Last May, when I set out to find a venue for my exhibit of propaganda paintings marking the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl, I thought it would be cute if the East Village KGB Bar hosted it. Once I pitched the project to bar owner Denis Woychuk, however, I realized his passion for Soviet icons goes beyond semantics. His family—and the building itself—have roots in Jewish Ukraine and Soviet dissidence that precede the literary bar’s existence.

The building, a speak-easy in the 1920s, was bought by the Ukrainian Labor Home—a social fraternal organization—in 1948, complete with a closet full of authentic Socialist propaganda. As building’s owners aged, Woychuk began renting the downstairs space as a gallery and hoped to eventually take over the building.

“It became an international headquarters for the Ukrainian American community,” Woychuk told me:

They ran a Ukrainian American paper out of that building for many years; my father worked for the printing press, where the comedy club is now. He used to take me, in diapers, sit me on a barstool, and would drink at the bar. I remember I had my first drink at [age] five.

He opened the Kraine Gallery downstairs in 1983, when the building was struggling. “They still had the bar at the time, and for $5, my artist friends could get a drink, a soup, a salad, meat, potatoes, and a vegetable,” Woychuk explained. “Even back then, that was super cheap.”

In 1986, he accompanied a group of the building’s owners on a trip to the Soviet Union, hoping to get their blessing to take over the space. It worked, and in 1992 Woychuk applied for a corporation license as KGB Bar Inc, which initially got turned down. “The Department of State says you can’t name your business KGB Bar,” Woychuk said. “But I got it through as an acronym for ‘Kraine Gallery Bar.’”

Woychuk’s latest project, 20 years after the christening of KGB Bar, is a Soviet-themed musical currently on stage at the theater below the bar. Isaac Babel and the Gangster King, promoted as The Godfather meets Fiddler on the Roof, is set in 1936 Odessa and based on the stories and real-life exploits of Isaac Babel, the Soviet-era Russian Jewish master literati.

Isaac Babel and the Gangster King runs Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 pm until November 25 at the Kraine Theater.

The post How KGB Bar, Formerly a Prohibition-Era Speakeasy, Got Its Subversive Name appeared first on Jewcy.

“You’ve got to be a fucking idiot to be an undecided at this point,” Mike Edison declared Thursday night while celebrating the publication of his new sex-and-politics-themed e-book, Bye Bye, Miss American Pie. Edison, formerly the publisher of High Times and editor-in-chief of Screw Magazine—and a 2011 Big Jewcy—offered the call to action in time for tonight’s final presidential debate and next month’s election.

At Jimmy’s No. 43 in the East Village, the mensch-pornographer was accompanied by a band that included Sonic Youth’s Bob Bert for a literature-meets-music-meets-revolution book party, the latest event in a tour that has included stops at the New York Public Library, where Edison is an Allen Room scholar, and 92Y Tribeca for the fifth annual Banned Books Festival, which featured an appearance by fellow Big Jewcy Rachel Shukert. “What brand was Lewinski’s blue dress?” Fleshbot.com editor Lux Alptrum asked the crowd before Edison’s reading. It was Gap, it turns out, and Judy McGuire, Edison’s co-host on the Mike and Judy Show, won a porn DVD for answering correctly.

Edison’s latest, which was what the amped up crowd was really there for, mounts an attack on political apathy. The novella channels the raunchy libertarianism of Edison’s past for a relevant conversation about sex, scandal, and politics. It reads like the 1968 cult classic flick, Wild in the Streets, in which a rock-star-turned-politician calls for the end of power in the hands of anyone over thirty years old and lowers the voting age to 14—except in Bye Bye, Miss American Pie, a female politician’s indiscretions lead to orgies across the country, and this year’s party lines, press relations, and voter opinions are on full display.

Edison doesn’t hesitate to include a Hillary Clinton-esque woman in the canon of badly behaved public figures, embroiling politician Barbra Bernstein in a sex scandal after her husband’s exploits go public. Bernstein boldly defends herself in a surprisingly powerful passage:

“The problem with self righteous people,” she began, “is that they always want to rain on someone else’s parade. Haven’t we had enough of prudes running this country?” It wasn’t Lincoln’s first inaugural, nor Kennedy’s, for that matter, but it was loaded with pith and dramatic import. It didn’t quite hit the high notes of Martin Luther King’s “I have been to the Mountaintop” speech, but for some members of the American people, it still rang with the bell tones of liberation.

