MERCURIALITY AS MUSE:
INTERSECTING IDENTITIES IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN-JEWISH-AMERICAN LITERATURE
Peter Alfredson
An honors thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in the Department of
Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures (Russian Language and Culture).
Chapel Hill 2014
Approved by: Stanislav Shvabrin
Radislav Lapushin
ABSTRACT
Peter Alfredson: Mercuriality as Muse:
Intersecting Identities in Contemporary Russian-Jewish-American Literature Under the direction of Stanislav Shvabrin
This honors thesis explores transitional identity among Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés living in the United States, as represented in literary works by five writers from that community: The Last Chicken in America (2007) by Ellen Litman, What Happened to Anna K. (2008) by Irina Reyn, Yom Kippur in Amsterdam (2009) by Maxim Shrayer, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002) by GaryShteyngart, and Petropolis (2007) by Anya Ulinich. Chapter One presents Russian identity as a largely cultural and sentimental phenomenon that has been increasingly emphasized in a context of emigration. Chapter Two explores representations of Jewish identity based in memory, historic anti-Semitism, and a sense of ethnic belonging. Chapter Three introduces and discusses the existence of a persistent and depoliticized Soviet identity that has been largely ignored by previous scholarship. Chapter Four examines a composite, pluralistic American identity that has redefined the relationships among all other identities. This interdisciplinary thesis draws upon extensive secondary sources from across the social sciences and humanities to further analyze all of these identities and their literary
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I first became interested in issues of identity among Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés in the United States during the summer of 2012, when I was able to get to know members of that community while living and working in New York City. To that end, I would like to extend my gratitude to Roman Shmulenson, Lisa Klig, Iryna Gubenko, and other former colleagues at COJECO (the Council of Jewish Émigré Community Organizations), the nonprofit organization where I interned. My time at COJECO taught me a great deal, both about the complexities of transcultural identity and the tremendous creative energy within the Russian-speaking Jewish émigré community. I would also like to sincerely thank the Lutsker family (Arthur, Victoria, Daniel, and Chris), with whom I lived in Brooklyn that summer. In addition to many
enlightening conversations with them about their experiences in the United States as a family of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, they showed incredible hospitality and kindness toward me, something for which I will always be grateful.
My heartfelt recognition goes to Dr. Anna E. Peck, who has been a close friend and mentor for nearly five years. She has contributed immensely to my interest in Russian culture and history, both in and out of the classroom, and helped show me how to “think like a
researcher.” She continues to be an incredible source of intellectual and personal inspiration to me.
tremendous patience in helping me to become more comfortable communicating and thinking in Russian: Jenny Barrier, Dr. Nicholas LeBlanc, Professor Eleonora Magomedova, Scott
Morrison, and Professor Kevin Reese. Professor Chris Putney first introduced me to the joys of studying Russian literature in depth and has offered me a great deal of support and advice. Professor Radislav Lapushin helped me to understand the ways in which Russian literature can change how we see the world, and also first encouraged me to undertake this honors thesis.
My advisor throughout this process, Professor Stanislav Shvabrin, has been an invaluable mentor, and his guidance and feedback have been extremely helpful in completing this project. I am grateful to have been one of the first of what I know will be many UNC students to benefit from his immense expertise, kindness, and dedication to effective scholarship and teaching. I will always appreciate the support and wisdom that he has shared with me along this journey.
