Shekhtman in the Times

[Benjamin Rifkin]

Dear Colleagues:

It helps me to know what people read and think about the study of
Russian.  In that spirit, I share with you an electronic version of
an article that appeared in the Travel Section of Sunday's New York
Times (08 April 2001).

Ben Rifkin

****






April 8, 2001






An Archipelago Called Russian

By FRANCIS X. CLINES



F a guy wants to be able to talk in bed with his new Russian wife,
this guy needs one vocabulary; but if he wants to deal in the Moscow
oil business, the guy needs another," explains Boris Shekhtman, a
merry-eyed despot of a language teacher who is ready for either
American urge these days.

Mr. Shekhtman is known simply and affectionately as Boris by the 150
or so private clients who have been variously enlightened, exhausted,
psychically tattooed and certainly inspired in his one-on-one
tutoring sessions across the last 18 years. A little noticed resource
within the Washington Beltway, Boris is valued for taking a creative
personal trainer's approach to his students, poking their softness
and whipping some muscular Russian onto their bones.

When graduates of Boris's tutorials meet - and there's currently a
dozen or so alumni in Moscow's diplomacy, journalism and business
circles - they invariably glory in the words and music not so much of
the Russian language as of Boris and his methodology.

"You will destroy them!" they recall Boris cackling in delight in
class when he finally hears a once struggling student masterly
deliver one of the series of language "islands" he forces one and all
to compose and not merely memorize: no, Boris requires these
conversational drills - cunning small-talk masterpieces chockablock
with vital grammar devices, revealing grace notes and reassuring
curiosity about things Russian - to be relentlessly repeated over and
over until they become atomized and assimilated somewhere between a
student's Pavlovian brainpan and his evolving Russian soul.

When this moment is reached, Boris becomes beady-eyed with delight,
bounding like Picasso in his studio at the way he has deranged
nature. Then he demands you traverse the island, repeating your
soliloquy again.

Rooted in confidence building, the island technique is Boris's way of
equipping students with a basic set of grammatical and vocabulary
tools that become second nature and eminently reusable in attempting
more ambitious conversation. They are tight monologues - perhaps some
autobiography, an honest opinion about a favorite author, a piece on
one's hobby - that are constructed to be open to question-and-answer
tangents that can give a newcomer a sense of actually speaking the
language. Across his tutoring, Boris tries to rattle his students
with unexpected conversational twists and turns that might be eased
by resorting to island tracts.

"Boris is a formidable character, his personality is overwhelming,"
attests Lucian Pugliaresi, president of LCI Consulting and a National
Security Council official in the Reagan Administration. He says he
was shocked to finally learn Russian from Boris after bumbling
through mute years of commuting to Moscow as a petroleum specialist.

"People I know in Moscow can't believe I can finally talk with them,"
Mr. Pugliaresi says. "It's all because Boris is very good at figuring
out how you absorb information, then deciding how serious you are and
what kind of a program you need."

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Shekhtman's Specialized
Language Training Center has evolved from a basement-classroom
operation for a few Washington neophytes each year to a multicity
business, with a small staff of professional teachers from Russia. It
serves various clients, from American parents who need some bedtime
banter for their adopted Russian children, to a New York psychiatrist
needing Russian to get at the superegos of his patients in Brighton
Beach.

Lessons - mostly one on one but also groups up to seven - now include
a 30-hour tourist course in which, for $40 an hour, a traveler will,
by all the promise and demand of Boris, prove to be "primitive but
creative" in navigating basic tourist situations while still packing
a simple island or two as traveler's aid to "destroy" that cabdriver.

Destroy, as in surprise native Russians with an island's texture and
range, a signature device of Boris and his faculty. Destroy, as in
the rugged arm wrestle that he imagines even the simplest colloquy to
be. Who is triumphing in the "psychology of language?" Boris asks
with the tone of Clausewitz on total war.

Islands, of course, are separated by the briny depths. But Boris
convinces most students that language management rooted in their
memorized verbal islands will produce "the appearance of fluency" at
first, then progress swimmingly as life unfolds in Russia.

With outlets in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Moscow
besides the main office in the Rockville, Md., the center not only
teaches Russian to Americans, but also now finds Boris tutoring
language instructors in his own techniques. These are not so much
about passive grammar memorization as about building confidence so
that the student takes the initiative.

