I’m not an observant Jew. Maybe if I’d grown up in Montreal or New York or another Western capital, where WASPs drop “oys” like ice in scotch, and where being openly Jewish is a non-issue—maybe then I’d attend Kol Nidre or give up beer for Passover.

But back in the USSR, I knew next to nothing about Judaism. Religious practice as a whole was marginalized, and if you happened to be Jewish, keeping it to yourself was a survival skill. The sum total of my knowledge of 5,775 years of Judaism was equal to the contents of the cardboard box that landed on top of my dresser every spring. The box contained the spoils from my father’s clandestine run to the city’s old shul, which operated unofficially on some holidays. There, on Passover, a handful of resolute Jews lined up for boxes of matzoh to take home to their families. The matzoh sheets were stacked inside the boxes underneath pink paper napkins. As soon as one of those boxes arrived at our apartment, it was stuffed on top of the dresser to be accessed with caution, away from gentile eyes. To my non-Jewish friends, who sometimes spotted a renegade piece of matzoh lying around, I would nonchalantly offer said piece as a cracker. Frankly, that’s what it was to me anyway: a Jewish cracker.

We fled the USSR in 1988, when I was 16—thousands of Soviet Jewish refugees leaving in a modern-day Exodus. On our way to the States we were stationed in Ladispoli, a sleepy coastal town outside of Rome, where we waited for our U.S. visas. There, on the Mediterranean shore,we learned for the first time about Jews as a people. A Chabad mission was set up in town, headed by Rabbi Hirsch, who worked morning, noon, and night reaching out to every lapsed Soviet Jew. That spring, we sat down to our first seder inside an Etruscan castle. Hundred-foot tables were filled with families like ours, and we finally heard the story behind the matzoh we used to hide under the pink napkins. For many Soviet Jews, that first seder marked the beginning of their return to their lost faith. For me, it marked the beginning of a life-long love affair with jarred gefilte fish.

That year, I also heard the sound of the shofar for the first time. My main memory of that Rosh Hashanah was the rabbi talking about praying to be sealed in the book of life for another year, and the obligation to purge one’s pockets of ‘sins’ into the nearby canal. I had 2,000 liras in my jeans, which I lifted from my dad’s wallet earlier that day with the intent to buy licorice. Despite the Rabbi’s passionate sermon, there would be no purging on my end. I was not giving up my stolen licorice money, High Holidays be damned.

We finally made it to Chicago. No longer scared of being outed as Jews, we were now discovering what it meant to be Jewish. We settled in West Rogers Park, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood filled with synagogues and kosher pizza parlors. But there was so much more than Judaism for a curious a 17-year-old to explore: my daily existence was divided between running to painting classes at the School of the Art Institute in the morning, and running the cash register at Dog On It (a kosher wiener joint) in the afternoon. My classmates introduced me to their friends as “Inna, she’s from Russia.” There was no time to think about being Jewish: I was too busy trying to fit in as a Russian among non-Jewish, non-white, non-conformist art students.

I suppose the physical proximity to all things Jewish precipitated a gradual awakening of my Jewish identity. The Jewish holidays arrived in West Rogers Park with a bang; religious or not, you were greeted with a “Gut Yontif” at every turn. My first Yom Kippur in Chicago was appropriately bleak: my grandmother had just died in a Chicago hospital. She’d been ill for most of her life in the USSR, and arrived in the U.S. too late to benefit from Western medicine. Dog On It was closed for the holidays, so I spent my day shuffling around the neighborhood. I tried thinking about the meaning of Yom Kippur and my babushka being with God, but the concept felt as foreign to me as the rest of America did at the time. There was no God with her or me that day, just the bad weather and the reality of her death and—a combination that felt almost clichéd.

Then I went to Israel. In Ladispoli I’d met some Israelis who had come specifically to encourage the Soviet Jews to immigrate to the Holy Land. Some of those “ambassadors” were particularly good looking, and I decided that Israel was worth a visit. So, during my second year in Chicago, I saved my cashier money, enrolled in an overseas program at the Hebrew University, and flew to the land of milk and honey—and good-looking people.

