Last Tuesday I heard this fascinating episode of Code Switch, an NPR podcast “cover[ing] race, ethnicity and culture.” For this round, they looked at the place that Jews occupy in America’s odd definitions of all those things. Ultimately, it…

…wasn’t totally off base. They narrated the American Jewish experience of becoming White clearly, accurately, and charitably: as a combination of White society’s whims, and of the desire (or need) to reap the benefits of Whiteness. This meshes well with the shockingly-civil social media debates I’ve gotten into with fellow Jews about our racial identity. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that light-skinned Jews get White privilege no matter how they personally feel about it.

But before the epic success of that discussion, the episode tries to characterize Jewish identity independently of American race politics. To explain how we define ourselves. And totally flubs it.

They try! They bring on their resident Jew, Leah Gershenfeld Donnella, to present large chunks of the program material. Both by her words and by her undeniable Blackness, she makes clear to everyone that It’s Complicated. (Code Switch host Shireen Meraji says “it should be the show’s subtitle—Code Switch: It’s Complicated.”) And yet they fail almost as soon as they start:

MERAJI: All right, so we’ve answered the question, everybody. Jews are a religious group, not their own ethnicity or race.

[Gene] DEMBY: Problem solved. Well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. OK. OK. If you take a DNA test, though, it will tell you what percentage Jewish you are. So it sounds like there’s at least some ethnic component to being Jewish.

Blink and you might miss it—amid the charming self-deprecation there’s a conflation of “race/genetics” and “ethnicity,” and a related dichotomy between racial and religious identity. When combined with the (very true) observation that race as an identity category is new, this leaves them at a loss to understand the deep roots of non-religious Jewish identity. Even when their (Jewish) sources bring up concepts like “tradition or identification,” or mention “speaking Hebrew” as a marker of Jewish identity, the hosts never seem to notice or to fit these ideas into their narrative. They talk about the meaning of 23andme, but not of Yiddish revivalism, secular Diasporic Zionism, or hipster gastropubs’ chopped liver. (I have tasted of all these things, and the last is the most satisfying.)

It’s not all guesswork. We have the numbers (thanks, Pew), we know what we think of us. A large minority of Jews (especially young ones) say they’re “Jews of no religion.” Most Jews say being Jewish is about ancestry and culture, not religion; even most Ultra-Orthodox Jews say it’s not just religion.

So definitely not just a religious group. But not “just” anything else— the main impression is of an imagined community whose members disagree about what exactly they’re imagining. How very Jewish. And useless. There’s only one traditional solution to this conundrum—smartass Jews torturously justifying their preconceived notions. I’ll go first!

My tack is to think about that most bitterly-contested of questions: Who is a Jew? Not with the intent of answering it, but to observe the points where it’s uncomfortable. Controversial.

Someone who’s born in a practicing Jewish household and practices Judaism is clearly Jewish. And if they’re non-practicing atheists? Probably Jewish, even if some say they’re Bad Jews. And if instead of atheists they become Lutherans? Ooooh. Much less comfortable. What about Buddhists? Slightly better (judging by the way my father’s voice would communicate ridicule rather than pain).

And if someone who’s not Jewish just starts calling themselves Jewish? Probably not. But if they start studying Hebrew? Going to services? Beginning the conversion process? The line’s blurry, but every Jew has some point at which they start chanting “one of us!”

So, a group that you can be in by ancestry; with initiation rites and customs that you’re supposed to follow, but don’t lose membership by shirking; that you may be kicked out of for adopting another group’s ways, depending on how much bad blood there is; and that you’re formally adopted into by practicing said rites and customs and being recognized by the community. You know what this sounds like? Someone at Code Switch knew. They did, after all, call the episode, with head-scratching earnestness, “Members of Whose Tribe?”

Image via Pixabay.

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On a Friday evening of February last year, Ruben Shimonov was waiting in his friend’s apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Everything was ready for the traditional Shabbat dinner to begin: The table was set, the food ready to be served. Now, it was time for the guests to come in.

What he had prepared was not an ordinary Shabbat dinner. Through a secret Facebook group, he and his friend Ramiz Rafailov had organized their first-ever Shabbat gathering for queer Jewish 20s and 30s with Sephardic and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) backgrounds in New York.

When he proposed the idea of hosting the dinner, Shimonov had no idea how many people would show up. About thirty people ended up coming; including some with a Persian background, some Iraqi, some originally from Azerbaijan. “There was a gap that needed to be filled,” Shimonov said in an interview. “This showed there was the desire to have a space where we could unapologetically be our full selves.”

Shimonov was born in Uzbekistan, and moved to the States with his parents as refugees seeking asylum when he was six. He was raised in Seattle in a Bukharian Jewish family. After moving to New York, he began working as a communal leader in organizations like the Queens College Hillel and the American Sephardi Federation.

He had recently joined the small Facebook group for Sephardic queer Jews, when he and his friends started wondering: “Where do we fit? Is there a place where we can bring our full selves? The answer was, ‘Not really.’” They felt that they could not fully belong to queer Jewish spaces—which are predominantly Ashkenazi—or to Sephardic synagogues and cultural spaces, where LGBTQ identities are often a taboo.