She went on to talk about the Pursuit of Happiness. She talked about Liberty, and Freedom from Tyranny at home. She looked straight into the camera, straight into the hearts and loins of America, and this is what she said: “I got mine, America, now get yours. You know you want it!”

Edison acknowledges that his pornography past might turn off potential new readers. If he were a horny housewife from Toronto, perhaps, people might embrace Bye Bye, Miss American Pie as quickly as they devoured Fifty Shades of Grey. Regardless, Edison hopes the book will wake people up. “Reading Bye Bye, Miss American Pie should be like taking the red pill in the Matrix,” he told me. “It should tear the sheets off of a fabricated reality.” In this election year, we need that more than ever.

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Next Saturday, hundreds of people will gather at an art and music festival at the New York Aquarium and the adjacent beach to celebrate the creative post-Soviet immigrants of Brighton Beach, New York City, and beyond. ArtOnBrighton 2012, the second annual manifestation of its kind in New York’s Little Odessa, celebrates the post-Soviet Jewish identity that has been largely unexcavated by its members, partly because of the traumatic goings on that the refugees suffered, and partly because of the absence of a tangible community among post-Soviet Jews. And despite the painful tragedy surrounding roots, the artists of this festival encourage the embracing of reality, giving credit to warriors where credit is due, and looking optimistically at the future of the freshly forming community. After more than 20 years of repatriation, there is much strength to be drawn from the shared cultural history that uniquely sets this tribe apart within the American and American Jewish communities.

Let’s look at this a la Estelle Getty. Picture it, Soviet Union, 1980s: You are a parent immigrating from the Soviet Union with your family, maybe already in America if you were lucky enough to make the paper-thin window in the 70s, maybe finally making the trek after waiting several years as refuseniks waiting for clearance to leave while living under severe persecution in a Kafkaesque purgatory, maybe laying low as cooperating citizens of the state until the gates opened during Perestroika. You envision a future without restrictions on your most personal freedoms, a joining of your private and public personas, and most importantly, a tabula rasa for your children. They will not know this hell you escaped, they will know freedom and opportunity that allows the individual being to just breathe already. When your children ask, “What was it like before America?” you answer, “Why do you need to know? You are American now.” But what if you were able to heal through profound communal catharsis, acknowledging victimization and transcending it stronger than ever as individuals and as a community?

That’s exactly what happened unexpectedly this April when over 250 people congregated for the 130th anniversary of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helped hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews make the courageous escape as refugees. The celebration manifested as a launch party for HIAS @130, a book containing thirty stories and one poem capturing the personal immigration accounts submitted through the organization’s myStory online forum that echo the untold experiences of emigres. It was a reunion between strangers, many hearing their own tales of refuge for the first time, but from the mouths of others. It was the first time for many to shed light on the dark past in a community environment. They cried, they laughed, they got to know themselves through others. Indeed, it was apparent that the gold-chained FOB stereotype was a bad fit, not quite describing the entrepreneurial strides and American successes of the demographic’s members since the trek.

HEALING THROUGH THE ARTS

Regina Spektor, who headlined that event, and left the former Soviet Union with her family during Perestroika, said in an interview a couple of days ago on NPR’s Fresh Air, On Growing Up A ‘Soviet Kid’, “My mind is so overwhelmed by these giant things and has been since I was a kid that sometimes I just have a hard time not feeling so guilty for how, how easy we have it.” Deconstructing the complex identity with many unconscious layers is nearly impossible through prose—though it can be done: Jewcy favorite Alina Simone, who authored You Must Go and Win, a book of essays revealing much about her family’s life in Kharkov, Ukraine, also doubles as a songstress, doing her thing next Saturday at the Aquarium.

ArtOnBrighton 2012’s Master of Ceremonies, Kira Soltanovich, a compatriot of Jay Leno and Joan Rivers who has been a staple on the comedy scene for over a decade, was born in the former Soviet Union and raised by immigrant parents in San Francisco. “There are about four-trillion Jewish comedians in the world,” she estimates roughly, “But guess what? There are only a handful of post-Soviet Jewish comedians. I’m talking born in the USSR and now standing on stage and making people laugh. I can name maybe five. There’s something really special about being in such a unique group.”

