Purim festivities have finally concluded, after an extra-long weekend (which started on Tuesday!) filled with work parties, street parties, and house parties. I wasn't really in the mood to celebrate, citing the gloomy current events, though to be honest, I'm not really a Purim person in general. But a good friend of mine who has family both in Ukraine and in Russia invited me to a party she was hosting on Friday and I immediately said yes because I realized that she needed a break from the war and just wanted to dance a bit (we danced a lot). She belongs to what's known here as generation 1.5 - those who immigrated from the former Soviet Union in the 90s when they were kids. Many who belong to generation 1.5, such as Arik Eber, made statements against the Russian invasion, no matter where in the former Soviet Union they were born, though there are others who are taking a more neutral stance, especially if they have friends and relatives in Russia who are suffering from the international sanctions. Everyone realizes that there's going to be an influx of immigrants from Russia and Ukraine, and I can only hope that they'll somehow have a smoother landing than the 90s wave (we'll see...). Arik Eber is quite known in the poetry slam circle and I'm very happy to see his work highlighted by the Tel Aviv Review of Books, with excellent translations by Alex Moshkin and Zackary Sholem Berger.
A boy's choir from Israel arrives at the Grand Choral Synagogue in St. Petersberg
This is how 1990 began
I don't remember any of their songs
And that's not the point really
What I do remember is the chewing gum
Bazooka
That they handed me
I'd never seen anything like it
A comic strip that absolutely nobody could understand
What's funny about it
I chewed this gum for two weeks in a row
Chewing during the day
Then carefully laying it on a shelf at night
A ritual I repeated with all chewing gums
Which were then
A truly rare
Commodity.
They took away my dog
A Rottweiler named Chase
Sold it to a security company
For a long time I'll be shaken by the thought: what did they do with that benevolent creature
Although we got him for protection from the antisemitic mob
Actually he'd lick anyone who'd enter the house from head to toe.
Dollar
My dad's friend gives me a dollar and says
Hide it in your shoes when you go through customs
Traitors are not allowed to take foreign currency out of the country
I'm frightened
But succeed in the task like James. Fucking. Bond.
Actually, we were supposed to move to the United States
But it closed the door right in our faces
Imagine
How easily
I could be American right now
Doing spoken word in Wisconsin or something
A friendly clerk at the Ben Gurion airport decides
That the name my mother gave me
Isn't suitable for the Israeli climate
So he writes on my ID card instead
Ariel
Why not Arnon
Or Arie
or
Boaz
Why not Boaz?! Boaz is a good fit for me, no?
Or something practical like
Aaron
With Aaron I'd probably be a star student in the religious school where I spent second grade
Not because my parents believed in the Jewish God or anything like that
But because that school was just across the street and free
And that's perfect for a Russian boy, poor and stinking
There, for the first time in my life I heard the phrase:
Stinking Russian
By the way, do you know why Russians stank in the early 90s?
I have a theory
As you know, they took all their furniture
All of them
And stuck them into tiny containers
In unbearably humid conditions
And shipped them across the continent for six months
Offloaded them in some port in Haifa or Ashdod
Then all this half-rotten furniture was crammed into tiny apartments
What the hell did they expect?
The stench stuck to everything
Like communism.
We didn't think it would collapse
My father would tell me a few years later
We thought it was just a lull, things would get back to normal,
We had to take advantage of this slit in the Iron Curtain
He was wrong
Communism crumbled
The nimble-fingered and quick-witted managed to seize a juicy piece of property
belonging to the state
Some of his good friends got
Incredibly rich
My Dad
Cleans a pool in Neve Yaakov in East Jerusalem
My mother cries
For his two academic degrees
For her medical studies
For the elegant buildings of St. Petersburg which she left behind
Because of the heat
Because she can't talk to strangers on the street
At the sight of her two sons
In gas masks
In a "sealed" room
Dreading death by gas
That's how 1991 began.
1990
At eight: cut right out from the Soviet Union
And pasted into Israel. What could I do?
I, a Russian boy, in a religious school
Who was told that God rules
But just as I learned how and when to pray
My parents decided that God was not the way
First they say religious, then they say not. For God's sake!
Who am I, who am I, who am I
Who am I, who am I, who am I, what?
In middle school I took another look around
Confused, what can I do if there's no God to be found
I realized that in Jerusalem to be popular and cool
I had to be more like the Morrocan youth
Morrocan is code for all Mizrahi Jews
Morrocan, Iraqi, all the same to stinking Russian tools.
Let's drop that, not relevant right now.
Look at me: a Russian listening to Eyal Golan
Faded jeans, gel in his hair,
Platform shoes, I tried but no one seemed to care
I always stayed a foreigner, strange kind of stranger.
Who am I, who am I, who am I, what?
In high school I tried to get back to my roots
"Belamor" cigarettes and Russian swear words
I hung out with the slackers, smoking out back
Wearing a tracksuit, accent so fake
But I failed to fit in, blend with the masses
My Russian vocab was zilch, what were my chances.
In the army I finally realized what's what
In the bed of elite girls I screwed my way to the top
The canon was revealed to me in all its glory
I swallowed it without gagging, no worry
Two servings of Leah Goldberg, Alterman and Oz
I became an Ashkenazi without any flaws
I rested on my laurels
Thought I found out who I was
'Til somebody blurted out: Nah
You are just an Ashki-passing Russian from nowhere.
Who am I, who am I, who am I, what?
I searched far and wide for who I was
Until I finally found a clear response:
I am Russian
I am a Russian Israeli or Israeli Russian or Hebrew-speaking Russian or Russophone Israeli or Israeli whose mother tongue is Russian
I mean, whose mother talks to him in Russian and he answers her in that language
Unless he wants to make a point and then he switches to Hebrew to make that point
Because, for real, Hebrew is his language
He's an Israeli, the case's closed, enough already! The guy's Israeli!
But then again: what is Israeli?
Who am I, who am I, who am I, what?
I highly recommended checking out this week's episode of Unholy: Two Jews on the News.
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