Shimonov, who is now 30, believes that whenever “you want change, you should make it yourself. I wrote in a post [in the Facebook group], ‘Maybe we can take this beautiful digital space to the next step and meet somewhere.’ . . . I started getting positive responses.”

That first dinner was so successful, that ever since he has organized similar gatherings on a monthly basis—each time in a different private home, always on Shabbat. Some participants said they felt as if they had regained possession of their Jewish roots without compromising their LGBTQ identity.

The Facebook group, which remains secret to protect the identities of its members, not all of whom are publicly out of the closet, has grown from fewer than 100 members last year to over 300. The group, which has now evolved into a grassroots organization, will gather at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center for its first weekend retreat this coming Friday. The Shabbat dinners and the retreat are both taking place thanks to the support of Moishe House, COJECO, OneTable, and Genesis Philanthropy Group.

Rebecca Davoudian, who lives in Great Neck, New York, and hosted one of the dinners, said that homosexuality is often a taboo in Sephardic communities. “It’s nice to give people a space where they can be Mizrahi and Sephardic and queer and Jewish.”

Another participant, Jonathan Cohen, felt similarly. “We’re a minority within the minority within the minority,” he said. Cohen’s family is originally from Iraq and Yemen. He recently moved back to New York after spending eight years in Israel; in Tel Aviv, he laughed, “half of the people are Mizrahi and gay. But when I moved to America, I wondered, ‘Who is my friends group going to be?’”

Cohen described the dinners as fun and intimate. Shimonov usually breaks the ice between the attendees, asking them to share their thoughts or memories on a specific concept or word.

“The Mizrahi identity is complex,” continued Cohen. “We’re not one people, we come from different countries and speak different languages. But being the ‘other’ unifies you. Seventy years ago we thought we’d lose our culture, but now we’re reviving it.”

Until a few years ago, Shimonov himself thought he could not merge his Bukharian and queer identities. But now he thinks differently.

“It’s difficult,” he said, “but many of us refuse to forego part of our identity for another. We are a composition of all these different tiles of the mosaic that makes us up. We want to hold on to all these different parts of our identity, because they’re beautiful.”

Photo from March 2018’s Shabbat dinner, courtesy Ruben Shimonov.

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If there are two things Jews are known for, it’s theatre and psychological issues. But did you know those two things closely overlap to the point of being exactly the same? You probably did!  But just in case you didn’t, here’s a list of why watching a contemporary play is exactly the same as a Jewish family going to therapy.

1. It’s mostly a bunch of  multigenerational Jews whining.

You can take years of classes about breaking playwriting down to its fundamentals: structure, beats, dialogue, arc, etc. But let me save you thousands of dollars: at their core, plays are about Jews whining. Even if the play is about WASPs or blue collar Southerners struggling with their repressed homosexuality during a sweltering Texas summer (the only other groups of people contemporary plays are about), odds are it’s written and/or directed by a Jewish person. And even if there are no Jews within a hundred mile radius, all plays are about people complaining, which is a popular Jewish pastime.

2. Everyone projects (their emotions).

No one will ever address their issues head-on. In plays, everything must be “subtextual,” which is theatre lingo for “passive-aggressive.”  No one in a play or in therapy will ever say “My father’s death unearthed a lot of conflicting feelings for me, especially since I was a young man struggling with his sexual identity who never felt truly accepted by his family. That is why I spent six years wandering the Midwest and never reaching out to my family.” They’ll just say something like “You forgot your bag” with a strange amount of tension. That’s how you know it’s not really about the bag.

If you need more examples of passive-aggressiveness or subtext, call your mother. If you still remember her number. And God forbid you visit.

3. Everyone projects (their voices).

In plays, actors must speak to the back row of a 1,000+ seat theater. Jews also speak to the back row of a 1,000+ seat theater, even if they are sitting in a small office in Westchester or at the grocery store or a funeral. There are a lot of techniques actors use to prevent vocal damage from all that loud talking, but Jewish families know the trick is to start early and do it often.

4. It can cost between $40 to  $200+.

It depends on your insurance.

5. It costs extra if Nathan Lane is there.

Nathan Lane is a huge box office draw. He’s a star of both stage and screen. Even people from Iowa know who he is. Right now, he’s starring as Roy Cohn in Angels in America for a limited engagement on Broadway, but if you want to book him for your therapy session, act fast and expect to pay a premium. This is Nathan Lane we’re talking about.

6. The chairs probably aren’t comfortable.

They’re not torture devices, but still, if you had a choice between this chair and a different chair, you’d probably choose a different one.

7. Everyone is unbearable.

I mean, really, ugh, who wants to hear about these people for hours? Could they be more self-pitying?  They grew up comfortably middle-class! Why are they complaining so much? Do they have any perspective at all about what some people go through? Their grandparents lived through the Holocaust for God’s sake! UGH, now the sister has a monologue? Is she seriously talking about her cat and her 10th birthday party? Why can’t she just let it go and move on like a normal person? Jesus Christ. How much longer is this thing?