I would like to recognize the wonderful support that I have received from so many of my friends throughout this process. I thank them for encouraging me when this project felt
overwhelming and cheering me on each time that I drew closer toward my goal. There are so many generous and creative people whom I have been fortunate enough to have in my life during my time at UNC.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...1
CHAPTER 1: BECOMING “THE REAL RUSSIANS?”:...12
Chapter 2: “I’M A JEW, TOO”:...26
CHAPTER 3: HOMO SOVIETICUS IN EXILE:...46
CHAPTER 4: “I CAN EASILY DOUBLE AS A FIRST-RATE AMERICAN”:...65
CONCLUSION...80
INTRODUCTION
The last decade has witnessed the rapid appearance of a new group of Russian-speaking Jewish writers within the American literary community. The literature produced by these authors, all of whom are émigrés to the United States from the former Soviet Union, has intersected many different lines of ethno-cultural identity. This process has been reflective of many issues facing the broader émigré community to which these writers belong. Writing in English, these authors have achieved critical recognition and, sometimes, commercial success on the broader American literary scene by focusing on characters who are also Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés living in the United States. The narratives that these authors construct are often permeated by questions of identity and belonging that reflect the roles of memory, place, and community in shaping how these authors and their characters perceive their interwoven and evolving Russian, Jewish, Soviet, and American identities. As a result, these authors have created works of literature that evoke real historical and sociological issues about the nature of transitional identity among this community.
According to the political scientist Zvi Gitelman, since the late 1970s, between 350,000 and 500,000 Jews have relocated from the former Soviet Union to the United States (see Gitelman 243).1 As sociologist Larisa Remennick describes, this exodus was largely a reaction
to institutionalized anti-Semitism on the part of the Soviet government that had led to widespread
1 Official U.S. Department of State immigration records do not delineate whether or not
educational, economic, and social discrimination against Jews (see Remennick 37). Even after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of official government-supported anti-Semitism, historian Annelise Orleck points out that Jewish emigration from Russia and the other post-Soviet republics continued well into the 1990s due to a volatile political situation, economic insecurity, the aftermath of the Chernobyl meltdown, and a desire to reunite families that had previously been split by emigration (see Orleck 73).
As these émigrés settled in the United States, they quickly formed close-knit
questions about the extent to which they are Russians, Jews, and Americans, as well as how much these identities are internally versus externally assigned.
Within this thesis, the term “Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés” (sometimes shortened to “émigrés” for the sake of brevity) is used to refer to members of this demographic community. As Remennick notes, the term “Russian-speaking Jews” serves as both a broadly-encompassing and accurate label for this community in a post-Soviet world, due in no small part to the high rate of usage of the Russian language as a unifying factor for this community in the late twentieth century (Remennick 51).2 Many Jews who arrived in the United States from the former Soviet
Union also came from outside the borders of the modern-day Russian Federation, hailing from what is now Ukraine, the Baltic States, Belarus, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Thus, while the term “Russian Jews” may be largely accurate in a cultural sense (considering the fact that many of these immigrants feel a strong identification with the Russian language and Russian culture), it is somewhat misleading in a post-Soviet geographic and political context.
The term “Soviet Jews” was long used to describe Jews from the former Soviet Union, including those who had already emigrated, yet that label has been eschewed from this thesis as well. Markowitz states that the academic community has increasingly abandoned that language following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the fact that much of the “Soviet Jewish” community now actually lives outside of the former Soviet Union (see Markowitz 1995 104). However, this is not to deny the continued presence of a Soviet identity among members of this community, even in a context of emigration—a point that is discussed in great detail in the third chapter of this thesis.
The term “Russians” has become common when discussing this population in an
American context, even increasingly by the émigrés themselves, as Orleck observes (see Orleck 11). While there are indeed many Russian components of these émigrés’ identities, for the sake of this thesis, it is important to differentiate this population as distinctly Jewish, a task which that succinct-yet-incomplete label does not effectively accomplish. It is also important to distinguish members of this émigré community from residents or citizens of the present-day Russian
Federation and non-Jewish ethnic Russians; this one-word label would invite confusion with those groups as well.
Finally, because this thesis stresses the importance of emigration to the process of defining identity among members of this community, the word émigré is also included as a component of this label. In a literary context, this term also helps to reinforce connections with the notion of these writers as a part of the broader genre of American immigrant and émigré literature. Thus, “Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés,” and at times, “émigrés,” will be used within this thesis to denote the demographic and ethno-cultural community from which these writers have emerged. While they will be included at times, “in the United States” or
“American” will usually be omitted from this label to avoid wordiness. It should be assumed that the terms “Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés” and “émigrés” refer exclusively in this thesis to people who have emigrated to the United States, unless stated otherwise.
