– To L.H.
May English…house my dead.
Joseph Brodsky, “In a Room and a Half”
I grew up in a room that did not exist. My family’s apartment house on October Avenue was identical to thousands of other apartment buildings lining the sides of other October Avenues, Revolution Streets and Marx Boulevards. During state holidays the house was always decorated with red banners, stating that Lenin lived, is alive and is more alive than all the living. This was a typical khrushcheba, a particular type of a house where I grew up along with millions of other happy Soviet children, anticipating our collective bright socialist future. Khrushcheba: a word like no other, derived from the name of the name of the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, and the word trushyoba – a slum, a term loaded with a Dostoyevskian dread of poverty.
I grew up in a room that did not exist. My family of four owned a one-room apartment. My grandparents, in a flat right next to ours, lived in three. They gave us one room, sealed it off with a heavy door and nails on their side. My parents, from our one room, took out the bricks and broke through the wall into my grandparents’ third room. On paper, our apartment existed as a one-room flat, yet my parents always reminded my sister and myself that if anyone were to ask us, the second room did not exist.
In that room that did not exist, before my birth, my great grandfather was nearing the end of his life. A son of a rabbi and a yeshiva bokher who was displaced from Lithuania during WWI he barely spoke Russian, reverting to Yiddish in his communication. In my family’s lore there is a story of him finding a chuppah in 1948 and managing a religious wedding for my grandfather, who had just returned from Europe and Manchuria after four years of fighting, to my grandmother, who fled from the German-occupied Ukraine with the first trains of Soviet evacuation. I have heard that he was a deeply religious man, a pious Jew praying before going to sleep in recitation of his evening prayers. Alone, he lived off his century in the room that stopped existing along with him, shortly after his death. His tombstone engraves the date of his passing as a year before my birth. All his religious artifacts, the family’s last, were buried with him.
It was not too long ago that Jews started settling in Ufa, an industrial city in Central Russia, where Jews from Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement were able to find relative calm. Most came during WWI, yet others escaped there from Hitler. They established their community and even built a synagogue. It is not surprising that a synagogue became a KGB club, and then a symphony hall in the 1930s. Accompanying me to school on a once-Jewish Gogol Street, my mother always pointed out the houses of some long-deceased relatives, always conveying their names through whisper. Whole streets turned into silent sites of memory that my mother wanted me to remember, perhaps instinctively, for I have no actual memories of these places and people. Vestiges of Judaism, long gone even before the burial of the prayer shawls of my great grandfather.
It seems that socio-economic, political and other factors that motivate emigrants to leave behind their homes and uproot their history, are veiled in an ever-present dream that the new country of residence will become a new home. Leaving behind their history, which by then has become inseparable from memory, emigrants-turned-immigrants-turned-émigrés search for that place where the new history and the new memory would commence. At a fateful interview at an American Embassy in Moscow, an American speaking excellent Russian is asking my family to tell him why we think that staying in Russia is dangerous for our lives. With Russia being “a free and democratic” country now, one cannot appeal for a political refuge, but leaving under the definition of “religious persecution” is still applicable.
Yet, what to America is persecution based on religion, to us means something different. We do not have a religion, but we are leaving – just as we have existed for three Soviet generations – as Jews, who never even for a moment doubted their Jewishness. To be allowed across the border, we tell our interviewer about my grandfather’s expulsion from the Communist Party, which one had to join to advance one’s career, for circumcising his son and about my classmates calling me names in school. We mention that “It’s time for the Yids to get out to Tel-Aviv” was written across from our apartment in charcoal and never erased. We tell about my great grandmother, whose grave the undertakers had dug at a Christian section of a cemetery, making me, a month before the age of bar-mitzvah that I would never have, gaze at her lonely Eastward-facing tombstone amidst the sea of gentile crosses. We await the decision downstairs, and rejoice when America stamps our acceptance forms. We immediately celebrate the coming change in our lives with a family meal at McDonald’s, where a line of people willing to feast on hamburgers and coke stretches far onto the Arbat Street, a locale that the bards of the 1960s have serenaded as a pivotal place in the nostalgia of a Russian exile.
