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    Stealing Cherries
    Stealing Cherries
    Stealing Cherries
    Ebook90 pages52 minutes

    Stealing Cherries

    By Marina Rubin

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    About this ebook

    "In Stealing Cherries, Marina Rubin offers us a collection of precisely chiseled blocks of soulful, funny, heart-rending fiction."Ted Jonathan, author of Bones & Jokes

    "Part old-fashioned gal who begs airport security to allow through her dearly departed grandmother's eyebrow tweezers and part Sex in the City sophisticate who leaves another luxurious but disappointing dinner date dreaming of her cold chicken in the fridge, you will surprisingly find yourself somewhere in her stories. Rubin will take you on a gritty but glamorous tour through New Delhi, Italy, Wall Street, the French Riviera, Grand Canyon, and Brooklyn. . . . And still, you will be the one who's running to catch up with her wit, wisdom, and wondrously poetic narratives."Michael Montlack, author of Cool Limbo

    Whether she's writing an engaging account of childhood memories from the Ukraine ("Otlichnitsa"), her family's quixotic immigration experiences ("Welcome to America"), or current romantic misadventures ("Curious Things at the W Hotel"), with a unique voice and sharp eye for detail, award-winning author Marina Rubin reveals the triumphant absurdities of contemporary times. Her stories and characters are all too human, too familiar, too flawed, and just glamorous enough to be endearing and unforgettable in these poetic, bite-sized short stories.

    Marina Rubin's writing has appeared in more than seventy literary journals and magazines. Her family emigrated from the former Soviet Union seeking political asylum in 1989. She is an associate editor of Tribeca's literary and art magazine, Mudfish and a 2013 recipient of COJECO's prestigious Blueprint Fellowship. She resides in Brooklyn, New York.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherManic D Press, Inc.
    Release dateOct 21, 2013
    ISBN9781933149813
    Stealing Cherries

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      Book preview

      Stealing Cherries - Marina Rubin

      I

      Welcome to America

      we arrived at the john f kennedy airport in the middle of april, wearing our heaviest sweaters, astrakhan coats, centuries-old gold refurbished from coins and teeth into earrings and chains. a family of five with no english and two suitcases per person, careers, houses, and tombstones neatly packed between the linings. for hours we stood against the wall with refugees from china, guatemala, and turkey, nibbling on plastic food smuggled in from pan american, waiting for the white cards that one day would become green cards and eventually blue passports. we were driven to our hotel in downtown brooklyn. with tears we watched the country of our dreams in all its magnificence of verrazano, twin towers, and woolworth. the seedy lobby of our court street motel greeted us with its pre-giuliani decadence and the cast of characters from scarface and taxi driver. we waited for the elevator, our lives assembled in a pyramid. when the doors finally popped open, a homeless black man covered in blood collapsed onto our suitcases in a magnificent drug overdose.

      Welcome to America: Day Two

      today we were visited by representatives from the salvation army. as if we were survivors of some natural disaster, they brought us food, blankets, sweat suits, t-shirts from the gap, tylenol, excedrin, cough syrup, thrift-store dostoevsky and tolstoy in english. we felt a tinge of shame for our fur coats hanging in the closet, for our rubies, diamonds, and boxes of contraband medication, even for the idiot and war and peace we had read in its original in high school. in broken english mixed with russian and ukrainian, we tried to tell the nice philanthropic people that we came here not because we were poor but because we were jewish, that we were persecuted, that my brother–a physics wunderkinder–could never study at the russian harvard, that my mother–a top economist–was passed over time and again for that huge promotion. still we took all the books, dishes, and blankets, and put on sweat suits and t-shirts and smiled our grateful all-american smiles because here you just never know how things might turn out.

      Welcome to America: The Weekend

      we were invited to celebrate passover with a community of hasidic jews in crown heights. we could have been murderers, robbers, imposters. nevertheless, these god’s chosen people, forever faithful to their black wool, opened their doors to us without any misgivings. self-effacing families with a gazillion children and barely any furniture fought against rich jewelers and judaica storeowners for the mitzvah of providing our room and board. every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner we were taken to a different household, presented with mezuzahs, yarmulkes, talmuds of various sizes and bindings. in every doorway women were giving me skirts, gingham skirts to go to yeshiva, ruffled skirts for purim carnivals, skirts for bat mitzvah, skirts for shabbat. they called us baal teshuva, the ones who had returned. we sat at their tables, watched them pray, sing, soak apples in honey, toast to meeting next year in jerusalem; without any misgivings, we were finally free to be jewish and yet, even among our own people, we didn’t belong.

      Welcome to America: The Bag

      Emma Schwartz, my mother’s lifelong friend, helped us find our first apartment. she knew all the shortcuts of immigrant life, how to sign up for welfare, which store had chicken legs on sale, where to buy yesterday’s bread, half price. one night she burst into a grim soliloquy, oy vey America, it is far from the La Dolce Vita we expected, a student stabbed for a pair of sneakers, an old woman mugged in broad daylight, earrings torn off with the flesh, bag snatched together with a finger. my mother, terrified, remembered the expensive leather bag she bought in Rome next to the Trevi Fountain, she loved it, but if it was going to cost her her dear life… promptly, she brought the cursed bag into the kitchen, tags still attached, and said, Emmachka, you have been such a wonderful friend, please accept this humble present. next evening, as we sat on the porch watching the mexican vendors roll up their flowers, we saw Emma Schwartz strutting down the street, swinging my mother’s bag with the carelessness of an italian schoolgirl.

      Welcome to America: Purple Rain

      was the first film we had seen in this country. on a television

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