Soviet Union (four of them in Moscow, and one in what was then Leningrad).3 By this point,
they have become acculturated into American society in many ways, to the point that their fictional prose is written fluently in English, and that four out of the five authors hold tenure-track or tenured academic appointments at American universities (three of them as creative writing professors, and one as a Russian literature professor).4 Yet these authors have achieved
their success as increasingly mainstream American writers despite, or arguably, because of the fact that much of their work is centered on Russian-speaking Jewish émigré characters and their often challenging search for identity in their adopted American nation.
The decision by these writers to focus on émigré characters can be seen as an extension of the broader tradition of the immigrant narrative within American literature, as the literary critic Morris Dickstein has observed (see Dickstein 130). Their emphasis on émigré characters has also given new life to Jewish-American literature and simultaneously undermined and reinforced Irving Howe’s 1977 prediction of the imminent demise of Jewish-American literature without the influence of the immigrant narrative: “My own view is that American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point. Insofar as this body of writing draws heavily from the immigrant experience, it must suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning out of materials and memories… there just isn’t enough left of that experience” (Howe 16). In the process of finding
3Litman was born in Moscow in 1973 and emigrated in 1992 (see Wanner 2011b 63, 73). Reyn
was born in Moscow in 1974 and emigrated in 1981 (see Wanner 2011b 73 and 2011a 157). Shrayer was born in Moscow in 1967 and emigrated in 1987 (see “Maxim D. Shrayer”). Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and emigrated in 1979 (see Wanner 2011a 95). Ulinich was born in Moscow in 1973 and emigrated in 1991 (see Wanner 2011a 167 and Rabalais).
4 Litman is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut
their place on the American literary scene, these authors have filled a specific niche by writing about a new and still-acculturating group of Americans and highlighting the unique challenges of identity faced by Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés in the United States.
Indeed, all five of the works chosen for further examination in this thesis (one by each author) meet very specific criteria, even from within the larger volume of work produced by contemporary writers from this émigré community. Each of these books is focused upon the experiences of Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés in the United States and their search for
identity, as well as explorations of the Russian, Jewish, Soviet, and American components of the characters’ identities. As a result, Russian-speaking Jewish émigré authors such as Lara
Vapnyar, who writes about Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés but does not focus as heavily on the theme of Jewish identity in her émigré characters, or Russian-speaking Jewish émigré authors who write in English, but emigrated to countries other than the United States, such as the
Canadian writer David Bezmozgis, were not covered in this project. These five works all take place mainly in the United States, and portray Russian-speaking Jewish émigré protagonists, their families, and their broader émigré communities. They also emphasize conflicts that have arisen between the émigrés and the broader American Jewish community or American society, and the implications of these divisions for the characters’ identities.
While each of these five works is different in form and substance, they all focus on the search for identity by characters within the Russian-speaking Jewish émigré community, often through humor and depictions of personal change. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart, the most prominent of the five writers covered in this study, is a debut novel
Prava in the 1990s with the help of Russian (but not Jewish) mobsters to fleece other Americans in a Ponzi scheme. Irina Reyn’s What Happened to Anna K., also a debut novel,is a
contemporary retelling of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina set among the modern-day Russian-speaking Jewish émigré community of New York City. Reyn includes extensive familial and romantic drama, and also highlights the tension between émigrés and the established American Jewish community. The novel Petropolis by Anya Ulinich features the resilient black-Jewish-Russian character Sasha Goldberg as she journeys from her hometown in Siberia to Moscow and then to the United States, where she explores her identity, falls in love, and reunites with her father, on a quest that takes her from Arizona to Chicago and, finally, to New York City. In Ellen Litman’s The Last Chicken in America, the interconnected tales of a number of Russian-Jewish émigrés adjusting to their new lives in Pittsburgh are told through chapter-length short stories, with a focus on the teenage protagonist Masha. Similarly, Maxim Shrayer’s Yom Kippur in Amsterdam is a collection of short stories that mainly center on Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés (largely academics like Shrayer) who are dealing with the challenges of acculturation and conflicts between various aspects of their identity, such as the prospect of marrying non-Jewish women. This thesis will examine three of the short stories from Shrayer’s book: The Disappearance of Zalman, Sonetchka, and Yom Kippur in Amsterdam. Overall, these five works offer a significant opportunity to study the issues of transitional identity that have embodied the experiences of these Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés over the last roughly 35 years that they have lived in the United States.
Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora, was the first full-length scholarly work to cover this literary phenomenon, and he extensively discusses many writers living in the United States, in addition to chapters on Russian-speaking Jewish émigré writers living in France, Israel, and Germany. Wanner thoroughly summarizes and analyzes much of the fiction that these authors have produced, eventually speculating on the extent to which these still-young writers will continue to focus on Russian-speaking Jewish émigré characters and risk “repetition and
predictability” (see Wanner 2011a 196). Other scholars have published academic articles about this trend, including Yelena Furman in her 2011 article “Hybrid Selves, Hybrid Texts:
Embracing the Hyphen in Russian-American Fiction;” Donald Weber in his 2004 article
“Permutations of New-World Experiences Rejuvenate Jewish American Literature;” and Adrian Wanner, in a number of articles that later became the basis for his aforementioned book (see Furman 2011, Weber, and Wanner 2011a ix). This literary phenomenon continues to be
discussed at academic conferences as well, and at the most recent convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, held in Boston in 2013, there was a panel discussion entitled “Russian Diaspora Culture I: American Contexts” that featured papers by Furman and Wanner analyzing the works of various Russian-speaking Jewish émigré writers, including stories by Ulinich, Shteyngart, and Reyn (see Furman 2013 and Wanner 2013).
both literary criticism and a rich assortment of secondary sources from across the disciplines that exist on Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés living in America, and on Jewish life the former Soviet Union prior to emigration.
For the purposes of organization, this thesis has been divided into four different chapters, each focusing on a unique identity: Russian, Jewish, Soviet, and American. The first chapter presents a Russian identity that has largely emerged in a context of emigration and is generally based in connections to Russian culture and an understanding of Russia as a former homeland. The second chapter describes a mostly irreligious Jewish identity that is largely tied to a sense of ethnic belonging and memories of anti-Semitism. The third chapter demonstrates the emergence and persistence of a depoliticized Soviet identity. This is a perspective that has been largely overlooked in existing scholarship on these writers, making this chapter perhaps the most distinct contribution within this thesis to a new understanding of these writers and their cultural context. Finally, the fourth chapter depicts a pluralistic American identity that has facilitated a process of hybridization among all identities, despite some cultural barriers. Throughout this thesis, none of these identities will be presented as occurring in isolation, and the connections between them will be explored to show the intersections of memory, space, and community in a transcultural environment. Indeed, all of these identities have together contributed to the deeply composite Russian-Jewish-Soviet-American émigré identity that has been so thoroughly expressed in the literature of these five authors.
Finally, the title of this thesis is an allusion to one of the major concepts presented in Yuri Slezkine’s book The Jewish Century, a work that proved especially helpful as a guide for
difference between those who grow food and those who create concepts and artifacts” (Slezkine 24). These terms reference Apollo, the powerful Greek god of agriculture and war (see 24), and his younger brother Mercury, the clever but comparatively less-grounded god of thinkers and travelers (see 8). As Slezkine describes: “One could choose to emphasize heroism, dexterity, deviousness, or foreignness, but what all of Hermes’ followers had in common was their mercuriality, or impermanence” (8). For Slezkine, it is the Mercurians, able to negotiate different cultural boundaries and identities, who have generated many of the most fundamental changes in human consciousness and history. However, such progress often occurs alongside stigmatization and exclusion that prevents the Mercurians from fully assimilating into
Apollonian societies. Consequently, much of Slezkine’s book focuses on the idea that the Jews, especially those who lived in Russia and the former Soviet Union, have exemplified this concept of “mercuriality” through the significant cultural shifts that they have instigated, despite never having been fully accepted as equals by their Apollonian Russian and Soviet hosts.
