals for $3 a pop. Varvara invited Lidia and Ruth to a Schechinah magazine fundraiser with Schuyler Harstein, a socialist liberal, speaking. Lidia caused a great disturbance with her mockery of Harstein's idealistic views of early Communism and Varvara fired her. Lidia later got a phone call from Volodya asking her to come back to Russia; he was setting up commercial enterprise in Sakhalin. The phone call interrupted a dream Ruth was having about barbed wire in her apartment; her foot was bleeding from the wire. When she told Lidia about the dream, all her mockery and irony vanished. Lidia was a skeptic who put her faith in charlatanism, and she called Ruth a holy woman. Lidia told her she was going back to Russia, that she had just come to America to make money, not to escape Moscow. In June, Ruth received a letter from Zhenya, now living in Tel Aviv, telling her that Lidia was pregnant with Peter's child and would soon marry Volodya.
