My family, if I had to give it an adjective, is elastic.

Forty-five years ago, my parents, my little brother, and I, came over to this country from the Soviet Union,

extending the family across continents.

Over the decades, the family, my father really, stretched to absorb spouses in-laws even though they spoke a different language, children both biological and adopted, ex-spouses who chose to stick around, and eventually grandchildren.

Over those same decades as in any family, people meet bad decisions, said things they hoped no one would remember, got mad at each

other, held grudges, came around, and the family stretched as needed. And then it snapped.

Someone did something that bad, that shocking. That person was my cousin Alan. He and his mother,

my father's sister, Lena, came to the U.S. from Moscow in 1990 when Alan was 15.

They stayed with my parents and brother for almost a year.

By the time they arrived, I no longer lived at home, so I didn't have much of relationship with them.

Never really wanted to, because I didn't like my aunt. And as Alan grew up,

I realized even from a distance, that I didn't particularly like him either.

Alan is a clown, a blow a heart, a pompous ass. He would call himself an entrepreneur. He started

his first business in college.

He hired students to go strike papers for other wealthier students.

He went to law school and got fired from his first job.

He later told me this was because his fine legal mind made the other lawyers insecure.

Then he lived in Russia, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, working a series of increasingly shady jobs.

In Africa, he was involved with diamonds and worked with an Israeli company that provided security for mining.

If someone had set out to write an unlikable international huckster character, they couldn't have laid it on any thicker.

Alan married a Zimbabwean woman. Word in the family was that she had been that country's beauty queen.

They had two kids.

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