Book in Moscow. Happy life maniac

Each new book by Dina Rubina evokes a feeling of a literary surprise, you want to buy it right away and immediately start reading, forgetting about current affairs and pressing problems.

When at the book exhibition NON FICTION – 2022 in Gostiny Dvor the familiar cover of a series of novels by Dina Rubina with the intriguing title “Maniak Gurevich” caught my eye (M .: Eksmo, 2022. – 512 p.), There was no doubt: you have to take it.

The writer warns: “Thriller lovers can relax: my “Maniac Gurevich” has nothing to do with pulp fiction. On the contrary, Dr. Gurevich, a psychiatrist, is obliged by the nature of his profession to treat the manic states of his patients. But what if his ardent imagination is easily ignited from childhood, and his noble and captivating nature makes him get involved in the wildest situations, bringing Gurevich to the point of complete grotesque and even deplorable buffoonery?

The author defines the genre variety of his novel as “biography in pictures”. And the biography begins from childhood. The family was medical. Mom is a gynecologist, dad is a therapist in a psychiatric hospital. Mom was harsh, domineering and tough in her statements. The essence of my mother’s profession, according to the pope, was “alas, far from poetry.” He himself, a romantic and unmercenary, knew all of Pushkin by heart, and took bribes only in books. “When he finally saw his native monastery, the Head drooped and sobbed …” Dad invariably repeated, opening the door to his son, who had returned from school. Sundays spent with parents were unforgettable. Many years later, already living in Israel, Gurevich recalled a lamp under a green glass dome, mother’s pancakes lying on a platter, lively conversations of parents – usually about work. “Mom had a velvety, booming laugh, dad quacked like a duck.”

Dad was one of those intellectuals who can’t do anything with their hands. He hovered over everyday life, afraid to get bogged down in it, like in a swamp. But he walked a lot with his son in historical places. “They also went around the surrounding ancient cemeteries with neglected temples, and, looking at a noseless weeping maiden or a badly beaten angel, dad said, sadly raising his thick acting eyebrows: “Death is great and unknowable …”

Probably, it is not necessary to specify that the family was Jewish. Behind this obvious fact of Semyon Gurevich’s fate, emigration loomed, first as a ghostly hint, then as a life plan, then – the reality into which his typical family plunged: Russian wife, Jewish husband, children – citizens of the world.

Dina Rubina, like no one else, knows all the twists and turns and pitfalls of the turbulent river called aliya. The preparation for leaving for Israel described by her is painfully familiar to all repatriates: collecting endless documents, selling an apartment, suddenly learning Hebrew (which the Russian Katya learned quickly and without much difficulty, which cannot be said about the representative of the ancient people Gurevich) – all this, including mental throwing in the dichotomy of “Soviet patriotism” and “historical homeland”, is presented truly deeply and, of course, with that pain in the heart that remains with those who have left for life, no matter how wonderful they are settled in a new place. Here it is impossible to do without a quote, we will also quote it in full so that the reader can feel the style of the author and immerse himself, at least a little, in the atmosphere of the story that Dina Rubina created.

“Gurevich completely quieted down …

He did not stop Katya from buying idiotic tablecloths, sheets, some kind of pajamas or leather jackets, but he bored her to hell with his dull maxims that emigration is a tragedy, and not a sea cruise and not walks in the moonlight – read it, Katya, good Russian poets. Katya replied irritably that only lunatics walk in the moonlight, and also Gurevich’s patients, whose ranks he will replenish if she, Katya, does not take him away from this mess and nightmare.

Beyond the distance, thought Gurevich; behind a mess and a nightmare there always looms another nightmare and a mess. This is an eternal carousel in that amusement park in which we are doomed to have fun all our lives … “

ninetieth year of the twentieth century. In this figure, Gurevich saw something bald on a thin leg, dull and hopeless. Here is how Dina Rubin describes the wave of emigration at this time: “A million people took a wing and flew to another habitat. This happens in nature with birds, animals or insects; this happens to people during periods of global cataclysms and social upheavals … Or at the behest of some incomprehensible force. In the apocalyptic flock that filled the heavens, the Gurevich family also rushed into the unknown.

The second part of the book is devoted to family life in Israel. Disgusting living conditions, lack of money, symbolically paid work – from a private “Russian” ambulance and sitting with absurd old men, from whom only Alzheimer did not escape, to duty in the dog bite service. It would seem that the reader should plunge into the atmosphere of monstrous difficulties and overcome them in order to survive, but such a feeling does not arise. Apparently, again because of the ironic style of narration and that meaningful positive, which is fueled by a sense of family, unity with the past and parents, even dead ones, and with children who turn habitual ideas and traditions upside down, but from this do not become less expensive and loved.

Chronologically, the novel ends 30 years after Gurevich’s departure to Israel, that is, approximately in the tenth years of our century. In fact, the main character, the same “maniac”, sums up his life, from which he would not give a single minute to anyone. Now he did not prove anything and did not argue with anyone. “I just wanted to stay here, together with Katya, with the children and with their new children, whom you also love so piercingly for some reason, but for what? All the same, you will stay with them for a short time … Maybe so that in fifty years one of them will also take their grandson to the hairdresser, look in the mirror, see grandfather Gurevich in himself and tell the distant, unborn hairdresser of the end of the twenty-first century: “Come on” under the Canadian “?

Yes, it’s sad, but it’s light sadness. In the preface to the novel, Dean Rubin admits that the idea to write a bright and warm book came to her at the beginning of the painful months of the pandemic. “I suddenly realized that it is so hard for the reader to breathe, and to live so closely; that he is now accompanied by illness, sorrow and loss; The reader instinctively seeks in the world of books such a space and such a “temperature of emotions” where he could not only hide, but enter and be there, breathing easily, albeit sad, but also smiling.

It must be admitted that few books in recent times give the reader the opportunity to “breathe easily.” Read most often about death, deprivation, crime and suicide. An example is Asya Volodina’s book “The Protagonist”, a review of which was recently published in Moskovskaya Pravda. But “life-affirming” is not obtained by many. Maybe that’s why Dina Rubina came up with the idea of ​​calling her hero a “maniac” – a maniac of a normal happy life?

Natalia Vakurova.