Good Writing About Boston

~ Laura

David Remnick's final paragraph about the Tsarnaev brothers is perfect.

The Tsarnaev family had been battered by history before—by empire and the strife of displacement, by exile and emigration. Asylum in a bright new land proved little comfort. When Anzor fell sick, a few years ago, he resolved to return to the Caucasus; he could not imagine dying in America. He had travelled halfway around the world from the harrowed land of his ancestors, but something had drawn him back. The American dream wasn’t for everyone. What they could not anticipate was the abysmal fate of their sons, lives destroyed in a terror of their own making. The digital era allows no asylum from extremism, let alone from the toxic combination of high-minded zealotry and the curdled disappointments of young men. A decade in America already, I want out.

I also loved Julia Ioffe's article in the New Republic.

Tellingly, Tamerlan also says he has no American friends. It is a statement that the media jumped on, but the second half of that statement is the more illuminating one: “I don’t understand them.” This is not surprising. I moved to America from Russia when I was 7, spent my entire conscious life and education here, am fully assimilated and consider myself American, and I often don’t understand Americans. It’s no wonder that Tamerlan couldn’t make sense of them either. Based on what’s known of when the Tsarnaevs came to the U.S., he was either 15 or 17. Immigration is hard at any age, but it is especially difficult when you are a teenager, when your mind and body is changing and you are struggling to come to grips with who you are. For Tamerlan, national identity was thrown into the heady mix, and he seems to have stuck with the one he knew his whole life: Muslim Chechen. The fact that history has made that definition an uneasy one cannot be irrelevant. 

Published by Laura

18 thoughts on “Good Writing About Boston”

  1. Honestly, this could be written about anyone at all. Want to take a shot at writing the same thing if the brothers were Irish, in the 80’s? A little bit harder now, but quite plausible in the 80’s. I knew, very peripherally, a Chicagoan, American-born Irish woman who got caught up in the IRA.
    I came to the “US when I was 6, spent my entire conscious life and education here, am fully assimilated, and consider myself American” and might note ways that I don’t understand “Americans”, but it wouldn’t be any different than what Texan may say about a New Yorker, or a Bostonite about one, even?
    I don’t know how isolated these brothers were from the American community, but I think there’s a lot of fact-free post hoc analysis going on. Painted another way, we have a kid who seems to be fairly well integrated (attending a state university, an athlete, with friends and coaches).

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  3. The saddest thing to me was a brief aside in the Wall Street Journal about how the boys’ mother encouraged Tamerlan’s turn toward religion, hoping it would lead him away from the aimless life of drinking and girl chasing that he was leading. Which it did, but it would be better to have a ne’er-do-well living son than a dead murderer.

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  5. Ace of Spades said, regarding similar literary exercises on the Boston bombers, “we are now in the Conspicuous Compassion Floor Exercise program of the Moral Peacocking Olympics.”
    I agree with bj that “this could be written about anyone at all.” My husband arrived in Canada from Eastern Europe at around the same age that Dzhokhar arrived in the US. My husband’s family had known real hunger during Martial Law, they had lived in fear of secret police, they had whisked him away from demonstrations just before the tanks arrived to crush them. And yet, somehow, my husband grew up to be a loyal and peaceable Canadian subject of Her Majesty and he hasn’t killed anybody at all (to my knowledge).

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  7. If you’re interested in this whole ‘meta-topic’ of “what does it mean to explain this crime? If we understand someone’s behavior, doesn’t that mean we’re being sympathetic?” — then the best resource out there is a little book called “Explaining Hitler” which deals with this question at length. I have taught the book several times in courses on genocide, terrorism, criminality because it is hands-down the best theological/moral/political discussion of what it means to explain a crime. The author is a journalist, but he traveled to Israel and met with heads of the religious organizations there and incorporates their viewpoints on how they feel when a psychologist begins talking about things like the fact that Hitler may have been abused as a child, etc. The author also does a nice job of discussing issues like genetics, and what it means to come up with a neurobiological or genetic explanation of a crime. (Yes, I read it at the beach one summer. Yes, people looked at me strangely. Yes, it is an awesome read.)

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  8. “Their daughter lived with her husband because she worked seven days a week, he said.””
    “WHAT?”
    Yeah.
    From a (possibly inaccurate) news story:
    “She [an aunt] said her nephew was considering bringing his wife to Dagestan.”
    “Former school friends told the Daily Mail that Russell, the oldest of three daughters, was raised Christian by her parents, a doctor and nurse. She once had dreams of entering the Peace Corps.”
    ““None of us would have dreamed that she would marry so young or drop out of college and have a baby or convert or be part of any of what’s happened,” the former classmate added. “She’s just not the same person at all.””
    “Tsarnaev was arrested in July 2009 for violently assaulting Russell, according to the Mail. She later told Cambridge cops that he was “a very nice man.””
    http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/wife-boston-bombing-suspect-dark-lawyer-article-1.1323925#ixzz2RI44hbiq
    Her parents are probably just a bit relieved right now. Although there’s still the possibility of a Chechen “black widow” career ahead of her.