CHAPTER 1: BECOMING “THE REAL RUSSIANS?”: EMBRACING A RUSSIAN IDENTITY IN AMERICA
Throughout their literature, these authors frequently engage their Russian identities, shedding light on what it means to be Russian for them and their fellow Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés living in the United States. With the emergence of these authors onto the American literary scene, much public attention has focused upon the “integral Russian component” of their literature, as noted by Furman in her study of the hybrid identities of recent Russian-speaking Jewish writers in the United States (Furman 2011 21). While all five authors included in this study were born in the former Soviet Union and lived there for much or part of their childhoods, as Jews they were never considered fully “Russian” during their lives prior to emigration, and as writers they have eschewed their native tongue by publishing exclusively (or in Shrayer’s case, mainly) in English. However, as Wanner describes, authors from this group often emphasize their Russian identities in their literature, and, at least in part, “this identity is actively created through a process of literary self-invention” (Wanner 2011a 8). Many of these authors’ primary characters are also immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and their stories are typically set in the former Soviet Union, post-communist Russia, or in Russian-speaking Jewish émigré
The relationship that emerges between these authors and their Russianness is often a strained one, reflecting the difficult process of negotiating identities that these émigrés have undergone since their arrival in the United States over the course of the last 35 years. As a result, when notions of Russian identity do appear in these works along cultural, sentimental, and existential lines, it is often in a negative light that reflects simultaneous feelings of both
connectedness and distance between the authors and their Russianness. In the process, these authors demonstrate that a sense of Russianness remains a part of who they are, despite the baggage that comes along with this identity.
In a context of emigration, conceptions of cultural Russianness and group identification are often linked to macro-level community formation. Zeltzer-Zubida observes how the “thriving cultural industry” that these émigrés have built in the United States has kept the Russian language and culture alive in a new land, and, as a result, “emigration enabled them to rediscover a sense of Russian-ness” (Zeltzer-Zubida 353). Economic networks and stores also play a significant role in the development of this Russian identity through a sense of shared interest and social interconnectedness, especially in larger Russian-speaking émigré enclaves, such as the Brighton Beach neighborhood of southern Brooklyn. Orleck analyses how Russian stores “have become informal community centers: news is exchanged, and congratulations or condolences are offered” (Orleck 106). Further reinforcing this perpetuation of Russian identity through communal activity is the presence of public spaces such as Russian restaurants, which, as Markowitz notes, offer opportunities to these émigrés “for public display of their Russian-ness” (Markowitz 1993 236).
mechanism for the characters to relate to other cultural Russians in an émigré setting and, in the process, examine their own identities more closely. The role of such spaces and networks can be seen in Shrayer’s short story Sonetchka during a visit that the protagonist Simon makes to a Russian restaurant located in suburban Boston:
He was too early for an appointment with a rental broker in Brookline, so he went into a Russian bakery-cafe to kill half an hour. The proprietress, a turtle with the dovish eyes of an Odessan belle, asked him where he came from in the old country and what his biznes was up in Boston. After Simon had introduced myself [sic] with the affected cordiality that he sometimes poured on fellow émigrés—in the sense that it’s fine to see other Russians in a strange land—the turtle-dove said she used to know his mother’s half-sister during her days in the Bolshoy [sic] Ballet troupe. She served Simon a glazed poppy-seed roll on the house and wouldn’t stop talking about his aunt’s gorgeous legs. Simon ended up giving her his mother’s number just to be rid of her and settled with a Russian daily paper near a rain-speckled window. (Shrayer 57)
Simon, visiting from Providence and ostensibly unfamiliar with the area, is still somehow drawn to this Russian bakery-cafe over all of the other potential establishments that he might have visited instead. He is a character who has experienced significant American acculturation since arriving in the United States nine years prior to this scene, having changed his name from Semyon to Simon, received a doctorate in literature from an American university, and published English-language essays in Harper’sMagazine. Yet the pull of his Russian identity, of his Semyonness, still remains. Rather than a mere coincidence, Simon’s decision to enter this establishment reflects his ongoing connection with Russian culture and aspects of Russian identity. To whatever extent this was an unconscious decision versus one made out of a more mindful sense of duty or obligation remains unclear. However, as both of those options still lend themselves to some sense of cultural identification, this would simply mark the difference between a fixed identity and an actively-evoked one; an identity that is still there nonetheless.
