White on Black
By Ruben Gallego
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Harcourt, 2006; paperback ed., 2007

Winner of the Soeurette Diehl Frasier Translation Award, Texas Institute of Letters, 2007

This is an extraordinary personal testament, the story of one boy's triumph in the face of impossible obstacles. Born with cerebral palsy in Moscow, Ruben Gallego was hidden away in Soviet state institutions by his maternal grandfather, the secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party in the 1960s. His was a boyhood spent in orphanages, hospitals, and old-age homes, a life of emotional deprivation and loss of human dignity. And yet, there is no self-pity here, no bitterness, only an unfailing regard for the truth. Gallego's story is one of neglect and mistreatment but also of shared small pleasures, of courage, of the power of the human will, and of a child's growing fascination with books and the worlds he finds in them. Winner of the 2003 Russian Booker Prize, White on Black is "one of those rare books one can call revolutionary" (Corriere della Sera, January 8, 2006).

Review

Mr. Gallego's little book is deeply moving, his triumph a joy to read about. -- Steve Goode, Washington Times, January 8, 2006

Review

Born with cerebral palsy in 1960s Russia, Gallego spent his childhood in appallingly negligent Soviet institutions where nurses “demanded only one thing of me: that I ask for as little help as possible.” In this series of vignettes, he recalls an abusive caretaker and his first taste of pineapple with the same unaffected prose and remarkable restraint. Of his grandfather the Communist Party general secretary who abandoned him in an orphanage Gallego simply writes, “I’ll never understand him.” While abrupt shifts from first to third person and past to present are sometimes jarring, Gallego has produced a harrowing and graceful memoir that consistently emphasizes empowerment and endurance over self-pity. -- Hannah Tucker, Entertainment Weekly, January 13, 2006

Review

To be a crippled orphan anywhere is a sad thing; worst, undoubtedly, in the Third World, but no picnic in the Soviet Union. Gallego, a brilliant boy born with cerebral palsy, with hands and feet so twisted that though he could crawl he could use only his left index finger, was abandoned to state institutions by his grandfather in the 1960s. That he survived this "cruel and terrible" childhood is a tribute to a remarkably strong will. The most atrocious fact of many that readers learn is that eventually, usually at age 15, institutionalized boys, Gallego included, were transferred from children's wards to the "old folks' home," where they lay in their own urine until they died; in one month, seven out of eight perished. Amazingly, Gallego lived to marry, have children and write this extraordinary book of "stories," spare, elliptical, often fierce vignettes centered around remembered figures and events: "a bite of lard, a salami sandwich, a handful of figs, a blue sky, a couple of books, and a kind word." These glimpses of adversity and triumph are quirky, sometimes appalling, often funny and touching without being sentimental. The book won the 2003 Russian Booker Prize and should receive similar acclaim here. -- Publishers Weekly, January 2006

Review

In the Soviet Union, according to its 1936 Constitution, unemployment did not officially exist: "Work is a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen according to the principle, 'He who does not work shall not eat.' " The new Soviet man was to be broad of chest and square of jaw, tireless in his dedication to the country's welfare. Set him a work quota, and he'd double it. Double his quota, and he'd flex his muscles and double it again.

Ruben Gallego could use only two of his fingers. Born in 1968 with cerebral palsy and abandoned to the Soviet orphanage system, he got around, for lack of a wheelchair, by pulling himself along the floor, as does the main character bearing his name in the jarring opening vignette of White on Black. "I was a better student than anyone," the narrator makes a point of mentioning. Unfortunately, his brainpower doesn't mean much to the caretakers who carry him to the toilet. "You say he's smart," one of them observes, "but he can't walk!"

White on Black captures a grim side of the Soviet workers' paradise: the thousands of children classified as physically or mentally disabled and locked away from public view. Winner of the 2003 Russian Booker Prize for best novel, this semi-fictionalized memoir now appears in Marian Schwartz's faithful translation. "My heroes are collective images from the endless kaleidoscope of my endless children's homes," Gallego asserts at the start. "What I write, though, is the truth." Paradoxically, under communism, truth was a realm unofficially ceded to writers of fiction, since facts were so often hedged or bent by politics. In White on Black, fiction similarly provides a truth-telling veneer to Gallego's straightforward if sometimes too convenient arrangement of facts -- a way of getting at the essential reality.

That reality is one that few others could describe firsthand. The grandson of a leader of the Spanish Communist Party, Gallego was shut away in the Soviet orphanage system at the age of 1 for a variety of complicated reasons having to do with his grandfather's political career. His mother, then a student in Moscow, was told her sickly son had died. Gallego spent his youth moving through a blur of children's and old-age homes. It was only thanks to perestroika that he managed to break free, marry twice, father two children and eventually, after discovering the truth about his origins, reunite with his mother in the West.