8. The people around you are crying and you’re not.

If this piece of art or therapy session is connecting with other audience members or your own family in a way that it’s simply not connecting with you, it might make you feel like you’re emotionally dead inside.  What are you missing? Are you simply a broken person? Should you broach the issue, air your fears? No, not in front of them. They’re either strangers (if you’re at a play) or your family (if you’re in therapy), neither of whom you want to be vulnerable in front of. Rationalize why you’re not moved. No one actually feels genuine emotions. It’s certainly not a personal failing or something to be worked on in another session.

9. If no one reveals an earth-shattering secret, then there is no point.

People spend years ruminating over other people’s flaws as well as their own. This includes fictional character archetypes as well as your loved ones, whom you hate and whom ruined your life. So what’s the point of listening to other people hash out well-trodden psychological issues, which have doubtlessly been discussed to death on stage or in an office in New Jersey? For the earth-shattering secret, of course! Keep pushing until an emotionally-charged announcement shifts everyone’s perspective about everything. The son was dead all along! The son never existed in the first place! The son was the mysterious cowboy! You should feel crushed under the secret’s terrible, all-consuming weight. All the sacred truths that you took for granted should vanish, leaving you cold and empty and confused.

And if that doesn’t happen, then get your money back.

10. The likelihood of a permanent life-change is nil.

You might leave thinking “Wow, that was a revelation. It made me rethink my whole life. I am a changed person.” But you’re not, and you never will be.

Photo via Wikimedia

The post 10 Reasons Why Contemporary Plays Are The Same As Jewish Family Therapy appeared first on Jewcy.

I met Vladimir Mukhotaev, 28, at the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, where he helps low-income New Yorkers access food stamps. After he provided translation for an article I was reporting, I asked him about his path from Russia to the United States. He explained that he had followed his husband to New York and had never planned to leave Russia. I was intrigued: how could he feel so warmly towards his homeland as a gay man? And what had led him to Jewish social work after he was raised Eastern Orthodox? Vladimir’s story is below in his own words.

I was born in Russia in 1989. My native city is Orenburg, which is very close to the Kazakhstan border, but I moved to Moscow when I was 10.

My father, he left our family when I was three. My mother, she used to be a mother and father as well. She was very strong. She had her own business and gave a nice education to me and to my older brother, who didn’t live with us.

Around seven or eight years old, I realized that I like more boys than girls. I didn’t question myself. I was just like, “OK, it’s fine.” It was very natural, very organic. I never struggled with that. Maybe my mom noticed something at some point, but she never asked me.

At age 12, I got my first computer, and I started to chat people online. When I was 17 or 18, I started to go out, but I hid that. I just said, “I went with my friends.” So I never said, “Mom, I’m going with gay people to a gay bar or a gay club.” I don’t think I used to hide that because she would never understand. I did that to make sure she was not getting nervous.

When I started to date this guy, Nikolay, he showed me the first bars and clubs I went to. You have to understand, the gay scene in Russia, it’s so open-minded inside, and so cool and amazing, but outside there are no symbols, or the name of the bar or club. It’s just doors.

Nikolay was my first love, and when we broke up, I couldn’t struggle with my feelings alone, and I had to reveal the situation. So that’s why my mom knew that I am gay. Even at the very emotional moment when I said it, she was very supportive. She said, “It doesn’t matter. I still love you, and it doesn’t matter.” It only took her one or two days to get over that.

During my third year of university, my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It was a tough time, not just because I had to say goodbye, but because she and I had such a strong and close connection. At one point, I needed a specific medicine for my mom, and one of my friends said, “I have an oncologist who can maybe help you.” So I got connected with him, and he got me the pills for free.

I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, but this doctor, Sergey, and I got to know each other through our souls. When I began dating him, my mom was already back in Orenburg, where she had decided to die. But she talked to Sergey a lot on the phone, and she said, “Please take care of Vladimir.” He really seemed very reliable to her.

After my mom passed away, I tried to find answers to existential questions: why do we exist, why do we love, why do we die? Priests at the Russian Orthodox Church, where I went growing up, couldn’t answer me. They just told me, “Please read the second part of the Bible.” And I did for a few months, but it didn’t help me.

Sergey had been going to a Chabad synagogue in Moscow for a while, and he said, “If you want, you can join me, and take a look.” I started to go, and from the beginning, it really impressed me. The atmosphere of discussing and trying to find answers is so different from Christianity, and there’s not so much distance between you and the rabbi. I really like that, and I was able to ask so many questions.

Judaism gave me hope. It gave me the structure of this life, how it works and why it was created. I was pretty frustrated after my mom’s death; I lost a source of love. And now, in this kind of tough world, I have a manual. I have instruction. So it was very, very powerful to me, and I might convert in the future.

In 2014, Sergey won a green card through the lottery. He’s my family, so I was like, “OK, we have to move.” We got connected with the U.S. Embassy in Russia and asked them what to do, because after the Defense of Marriage Act was repealed, I could apply for a green card with Sergey. They said, “If you get married right now and provide us proof that you’ve been together, we can extend the green card to Vladimir as well.”