As she remembers of her household,

Even though we were in America I think it was very, very Soviet. Sure, I was only two years old when we arrived in America, so I didn’t have much personal Communistic experience to draw from, but that didn’t stop my parents from reminding me every day what they had to go through back in Russia. They also constantly reminded me what they had to go through to bid farewell to the motherland and journey over to the States in the mid 1970’s. The propaganda was so thick back then, my parents were told they would never be accepted anywhere else outside of Russia, so they might as well just stay there along with all the other Jews that were desperate to leave. I feel like I’ve carried this history with me throughout my entire childhood. I don’t know why, but it really stuck with me and resonates in my stand up as well.

COJECO (The Council of Jewish Emigre Community Organizations), an umbrella nonprofit over thirty-something New York City alliances and the producer of ArtOnBrighton, is dismantling the silence that disjoints the post-Soviet Jewish community: it puts power and resources in the hands of its artists. I, for one, am coming on board at a marketing capacity with the goal of rebranding the post-Soviet Jewish identity after working with the organization as one of about 20 fellows in their Blueprint Fellowship, which funnels UJA and Genesis Foundation funds to creative community and art projects of young innovators that expand understanding of what it means to be us. So who are we?

We are rooted in our past stories, worldly in our interests, recontextualized in the American landscape, hybrid and unlike any breed the former Soviet states and America have seen before, sexy in our playfulness with the je-ne-sais-quoi aura assigned to us by others, and outside-the-box in what we bring to the table in professional, community, and social settings. The resourceful and adaptable nature that our families’ immigrant experiences have bred in us might elicit a favorite adjective of RuPaul: we are fierce.

AND IT’S NOT AN EXCLUSIVE CLUB

One of ArtOnBrighton 2012’s acts, the fire-breathing, sword-swallowing Lady Aye, says of her family, which originally made their way to the States during waves in the late 1800s up until just after WWII, “Our connection to our Ukrainian past is interestingly tenuous, but ever present. My grandparents dropped their names as they left and didn’t look back with any nostalgia, but it was also a part of who they were. It made a definite impression, so I think my generation is curious and chases down those origins.”

Headlining performer Y-Love is also not a post-Soviet Jew, yet his experience as a gay, black hip-hop artist who converted to Orthodox Judaism has many relatable points. Like in my essay for Tablet on what post-Soviet Jewish child immigrants could learn from Kanye West, Y-Love’s multifaceted voice holds a few lessons of its own. In Erika Davis’ interview with Yitz for Jewcy in May, he envisioned an ideal Jewish community thusly: “Everyone would respect each other’s traditions, beliefs, and orientations. Only when we recognize that people deserve to exist on their own terms will we get there.” But what does it take to embrace a complex identity that the larger community is to accept? I posed this question to Yitz over the phone, and as he sees it, “We are all finite beings trying to connect to an infinite.” He feels there is no such thing as the American Jew, rejecting the theory of a melting pot in describing any multicultural community. And while he’s normalized in the Hasidic community in many ways, he also naturally distinguishes himself through his own experience as a Jew of Color, which in turn enhances the greater community. It is this pursuit of personal potential spiritually, socially, and creatively that is each individual’s right and responsibility.

And for outsiders to be confronted by the real thing does critical work in diminishing false stereotypes that are rarely as efficiently dismantled outside of the arts. Says Kira, “I’m amazed at how little people know about the old Soviet culture. There are pockets of this country that think Soviets are Boris & Natasha from the Bullwinkle cartoon series. No joke! I like being about to get up on stage and make fun of immigrants and also do some educating about what it was really like to wait in line for food.”

Indeed, the artists have it, and their sharing brings catharsis and healing. In Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, he orients the birth of hip-hop in the 1970s as something that tackled social malaise in the community in ways government programs could not and would not touch. When slumlords set fires to buildings to make a buck over and over while politicians argued that it was the residents in poverty who were to blame for their own victimization, ignoring that the Bronx was burning due to systematic neglect did nothing to extinguish the fires. Ignoring that we are post-Soviet Jews with a shared tumultuous past is to tacitly remain stagnant in the victim role. Owning it and moving on, to use the hip-hop colloquial, is about keeping it real, and as Jeff argues, it’s also about keeping it right. America is vibrantly multicultural, and the post-Soviet Jewish identity is an important color we must use on our canvases in painting the American landscape.