The mini-tales that make up White on Black, which Gallego typed with his left index finger, brutally expose the reality the Soviet government did not want its people to see -- a reality that persists despite some improvements, with hundreds of thousands of orphaned or abandoned children living under circumstances that Human Rights Watch, in 1998, called "shocking" for their "levels of cruelty and neglect."

Escaping -- indeed, surviving -- the closed institutions in which Gallego grew up often depended on the slim likelihood of mastering a practical trade. Food, heat and kind words were pitifully rare, and public humiliation was a common disciplinary tactic. "Poor child, better you'd died," one caretaker says. "You'd have spared yourself the suffering, and us." Yet even such callousness was less painful, on balance, than tales of a brave new world meant for everyone but him: "They told stories about the stars and continents, but they wouldn't let me go past the gate of the children's home."

Physical disability was positively portrayed in official rhetoric only when overcome, raised to the level of national myth in the case of Pavel Korchagin, the hero of Nikolai Ostrovsky's autobiographical novel How the Steel Was Tempered, who exchanges his gun for a pen after blindness and paralysis strike. When Korchagin loses his right eye, he declares: "Better to go blind in the left one; how will I shoot now?" Looking to Ostrovsky and Korchagin as models, Gallego devotes some of the more powerful sketches to his narrator's attempts to eat as little as possible, thereby making it easier for his caretakers to carry him around.

Generally, though, the dogma seems lost on him. In the most piercing and starkly ironic incident, the narrator recalls falling in love with the idea of America after being told that the capitalists there routinely have their handicapped children killed. "I want the injection, the fatal injection," he says passionately. "I want to go to America." To him, the Soviet myth is little more than a hollow and oppressive pretense of compassion. Gallego unmasks that charade with intelligence and authority, exposing along with it any cult of heroism that thrives on suppressing human weakness. "I'm a hero," he states. "If you don't have hands or feet, you're either a hero or dead." White on Black demonstrates in no uncertain terms that this hero is alive and kicking. -- Rebecca Reich, The Washington Post, 2006

Review

In 1968, Ignacio Gallego, the patriarch of the Spanish Community Party, severed ties with a willful daughter, who had just given birth to a toddler with cerebral palsy in Moscow. The Kremlin covered for Gallego's callousness and informed his daughter that the boy, who was being held in a special hospital, had died.

This illustrious, troubled pedigree and diplomatic intrigue are nowhere to be found in that boy's memoir of having grown up, amid inconceivable humiliation and want, in a succession of Soviet orphanages and old-age homes where he was anonymously registered after his official "death." Gallego's very first line defiantly telegraphs that he would rather do without special treatment or easy sympathy: "I'm a hero. It's easy to be a hero. If you don't have hands or feet, you're either a hero or dead."

The rest of this blistering memoir proceeds with equally clear-eyed reflections on growing up handicapped in the Soviet Union, a place where disability was viewed with embarrassment and disdain. Gallego does not wish for sainthood, only for as much right to coarseness as to virtue. Discussing Monsieur Coquenard, a character in a sequel to The Three Musketeers who dies, leaving his wife and fortune to the lovable Porthos, Gallego writes: "Monsieur Coquenard did not arouse my sympathy . . . If that pathetic old man had had the strength and smarts to sprinkle poison into Porthos's wine, I would've been on his side."

Gallego is above self-pity, but not above rage, and a bitterness that happily makes room for humor: "In Russia, there's a custom of honoring the dead by sharing food . . . The more unfortunate the person fed, the more you've pleased the deceased. But where was one to find them, the unfortunates, in the most fortunate country in the world?" The Soviet Union kept the disabled out of public view in understaffed homes short on even the most basic equipment. Young Ruben crawls to the bathroom because there are no wheelchairs.

But there are drinking parties with other boys in the home, an occasional chocolate, nighttime visions on the ceiling. Gallego conveys these experiences without any care for antecedent or historical, geographical, or logistical detail. Wives — Gallego seems to have married twice — appear in later years without any introduction; the narrator leaps from youth to adulthood without warning; the procession of homes where Gallego found himself receive no elaboration beyond generic references. Gallego's memoir is a brutal impressionist painting — his abstract and free-associative prose aims above all to convey the blur of pain and somehow persisting hope of which his life consisted in the two decades he spent in the system.