In Israel, the divide between religious and secular Jews felt bigger than the divide between Jews and Arabs. A Jew like me would get frowned upon for wearing a sleeveless shirt on a bus full of religious Jews, while on her way to visit an Arab friend. Still, a measure of superstition infiltrated secular Israel on Yom Kippur: no one got behind the wheel that day, just in case there was a God, and He decided—God forbid—to punish you for driving. On the eve of Yom Kippur, crowds poured into the streets in every neighborhood and children skateboarded safely on car-free roads. People fasted because, you know, tradition. I fasted too, out of solidarity. God knows I didn’t do it out of faith.

I returned to Chicago a year later only to find that my family now kept kosher and went to shul on Friday nights. There was no picking up the phone or driving on the Sabbath. I didn’t get answers to how it happened—it just did. That’s when I first felt conflicted over competing definitions of Jewishness. I had just spent a year in Israel and felt more Jewish than ever; but I simply didn’t see how giving up the car on Saturdays would make me a better Jew. My parents eventually downgraded their religiousness and found a middle ground, which balanced their yearning for a Jewish identity with their modern-day needs. My brother continued on a religious path. Today he’s an Orthodox father of seven living a few blocks from our first home. He goes to the same shul, keeps kosher, and observes all Jewish holidays. As I write this, he’s probably saying selichot.

Perhaps the closest I came to the Jewish faith was during my return to the former USSR a few years ago. I came to Kiev to work as an advertising executive and went to shul on Yom Kippur to see for myself the state of post-Soviet Jews. They had come a long way from lining up for camouflaged matzoh; there was even jarred Manischewitz gefilte fish at break-fast. On that Yom Kippur, I felt thankful for their freedom and mine, though I still wasn’t sure who I was thanking.

On this Yom Kippur I’ll walk around my city as I often do, remembering past Yom Kippurs. I won’t be asking for forgiveness or praying to be sealed in the book of life. I will be thinking of that early Yom Kippur morning in Jerusalem, 20 years ago. I saw an old lady who seemed lost. She summoned me over and asked, “Is today Yom Kippur?” I said yes. “Oh good,” she said, “I’m glad I forgot to eat.”

I’d like to think God was good to her for another year.

Inna Gertsberg is an advertising writer. She lives in Toronto with her husband, two sons and a cat. You can follow her on Twitter at @twigstr.

(Main image: Yossi Gurvitz via Flickr)

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Yelena Akhtiorskaya, 28, is the author of Panic in a Suitcase, a novel spanning 15 years in the life of a family of Ukrainian emigres struggling to adjust to life in the United States. The Nasmertovs live in the Soviet immigrant community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where the tension between the past and future is acutely felt by all—and exemplified by a visit from Pasha, the famous poet uncle who remained in Ukraine. In 2008, 15 years after Pasha’s visit, his niece Frida—now a medical student—travels from New York to Odessa for her cousin’s wedding, a journey rich in wry observations about displacement, homesickness, and culture shock.

Panic in a Suitcase has received rave reviews from The New York Times (“crisp and gorgeous”), the Washington Post (“genius”), Vogue (“a virtuosic debut”), and many others. (And this morning Akhtiorskaya was named by the National Book Foundation as one of their “5 under 35” for 2014.) Earlier this summer, Michael Orbach talked with her about writing, misery, Brighton Beach, and Russian literature in translation.

What’s the story behind Panic in a Suitcase?

A lot is based on my life. It’s kind of a composite of a few things: one is being totally fascinated by Brighton Beach—loving it and at the same time realizing that it’s a very absurd and sad place. The second is the dynamics of a claustrophobic, suffocating, chaotic family, which functions as a unified monstrous being. And the third idea was about a character who chooses not to emigrate. I love Russian-Jewish immigrant novels and that whole tradition, but they don’t entirely speak to the way it is now, or not the way it was with my experience. I wanted to explore the way we romanticize the old country and the authenticity of it.

When did you move to America?

I came in 1992. I feel like I can’t say I grew up in America; I meet Russians who moved to California or Ohio and they’re so Americanized. I grew up in Brighton Beach where I spoke Russian wherever I went.

