We were two would-be vagabonds, Anna and I, traipsing our way up the Pacific Northwest to satisfy a rather urgent sense of wanderlust, charged by equal parts restlessness and East Coast disillusionment. This was in Spring 2013, around the time that Didion-inspired “Goodbye to All That” anthology was published; I had only just graduated from college but already felt worldly enough to dismiss New York outright as “not really my scene” (though, wherever that scene may be, I still do not know).

Anna, always resourceful in matters of being young and broke, took the liberty of contacting some friends-of-friends she knew from her days as a Moishe House resident to find a place for us to crash for the duration of our trip. Moishe House, for the unacquainted, is a non-denominational organization that funds groups of Jewish 20-somethings to live together and host events in their area, with the intention of fostering a sense of Jewish community and identity. We had stayed at MoHo San Francisco the previous year and, having had a fantastic time, decided to give it another shot. Thus, housemates in Portland and Vancouver woke to emails from two spunky young New York women asking if they’d be willing to put us up for a couple nights. And wouldn’t you know it, they were.

Couchsurfing via Moishe House (let’s call it Moishe-surfing) came to be my favorite means of travel. Hotels are sterile and expensive. Hostels are hit-or-miss. A Moishe House has the added bonus of being a community center of sorts—people pass in and out all the time, events take place that are genuinely interesting, and housemates are remarkably sociable (they kind of have to be). And of course, there’s the Jewish angle: each Moishe House provides a glimpse into the Jewish character of its city, from a fun, Millennial point-of-view.

My first West Coast MoHo experience was a candlelit meditation session in San Francisco in April 2012. Anna and I, two secular Russian Jews reared on good old-fashioned immigrant cynicism, reveled in the energy of the event, which was spiritual yet atheist-friendly. Chakras may or may not have been opened. Regardless, I had a good time.

The following April, we embarked on our journey up the Pacific Northwest, sampling a great deal of exceptional coffee along the way. Our first stop was MoHo Portland, to greet our hosts and engage in the first of many rounds of Jewish geography. Unsurprisingly, the network is vastly interconnected—every introduction revealed a smattering of mutual Facebook friends acquired from previous MoHo visits. At the House, we explored the joy of kosher veganism (or rather, vegan kosherism). I tried chia seeds for the first time and jammed with an observant Jew. Frolicking through the temperate rain of northern Oregon, we bonded over our mutual love of falafel and shakshuka, made with free-range eggs or otherwise.

We stopped for two nights with a friend in Seattle (which has no Moishe House right now) and made our way across the Canadian border, into the mountain-hedged city of Vancouver. Once settled in the House, we found ourselves in great company: two Israelis taking a year abroad had made MoHo Vancouver their home-away-from-home, coinciding with our stay. In customary Israeli fashion, we were greeted warmly and loudly. Yehuda and Avior initiated our stay in Canada with song and smoke. Drinks were had and YouTube music exchanged. We also compared Jewfros (Yehuda’s corkscrew mane was far superior to my own). Soon, it was revealed that Anna and I were, in fact, two Rusim: “And did you know, Avior, that balagan is a Russian word?”

My Moishe expeditions would eventually take me to the other side of the world. A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of staying in MoHo Moscow, where three charming young women from Belarus and Russia opened their home to me and a friend. Like the other Houses I’d stayed in, their apartment was adorned with Judaica, but here it seemed a bit more earnest. The sense of Jewish pride was not subtle or implicit, but overt. It reflected a trend I’d witnessed in Jewish communities elsewhere in Russia: those who hadn’t been able to practice Judaism for however many generations now relished the opportunity to make up for lost time.

It was greatly heartening that, thousands of miles away from my country, I was taken in by perfect strangers who hosted me like one of their own. In 63 cities around the world, I can find a home with that familiar Moishe House plaque on its walls, show up at an event, and be welcomed. If you ask me, that’s a pretty good incentive to travel—as if you needed any more.

Samantha Shokin is a freelance writer in Brooklyn.

(Images: supplied by the author.)

Related: “The Refusenik That Wasn’t”: My parents fled the culture of the USSR. So why am I drawn to it?