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  9. “Her parents are probably just a bit relieved right now.”
    Oh yeah. It would be interesting to armchair-psychoanalyze the daughter/widow, but I guess we won’t for bj’s sake. 😉
    OK, time to question police decisions:
    Why the HELL didn’t they set up the perimeter a certain distance around the place where the car was abandoned by Tsarnaev. Here’s a thread (warning: stupidity about Islamic jihad contained within) about it: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1492498-bombing-hits-bostonmarathon-118.html
    As pointed out, Tsarnaev “was found in the boat less that 2/10ths of a mile or about 1000 feet (as the crow flies) from where the SUV was abandoned.” The kid drove the SUV west … and then the police didn’t extend the perimeter west! They searched every house where the kid was fleeing from and very few of the houses in the area he was fleeing toward! That makes no sense.

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  10. “Her parents are probably just a bit relieved right now.”
    ‘Oh yeah. It would be interesting to armchair-psychoanalyze the daughter/widow, but I guess we won’t for bj’s sake. ;)’
    Sorry in advance, bj!
    I don’t think we can get much of a read on her, without knowing where she goes from here. Does she continue in her pre-bombing trajectory (and maybe find another abusive, exotic man and/or jump head first into Chechen radicalism), or does she revert to something like her previous self? Was she just scared of Tamerlan, or was she a true believer? Or was she scared of Tamerlan and a true believer?
    I don’t think trying to understand Russell is at all like the armchair psychologizing of Hitler (or even of Tamerlan Tsarnaev himself), because Russell is just an extreme form of a common female type. She was pretty young when she met Tamerlan Tsarnaev and I’m sure that as a boxer he had a lot of surface magnetism and confidence at the time, not to mention rugged good looks. Lots of young women have iffy boyfriends at that age, and there’s a sort of young woman who gravitates toward exotic men. (I had a very iffy ex-Soviet emigre boyfriend when I was 19, as a matter of fact.)
    In a way, Russell was lucky, because if LT had had his head screwed on slightly differently, he might have gone with a US style suicide-murder of himself and his wife and/or child.

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  12. What a lot of it comes down to, with me, is that all these people in this story seem a lot like my students, which is not surprising given the location and the general academic ability (i.e., I teach at a mid-level college in New England). I was telling my students today that Dzhokhar just seems like a lot of the students I see every day. Immigrant, upwardly mobile/college-attending, weed-smoking, trying to find his place in the world. I see a hundred Katy Russells, too, every year–raised in relative economic comfort but somehow enmeshed in difficult peer relationships.
    New info today on the carjacking victim: he’s Chinese. I somehow knew he wasn’t white.

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  13. “The digital era allows no asylum from ….”
    Last time I looked all these digital devices came with an on/off switch. Parental responsibility anyone? How many years did they have to instill a sense of right and wrong?

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  14. Remnick’s musings are based on nothing more than the gossip and speculation we’ve been inundated with since the bombing at the marathon occurred. I’ve followed the news closely, and every single “fact” has several versions. I think it’s too early to draw any conclusions. Everybody is analyzing the oldest brother on the basis of that one single sentence.
    Where are the reporters who actually want to do some independent investigating on this event, rather than endlessly quoting unnamed government, police, or FBI sources.

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  15. “Tamerlan also says he has no American friends.”
    I just remembered today that there is possibly a cultural nuance here. In American English, we call nearly everybody we know a “friend,” even if we kind of hate their guts. In Russian, they make a stronger distinction between a “znakomyi” (an acquaintance, a person you know) and a “drug” (a close friend). “Znakomyi” is a warmer, more positive term in Russian than “acquaintance” is in English. “Drug” in Russian means a person you are close enough that you are practically willing to take a bullet for them. When Tamerlan said he didn’t have any American friends, I think he might have meant that he didn’t have any American friends at that level of intimacy.
    Between Russian-speakers and Americans, friendship is a major area of potential misunderstanding. The typical America is often smiley and ready to be a “znakomyi,” but is not necessarily either willing or capable of becoming a “drug.” This is traditionally a source of frustration and/or alienation for Russian-speakers. On the other hand, the Russian culture of friendship is one where close relationships have traditionally been forged in the crucible of extreme material hardship and oppression. There, friendship has often meant the difference between surviving or not surviving. (I think I have Russian-quality friendships with other Americans in the US, but I am Russian-trained.)

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  16. To forestall MH, it’s worth noting that the Russian “drug” that Amy mentions above is pronounced more like “droog.”

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  18. Doug,
    That did cross my mind.
    MH,
    Go ahead. I have no idea how anybody gets through that book without knowing Russian. I haven’t read it myself, but the quotes I’ve seen look practically unreadable.

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