I think that’s why everyone says they hear an accent. I shouldn’t have one, but I do, because I stayed in Russia. Growing up in Brighton Beach was kind of like growing up in the 1950s. It’s like Brighton Beach Memoirs mixed with Requiem for a Dream. Wholesome and Jewish, but at the same time lots of wandering the streets and drugs and all this desperation. The parents are working really hard to rebuild their lives and the grandparents are watching over you, but it’s easy to fool the grandparents.

Did you disappoint your parents by not becoming a doctor?

My mom used to say every day, “Please just reconsider, it’s not too late to go to medical school.” I think the fact that she no longer says that, or not as regularly, means she must be proud. It is hard to tell. Ideally, you become part of the tradition of Russian writer-doctors—Chekhov, Bulgakov, Tsypkin. I’m considering becoming a clinical psychologist. This summer I took an intensive statistics course… I can’t tell how much of it is for me and how much for my parents.

I know you went to Columbia for your MFA, what happened afterwards?

I really needed to make money, but I didn’t want to work. There were some dark times. First, I worked at The Strand.

Like every other novelist.

It was the only place I could get a job, but it didn’t last long, then I moved to New Orleans. My friends from high school were there and I thought it would be a good break from New York, but it was too joyful. Then I moved back here and I got a job at Columbia University Medical Center on 168th Street.

Uh, shouldn’t you be happier?

Do you know how to do that?

No, but I haven’t written a novel that’s gotten great reviews.

If you know how to be pleased with yourself, you will be, but if you don’t, you won’t.

You are so Russian.

My friend says that my capacity for misery is greater than anyone he’s ever met.

You should drink more. I think you need a hug.

Maybe that’s true. People usually say that on the phone but people are scared of giving me a hug.

Do you prefer to read in Russian?

It’s much harder for me to read in Russian. I read poetry in the original but for the fat novels there’s [translators] Pevear and Volokhonsky. It’s necessary to take Babel in Russian, but luckily he spawned two of my favorite American short story writers: Grace Paley and Leonard Michaels.

What do you like about the Russians?

Russian writers are like Russian people: there’s not a lot of bullshit. I can relate to the inherent darkness, the pessimism, and all that misery. They get to the essential stuff pretty much right away.

What is the essential stuff?

Life, death, love, time. Russian poetry in particular cuts through to the heart of you in a way that is very not-American. I have to make a distinction: it’s a Russian quality, not a Jewish quality, and I don’t have it. I can’t help but make the joke. I don’t have the Russian thing where it’s really pure, dark tragedy. I can’t help but write in a funny or crooked way, even though at core there’s the darkness.

It’s very dark for you?

Being a writer you spend most of your time holed up in a room by yourself trying to get to the bottom of stuff. It’s not a very positive occupation. It doesn’t correlate to optimistic fun-in-the-sun-Frisbee time.

I noticed that you have some lovely passages about the sea.

I go back to Brighton Beach every weekend to swim in the ocean. That’s when I’m not in the miserable mode. I have a very good relationship with the sea. It’s like my home.

Read an excerpt from Panic in a Suitcase over at N+1.

 (Image: Riverhead Books)

Related: Anya Ulinich on Autobiography in Fiction, Drawing, and the Perverse Pleasures of OkCupid
Boris Fishman on Grandfathers, Russian Hirsuteness, and the Immigrant Experience

The post Debut Novelist Yelena Akhtiorskaya on Misery, Writing, and Brighton Beach appeared first on Jewcy.

Michael Orbach caught up with her recently to talk about autobiography in fiction, drawing, Bernard Malamud, and the perverse pleasures of OkCupid.

So your new book begins with your lead character blaming the U.S. State department for her sexual awakening. That’s actually coincidental since I blame the U.S. Department of Agriculture for my own belated sexual awakening…

[Laughs] Actually I would like to stop you right there—it’s a novel, not a memoir, so I don’t want to discuss my own sexual awakening. It’s definitely semi-autobiographical. It’s informed from my own experience, there’s no question about that, but it’s not straight out of it. My life is much more boring.

I think some people are writers who write stuff because they’re very interested in what happens to them; other people aren’t like that. I can think of many writers who write about places they’ve never been to. Some people can’t do that. I need a personal connection to the material.

What was the genesis of this graphic novel?

