"It Only Hurts When I Laugh" by Dina Rubina, summary Automatic translate

The work was published in 2010. This book is a coherent autobiographical narrative born of pure chance. When the author’s work computer crashed, the young master extracted old files containing dozens of conversations from the hardware. Rereading the saved interviews from different years, the writer decided to combine them, cleanse them of the chaff, and compose a standalone text about the craft of writing, emigration, and travel.

The development of a writer and Soviet realities

The events open with memories of an early start. At sixteen, the young schoolgirl sent a story to the Moscow magazine "Yunost." Publication in the publication, with a circulation of three million, brought her nationwide fame. The girl received a gigantic fee for the time — 98 rubles. The money was used to buy an awkward pink sweater from a market speculator. This early success quickly allowed her to obtain the coveted membership card to the Writers’ Union.

Her new status entitles her to visit the Central House of Writers in Moscow. She amuses herself by teasing the stern doorkeepers: she pretends to be a naive provincial, pats her pockets, and endures rude remarks before pulling out her Red Book. It’s also there that she meets her future husband, the artist Boris Karafelov. His classic appearance and distinguished beard open any door without fail.

Provincial euphoria collides with the harsh necessity of earning a living. Writers survive by translating national authors. Dina Rubina describes her experience as a ghostwriter in Uzbekistan. One day, she is tasked with translating a clumsy interlinear translation of a local classic novel. Soon, chunks of perfect prose emerge from the mediocre text — an outright plagiarism from Mikhail Lermontov’s unfinished story. Faced with the danger of exposing a powerful party boss, the translator is forced to painfully adapt the nineteenth-century classic to the collective farm world.

Craft techniques and the search for subjects

Writing is depicted as a 24-hour exercise of the imagination. The master must keep the audience on edge and master every situation. A story is told of a diplomat who imitated a brilliant taster and deceived an Austrian baron by guessing the harvest month of a unique wine.

Material for stories is obtained from everywhere. The writer eavesdrops on conversations in coffee shops, while waiting in line at the doctor’s office, and jots down other people’s intonations on the backs of prescriptions. The conflict between literature and the mundane is revealed: real-life prototypes are often offended, discovering their own traits in literary characters. The creator asserts the right to use any human material, ignoring threats of lawsuits and the loss of friends. A fictional phantom is always more powerful and vivid than the living original.

Emigration and Jerusalem Babylon

Moving to Israel in 1990 felt like a leap into the abyss. The first nights in Jerusalem were accompanied by pouring rain and a sense of surrealism. Gradually, the city became more familiar. The author debunks the myth of Israel’s oriental nature, describing it as a bustling Mediterranean destination.

Jerusalem functions as a colossal theatrical stage. The crowd is filled with grotesque characters. They vividly remind the author of the characters from Tashkent courtyards and Odessa streets. The book describes rides on an Odessa tram, the purchase of gigantic purple tights from a colorful vendor, and a grim dialogue with an old watchmaker.

The air of Jerusalem is charged with a nervous tension. Absurd and tragic events occur here daily. The author treats a crew of Arab workers repairing pipes in her apartment to coffee and, along with them, listens to reports of foiled terrorist attacks on the radio. Police explode suspicious bags, while citizens routinely continue to move past the cordon. Spring Christian and Jewish holidays bring crowd density to a fever pitch, triggering outbreaks of a peculiar "Jerusalem syndrome" among religious tourists.

Language freedom and the paradoxes of communication

Particular attention is paid to the verbal texture. The writer defends the use of obscene language to accurately characterize the characters, comparing a writer to a muralist who requires a variety of colors. Anecdotes from real life demonstrate the naturalness of strong language in extreme conditions. The episode with the evacuated mare, who refused to pull the cart and moved only to the swearing of cadet pilots, demonstrates the hidden power of folk phonetics.

Israeli society is characterized by a distinct lack of respect for rank. Locals immediately adopt the informal "ty" and dispense with patronymics. Israelis are practical and rugged. A female municipal inspector measures the dimensions of someone’s apartment, completely ignoring the intense lovemaking unfolding in the bedroom.

Personality formation

Their approach to education is completely unsentimental. Children who write are doomed to endure their parents’ perpetual busyness. The child develops their own defensive reactions and a unique way of understanding the world. Absurd childish statements and twisted myths accumulate. Real dramas emerge from childhood fantasies. An eleven-year-old girl, watching the aftermath of a bloody terrorist attack in central Jerusalem on television, weeps bitterly over the Yankees’ capture of Atlanta in the novel "Gone with the Wind." A little boy in Moscow mistakes a homeless tramp sleeping in a square for Lenin, who has escaped from the Mausoleum. And a Japanese-breed puppy, trained to relieve himself with a code word, makes the entire family shout the name of the founder of Marxism in the forest. Children chew over ideology, issuing paradoxical verdicts.

Her grown daughter’s service in the Israeli army adds gray hairs to her hair. She serves at a secret base near the Egyptian border and jokes that if military secrets are revealed, she’ll have to kill her own mother. The army fosters inner freedom in teenagers, teaching them through training to choose between the interests of the individual and society.

Roads, cities and the birth of ideas

The author’s routes take her through Europe, America, and Russia. Foreign life continually provides fodder for analysis. She often elicits stories from taxi drivers and random fellow travelers. She cites the story of a Moscow driver who treasures a hundred-dollar bill given to him by a politician as a sacred relic, but categorically refuses to vote for him in elections. In a foreign country, the writer absorbs every detail, be it the anger of a wealthy Indian woman in an Italian restaurant or an absurd line for raw herring in The Hague. In Germany, shifts in national behavior are noticeable: the grandchildren of Soviet immigrants curse on platforms, and young native Germans refuse to repent for the sins of a bygone era.

It is in these wanderings that new books are born. The idea for the novel "Leonardo’s Handwriting" arose over breakfast in Boston, after hearing a story about a bassoonist stranded on a mountain pass during a snowstorm. The image of the main character crystallizes in the sweltering heat of Miami, after meeting the aerialist Lina Nikolskaya. Details of the circus profession are collected bit by bit, the writer devouring the closed professional environment.

The other side of touring

Public speaking in front of audiences is physically exhausting, bringing in an unstable income. Flights across American cities become grueling marathons. The author often crosses paths with Igor Guberman, sharing the same rooms with hospitable hosts.

The book is replete with anecdotes about colleagues. Memories of Renata Mukha read like stand-alone novellas. Her oral story about her aunt Ida Abramovna, who, in hungry Tashkent, fed a visiting folk artist a golden chicken in hopes of romance, becomes the culmination of table humor. She describes gatherings with the artist Alexander Okun, where alcohol mingled with philosophical debates and comical situations.

The Burden of Memory and the Passage of Time

Love, family, and everyday life are subordinated to the rhythm of the typewriter. Creativity demands deathly silence. Personal dramas, breakups, and upheavals are distilled into prose. The writer confesses to pathological jealousy and debilitating anxiety for close relatives.

Over the years, the fear of irreversible loss intensifies. Every year on Victory Day, the writer calls her elderly father, praying to preserve this brief telephone ritual for the future. The memory of the war is met with incomprehension from civilians in other countries. Israeli veterans with Soviet medals seem strange to local merchants, who fought their four Middle Eastern wars without decorations.

Repeated trips to Moscow reveal stark social contrasts. Impoverished elderly people on the metro beg for the preservation of their native nature, eliciting apathy from passengers. Meanwhile, respectable drivers struggle at intersections in spring traffic jams. Assessing her habits and reactions to the surrounding reality, the writer admits: "My only life yesterday, today, and tomorrow is material for a future book."