We had to be very quick, because the final day the second green card could be issued was in two or three weeks. Only Iceland said we could be married in a few days, so we went with Sergey’s parents, who were our witnesses. It was very sweet.

We moved to New York in 2016. I had never thought about immigration to the United States or anywhere else. I was maybe not a patriot, but I really felt at home in Russia, and I loved my country. And part of that was my law degree, because it makes you feel that you are in service to the people or government. I knew that I had only one motherland.

In Russia, people are more connected to each other, even to someone you don’t know in the street. And here in the U.S., we’re pretty far from each other, and it was very surprising to me. Because life is supposed to be the same, right? You eat, you go out; it’s kind of the same. But the details are so different.     

In a train here, I can’t imagine someone would come up to me and say I’m wearing something that is not appropriate. And over there, a grandmother might come up to a girl and say, “You know what? Your skirt is pretty short.” Because they feel not just that there’s no border between you, but they believe they care about you, and they’re like, “You know what? It would be better for you do that.”  I think the problem of homophobia in Russia comes from that closeness.

Russians also don’t ask “How are you?” to make fun or just to fill up the atmosphere. And we do not smile just to show that we’re not aggressive right now, or you’re fine passing by. The Russian smile is always sincere; it’s if we really have a reason. Saying that these are cultural differences, we forget that they’re very important.

The Gay Pride Parade in New York has been very powerful for me, a moment when you are all together and you don’t feel that it’s wrong. Still, this feeling that I’m not at home… I’m just afraid it will never go away. And it really bothers me that my kids—which I really want to have in the future—will lose my Russian heritage, even though I will do my best. Like in the second generation, they will probably say, “Yeah, we had a father, Vladimir, who used to make Russian dumplings,” but they will be total Americans. So I’m still thinking about whether I want to stay.

The one thing I have to remember is that there is no better or worse place. Russia is a place to live in; it’s not that it’s worse or better. And the same in New York or America. I used to think that it was worse here. But once I tried to connect with people, I understood that this is just another reality.

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Chanukah is a great holiday for kids. Games, fried foods, lighting candles— add in the Americanization of the holiday with gifts, and it’s an easy favorite.

Plus, there’s the simple narrative of the holiday— the dual miracles of the impossible war, and the oil that burned for eight days. But there’s lots we don’t bother to tell kids about the holiday, that, I have learned, really piques their attention. Use your best judgment— don’t tell a kindergartener about a man being crushed to death, for example. And some of the fascinating geopolitics might be a bit sophisticated for even the most precocious of tykes. But here are some great ways to make a Jewish child question their entire holiday experience up to this point:

1. The story really starts with Alexander the Great.

OK, you do need a kid nerdy enough to appreciate the historical connection, but if they’re Jewish, the odds aren’t necessarily against you. The villain of our story after all, Antiochus, was really Antiochus the IV. The kids almost certainly won’t know how the Seleucids came to be in possession of ancient Judea— when Alexander’s generals divided up their late leader’s empire like it was a giant cake.

2. Judah the Maccabee died during the War. In fact, most of the brothers died.

Our heroes are the sons of the priest Mattathias, especially the middle of the five— Judah. What we don’t bother to tell kids is that Judah didn’t live to see the end of the war, after walking into a bloodbath rather retreating. Watch their eyes grow wide as you break it to them. And he was far from the only core member of the gang to die, which brings us to:

3. One word: Eleazer.

Judah’s brother Eleazar had a notoriously sticky end. In battle, the Syrian-Greeks brought out elephants, because if you had an elephant, wouldn’t you? Anyway, Eleazar charged the elephant, spearing it in the stomach. What happened next in retrospect was sort of obvious; the dying elephant fell up Eleazar, killing him.

The best part? The Jews didn’t even win that battle.

4. The post-victory government imploded pretty much immediately.

We tell kids proudly how the Maccabees won the day and ejected Seleucid rule. We usually end the story right there. Admit to the child in your life that attempts to create a stable government in the aftermath of the war lasted like 70 years and then collapsed in a heap when the corrupt monarchy ended in everyone assassinating one another like it was Game of Thrones. (Why is a kid watching Game of Thrones!?) Don’t worry kids, you still get gelt.

5. Chanukah is pretty much Sukkot.

Listen, you don’t need to tell a kid that the miracle of the oil “may not have happened,” unless you want to have a huge conversation about the evolution of Judaism and the way we create and then codify faith-based narratives. But you can also gently point out that Chanukah is the same length as Sukkot— the Maccabees were fighting so long and hard for the Temple that they had to put off the High Holy Day’s celebration until the winter. What will they do with this information? That’s up to their tiny little minds.

6. Giving Chanukah presents is only because of Christmas envy.

Sorry, kids. We know you want to insist to your gentile friends that Chanukah is just as good as Christmas, but the presents you so covet are because your great-grandparent immigrants saw the Macy’s holiday windows one too many times and snapped. Back in the old country, you would get a kopek and a potato, and be grateful.