My first novel [Petropolis] came out in 2007 and I wrote another one, and it was just not good. I didn’t entirely like it; I showed it to my agent and she didn’t exactly love it; my editor didn’t like it. After that, I was in a kind of bad personal state. I couldn’t get myself to start writing another novel but I was doing a lot of drawing and doodles. I haven’t drawn for ten years and then a freelance illustration job fell in my lap. I found that drawing was soothing. I showed those drawings to my agent and she said maybe this was my next project. I have never done any comics before—I didn’t grow up with comics. And I haven’t read that many graphic novels. The graphic novels I did read were basically literary fiction or memoirs: Persepolis [Marjane Satrapi], Fun Home [Alison Bechdel], and stories by Adrian Tomine. I read them the same way I’d read any fiction. I didn’t really know what I was doing at all.

But when I was telling stories with drawing, the space constraints of a comic panel or a speech bubble actually helped me construct a story. When I write fiction it tends to sprawl. With handwritten text, there is the issue of space constraint. It forces you to get the story out. It was an easier process in a way. Do I wrap up a scene or extend it? The choice was obvious; I have to say what I have to say, or draw it all over again. It gave me a kick in the pants as a writer. It made it more vivid. It was a good experience overall.

How long did this take you?

I started it in May 2012 and I finished it last summer—less than a year. I sold it to Penguin on proposal and they gave me a few months. I was really rushing. Drawing takes up a lot of time; the first draft was completed in a few months. I did 16-hour days, it was crazy. I work at home and my kids would be like “There’s no food!” and I’d be like “Here’s twenty bucks, go to the grocery store.” I was disappointed that I didn’t have time to perfect the drawings. Writing is finite, there’s a stopping point when you can’t improve, but with drawing it’s much more ambiguous. I’m much more judgmental of my artwork than of my prose. I would have loved to have more time to make the book more more beautiful. On the other hand, when it was finished, I was happy because the speed gave the book a kind of urgency. The momentum is more intense because the pace is intense and it’s matched by the quality of hand-written text.

I love the dialog. Did some of that come from your own experience on OkCupid?

Yes, I have that in common with my character. I spent my whole adult life in a marriage; I was married at 21, and I had a kid when I was 24 and another one when I was 28. I stayed in this marriage for 15 years. I never dated; you don’t “date” when you’re in college, you “meet people” which is different. I was absolutely fascinated by the whole dating thing; I met people whom I never would have encountered in my normal social circle. All these crazy different stories.

Not every guy I met was somehow interesting or entirely insane, like the guys in the novel. The novel does its fiction thing—even if based on reality, everything is kind of exaggerated and tweaked… But still, it was a really interesting experience for me. Doing online dating as a writer, I couldn’t help deconstructing the way people misrepresented themselves online; even if they are trying to say one thing about themselves, they said another. The way they write about themselves and what they include or choose to exclude, it’s very telling. You learn to read between the lines.

I never looked at OkCupid like that, but I probably should.

I’m almost tempted to do a sociological study of OkCupid profiles and what people do. Our relationship with our photographs for example: we all have something we think is our best feature and our worst feature and we take pictures accordingly. Or something that’s meaningful and sentimental and we put it in our profile, but it’s not necessarily our best picture or looks like that you, or that you’re visible in. Another interesting thing is the language people use and what we chose to include in our reading lists. We don’t put down our favorite guilty pleasure, we put down the kind of stuff that we think will attract the kind of people we want. The men OkCupid matched me with usually “loved” David Sedaris and Charles Bukowski. There’s a list of three writers that the guy who doesn’t actually read books likes to use. No man ever likes any women writers, except for Sylvia Plath.

I’m going to my OkCupid profile to add a female writer now.

Add one who isn’t Sylvia Plath. You can so get the chicks.

Our interview is on hold, while I add Margaret Atwood.

She’s okay. Put Lorrie Moore in there.

Alice Munro?

Yeah, that’ll help.

If I get laid because of this interview…

You can buy me a drink.

I waste a lot of time on OkCupid, but you really made something useful out of it.

