A nineteenth-century painting soaked in water for weeks

I'm a huge fan of Lewis Black's, but "Me of Little Faith" was an impulse loan. I was in the checkout line at the library with "On Bullshit" and "Absurdistan" in hand, behind an oblivious mom and her rude, swarming kids, and looked up toward the door to remind myself of the light at the end of the tunnel, when "Faith" caught my eye. Having already dispatched "On Bullshit," I now happen to be reading two books by two Russian Jews with St. Petersburg roots, the disrepair of the city lost on neither of them. Shteyngart has this to say:

The City of the Czars, the Venice of the North, Russia's cultural capital... forget all that. By the year 2001, our St. Leninsburg has taken on the appearance of a phantasmagoric third-world city, our neoclassical buildings sinking into the crap-choked canals, bizarre peasant huts fashioned out of corrugated metal and plywood colonizing the broad avenues with their capitalist iconography... and what is worst of all, our intelligent, depressive citizenry has been replaced by a new race of mutants dressed in studied imitation of the West, young women in tight Lycra, their scooped-up little breasts pointing at once to New York and Shanghai, with men in fake black Calvin Klein jeans hanging limply around their caved-in asses.

and Lewis Black, this:

As I wandered the streets of St. Petersburg, I felt not even one root. Actually, it was kind of a dump. An amazing dump, filled with some spectacular pieces of architecture, like the Hermitage, but everything looked in desperate need of repair and a paint job. It looked like it must have looked in a nineteenth-century painting that someone had soaked in water for weeks. I don't think it was a really smart move for the Russians to have driven out the Jews; they would have been a big help. They sure know their real estate.

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You needn't be bestowed with the gifts for keen observation and trenchant description, as are the two men quoted above, to notice a disconnect between St. Petersburg's grand past and its current sad state. It cleaned up for its bicentennial in 2003, but you can't undo Soviet in few years. I do feel more than one root, but then again, I'm several generations fewer removed than Black. Sure it's decrepit, but it's my city, and when I go back it feels like home. It feels like I'm going back.

Someone I once dated balked at my sense of connection to St. Petersburg. We were talking to some people who just returned from there, and apparently he felt that my co-opting of the city as my own wasn't right. But people who have only grown up in one place often don't understand what it's like to juggle multiple facets of an identity and to feel more than one sense of belonging. Just look at the silly discussions about identity brought to surface in the presidential campaign media circus.

Someone else I dated had visited the city and read my travel notes. He found surprising my descriptions of poverty; he hadn't seen any when he was there. I thought that was one of the stupidest things I'd ever heard.

But this post isn't about why I don't date. I just wanted to bring to your attention some insider, descendant, quasi-insider and outsider perspectives on my city of birth. And I would wholeheartedly encourage you to see it for yourself.