And so, blow a child’s mind this holiday season! Let us know how it goes, and you’re welcome.

Image: Gustave Doré’s “The Death of Eleazar” via Wikimedia.

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Don’t ask me how my husband convinced me to hike the Inca Trail. I am legitimately not sure. All I know is that it all started with a voucher from a cancelled flight (not to Peru), and it was easier saying yes to something when the trip was six months away.

The hike was four days (three nights camping), and involved both climbing up, and down, over 10,000 feet (plus walking nearly 30 miles).

I had hiked once before, in Ein Gedi, with my high school, a mild trip. I still almost threw up towards the end, and had to drag myself up the last few steps, before crawling to the tour bus to catch my breath. I had never camped. I had never been anywhere remotely that high- not even the Rockies. And as the trip neared, and the reality of the impending hike set in, I began to panic.

…

Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

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As the French get ready to celebrate their weird, fraught history today, what better time to remind them of when their military orchestrated a witch hunt against a Jewish officer and essentially framed him for being a spy, causing one of the greatest scandals of the late 19th/early 20th century?

And what better way to celebrate Alfred Dreyfus’s eventual exoneration than a look at who is (and who might be) a living relative of the lieutenant-colonel today?

Spoiler alert: They’re all actors.

…

Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

The post Dreyfus! Dreyfus! Dreyfuss! appeared first on Jewcy.

We already know that Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer are soulmates, and now, they’re officially family.

We know this amazing news thanks to Twice Removed, a podcast by A.J. Jacobs (also Jewish, because of course). The podcast premise is that Jacobs takes a different celebrity each episode and, as he interviews them, explores their genealogy. Then, he presents his guest with someone unexpected he’s found on their extended family tree— like when Dan Savage turned out to be related to the drag queen who set him up with his husband.

This episode’s guest was Abbi Jacobson, and after an episode diving into her genealogy, her “mystery relative” is brought in. Spoiler, it’s her comedy partner Ilana Glazer.

“I did know who that was gonna be,” Jacobson responds, “I was like, ‘Who else would come in this early for me?’”

They also joke that being related makes doing the show together, and potentially having sex, weird. Never change, gals.

While the two are extremely distantly related (seriously, it’s further apart than Lone Star and Dark Helment’s connection in Spaceballs), this is the best news since we learned that Glazer and Rachel Bloom were post-college roommates.

Of course, all Ashkenazi Jews are all genetically related to each other. That similarity between any two Jews is going to look like fourth or fifth cousins in the general population. That’s about ten times higher than, say, two random New Yorkers, according to the New York Times.

But this is a definitive connection, and not all members of the ladies’ extended family are Members of the Tribe. In an odd twist of fate, it turns out that the ladies are also related to Molly Shannon (50+ degrees of separation apiece).

So mazel tov, Abbi and Ilana, on your newly found connection.

You can listen to the episode (the interview portion is great as well) below:

Image via Wikimedia

The post Abbi and Ilana Are Related! appeared first on Jewcy.

Apparently, if you go to Paris and ask around for French Bubbes to interview, you get one response: MAMIKA.

Frederika, also known as Mamika (Hungarian for “my little grandmother”), is a Jewish grandmother celebrity. Born in Budapest, she moved to France after the war after surviving both the Holocaust and Communism. She now lives in Paris and is very close with her photographer grandson, Sacha.

Her fame began when Sacha asked her to model for some photographs, hoping to cheer her up during a bout of post-retirement depression. He soon realized his grandmother had star potential. A very popular Facebook page and several books later, Mamika, now 97, is an internet sensation and inspiration to many. Their collaborative photoshoots, which have now been going on for years, feature Mamika, usually in costume and always in absurdist situations. The photos are charming and wonderfully bizarre.

Armed with sub-par French and too much American enthusiasm, I met Mamika and Sacha in Mamika’s apartment in Paris. It was just a few months after the November 2015 terrorist attacks, and I noticed the heavily armed guards patrolling the synagogue down the street.

I didn’t conduct the interview as much as play third wheel to Sacha and Mamika, whose close bond is equal parts loving and hilarious. It reads like a Beckett play. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Interview translated from French by Kelsey Westphal. Edited and condensed by moi.

The players:

Sacha: The cool French photographer

Mamika:  His grandmother, the superstar

Sarah:  The bumbling American

We start our discussion the French way — that is to say, with kissing:

Sacha: So, Sarah has a blog of grandmas giving advice about life. She wants to ask you some questions — because you aren’t only an international star, you’re also a grandma.

Mamika: I’m not a star. I’m a grandma.

Sacha: Can she ask you some questions? Like, for example: how does one make-out?

Mamika: What?

Sacha: Kiss with the tongue.

Sarah (finally getting it — remember, this was in French): French kissing!

Sacha: Yes, French kissing.

Mamika: I don’t know.

Sacha: You were married four times.

Mamika: Three times.

Sacha: Four times. And you have two children. You must have kissed your husbands at some point.