To me it was not a waste of time. I waste time professionally, I’m a writer. I gather material. It was fascinating, especially the way people answer some of the questions. Probably 90 percent of men answer the question “Are you smarter than most people?” in the affirmative. I get matched with a certain sub-set of men: basically, educated New Yorkers. And lot of them are white people, and I guess white men think they’re smarter than most people. I wouldn’t date anyone who said that he was smarter than people. What kind of thing is that to say?

I liked how you picked up on the question OkCupid has about whether people with low IQs shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. They should rename the site OkHitler.

How many over-educated hipsters actually say yes—that the world would be a better place if people with low IQs couldn’t reproduce? It’s really crazy.

In the book, Lena has this moment where she has a nightmare about Philip Roth and picks Bernard Malamud instead. Can you talk a little about that?

Lena has a nightmare about Philip Roth on a Greyhound bus. I had a good dream about Roth on a Greyhound bus, he was really nice to me, but narratively speaking it needed be a nightmare. Malamud is a great artist—his writing is so fine. I like him as an artist better than Roth—but I identity with Roth’s autobiographical characters more. But although I identify with them, I also think if Roth and I met he wouldn’t have given me the time of day. He’d dismiss me. I relate to Alexander Portnoy but I’m not supposed to, because I’m a woman. It’s complicated with Philip Roth… Anyway, sometimes things in novels aren’t put in to be straightforward; it’s not like Lena picking Malamud over Roth. it’s just a sequence.

The story “The Magic Barrel” spoke to me so much because it’s about an existential crisis and desperate scramble for meaning and love. I really related it and I got a kick out of the parallel between the marriage broker’s Magic Barrel full of girls and OkCupid. It’s just a nice framing device for the book. Lena is similar to Leo [the lead character in “The Magic Barrel”], but Leo becomes depressed and is pretty passive. He gives up and mopes around his apartment and finally finds the girl he falls in in love with in an envelope of photos, right in his apartment. But Lena is a woman and women tend to be proactive about fixing their fate. They get off their ass—if things aren’t good, let’s make them better. Especially immigrant women; they’re kinda into survival of all sorts. Lena’s actively searching, rather than throwing up her hands and saying “There is no such thing as love and meaning.” She thinks there might not be, but she doesn’t give up and then she finds it.

Related: Russian as an American Language: A Conversation with Anya Ulinich
Graphic Novelist Liana Finck on Yiddish Letters, Teen Angst, and Becoming a Book Person
Boris Fishman on Grandfathers, Russian Hirsuteness, and the Immigrant Experience

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With a curly gray wig and pink, comically smudged lipstick, Gary Spielberg (no relation to the legendary filmmaker), 26, is ready to rock, “Baba Fira“-style.

“Baba Fira” is the Russian Jewish grandmother persona that Spielberg created for his popular YouTube series in February 2012. In these parodies, Baba Fira force-feeds her 21-year-old grandson Olivier (a popular Russian potato salad), then nags him to lose weight in order to attract a good wife. In spite—or perhaps because of—her guilt-inducing tirades, Baba Fira has amassed 813,747 YouTube views, and comments like “Entertainment at its best! Subscribed!” are ubiquitous.

On a recent summer day, I sat down with Gary to discuss his Russian-Jewish background, comedic inspiration, and future projects. He made me erupt in laughter several times (which I’m normally not quick to do) by effortlessly shifting into Baba Fira’s high-pitched voice and lovable character.

Why did you choose to direct and act in Russian-inspired comedy?

Well, I emigrated with my family from Kharkov, Ukraine to New York in 1990. I was two-years-old at the time. And I later grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn—which is a very Russian populated area in New York. Obviously, Russian culture was a significant part of my identity. Growing up, I originally considered becoming a lawyer and even went to a high school specializing in teaching law. But I later became much more interested in film making and made a big career switch by going to Brooklyn College’s Film School. I took many screenwriting, producing, and directing classes, but I never took official acting ones.

What inspired you create a parody of the Russian babushka in particular?

I used to love prank calling my Russian friends and pretending to be their grandmother. I would yell things like, “Oh my God! Where are you?! I’m going to tell your mom!” These prank calls were very successful! I always scared my friends. And, of course, that was fun to do. I also wanted to create a Russian version of the popular Sh*t New Yorkers say meme that was popular on YouTube.

