Folklore
Published in Issue #34 Translated from French by the author subscribe to unlock the full storyIf you have never had a brother six years older than you, you will not understand the discomfort your parents have spared you. In the first years of your life your brother pays no attention to you, because you are too small a person to be interesting. But when you grow up, he turns into a teacher of life and tends to impose things on you that you don’t need at all. My older brother taught me how to live my life without understanding anything about life. The thing is, he was a bigot. Fanatics are not only people with glowing eyes who make revolutions, coups d’état, great scientific discoveries, and imagine themselves geniuses. Fanatics are also people who believe that what they are passionate about is more important than other people’s interests. A student of our father’s used to say, “A fanatic is an ideological fool.” A fanatic burns in the fire of his stupidity and, for company, involves other people in his fire. My brother Michael was a Jew. Our parents happened to be Jewish. In the Soviet Union, being Jewish meant not only belonging to a certain, Jewish nationality. Being a Jew in the Soviet Union meant being sentenced to disgrace, to the shameful background that you had inherited from your parents. You were sentenced to life imprisonment among Jewish people. Being in the ranks of the Jews imposed on you the rules of conduct prescribed by the inscriptions in the Odessa1 streetcars. It is said about Odessa...
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