After we arrive in our new American apartment, three bedrooms this time, all rooms too obviously existing, my parents begin to display their Jewishness. We acquire a mezuzah, it is even affixed to a door, unlike my grandfather’s that he carried wrapped in a handkerchief and made his grandchildren kiss at family gatherings. But my parents’ mezuzah is affixed to the wrong side of the doorpost, inside the apartment instead of outside. The mezuzah hangs for quite some time above the kitchen table covered with the Easter-egg tablecloth my mother purchased at a yard sale – a fifty-cent deal not to pass up regardless of the symbols. Our shower curtain, also a yard sale find, is of a Christmas theme. It takes courage at first to explain to my American Jewish acquaintances that the tree in our house at the end of December is not a Christmas tree, but a New Year’s tree that we have always had, as have all other Russians. Identified in our passports as Jews in Russia, we have become Russians in America.
Each time I am compelled to attend religious services, I cannot help but leave them with an uneasy feeling. What feels more fake, I wonder each time: to pretend that I am participating in something which I do not understand, or to attempt to learn something for the sake of gaining easier access to the American Jewish community, so much of which identifies with Judaisms of different stripes, primarily for religious reasons? True, the all-out Soviet war on religion so thoroughly did away with traditional practices so that my parents’ generation lacked all knowledge of Judaism. Yet, somehow, my parents managed to never give us even a hint of doubt that we were Jews first, before anything else. The intellectual, vibrant, strong cultural identity at the core of which was Jewishness came to replace an identity at the core of which was Judaism. In America, where to be meaningfully Jewish is taken to mean, primarily, to belong to a community at the core of which is religious affiliation, preserving an identity whose core is an uncompromisingly secular Jewishness is somewhat of a solitary quest.
Once, at a lonely seder in college, as others remembered their grandfathers hiding the middle matzah and their fate of always having to ask the four questions, I realized that I had no Seder memories aside my family’s non-ritualized celebrations of the holiday. At the table there was someone who wished that he would reach personal stability by the following year’s Passover.
But might it be that to be a Jew is to always experience personal instability, to never arrive at knowing fully who one is, to remain a least a little homeless? To sea
rch for answers in many spelled-out Judaisms of America, and in yet more that attempt to spell themselves out in opposition to those that seem already too strict, seems too simple. What to do with the many voices, many identities, that battle with one another to create one that should never finalize itself, should resist any conclusive answer, any happy ending that America would so much want from me? The only Judaism that I can ever have is the Jewishness contained in the non-existent room of my childhood, an entrance to which my parents walled with the bricks on the day that we emigrated, just like they had taken these bricks out to make a door some years before.
Such thoughts occur to many emigrants who have succeeded in becoming émigrés. Leaving a home always results in a search of a new home, yet the charm remains in a never-ending cultural relativity, a home that is never found, in the non-arrival that itself becomes a component of identity. Eva Hoffman writes in her memoir of Polish-Jewish upbringing and subsequent emigration, Lost in Translation: “All immigrants and exiles know a peculiar restlessness of imagination that can never again have faith in its own absoluteness. ‘Only exiles are truly irreligious,’ a contemporary philosopher has said. Because I have learned the relativity of cultural meanings on my skin, I can never take any set of meanings as final.”
Each time I am confronted by any collective manifestation of Judaism’s American institutions, a private memory, oft rehearsed and open-ended, flashes before my eyes. I am once again a boy, leaving his room that did not exist to stand on his toes and reach to the top of a bookshelf where lies a mezuzah, wrapped in an old and worn-out handkerchief. My grandfather’s father, a rabbi, gave it to him at the start of World War II and my grandfather, until his death, treated it as a sacred object that shielded him in brutal battles. I take the mezuzah and bring it to my grandfather so that he can bless me and let me kiss the scroll in his hands.