So one day, in February of 2012, I called my friend Ari Barkan, to act as ‘grandson Joseph’ and another friend to film. We all went to my grandma’s apartment in Brighton Beach when she was out for a doctor’s appointment. I then quickly did an outline for all topics I wanted to cover in the video: Babushka worrying about her grandson’s lack of a serious girlfriend, demanding that her grandson eat grenkie (Russian French toast) and then later pointing out that he’s getting fat, and criticizing her grandson’s “impractical” acting profession. When we shot that video, and I got into full Babushka mode by putting on a house robe, wig, and makeup, I literally became a different person. It was as if I really was a Russian Babushka! In those moments, all of my personal experiences with my own Russian grandmother resurfaced and the Baba Fira character was created. Everyone in the video just improvised and went with the flow. Barely anything was scripted.

I was very close to not releasing the first Baba Fira video. I personally didn’t find it so funny because I wondered “can anyone else relate to this but me?”  I only ended up releasing it because I felt bad that my friends invested so much time in it. I felt very gratified when one of our Baba Fira videos became the second most viewed video on Reddit in Russia, after a political video with Putin speaking.

That’s very cool! Tell me about the Brooklyn Russian Vines.

I started it in November 2013. They’re more like Instagram videos, which are 15 seconds. The best part about these video is that I am able to introduce more characters! I joke about random things that Russian parents and people in the Brooklyn Russian community would say or do.

I promised that I would post at least once or twice day and keep the audiences coming back. And so far, that has worked out very well. The response that we got was amazing. What I love most about this project is when I get a message in my inbox from strangers saying that one of my videos “really uplifted them” or that they were “having the worst day ever, but the Brooklyn Russian Vines changed that.

My favorite character in the Brooklyn Russian Vines is “Yana,” who is a slight caricature of the 20-something Brooklyn Russian girl. Is she based on the girls you date?

Sometimes. I really tend to pick up on little things and mannerisms from any girl that I meet. I’m talking to you right now and I could be picking up on something. I also notice how Russian girls interact with each other on Facebook and social media. I take note of their statuses and their hashtags and what that might say about their general habits.

Being able to riff on small, everyday things that most people don’t even notice is part of being a good comedian. Speaking of which, who’s your all-time favorite comedian?

My favorite comedian is definitely Russell Peters. I want to emulate his work, since he also gears toward an immigrant and first-generation-born audience. He makes great jokes about growing up in an Indian home and many non-Americans can relate to his material. He’ll mimic a conversation that he has with his parents. He’ll say things like “Dad, I’m not feeling well,” and the dad will overreact and say “Oh my goodness. You have fever! We must take you to the hospital!” Russian parents can also be just like that, and I love how this humor connects all kinds of immigrants together. Watching someone like Peters motivates me to get into stand-up as well, though it’s obviously a different monster than directing and acting.

Do you specifically aim your comedy to a Russian-Jewish audience, or to the broader Russian community?

I try not to make specific Russian-Jewish jokes because I think that everyone in the Russian community should be able to relate to my material. I have many non-Jewish friends and I want everybody in the Russian community to find my vines enjoyable. But, okay, maybe there’s just one Yiddish phrase that I use in my videos: “Kishin tuchus!” (“Kiss my butt!”) My mom and grandma always say that to me when I want something but can’t have it. “You want so-and-so? Kishin tuchus!”

You recently led a Birthright trip and will be going again this winter. How did you get involved with the organization? How do you view your Jewish identity?

I first went on Birthright two years ago and had a blast. I even made a Baba Fira video during the trip and got my fellow Birthrighters to be in it! After that initial trip, I really wanted to go on Birthright again as a leader of the group. I even became a prime advertiser for the EzraUSA subdivision of Birthright, which attracts many young Russian Jews. I ended up recruiting 275 applicants to the program.

And after I got involved with Birthright, many other organizations targeting young Jews—like Hillel campuses in New York—heard about me and asked me to perform Baba Fira skits at their events. I now volunteer for young Jewish organizations like Ezra USA. The Jewish community in New York is a very generous one and I strongly believe in giving back. I also believe in maintaining my Jewish identity and having a Jewish wife! We’re a small breed and we need to keep strong.