emerges and brings out Simon’s own sense of Russian identity. Justifying his politeness and friendly introduction to the woman behind the counter, Simon notes that this was how he “sometimes poured on fellow émigrés—in the sense that it’s fine to see other Russians in a strange land.” This sense of linked fate and solidarity causes Simon to act in a way that Shrayer implies is different from how Simon might have behaved toward “other Russians.” As émigrés in a country where few people share their cultural background, the ability to find some shared sense of identity with those around them takes on greater importance. In this passage, Shrayer presents this development largely along cultural and linguistic lines (biznes appears in italicized text, implying the usage of the Russian word, rather than the English “business”). This sense of communal Russianness plays a vital role in why Simon initially relates to her in such a pleasant way.
As the scene concludes, instead of escaping into an American literary magazine or the Central European prose that is the focus of his academic research, Simon chooses to immerse himself in a Russian-language newspaper. Through such cultural ties, which have continued despite ongoing Americanization, this important connection to one principal component of Russianness, a feeling of linguistic identity, remains intact. He breaks off from talking with another émigré not to pursue any number of non-Russian options that might have been available to him, but to connect with something inextricably linked with his own Russianness.
Hallmarks of Russian culture, especially those encountered during childhood, also serve as a frequent reference point for many characters to process their surroundings and relate to the world around them, creating an innate means of seeing the world through Russian eyes. In their work on the formation of self through culture, Carolin Demuth, Heidi Keller, Helene Gudi, and Hiltrud Otto note the importance of exposure to stories and narratives to the development of a framework for identity within a culture, as well as the broader implications of this process for establishing a lifelong concept of self (see Denneth, Keller, Gudi, and Otto 92). There are numerous scenes in the primary literature in which Russian cultural and literary sources provide context and meaning to the protagonists, with references ranging from the characters of Russian folklore such as Vasilisa the Beautiful, to Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov, to the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. For the protagonists of these literary works, this lifelong attachment to such narratives helps to place them into Russian cultural identities.
in the minds of many other visitors (especially Jewish ones), but to the memories of the Russian folk tales of his childhood:
Across the tracks a sole structure stood—a rickety, wooden lookout post on a set of stilts, which reminded Vladimir of the house of Baba Yaga, the witch of Russian fairy tales. Her house was supposed to be built on chicken legs that would take the Baba to wherever she felt havoc needed to be wreaked. The house could also act on its own accord, galloping through the village, trampling honest Christian folk at will.
