The Swede’s Thanksgiving dinners in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, are perfect replicas of the Gaister family dinners in the House of Government, Moscow. The more or less fictional Swede (Seymour Irving Levov) was born in 1927; the very real Inna Aronovna Gaister was two years older. Both had indomitably successful fathers (Podhotzur the businessman and Perchik the revolutionary) and preternaturally loving mothers (the self-effacing Beilke and the self-assertive Hodl). Both had happy childhoods, both had to deal with non-Jewish in-laws, and both worshiped the countries that had made dreams into reality. The upwardly mobile American Jews of the 1940s and 1950s loved America as passionately as their upwardly mobile Soviet cousins had loved the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. The Swede was as American as Inna Gaister had been Soviet: “He lived in America the way he lived inside his own skin. All the pleasures of his younger years were American pleasures, all that success and happiness had been American.” And for both, the Paradise Found was the rural idyll of the newly welcoming Apollonia: the dacha pastoral of Inna Gaister and the suburban pastoral of Swede Levov. According to Gaister’s memoirs: In 1935 we started spending our summers at a dacha in Nikolina Gora. . . . The settlement was located in a beautiful pine forest, on a high hill above a bend in the Moscow River. It was a magnificent place, one of the finest in the Moscow area. . . . Our plot was right above the river, on a high bank. The dacha itself was a large two-story house, which my mother’s brother, Veniamin, not without jealousy, used to call the “villa.” It really was a villa. . . . In front of each dacha was a little wooden pier for swimming. . . . My friends and I liked spending time on the pier below the Kerzhentsev dacha. The water there was shallow and good for swimming. . . . Life at the dacha was wonderful. 159 The dream of Babel’s little boys had come true: not only were they the best at learning, but they could swim too—Hodl’s children, and Chava’s, of course, and now Beilke’s, as well. “The Swede starred as end in football, center in basketball, and first baseman in baseball.” In the early 1950s, as a successful businessman, he liked to walk home through the Elysian Fields of the “Garden State”—“past the white pasture fences he loved, the rolling hay fields he loved, the corn fields, the turnip fields, the barns, the horses, the cows, the ponds, the streams, the springs, the falls, the watercress, the scouring rushes, the meadows, the acres and acres of woods he loved with all of a new country dweller’s puppy love for nature, until he reached the century-old maple trees he loved and the substantial old stone house he loved—pretending, as he went along, to throw the