What’s next for Baba Fira?

The next video project is going to be like a “Russian Cooking for Dummies.” In this weekly YouTube series, Baba Fira will show everyone how to cook Russian food. I love to cook and learned a lot from my own grandmother. So, I’m excited that this series will be both educational and entertaining, and also hopefully expand to an American audience as well. Stay tuned and learn how to make really good borscht!

But, other than that, Baba Fira’s biggest future project involves making a movie. The premise is Baba Fira traveling with her grandson Joseph across America, as they get into lots of hijinks. I met up with some writers at Comedy Central to discuss it. There’s definitely potential to make Baba Fira bigger and reach a wider audience.

I know we spoke a lot about the fictional “Baba Fira,” but what is it like having a real Russian Jewish grandma?

My grandmother is very cool. She was a medical surgeon in Ukraine. And she also, of course, makes great and abundant food. I love when she makes kakleitki—Russian style hamburgers.  But she’s also on my case a lot and will ask the same questions about my personal life multiple times. And she’ll be blunt with her opinions. While this tests my patience, it has also helped me to become a better person in general. My grandmother’s tough love has definitely prepared me for the rest of the world’s criticism. Now, thanks to my Babushka, general criticism doesn’t really bother me. And I’m starting to cherish my grandparents more than ever because I know that they won’t always be around. While they’re still here, I’m asking them as many questions about their past as I possibly can. I listen to all their incredible, miraculous life stories and even plan to eventually make a documentary about them. Aside from the lighthearted and funny aspect of my Baba Fira videos, I hope that that they’ll also encourage my generation of Russian-Americans to become more aware of their roots and appreciate the very wonderful craziness of having babushkas and dedushkas (grandfathers) around.

To meet Baba Fira in person, check out the Annual Brighton Beach Jubilee Festival on Sunday, August 24.

Rebecca Mordechai is a graduate student in English Literature and a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

(Images supplied by Gary Spielberg.)

Related: Gary Shteyngart On Surviving Solomon Schechter, Soviet Pain, And Botched Circumcisions

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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?

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Boris Fishman, 35, is the author of A Replacement Life, a dark, hilarious new novel about a failed young journalist who begins forging Holocaust restitution claims for Russian Jews in Brooklyn, at the behest of his incorrigible grandfather. I talked to Fishman about writing, grandfathers, Russian hirsuteness, and the immigrant experience.

So when I first saw that you were 35, I became quite jealous of your success. Then I looked at your author photo and realized you look like you’re 50 and like you might have killed someone in the Gulag.

Maybe you should be worried. Since the novel is about a crime and the first question anyone asks of a debut novelist is how autobiographical this is, I guess there’s a possibility that I have those tendencies. But I don’t. My temperament is the diametrical opposite… People assume you’re one kind of person but I’m a total teddy bear. Everyone’s kind of thrown by that.

You do seem awfully nice. I was expecting a Russian cliché.

I’m really nothing like the typical Russian person except for several key departments.

What are those key departments? Are you hirsute?

I am hirsute, absolutely, but nothing compared with my father. But really I’m talking about a certain quickness to intimacy. There’s a really wonderful essay in the New York Times by Alina Simone about the meaning of “How are you?” in American versus Russian culture. American culture is far more civil than Russian, if we are going to generalize and be reductive, but Russian culture tends to go soulful and deep much more quickly than American culture. I really don’t want to have small talk–I want to get down and deep very quickly. I don’t mean you, the person I’m speaking with right now, but hell, you too.

And the next thing is a real devotion to Russian literature and Russian culture. For all those horrible things that happened in the Soviet Union—there were many–the one thing that was remarkable was that there was state-mandated intellectualism, so to speak, in the sense that cultural production wasn’t dictated by the market, but the government. There was no low-brow literature published, and by the time you graduated high school, you were deeply familiar with all the Russian classics. In a society like that, there was obviously a big problem in the individual-freedom department, but at the same time you had a lot of people with a tremendous amount of respect for literature, a cultural literacy that was really impressive. I have a lot of respect for that heritage.

You got the good and none of the bad, except for the hirsuteness?

The hirsuteness gets rough especially when it’s warm. Some days, it really isn’t the most awesome cultural patrimony.