Mamika: Yes… But they didn’t kiss like Frenchmen.

Sacha: For example, which direction should the tongue go?

Mamika: You don’t notice the tongue.

Sacha: You don’t know which way it goes?

Mamika: Non.

Sacha: So, if you start to notice which way it goes, it means he’s a bad kisser?

Mamika: Yes… Or that I’m a bad kisser.

Sacha: But if you don’t notice, it means the kiss was good.

Mamika: Yeah. I never noticed.

Sacha (to Sarah): So, we don’t know which way the tongue goes.

Sarah: But we know that it was used!

Sacha: Yeah well, in the U.S. there’s no tongue.

Sarah There is! We call it a French kiss.

Sacha: In the U.S. you have to kiss French people to learn how to use tongue!

Sarah: Oui oui.

Mamika: You’re such jokers!

Sacha: Us?

Mamika: You two.

Sacha: Not at all.

Mamika: You are!

Sacha: Sarah, what’s your first question?

My first question:

Sarah: Since we’re talking about kissing, I’ll start by asking if you have any advice about love or marriage, seeing as you have been married several times. Do you have any tips? Your grandson said you had four husbands — or was it three?

Mamika: Three!

Sacha: Four. [He then listed four French (slash maybe Hungarian?) names, including Georges and Louis, which should be French enough to satisfy you.]

Mamika: I don’t know.

Sacha: So that makes four! Plus all the marriages we don’t know about!

Mamika: That’s true.

Sacha: And we’ll never know.

Mamika: You’ll never know.

Sacha: I don’t want to know. Four is enough.

Mamika: Yes, it’s quite a lot…

Sacha: So, do you have any marriage advice? For example, how do you choose a good spouse?

Mamika: You have to consider whether they are good or bad. Good or evil.

Sarah: What do you mean by good? Friendly? Kind?

Mamika: Yes, kind.

Sacha: You said to me, “Your grandfather was short and fat but he was funny, he was very considerate, he always made sure I was happy, he always made me laugh, and he was a bon coup — very good in bed.” Is that important to you?

Mamika: I never said that!

Sacha: You said you learned a lot from him. And you always gave me this advice: you told me [he puts on a Hungarian accent in French] “In life, love is 70% sexuality and 30% intellect.” And you said it’s better if he’s really good in bed and less good intellectually, because over time it flips. You said that!

Mamika: And I stand by it.

Sacha: And you told me that the first time I was with a girl, you asked, “How was she in bed?” and I said it was okay. And you said, “Remember 70-30! Because later it switches!” Meaning that the more time passes living with someone, the less important sex becomes, and the more the intellect becomes central — jokes, humor, getting along — until sex takes up 30% and the intellectual relationship 70%.

Mamika: Yes. I stand by it.

Sacha: It’s good advice. You gave me so much advice. Like you always said to be with someone you can have fun with.

Mamika: So you don’t get bored, it’s terrible to be bored by your partner.

Sarah: And if you get bored after awhile, what do you do?

Mamika: You suffer.

Sacha: And then bounce, right?

Mamika: No. For a few years you stay.

Sarah: What is the Jewish grandmother stereotype?

Mamika: Trying to understand her grandson!

Sacha: That’s not it. The problem is that Mamika is so different from others, she doesn’t fit the cliché.

Sarah: How?

Sacha: Do you know a lot of grandmas who have modeled in a whole book of photography, who have been married four times, who have survived the Nazis, Communism?

Mamika: I was married three times.

Sacha: Maybe three and a half. Her last husband was ten years younger. She’s a cougar!

Mamika: First of all, he was only five years younger than me.

Sacha: He was a playboy! A BIG playboy.

Sarah: Really?

Sacha: Oo la la, remember the story, Mamika? You were at the beach with your husband at the time, Georges. I love this story, I learned it not long ago. So there you were with your husband and your two daughters, who must have been around 18 at the time. The playboy comes around and starts chatting up your daughters, and everyone thinks he’s flirting with them… But actually he’s doing it to impress you. He came to flirt with you, and you ended up having an affair for a few months. One day you noticed there was a private detective following you. So, since you don’t let people push you around, you managed to corner him and ask him what he wanted. He said, your husband hired me to follow you, what can I do? And you went off and divorced Georges.

Mamika: I divorced him?

Sacha: You did. And then you went off with Louis, even though he was broke at the time, and you went boating and had picnics next to rivers all over the world. Do you remember that?

Mamika: I do.

Mamika survived the war and helped others survive as well:

Sacha: Her little brother was put in a concentration camp and left behind his wife and a son. So she and my grandpa saved them by hiding them in different places.

Sarah: How did you escape the war?

Mamika: Sacha, you tell her.

Sacha: She hid a lot. In Budapest, where she was born, she had to wear the armband — but she took it off. Then they started hiding, moving from one place to another, and helped hide other people too. There was an explosion and she was wounded — she still has the scar. They were in a cave for weeks without anything to eat or drink. I think it was the Levy family’s cave? There was wine, and Grandpa wanted to drink some just to have something in his stomach, and Mamika said, “Don’t touch it. We have to leave it in case the Levy’s come back, they might need it to survive.”

