The Amazing Life & Adventures of Albert Parry

(a.k.a. Abram Peretsky)

“I OUTLIVED THE BASTARDS”: A MEMOIR OF ESCAPING RUSSIA AND DISCOVERING AMERICA
By Albert Parry
Afterword by James and Thomas Parry
Cherry Orchard Books; 410 pp.; $39.95

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“I had always had,” reflects Albert Parry (1901-1992), “a certain amount of healthy naivete alloyed with cocky bluster.” Those qualities propel his remarkable memoir, which I’ve realized is one of those manuscripts anyone should hope to leave behind for their children to discover and be amazed and mostly delighted by. James and Thomas Parry’s old man had such a life — and yet he never told them the half of it! “I was born Abram Paretsky …,” he begins, “in the city of Rostov, in the land of the Don Cossacks, near the Azov Sea, on the borderline of Asia. … You will find mention of my city in some of Chekhov’s stories, for he was born and raised in the neighboring town of Taganrog.”

Parry was one of several children of a Jewish, Lithuanian-born store owner. By his own account and on the strength of the documented evidence, Parry was a brilliant, sparky dynamo. Squeezed and threatened as he and his family were between the Whites and Reds in the Russian Civil War that broke out at the end of World War I, he nearly lost his life to both sides before being enlisted as a teen photographer for the Red army. “In their method,” writes Parry, “the Reds were revolutionary, but in their substance they were reactionary. While talking of the greatest good of the greatest number of people, in actuality they oppressed, tortured, and killed multitudes of humans, and not only of the upper and middle classes but of the lower classes, too. If the Reds were at all democratic, it was in the lack of discrimination with which they jailed and murdered men and women of all classes. They were power-drunk, they negated human lives and human values. And that is why I was determined to leave Russia for good.”

Dreaming of America and hoping to bring his parents and siblings there, he talked and smuggled his way out of Russia through Georgia and finally to Turkey, where an uncle in Los Angeles would fund his passage to the States. At the port in Constantinople, during a New Year’s celebration with his fellow dockworkers, he was accidentally shot in the back. The story of that incident and the bullet that American doctors eventually extracted was one of the few “highlights” of his younger life that his sons knew (and merits their lone mention in his memoir!). The twenty-year-old Parry arrived in Boston with no English, but he quickly accumulated and adopted it as his own in New York City: “I could not learn a word unless I saw it in print or writing. I was told that the better I learned the English idiom the sooner I would be a master of the language, also that I must never, but never pronounce w as v.” He knew the charm of an accent, and deliberately maintained a trace of it in his speech; there is also the very occasional Russian-seeming diction and syntax. For example, he remembers addressing his friend Irving Stone about Stone’s ficto-biography of Van Gogh: “How can especially you, pretending to be a scholar, prevaricate about a historical figure by putting in your text personages that you know never existed in the subject’s life?”

By the age of twenty-five, Parry had already changed his name and was publishing articles in English: “I craved to be accepted as an American and do work … of the type that would not set me aside as a stranger within the pearly gates.” As a journalist for and then editor of the New York daily Novoе Russkoe Slovo, he admits that, despite his clever moves and hunches, he made mistakes about situations, people and art. But before he was thirty-five he had already written and published two books in English to critical and popular acclaim. Only then did he decide, amid the trials of his first marriage (to an American), to earn, in the blink of an eye, a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. As a professor at Colgate University, he started America’s first undergraduate program in Russian studies.

His story is of a doer and problem-solver, but he usually steers clear of sticky personal issues involving his family – which avoidance readers might not have paused to consider had not his sons written their appreciative and engaging memories of him in the fascinating Afterword: “Growing up, we didn’t know about Dad’s two previous marriages. We didn’t know we were (are!) Jewish. We didn’t know that Dad’s father (our grandfather!) was alive in Los Angeles.”

In email correspondence with Thomas Parry, I learned how he and his brother came upon this book: “In 1989, following our trip to Russia, we moved our father from his condo in St. Petersburg, Florida, to Los Angeles, where I supervised his care until his death in 1992. In St. Petersburg, he had a study full of papers, which, because of his health, Jim and I sorted through without him. … We prioritized what we thought were any unpublished manuscripts, with the memoir being the most important. Along with other material, I shipped it back to Los Angeles with the intention of going through it with him. Unfortunately, due to his health issues, he and I never were able to do that. The manuscript sat in a box until 2017 when Prof. Alice Nakhimovsky, the then Chair of Colgate’s Russian and Eurasian Studies program, got in touch with us with questions about our father. … I referenced that he had an unpublished memoir that might answer some of those questions. She eagerly asked me for a copy. This led to both Jim and I finally reading it and realizing how eventful and interesting it was.”

The first hundred pages of the memoir seem to have been written in the early 1930s (two fabulous sections were published in 1935 and 1936). The other chapters bring us to and just slightly beyond World War II, though there are cryptic references to events in the 1970s that indicate he was composing or revisiting the memoir. We know he was busy with other books and projects, but it is a shame he didn’t bring his adventures—which may have involved undercover work for intelligence agencies – up to date. In the midst of his personal and professional movements from the 1920s through World War II – mostly in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – we hear of his friendships and acquaintanceships with famous men and women, usually before those folks’ greater fame, among them the 1952/1956 Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, novelist Richard Wright, artist Arshile Gorky, playwright Thornton Wilder, and ,particularly interestingly, Vladimir Nabokov, whose fiction Parry championed to American publishers before Nabokov was known in English.

His sons document his surprising return to Russia (still the USSR) when they accompanied him in 1989 for a family reunion that included a distant cousin, the comedian Billy Crystal. They retitled his book “to align with the headstone epitaph that he wrote himself,” that is, “Я пережил сволочей.”

Better late than never, this marvelous, entertaining and informative memoir has arrived.

– Bob Blaisdell