I’m speaking to an author about hairiness. I don’t know when exactly my life went wrong.

I do appreciate the novel direction this is going. There are only so many times I can talk about where I got the idea for the novel. [Laughs.]

That’s good–I really don’t care about that. I’m really more interested in your hair.

Well, I’ve got none on my head: an odd bargain. I took after my father. Meanwhile, my maternal grandfather, who is 87–may he live till 120, as we say–has a full head of hair and not a wisp on his chest. His hair is like goose down. He lives in Midwood. Sometimes I go down there just to eat his home-attendant’s cooking and rustle his hair.

We should trade grandfathers.

I should rent him out. Rent a grandfather.

He’d make a great pick-up line.

The thing about my grandfather is if I brought him as a wing-man, he’d collect more women than I would. He’s a really interesting storyteller.

When the story broke about the group of Russian Jews defrauding Holocaust restitution claims, did you see a novel in that?

The novel was formed by then. I started writing in November 2009 and this was exposed in November 2010. I had just gotten to a seven-month writing residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, which is very remote from all things Jewish and all things New York. I was stunned to see this in the Times, but I didn’t really feel like my thunder was stolen. It didn’t feel like it was a story that would own the mainstream news for weeks and weeks. It was more that it was a bizarre and really depressing vindication of what I imagined.

What happened afterward was quite interesting. I wrote an article in Tablet Magazine saying that, legally, there’s no question these people are culpable and they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But morally, let’s not dismiss them as pure evil. Let’s instead try to understand why they did something like this… The people who did this were primarily ex-Soviet Jews. For me, they’re trauma victims, and trauma victims inflict a lot of damage. But I feel that their culpability is mitigated by the trauma they underwent. I don’t know if they can plead insanity, but actually something close. They spent decades in a system whose perversity and abusiveness and discrimination against Jews is difficult to convey. That doesn’t make what they did okay–but I think it obligates us to be nuanced in our moral judgment of them. Certainly, you can’t write fiction about them without that capacity.

So what was the kernel that started the novel?

For me the genesis of the novel had to do with the fact that Holocaust survivors behind the Iron Curtain were not able to apply for restitution because it was felt that their governments would poach the money—a reasonable thing to have been concerned about. My grandmother, a survivor, did not become eligible to apply until we got here from the USSR in 1988. When she got set to submit her paperwork in the 1990s, it was given to me even though I was just a teenager because I had the best English in the family.

Two things stood out to me, one leading to the next. The first was that virtually no documentation was requested, for obvious reasons. You weren’t given a confirmation voucher when you went to the Minsk ghetto. So it kind of came down to how good a story you could tell; a matter of history became a matter of storytelling. I didn’t need to make it up for my grandmother since she went through it, but that idea was intriguing.

And the second thought I had was: It’s just a matter of time before someone has a field day with these applications. And that someone, I knew, might very well come from the ex-Soviet community. If you lived in that place, you couldn’t get certain basic things without going around the law. Some people remained honorable and did without; some people lucked out and knew the right people; others just wanted a little more for their families. I’m not talking about Rolls-Royces and gold watches. I’m talking about another pair of shoes or a banana. Tangerines were a once-a-year luxury. Sometimes, you could not get basic things without resorting to light crime.

Speaking of Russian Jewish writers, Gary Shtenygart just came out with his memoir. Was your arrival in America as painful as his?

I would guess that it was, but every pain is its own. That’s why people fail to learn from their mistakes, not because they’re stupid but because every mistake has its own character profile.

It’s brutal at such an impressionable age to switch from one place to another that’s so different. In my case, I became the adult of the family. I learned English the fastest and became my family’s ambassador to a world that had things going on that we had never dreamed about: phone bills, credit cards, medical insurance, car insurance… Suddenly I was responsible for all this being handled properly, for the family coming to no disadvantage or harm. I used to be so terrified of making a mistake that when I collected cans to bring to the supermarket for the five-cent deposit, not only did I wash them out with water, I sprayed them with my mother’s Parisian perfume so the supermarket would have no way to say no.

Related: Gary Shteyngart On Surviving Solomon Schechter, Soviet Pain, And Botched Circumcisions

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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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