Mamika: I didn’t let him touch it.

Sacha: But finally, you didn’t have a choice, and you drank it.

On a Jewish sense of humor:

Mamika: There is a Jewish humor.

Sacha: Where does it come from?

Mamika: I think from the ghettos.

Sacha: You think when people were bored out of their minds in the ghettos, they told each other stories to escape the situation? The more funny you are, the better you are able to survive and get past pain and hardship. If you laugh when the worst possible things happen, that’s a way to survive.

Mamika: Yes… Except you don’t laugh.

Sacha: That’s not exactly true. The worst things have happened to you and you were always able to laugh at it.

Mamika: I used humor to move onto other things.

Sarah: Do you practice Judaism now?

Sacha: I do but she doesn’t.

Sarah: How come?

Mamika: We don’t have time.

Sacha: Oh, as if! For many reasons. First of all, because you’re angry with the consistory of Budapest because they deported your father and his brothers to the concentration camp.

Mamika: Yes.

Sacha: And after that, you said, “I want nothing to do with Judaism.” And you felt that you always wanted to hide being Jewish, because there had been enough problems associated with it and it was time to just stop.

Mamika: I said that?

Sacha: Yes, but you also said the opposite. When I was a teenager, I came over wearing a Star of David, and you told me to take it off right away. Then five years later you told me that you had never told me this, but you’re very proud that I would wear a Star of David. So there’s a certain contradiction there.

Mamika: Yes, I see the contradiction.

On being young at heart:

Sacha: What age do you feel like?

Mamika: Forty.

Merci beaucoup, Mamika et Sacha!

Sarah Rosen is a writer and actress living in Brooklyn. You can read more amazing interviews with with bubbes at bubbeknowsbest.com.

Photos courtesy of Sacha Goldberger.

The post Ask A Bubbe: Mamika appeared first on Jewcy.

My parents struggled to choose a name after my birth in a shabby Moscow hospital. Nothing felt exactly right. After a month they settled on Yulia, a traditional Russian name that, they decided, was just unique enough. My mother loved the lyrical way it rolled off the tongue, Yoo-Lee-Yah. Most often, though, I was Yulya or Yulinka or Yulyasha.

When I was five-and-a-half, my family left Russia. I was still Yulinka in Vienna and Santa Marinella, Italy, where my family lived stateless for nearly nine months while I pleaded for chocolate ice cream and swam in the frigid Mediterranean Sea near our monastery-owned apartment.

A few months after our arrival in New York City, I became Sara.

My parents enrolled me in a Hasidic yeshiva for Russian-Jewish immigrants. We shed our secular names, and aspired to commit to memory everything our parents and grandparents never knew. Sara had been my grandmother’s birth name, before she felt compelled to change it to the more palatable and less Jewish “Alexandra,” or Sasha for short.

As Sara, I was the girl who learned to read both Hebrew and English at a sprinter’s pace, discarding all traces of an accent within months. Sara was bright, popular, and fiercely determined to rack up accolades. She moved from first grade to third grade the same school year, although at this particular townhouse yeshiva, that only meant a move to the adjoining room. All my new friends knew me as Sara. The name felt like my own. And Judaism was now at the forefront of my identity. At the yeshiva we devoted an entire period to reciting passages from the Chumash (a printed version of the Torah), starting with Bereshit. We’d sing the Hebrew verses followed by the English translation, over and over, until we knew them by heart. I learned the intricacies of nearly every biblical tale. The stories, the rituals, the history—all of it was mine.

After three years came unexpected news: we were moving to Virginia, where I’d be enrolling in a public school. Though I had once admonished my parents for not teaching my brother and me any Jewish rituals, I found it surprisingly easy to let go of the name Sara and the Orthodoxy it represented.

At the elementary school where I started fifth grade, they asked what I preferred to be called. “Julie,” I answered. I’m not sure where I first heard it, but I remember feeling it was an appropriately “cool” name, and at nine, being thought of as cool was paramount. It felt more me than “Julia,” the transliteration of my given name. I embraced this new identity. I was ready to be wholly American.

Julie was shyer than Sara, less adept at making new friends, but she was also more curious and more adaptable. As Julie, I discovered American pop music, like Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men, and the comforting malaise of a suburban life filled with birthday parties at the arcade and trips to the local shopping mall.

Sara hadn’t disappeared entirely, however. On my first day of Hebrew school at the local conservative synagogue, the teacher asked my name. “This is Hebrew school,” I thought. “In Hebrew school, you go by your Hebrew name.” So I answered, “Sara.” The teacher proceeded to introduce the rest of the class. “Kevin, Ashleigh, Lauren, Beth…” I immediately realized my mistake, but in my anxious nine-year-old mind, it was too late to correct it. My two identities were kept separate until a year later, when I moved to the better public school district attended by most of my Hebrew school classmates. There was a lot of confusion and embarrassment and awkward explaining. The comic ridiculousness of having three names wasn’t lost on me either, and I quickly learned to be self-deprecating. More than twenty years later, some members of the congregation still refer to me as “Julie-Sara.”