The post Around the World in 63 Moishe Houses appeared first on Jewcy.

I love Russian. I love how the phrases resonate with innate lyricism; how the constants punctuate speech with that distinctly Slavic bite. I have a weakness for chanson, a fondness for Pushkin, and I know more about Russian rock than do my parents. But I especially love how speaking the language makes me feel – like an edgier, snarkier me, with a stockpile of one-liners and wit that rarely makes its way into my English-language conversations.

For these reasons and more, I’ve incurred countless raised eyebrows from fellow Russian-speakers when answering that obligatory question – where are you from?

Because I’m not from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Baku, Tashkent, or some variation thereof—I grew up right here, between Brooklyn and Jersey.

I am the product of two Jewish refugees whose families fled the Iron Curtain at the first sign of opportunity. Long before the mass exodus of over a million Soviet Jews to Israel and the United States in the ‘90s, both nations harbored the first wave of refuseniks in the seventies after overwhelming international pressure on the USSR to loosen its emigration restrictions. My parents were of the 163,000 or so who fled to Israel and America in that first wave, before the doors were again shut throughout most of the ’80s.

It comes as no surprise, then, that most of the Russian Jews I encounter (and living in New York City, I encounter many) are of the latter exodus. Thus, in addition to the obligatory question, I’m often confronted with inquiries suggesting the uniqueness of my situation:

“How is your speaking so good?” (I learned from my family).
“Why do you live on Brighton Beach?” (My parents have an apartment there).
“What is your Russian name/What does your family call you?”

To the last question, I give my name with a foreign pronunciation: “Samanta,” said in what could be my own grandmother’s accent. Cognitive dissonance ensues.

When these exchanges take place, I feel like an anomaly — a rare sighting in the urban immigrant jungle. The immigrants who arrived in their teens (as my parents did two decades prior) are immensely curious. They interrogate me as if getting a sense of what their Americanized children might be like a generation from now.

Twenty-somethings who arrived as mere toddlers are surprised to find that my command of Russian is, in many cases, as strong as (if not better than) theirs. While some have shunned aspects of our heritage as a means of assimilation, I’ve not only embraced but gone so far as to incorporate immigrant traits into my self-image. Whereas my love for the language is obvious, my significant other (another American-born whose family arrived in the seventies) detests and refuses to speak it, though his comprehension is as good as my own.

But why? I was born in Manhattan and raised in a Jersey suburb with no semblance of an immigrant community. Why do I find myself consistently gravitating toward Russian expats?

The explanation, though not simple, is unique. It comes from a place of strong family values and even stronger contradictions. Somewhere in the process of coming of age and establishing an identity, the ideologies that were hammered into me as a child — among them, Zionism and American patriotism were mixed up with misplaced nostalgia for a reality I never experienced. The result is an avid, perhaps naive, not-quite-Russophilia, which (much to the chagrin of my parents) doesn’t seem to lessen with age.

The enthusiasm started young. At school show-and-tells, I would flaunt storybooks adorned with Cyrillic lettering. At student icebreakers, my bilinguality was always the defining characteristic I shared about myself, and eventually kids started accusing me of sporting a foreign accent. I relished having a unique background that set me apart from the rabble, but hated the exclusion that came with it. In truth, my pseudo-immigrant pride was really a defense mechanism used to cope with a general feeling of “otherness” that I could never quite shake.

The factors that contributed to this otherness were all lumped together into a confused amalgam of Eastern European identity, or at least some vaguely Eastern European identity that I picked up from family, Soviet cartoons, and many weekends spent at my grandmother’s home in Brighton Beach, the Russian immigrant community in Southern Brooklyn. I associated Russian things with Jewish things because my family’s goofy Yiddishisms were interspersed with Russian, and because all of the Russian-speakers that I knew were Jews. (The exception, of course, was my Ukrainian nanny, who I remember once crossed herself before me in silent prayer. This was the first time I’d witnessed this act in person, and it made me notably uncomfortable – as if I had intruded on an alien, intimate ritual that wasn’t meant for Jewish eyes).

