“I'm a Russian American”: How Jay Close Lives and Makes Cheese in a Village near Moscow
He was born in New York, grew up in California, and lived in France, Australia, and even Papua New Guinea. He now feels at home in Russia.
Jay Close makes cheese in the Moscow region village of Moshnitsy near Solnechnogorsk. He keeps bulls and goats, but buys cow's milk for production from a livestock farm. Jay is confident in the quality of his products. And he has cheeses for every taste - Romano, Gruyère, Edam, with herbs, with red wine...
Jay has also started an expansion — his space for a cafe is almost ready, which should open in the summer. This is where we communicate, and from here we are transported to the States…
“The Cold War, negative propaganda, Russians being bad: I was interested in all this,” Jay recalls. “I grew up at a time when people whispered: Be careful, maybe our neighbors are communists.”
Although he was born in New York, he grew up in California — so for the first three or four years he communicated more in Spanish. He learned proper English a few years later.
“When I was 13 years old, I saw a matryoshka doll for the first time. And I thought, Why are the people who invented it our enemies?” Jay recalls.
This was his first encounter with Russia. The next one happened in the early 1990s. Before learning how to handle Russian goats and cows, Jay had to interact with crocodiles.
“My godfather, my dad’s best friend, was the head of agriculture in Papua New Guinea,” says Jay. “And I fed crocodiles on the farm for several months.” He studied at a school with the local aborigines. “Sometimes I took a little crocodile with me and hid it under the lid of my desk. At recess I would take it out and the boys and I would play with it.”
Of course, Papua New Guinea and Russia are two very different places. But back in the 1870s, the territory of New Guinea was explored by Russian scientists, and in 1875 Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay proposed to Tsar Alexander II to establish a protectorate of the Russian Empire over part of the island. But the proposal was not supported. So the crocodile grounds became British and Dutch.
Feeding a crocodile, according to the cheese maker, is quite a pleasure:
“You take the fish, attach it to a long stick, and stretch it out to the water. Suddenly a huge mouth opens and grabs the fish. If it was a very big crocodile, I just threw in the stick and then he came for it...”
At the crocodile farm they were engaged in the procurement of crocodile skins — this was one of the most important sources of income for Papua New Guinea.
In Russia, Jay's income comes from goats and bulls. And before starting cheese making, he went through good schools — in France, Holland, and Greece.
Jay says that supermarket cheese is “plastic.” Meanwhile, he says that cheese fresh from the farm is “33 forms of pleasure”. So his shop is called "33 Cheeses". He has been making it himself in Russia for more than 15 years. It’s not easy work, and it requires a lot of responsibility. His son Zakhar helps . . .
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