ArtOnBrighton 2012 is going down September 8, 2012 at the New York Aquarium with food, beverages, art, music, and comedy, followed by a DJ-spun dance party on the adjacent beach. Get your tickets in advance for $10, $15 at the door.

Editor’s note: Today is Margarita’s last day at Jewcy. Since starting in June 2010, she has been nothing short of exceptional in her various roles at Tablet Magazine, Nextbook Press, and Jewcy. While we will miss Margarita’s inspired vision, urban pop flair, and super-human work ethic, we couldn’t be more proud of her as she follows her passions and makes good by her refusenik roots.

Art, as always, by Margarita Korol.

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Their show, the culmination of a COJECO arts fellowship, takes place tonight at 7 pm at 92YTribeca, and will surely be a profound treat.

Related: The 10-Year Itch

Margarita Korol is a COJECO Blueprint Fellow, producing an illustrated poetry exhibit honoring her refusenik mother.

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Follow the two-dimensional cotton candy snake to its tail and you will come upon its cryptic origin story, entrenched in concrete rubble, center-stage at Ha’Kibbutz Israeli Art Gallery. The short documentary to which Eshkar Oren Wetzstein, the gallery’s operational manager, politely directed me after I stormed in demanding answers presented artist Hagar Mitelpunkt’s public art project as nothing short of profound.

Unlike the earlier manifestation of the pink line, in which Hagar painted an unoccupied building near Rehovot guerrilla style (showing up a month later in a pink suit to confront the building owner, who assumed this was the mark of some pink line gang, and requested that she erase it, which she did), the line on Rehov Dov Hos took shape in transparent dialogue with the city, the gallery, and its residential neighbors.

The video documents nay-saying building managers and the breakthroughs that follow as an art project takes its first breath. In the middle of viewing the documentary next to a woman who desperately wished, along with me, that I spoke more than two words of Hebrew, we got to the root of her enthusiasm when she pointed at the screen and told me, “That’s me!” A neighbor who lived upstairs with a strip of pink decorating the exterior of her apartment, you could pick up the pink, kvelling aura around her from a block away.

Hagar embodies what I consider to be the most critical role of the public artist, connecting the dots between the individual, the community, and the spaces they occupy. The fact that a 200-meter pink object could be temporarily transposed onto the X-Y-Z planes of a block’s normal life is a sign of healthy urban life, reflecting a goal-oriented connectivity between business, residential, and municipal players. And it’s even green: painted over an initial layer of cornstarch paint, Hagar’s peace work will be erased without a trace at the end of this month.

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Grant told us about Michael Ioffe’s “Walking on Mind-Fields” exhibition opening May 24, as well as the 2012 International Art Festival Competition, which the museum is co-sponsoring with International Art Festival, Inc. and Fine Art Magazine. There’s a June 15 deadline on their call for submissions, with prizes including group and solo shows, a feature in Fine Art Magazine, and cash prizes. Get it while it’s hot.

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Especially from a refusenik perspective, the reach of an empowered outsider, like HIAS, that can pool private and political resources to a voiceless populace within a smothering system, like the Soviet Jews, should not be underestimated. The group provided critical humanitarian support of individual pursuits of happiness and safety worldwide.

The kinship among the advocates, refugees, and predecessors of the Let My People Go movement of the last century is a reminder of the value of the web formed by tribal association. Check out this timeline of HIAS’ efforts, and purchase tickets to this Sunday’s book launch reception at the Center for Jewish History, to become part of that web.

This article was originally posted on Tablet Magazine

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Executive Director Roman Shmulenson commented, “The number came as a surprise to many. Yet, for a whole range of reasons, Russian-speaking Jews remained either unaffiliated or only marginally affiliated with the existing communal institutions. There were key people in the American and the Russian Jewish communities who realized that in order for the integration to be successful, certain changes had to take place. There was a need for a unified strong voice and coordination for many grassroots efforts existing in the community but not really connecting with the mainstream.”

