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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samantha Shokin is a freelance writer in Brooklyn.

(Photo by Philipp Hienstorfer/Wikimedia Commons)

Related: Around the World in 63 Moishe Houses

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

Dear President Peres,

After your recent visit to Moscow to open the loftily named Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre, it seems you’re having trouble distinguishing between your Russian Mother and her lullabies, and Mother Russia and her “hospitality.”

“My mother sang to me in Russian, and at the entrance to this museum, memories of my childhood flooded through my mind, and my mother’s voice played in my heart,” said Mr. Peres, 89, who was born in what is now Belarus. “I came here to say thank you. Thank you for a thousand years of hospitality.”

So, Mr. Peres, here’s a small list—an A-Z of sorts, mostly covering only the last few centuries—of some other things we can all thank Mother Russia for. I’m sure your own Russian-Jewish citizens will agree.

Anti-Semitism — See everything below.

Babi Yar — A killing site near Kiev used throughout the Holocaust, with estimates ranging between 70,000 and 120,000 deaths. In 1976, the Soviets permitted a monument to the dead, but would only commemorate Soviet citizens. After the Soviet collapse, a memorial specific to the Jewish victims of Babi Yar was erected.

Conscription — To the Tsar’s army with you! A mandatory 25-year conscription, beginning at age 12, was enacted in 1825 under Nicholas I (of all the edicts about Jews enacted by Tsars between 1649 and 1881, Nicholas I was responsible for 600, or half). Stories abound of boys being hidden from or kidnapped for the Tsar’s army, of child marriages and brothers with different last names, all to fool the army enforcers.

Doctor’s Plot — On January 13, 1953, Soviet citizens awoke to newspaper reports of a plot by a group of prominent Moscow doctors—almost all Jewish, surprise, surprise—plotting to poison Soviet leadership. Authorities arrested 37 doctors, making more arrests during the following weeks. The propaganda machine went into full swing, as did the show trials, executions, and gulag orders, affecting Jews across the country. It’s largely believed that Stalin was using this as a precursor for large-scale deportations, halted only by his death two months later on March 5, 1953.

Elders of Zion, Protocols of — One of the most infamous works of anti-Semitism, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first serialized in 1903 in a St. Petersburg newspaper. One of the possible authors headed up the Russian secret police in Paris. It claimed to document a meeting by world Jewish leaders, the “Elders of Zion,” plotting world Jewish domination. During the Russian revolution it was used by the Tsar’s supporters to discredit the Bolsheviks. Despite being exposed as a forgery, it continues to circulate as “evidence” of a Jewish conspiracy to world domination.

Fifth Line — Under Soviet rule, all citizens were required to carry an internal passport. The infamous “fifth line” was for nationality, which, for Jews, was always stamped Jewish, giving employers, universities and others a quick way to weed out undesirables. Officially, all citizens of the Soviet paradise were equal, but the realities of the fifth line made it clear that the opposite was true. Wry jokes about the “disease of the fifth line” were common among Soviet Jews. Nationality was only abolished on internal identity papers in 1997.

Gulags — It was cold, people died, lots of them were Jewish.

Holocaust — Until recently, little has been known in the west about the specific nature of the Holocaust within Soviet territories, where over two million Jews were killed. There were few ghettos and concentration camps–people were typically rounded up and shot immediately as the Nazis advanced towards Moscow. After the war, the Soviets refused to acknowledge anything particular about Jewish deaths, leading to a particularly painful irony that Jews were counted as Russians in death but as Jews in life (see Fifth Line, above).

Inter-marriage — A direct result of Soviet assimilation policies, intermarriage became an issue when Russian-Jewish immigration to Israel began, as many people who’d been discriminated against as Jews in the USS, found themselves unable to be married or properly buried under Israel’s laws of matrilineal Jewish descent.

Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee — The JAFC was formed by Stalin in 1942, to promote anti-Nazi sentiments both in the USSR and abroad. It was led by Solomon Mikhoels, the very popular director of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre. A year later, Mikhoels and Itzik Feffer traveled to the US, Canada, Britain and Mexico to gather support and funds for the Soviet war effort. The JAFC also helped publish and distribute the Black Book. After the war, the JAFC’s international ties became a liability – it was brutally disbanded and its most prominent members were killed on trumped up charges (Mikhoels was famously killed in a staged car accident).