I knew that I came from a family of passionate Zionists before I knew that a word for the concept existed. In later years, I tried to embrace my Jewish identity with a trip to Israel and a couple of disappointing Jewish summer camp experiences. I didn’t get along much with American Jews – their version of Jewish identity was different from mine and felt all but foreign. Russian faces, voices, and accents felt like home. Kosher food was a stranger. The Passover seder felt more authentic with vinegret and Olivye on the table (chased back with vodka, no less).

It became clear by the time I entered college that my parents’ hopes of raising an all-American daughter with zero ties to the Old Country had largely backfired. My Russophilia was as ardent as ever. One summer, after taking a semester’s worth of Russian language and literature courses, I asked my parents to allow me to study abroad in St. Petersburg (a city in a country that I, shockingly, have yet to visit).

Merely entertaining the thought, it seemed, was totally out of the question. My parents scorned me for my naivety, outraged that I romanticized the very culture they fled (and they wouldn’t be the first. I’ve met many immigrants with post-traumatic aversion to anything having to do with that place). “You have no idea what it’s like,” urged my mother. “A girl like you would be very unsafe there. Don’t be foolish.”

Of course, this only fueled my curiosity – but I found other means of satisfying it. A few summers later, I packed up my guitar and carpooled with some friends to a Russian music festival in the middle of the Catskill Mountains, where I met dozens of Russian artists and musicians, old and young alike. There, I became acquainted with group of free spirited young Russians that were different from the ones I had grown accustomed to, for primarily two reasons: one, they had just arrived in America; and two, they weren’t in the least bit Jewish.

I was fascinated. Their dress, their music, their slang — everything was so different from the Russian-speakers I was used to; the Brighton Beachniks who still clung so desperately to antiquated Soviet mentality. These youngsters were cosmopolitan and bursting with fresh energy. They weren’t yet jaded by the “immigrant experience,” nor were they hampered by big glaring questions of Jewish identity. They just wanted to have fun, and I wanted to right along with them.

So I did. I spent the rest of that summer attending every Russian festival and party I could get to, and as a result, my speaking improved tenfold. Mom and Dad were furious at me for getting mixed up in this crowd, and I was furious at their close-mindedness. But it didn’t matter. For a time, my new scene (and the adopted identity that came along with it) was a dream. These friends were creative, exotic, and spoke Russian so beautifully that even expletives fizzled in my ears with charming effervescence. To them, I was a novelty; a bridge between cultures. I laughed at jokes I didn’t understand because I wanted so badly to. Soon I found myself wondering, would I be like them if I’d grown up there? If my parents had never left?

In truth, if my parents hadn’t left, I’d never have existed. Mom and Dad met in New York City years after they’d immigrated from their respective countries, Ukraine and Lithuania. Were it not for the state-sponsored persecution they endured as Jews in the Soviet Union, which led to the dissident movement and their ultimate liberation, I wouldn’t be here. So in fact, one could say that I was born because of, or in spite of, anti-Semitism. While I’m not going to parse out the infinite sequence of serendipitous events that led to my conception, it’s neat to think that I somehow owe my entire existence to a piece of legislation.

As a proud Refusenik baby, I can’t help but be drawn to symbols of my heritage, but at the same time, letting something as fixed and predestined as ethnicity dictate my actions just doesn’t seem right. When I step back to dissect my behavior objectively, I feel uneasy. I feel bad for failing to embrace diversity more than I have been.

But then, by hanging out with Russians and Jews, I haven’t exactly shunned diversity, either. Eventually, I drifted apart from the festival crowd (partly out of loss of interest, partly out of inability to keep up with their conversations) and moved on to a clique that shares a different passion of mine — music. My Russian has gotten rusty since, but I’ve gotten much better at the guitar. Someday, I even hope to take it with me to St. Petersburg.

Samantha Shokin is a freelance writer in Brooklyn.

(Photo by Philipp Hienstorfer/Wikimedia Commons)

Related: Around the World in 63 Moishe Houses

The post The Refusenik That Wasn’t appeared first on Jewcy.