Three of these key players were the honorees, who have bridged the gap a bit further between the communities. Emphasis was placed on empowering the individual through Jewish values to allow for opportunities to fully integrate as individuals and as a community. UJA Vice President and CEO John Ruskay quoted the famous refusenik Natan Sharansky: “Identity is now the driver for everything we care about. If one is not positively identified, why care about the Jewish poor, renewing Jewish life in the Former Soviet Union, or securing the Jewish state?”

The honorees have focused their efforts on transmitting appealing Jewish values to a formerly outsider demographic, via a Dolly Parton-esque book gifting program (Harold Grinspoon’s PJ Library), Soviet persistence in community organization after immigration (COJECO’s first president and Board Chairman Feliks Frenkel’s efforts in the arts and community), and from within the political machine (COJECO’s first executive director Hon. Alec Brook-Krasny, and the first member of the area’s Russian community to be elected to the New York State Assembly).

COJECO’s current president David Kislin put the decade in perspective: “This is only the beginning of a much larger history that we’ll be talking about for years to come.” The Russian Jewish community seems to be an untapped natural resource in New York with much gain to be had in the further excavation of its creative and cultural inspiration. Most important is COJECO’s vision that such integration is possible through the arts. Its Blueprint Fellowship program has been a beacon of the arts, allocating support for individual creative projects like Yiddish theaters, children’s programs, documentaries and exhibitions that illuminate a thirst to know what this Russian-speaking Jewish identity exactly is, revealing potential beyond the old country, however invisible and tragic that past might have been. Looking toward a vibrant future, as former Blueprint Fellow Mira Stroika, an accordian-clad musician belted at the conclusion of the evening à la Edith Piaf, “Non, je ne regrette rien.”

(Photographed: above, Hon. Alec Brook-Krasny; below, Mira Stroika)

Margarita Korol is one of this year’s Blueprint Fellows, producing an illustrated poetry exhibit honoring her refusenik mother.

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Cat and mouse, wolf and rabbit, moose and squirrel. An American Tail‘s (No. 71 on Tablet’s Greatest Jewish Films list) Fievel is the child Jewkrainian immigrant poster child–despite refugee status coming out of the shtetl, he is loyal to the Mousekewitz’ and exhibits some fine immigrant work ethic in his adaptibility, creativity, and fearlessness. The animals associated with the Russian-speaking American FOB kid’s pop culture experience must have shaped something in our psyches. In 1986, outside representations of Soviet Jews took on a rodent visage as Sullivan Bluth Studios shaped Fievel and Art Spiegelman gave us Maus. Meanwhile, insiders continued to consume Soviet cinema with other kinds of anthropomorphic creatures like the 70s strikingly animated russky Winnie the Pooh, Gene the Crocodile and Cheburashka (a not-quite-rodent, not-quite-bear Gumby-like toy), and the coyote-roadrunner-like Nu, Pogodi! (Translating to “Just you wait!” or as I liked to think, “Go fuck yourself!”).

It’s not surprising that the characterization of the Soviet Jew as victim came from the outside, specifically 1980s Americans. It is rare to find someone inside the demographic (without adequate Americanization and therapy sessions) to admit that they were screwed by the system more than others. As a kid hearing, “Somewhere out there…even though I know how very far apart we are/ It helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star” cemented the importance of outsider help, hope, and resilience to a mouse surviving amidst vicious cats.

However, thinking as a mouse, while it acts as the first step toward recognizing that one’s past is riddled with suffering, is not very Soviet, and invites the disdain of one’s comrades who are built to sniff out self-pity and egotism. It’s like babushka liked to say: “If I tell you you’re pretty, then you will stop trying.” To be depicted as a mouse time and again, while it beautifully illustrates the contextualized Soviet Jewish experience among persecutors, also undermines that adaptable resilience that comes with the territory. Because no animator has yet to portray the evolution of vulnerable mouse to powerful bear.