In recent years of heavy Russian immigration, Boris has also begun
teaching Russian newcomers Americanized English, replete with those
"guys" and other reassuringly noir-ish touches that Boris, who is 61,
first savored as a young student of English in Kiev and Baku.

For each of his students, when all else fails, there remains a Boris
island to crawl onto, firm as a riff of Melville. ("Menya zavut
Frenk" - They call me Frank - always seemed an island opener worthy
of Ishmael.) Islands can be about whatever interests the student,
providing Boris rates them as engaging to the casual Russian and open
to crucial devices of idiom and grammar that he finely machines into
the developing spiels.

Bill Keller, managing editor of The Times, recalls the islands
starting "with a small shoal," two of his being: "I come from New
York," and "I work for The New York Times." They then grew into more
elaborate soliloquies on subjects certain to come up in
conversations: the population, climate, economy and cultural
importance of New York.

When I studied with Boris 12 years ago, the lesson vocabulary was
thick with the clichés of Cold War saber rattling. These have yielded
some to the jargon of capitalism, although the words of cronyism
still seem relevant. Through it all, a student can rest assured that
Boris's sarcastic glossing of the Kremlin's Orwellian doublespeak
remains a virtuoso lesson.

A graduate always retains scraps of Boris's eclectic classes - a
stunning phrase of Pushkin, perhaps, or certainly a couplet from the
tiresome nursery rhymes that students must daily sing as Boris stands
there like a leering, formidable Big Bird. A line from the song "Ochi
Chorniye" ("Dark Eyes") best summarizes a student's view of both
Boris and his bittersweet language: "How I love you; how I fear you."

In class, Boris has a charming way of suddenly swiveling from the
role of absolute language tyrant to literary romantic melting to the
poetry of Anna Akhmatova. After Boris's classes of a decade ago, the
glasnostian speaking touches of Mikhail Gorbachev (he used a kind of
reflexive papal pomposity in pronouncing what he thought) became a
treasured leitmotif for an American's ears during the endless wintry
nights of Moscow. The mother tongue proved as gritty as the bread.

As if in advance compensation, Boris has introduced a certain sense
of luxury into his tutoring methods. "It became a usual procedure for
our newspaper correspondents to take us to their summer homes when
they were studying through these hot days," notes the taskmaster, who
somehow accepted the proletarian cocktail hour after a hard day at
the six declensions.

This was never some expense-account junket for learning the always
useful Russian words for fresh lobster and melted butter, Mr. Keller
insists. He recalls his summer teach-in at a Delaware beach resort as
"an extraordinary amount of drills, homework, lessons and practice"
with "a rotating cast of Russian immigrants - members of the Boris
entourage of smitten babushkas, former Kiev taxi drivers and literary
divas who accepted a free week at the beach" in exchange for
tolerating sandy hubris and bad Russian.

"To my mind, Boris's technique depends on the principle that if you
can convince Russians that you speak Russian, you'll trick yourself
in the process," Bill decided.

Boris could not agree more, as he customizes his lessons. "We will
work wherever our clients want us to work," he altruistically vows,
so long as the rate remains $40 an hour. In Rockville, just outside
Washington, he maintains a separate apartment for live-in students
who sign up for months of intensive lessons.

"The first time I met Boris he didn't talk at all about language,"
Mr. Pugliaresi recalls. "He talked about power relationships and
fascinated me instantly. He said when you don't speak the language
over there, you have no power."

Mr. Pugliaresi soon was crawling about his first Boris island, then
standing upright, looking to destroy them.

The Specialized Language Training Center, 4 Monroe Street, Rockville,
Md. 20850; (800) 839-7987; e-mail, sbsltc at aol.com. Individual lessons
cost $40 an hour. For groups, rates drop progressively, so that the
maximum group, seven, would pay $100 an hour total.
--
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Benjamin Rifkin

Associate Professor, Slavic Dept., UW-Madison
1432 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706 USA
voice:  (608) 262-1623; fax: (608) 265-2814
http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/slavic/rifkin/


Director, Russian School, Middlebury College
Freeman International Center
Middlebury, VT 05753 USA
voice: (802) 443-5533; fax: (802) 443-5394
http://www.middlebury.edu/~ls/Russian/

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