Kishinev — Kishinev, now Chişinău, capital of Moldova, was the site of one of the most prominent Tsarist-era pogroms over Passover of 1903. The pogrom was sparked by the deaths of two children—a suicide and a murder—quickly leading to charges of blood libel. No attempts were made by officials to stop the rioting until the third day, by which point 49 Jews were killed and nearly 600 wounded; the New York Times stated that the details were too horrific to pass its censors. The episode had a direct impact on emigration as Russian Jews realized emancipation would never be theirs.

KGB — Nice folks. ‘Nuff said.

Letters, Hebrew — In 1915, the Russian authorities found the time, amidst war strategizing, to ban Hebrew letters from books and newspapers—effectively abolishing both Yiddish and Hebrew publications—as a result of their general suspicion of Jews as disloyal traitors. Then, in 1919, the Bolsheviks banned teaching Hebrew in schools as part of their efforts to enforce a secular, pro-communist, Yiddish culture among the Jewish population. Hebrew books and periodicals were seized and the language virtually disappeared.

May Laws — More repressions after more pogroms! The May Laws were enacted in May 1882 on top of existing restrictions on Jews in the Pale of Settlement. The Tsar’s minister, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, reportedly stated that the government’s wish for Russia’s Jews was that “one-third will die out, one-third will leave the country and one-third will be completely dissolved in the surrounding population.”

Night of the Murdered Poets — Just another day for the KGB when 13 prominent Yiddish poets and writers were executed in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison on August 12, 1952, after a two-month show trial. The episode was kept out of the papers and the victims’ families didn’t learn of their fates until 1955.

Okhrana — The Tsar’s secret police and precursors to the KGB, often thought be behind the “spontaneous” pogroms of the time.

Pogroms — As a result of pogroms, two million Jews fled Mother Russia between 1880 and 1914. Two million. (Incidentally, that still left about three million under Soviet rule.)

Quotas — Quotas on Jews in universities, on Jews emigrating from the USSR, on Jews in positions of power. Quotas, quotas, quotas. (See Fifth Line, above.)

Refuseniks — The term came into existence in the 1970s, referring to Soviet Jews who were refused permission to emigrate, often for no reason, though bogus excuses like state security were cited. Sometimes people arrived at the airport, luggage and tickets ready, only to be turned away at the last moment. Refuseniks (particularly those who then became activists) came to symbolize the Soviet human rights repressions throughout the last decades of the empire.

Sidelocks — Distinct hairstyle of observant Jewish men. Banned in 1844 under Nicholas I (see Nicholas I, above).

Tashkent Front — Despite the high number of Jews fighting in the Red Army, including Jews decorated as Heroes of the Soviet Union, the country’s highest military honor, a common joke after the war was that the Jews had spent World War II on the “Tashkent Front”—that is, hiding alongside children and other evacuees.

Vyisov — Since Soviet law only allowed immigration for family reunification, the one way a Soviet Jew could even consider leaving Mother Russia was by getting an official invitation from Israel. A vyisov was typically acquired by whatever connections one could muster up, and many families opted for the United States and Canada once they were safely out of the USSR. The “drop-out” rate was a major point of contention between Israel and the U.S. throughout the Soviet Jewry movement.

World War II – See Holocaust and Tashkent Front, above.

Yiddish — During the early Soviet days, Yiddish became the language of the Jewish proletariat—and a key tool of communist propaganda for the newly established regime—leading to a flourishing Yiddish culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Highlights included red Haggadahs, where the escape from Egyptian slavery was recast as an escape from the slavery of capitalism. Soviet Jews effectively lost their religion, but got to keep their sense of culture, at least temporarily, so long as it sent the right communist messages.

Zion, Prisoner of — Zionism was right up there with rootless cosmopolitanism in the annals of Soviet slurs and criminal charges. During the Soviet Jewry movement, imprisoned refuseniks such as Natan Sharansky were known as Prisoners of Zion.

All this to say thank-you, Mother Russia, for the hospitality!

Lea Zeltserman is a Toronto-based writer who writes on Soviet/Russian Jewish issues, tech and gender. Find her on Twitter here.

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