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From the moment Mike Edison wandered into Los Angeles’ Stray Cat Cafe with his entourage, including Counterpoint/ Soft Skull Press publisher Charlie Winton posing as his chauffeuring Samoan lawyer, for the occasion of a very Jewcy interview before a lively reading of his newest Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! across the street at The Last Bookstore, the vibe of the evening was a largely liberated one. And not in the scary Big Lebowski nihilist we-believe-in-nothing sense, but somehow still bound by something sacred, despite the passing around of a vulgar vintage canned Penthouse puzzle and even more filthy discourse. Yes, while he just about manages to use every word soapboxed by Carlin in the index alone, Edison engages in something wholesome and good in his chronicles: preserving freedoms.

Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! reads like the lovechild of Screw Magazine and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. In this highly researched yet devourable volume, Mike Edison, founding publisher of High Times and editor-in-chief of Goldstein’s Screw (a cornerstone of uncensored, smart free speech with an actual informed opinion–pro-sex, yes, but also anti-war), provides a historian’s perspective that is that of the insider at the top, but also more importantly that of the active citizen who has done his part in testing, exposing, and now chronicling the limits of freedoms so that they (and we) could continue enjoying them today. Dirty! pops four notorious gentlemen–Hefner, Goldstein, Flynt and Guccione–into a time machine so that they could be reread in their appropriate contexts, rather than through the traditional skewing lens of a moralizing public applying an emotionally-charged value system. And the outcome is not entirely reverent.

Starting with a crash course in the history of US sexuality, Edison hits up the most interesting gamechangers in the perceptions of sex through the country’s short history. It’s a match between the Comstock-humping prudes and the libertarians fought outside the ring (that Edison is familiar with in his dabblings with Kaufmanesque wrestling) and in the centerfolds, courthouses, cities, and suburbs of the country.

The book is riddled with citations of court cases. Another American tradition after porn is the popular punishment of its purveyors and fans, citizens on the prowl for the perfect quench to a primitive thirst sans measurable harm to others, reactionary persecution that is an offense against constitutionally protected individual pursuits of happiness. In addition to the freedom of religion, Dirty! reminds that it is important to defend the part of the first amendment that also protects freedoms from religion so that the peaceful minority can do what it does without the restraints of a system to which it does not subscribe even tacitly. Through this volume, a contextualized discourse that goes beyond good and evil is made possible equally for those who agree and disagree with the achievements of fellow American playboys and hustlers.

Dirty! deeply profiles the drives behind smut kings and what dents they made in the economics, politics, and morality of the country over the decades between the 50s and the information age. Their victories (like Goldstein’s relatively modest win against Pillsbury for cartoons in Screw portraying indecent acts among baked goods with yeast infections) and failures (Guccione’s Gore Vidal-screenwritten, Roger Ebert-walked-out-on Caligula) are scrutinized unapologetically (with his sex-drugs-rock-and-roll-allegiant biases exposed gonzo-style at every peephole) side-by-side with other iconic champions of freedom off the printing press like Jewcy-favorite Lenny Bruce. One of the shiniest gems in the book is the primary document that acts as the final chapter, an interview with Chip Maloney, a smutty relic of a pretty much extinct breed of journalism. A man with “so much shit inside his head, he should clean his ears with Pepto-Bismol,” Maloney’s is a day-in-the-life account from the perspective of Goldstein’s favorite ghostwriter, pairing well with Edison’s first book, his autobiography I Have Fun Wherever I Go.

Man-haters may be silenced in noticing that a prevalent persuasion in the book is Edison’s staunch feminism, manifesting most vividly in his disdainful view of Hugh Hefner, Playboy extraordinaire who helped send the modern material girl to the shallow end of the pool. It is a passion felt most during the Dirty! “reading” in his inspired beat “Hugh Hefner Hates Girls,” (accompanied by the Space Liberation Micro-Arkestra, featuring Danzig veteran Howie Pyro on zero-gravity fuzz guitar, Beatnik No. 9 on bongos, and Edison on electric space piano and theremin). Throughout the progression of Hefner’s trajectory, Edison deduces the king-pimp’s deep-seated anxieties stemming from early miserable romantic relations that reveal some major roots of idealogies supporting the possession of women in modern pop culture.

I don’t care who he had to screw to get here, Edison’s is noble work done not because he hates women, but because he loves people and their freedoms. As was deduced at the Stray Cat, he is the gentleman pornographer. An established “fucking mensch,” these two words describe the state that every self-respecting human being wishes to embody, from the holy rabbi to the common scumbag.

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