In the Russian original, the contextless prose universalized Gallego's experiences without abandoning too many readers: those who had lived in Soviet times knew the code. In this way, a phrase like "it was explained to me that my mama was a black-assed bitch" needed no explication for most because "black-assed" was a common epithet for darker people, whether from the Caucasus, or, like Gallego, from southern Europe. When a pineapple appears in a home and Gallego is the only ward that takes to it, a nurse exclaims, "I'll bet his papa grew up on these pineapples." In the Soviet imagination, African blacks — dark-skinned Gallego's presumed parentage to the unknowing attendants — swung from trees and ate fruit.

One wonders if the transcontinental trip is too far for all this cultural shorthand. Marian Schwartz's lucent translation preserves Gallego's unique mix of fury and bittersweet laughter — one part perennial child, one part old man, an uncanny facsimile of the orphanages and old-age homes where he lived — and she admirably resists the impulse to clarify Gallego, either in the text or with footnotes. It's a rare, bold case of valuing craft above sales, and even above readers. -- Boris Fishman, Words Without Borders

Review

Ruben Gallego was born in Moscow in 1968 without hands or feet. He was packed off to an orphanage, then later to an old people's home, where he was left to die. Somehow he survived. White on Black is his story. It won the Russian Booker Prize in 2003.

Nothing typified the Soviet Union so much as its treatment of the handicapped. Laziness, indifference and bureaucratic stupidity achieved what in Nazi Germany was the result of deliberate policy. Most of Gallego's fellow "non-ambulants" eventually perished of starvation and neglect, but not before enduring endless speeches "about the ultimate victory of communism, about our happy childhood". However, as elsewhere in Russia, the cruelty of the system was occasionally softened by individual kindnesses. Gallego fondly remembers some of his nurses or nyanyas, kind-hearted peasant women who gave him sweets and told him the truth, even if it was only that he was better off dead.

To survive such an upbringing, you had to be tough. Gallego recalls with envy how the boys would drink chifir, a vile amphetamine-like concentrate of black tea, and pump iron with their extant limbs. He himself was too crippled to take part in these feats, so consoled himself with reading. He read about the Vikings and the kamikazes, about Cyrano de Bergerac and Pavka Korchagin. Literature became his weapon. "Slowly pressing the computer keys, I set down letter after letter. I'm painstakingly forging my own bayonet - my book." But literature, in the end, was no substitute for physical prowess. Gallego fondly recalls a drunken soldier mistaking him for a veteran of the Afghan war and calling him "brother". For a moment, he was an equal. It is a sad scene.

A book like this could never have been written by a product of the English care system. Gallego is hard and angry, but mercifully free of "issues". He does not rant about the system, he does not cut himself with knives, he is not paranoid or neurotic. In short, he has dignity. He is a human being, not a "problem case". Why is this? Is it because he never enjoyed the benefits of counselling, with its endless rehashing of grievances? Or is it because he always knew that if he did not help himself, no one else would help him? "I am a hero," he says. "If you don't have hands or feet, you're either a hero or dead." Horrible though Gallego's upbringing was, it left intact something that our far softer system of care succeeds in destroying.

However, Gallego offers no com- fort to devotees of Russian backwardness. His book concludes with a paean to America, with its electronic wheelchairs, elevators and ramps. Even McDonald's gets a friendly mention for meeting "world standards for barrier-free access". Gallego loves America for those very qualities that his fellow countrymen affect to despise. "Here everything is bought and sold. A terrible, cruel country. You can't count on compassion. But I had my fill of compassion back in Russia. I'm fine with ordinary business." The US has nothing to compare with the saintliness of Gallego's nyanyas, but neither does it have the conditions that make such saintliness necessary.

White on Black belongs to a distinctively Russian genre, with no exact equivalent in the west. It is not reportage, but neither is it fiction. Perhaps the best word for it would be "witness". It is divided up into a series of short stories, each recounting a single incident. These stories make no claim to historical truth. Their target is essential truth - pravda. They are icons of suffering and resilience, cruelty and kindness. This has nothing to do with "literature" in the western sense, with its omnivorous curiosity and surface polish, but it has a beauty of its own. Lovers of the later Tolstoy and of Solzhenitsyn will appreciate its value. – Edward Skidelsky, New Statesman, February 6, 2006

Review

His darkly, matter-of-factly Homeric, heroic shout of triumph is astonishing. -- Iain Finlayson, The Times

Review

Reticence about politics is another source of the book's power. Gallego suffered more than most from Soviet squalor and lies, but this is indirectly conveyed, in often burlesque episodes. (...) If the entire book is an allegory of Communism, it is one that is unforced, and maybe unconscious. The Soviet Union emerges as a country in which good people existed, though most were morally disabled, metaphorically without arms or legs. Yet the tone is not one of despair, and the individual can survive against the odds." - George Walden, Times Literary Supplement