I felt that duality when I offered to do more for my Bat Mitzvah than was expected by leading certain prayers usually reserved for the rabbi—to the bewilderment of my classmates—because I genuinely loved them and was moved by the melodies. I’m still moved by prayer, by the crescendo of an entire congregation singing Avinu Malkeinu during high holiday services. There’s a purity to it, a lifeline to the past that feels indestructible.

I remained Julie all through middle school, high school, and college. Richmond, Virginia, my new hometown, was a cultural lifetime removed from the Russian-speaking neighborhoods of Brooklyn where we’d lived for three years. In Richmond, I had one Russian friend, who, like me, barely registered as Russian. We spoke about Russian food or cartoons every once in a while, but mostly we bonded over Tori Amos and musical theater. I was Julie, the girl who played soccer (less than decently), obsessed over Beat poetry, and hung out with friends over plates of French fries at a smoke-filled cafe downtown.

Most new friends were surprised to learn I was an immigrant. The more I told the story, though, the more I felt it burrow into me and become an ingrained part of who I was. My immigration made me something other than an average suburban teenager. The cloud hanging over my family and every other family who’d gone through a similar experience was always there versus here. Stagnation versus opportunity. Ignorance versus truth.

And though my family assimilated quickly and willfully (no Russian television, few Russian friends), intrinsic differences remained. My parents are warm and loving, but they’re also unexpectedly direct, which has caught many Americans off-guard. They’re patriotic in a way U.S.-born citizens can never truly understand. And yet, there’s still a lingering cynicism that no amount of American positivity can scrub clean.

There are also the cultural mainstays of Soviet life my parents can never entirely forget—nor do they want to. Vladimir Vysotsky is the music of their youth, and I’ve never seen them feel music so intensely as when they’re listening to one of his songs. I can’t help but love him, too. My mother and I sing patriotic Communist anthems on long car trips. We register the dangerous naiveté of the lyrics, but the act of singing the songs—my mother and I, together—transforms them into something comforting.

My parents never took to processed American food, and our table, even at Thanksgiving, is laden with celebratory Russian dishes like caviar, smoked meats, eggplant dips and beet salads. Russian culture, at least in major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, was remarkably homogeneous under Communist rule. The food, the music, and the movies were all scarce, and so cultural “favorites” were everyone’s favorites, which is why, perhaps, it is so easy to bond with fellow Russian immigrants. True counterculture was reserved for the truly subversive.

During an internship interview my senior year of college, the coordinator uttered the name atop my resume.

“Thanks, Yulia,” she said. “We’ll get back to you.”

“Actually,” I responded, as I had many times before, “You can call me Julie.”

“But Yulia’s so much prettier.”

“Okay,” I said, unsure how to interpret the backhanded-compliment. “Yulia’s fine, too.”

For the past 10 years I’ve gone by Yulia in the workplace, though I continue to introduce myself as “Julie” to new friends. At first, I felt a bit like an impostor. It was strange to hear colleagues say my name. I barely felt Russian, way less Russian than many writers and authors whose Russianness was a central tenant of their writing, but whose bylines were Americanized names like Gary and Ellen and Julia.

Plus, “Yulia” is a formal name. It contains one more syllable than the casual Yulya. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a Russian person call me aloud by my name, despite my mother’s fondness for it.

Was I fooling my colleagues into thinking I was something other than who I was? Slowly though, I grew into it. As I started getting published, seeing “Yulia” as a byline below a story I’d written felt right. It is my birth name, after all. It represents a unique life, a journey that’s taken me from a Communist childhood, to statelessness in Italy, to an Orthodox schooling, and finally, to American adolescence and adulthood.

I’ve decided I like the internship coordinator’s comment, about my name being pretty. It reminds me of my mother’s comments about why she chose it in the first place—her fond gushing over how beautiful she thought it sounded.

To minimize confusion when first introducing myself, I sometimes follow “Yulia” with the refrain “like Julia, but with a ‘Y.'” In a way, though, the name feels not at all odd or out of place for the city to which I’ve returned: New York City—the city of immigrants. It has a home here, a point of reference.

One night last summer I met friends in Coney Island for a Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball game. There was beer and popcorn and fireworks—a collection of all-American trappings. After the game we walked to a Russian restaurant, where we drank vodka and feasted on blintzes and borscht. On the boardwalk, within yards of each other, couples writhed to reggaeton and Russian grandmothers sashayed to old Russian ditties. Yulia feels like the name best suited to this mishmash of a city, itself a fitting metaphor for my own patchwork of an identity. Feel free to call me Julie, though, if you’d like.

Yulia Khabinsky is a research editor and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Jewish Daily Forward, Narrative.ly and other publications. She blogs about New York at Notes From the Wonder City. Follow her on Twitter at @ykhabinsky.

Image: Shutterstock

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The post Julie and Yulia: One Immigrant’s Name is as Complicated—and Enriching—as Her Identity appeared first on Jewcy.