Vladimir’s grandmother had fulfilled the duty of Russian grandmothers and told him Baba Yaga tales as an inducement for eating his farmer cheese, buckwheat kasha, and the other insipid delicacies of their country’s diet. But as these tales were frightening indeed, Grandma tempered the carnage with helpful disclaimers, such as “I hope you know that none of our relatives was ever killed by Baba Yaga!” Whether Grandma consciously understood the deeper significance of this disclaimer, Vladimir would never know. But it was true that practically his entire family escaped Hitler’s advance into the Soviet Union. (Shteyngart 2002 424)
Upon encountering these remnants of Auschwitz, Vladimir’s Russian cultural identity, as expressed through the lens of the Baba Yaga story, serves as a coping mechanism and a point of reference in making sense of the inexplicable cruelty of the Holocaust. Baba Yaga is one of the most common figures in Russian folklore, a mythical witch capable of relocating her house and, as Vladimir grimly notes, of “trampling honest Christian folk at will.” For Vladimir, the trauma of confronting the legacy of the Holocaust evokes the most primal and intrinsic of reactions. Yet Vladimir does not turn to the biblical story of Job, or visions of lynching and ethnic conflict in the United States, but to the fairy tales of Old Russia from his childhood. They remain at the heart of how he perceives and interprets the world around him.
country’s diet” meant giving her grandson more than just buckwheat and farmer’s cheese. It meant imparting upon Vladimir a cultural identity that she was not necessarily born into herself, having grown up in a Jewish family in Western Ukraine, and later moving to Leningrad, a primary center of Russian culture, where she became a respected school principal. These developments in the life of Vladimir’s grandmother are much like the phenomenon of Jews “converting to the Pushkin faith” that Slezkine describes in the context of Jewish acculturation into Russian society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Slezkine 285).
Further proof of this intent on the part of his grandmother comes from the fact that she not only tells this story as something that happened to other people, but that she inserts their own family into the narrative. Her declaration, “none of our relatives were ever killed by Baba Yaga,” is of course true in the most literal sense. However, this also represents a situation in which she reframes the historical separation of Jews from Russian culture from a theme of exclusion into one of survival. Thus, Vladimir was able to grow up, at least for a time, believing not only that had his forbearers lived alongside the ancestors of his non-Jewish peers, but that they had thrived. His grandmother was able to contribute a sense of cultural and historical Russianness to her grandson that remains relevant to Vladimir at a deeply personal level, even long after his departure from the Soviet Union.
anti-Semitic discrimination, and, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, volatile economic and social conditions. But it was still a place that represented home in a physical and cultural sense for many of their most formative years. Even after years of living somewhere else, they do not dismiss this idea of memory as a component of defining their Russianness. Several years after her relocation to the United States, Sasha Goldberg, the protagonist of Petropolis, returns to Russia to visit her mother and daughter in her remote Siberian hometown of Asbestos 2:
The Prostuda flight is full. Tan families carry baskets of fruit and vegetables from their Crimean vacations. Here, nobody bothers with seat belts. Men smoke in the
lavatory, and children play under their seats. Sasha thinks that her mother would never let her play on the filthy floor like this.
By the time she gets to Asbestos 2, Sasha Goldberg is exhausted and jittery. Every little thing threatens to make her cry: a faded May Day banner by the District Soviet, graffiti on the walls of the bus stop pavilion, and the mere fact that it’s all still there. Sasha realizes that she’s halfway expected her hometown to be gone or to be unrecognizable. It has only been two years, she reminds herself.
Her apartment building is there, too. The same littered foyer, busted lightbulbs, same reek of rotten potatoes, cat pee, and human pee. This is home. Sasha feels herself immediately settling into it, the way Heidi’s cell phone snaps into its charger. She wonders where she has found the strength to live anyplace else. (Ulinich 269)
For Sasha, this trip to Russia represents a return to her former physical home, but not necessarily a homecoming to Russian culture or consciousness; those things have still remained with her, even long after she had left Russia. Sasha has remained largely in the midst of other Russian-speaking émigrés during her stays in Arizona, Chicago, and New York, interpreting questions of Russian identity and Russianness in an American context. However, Sasha’s awareness is still often tied to memories of the place and time that she has left behind in
Prostuda. As a result, Sasha’s relationship to Russia through a sense of place remains important to her and serves another function in defining her Russianness.
This scene also serves to reflect the position of space in defining Russian identity
emotions that Sasha feels upon once again returning to her hometown are reflective of the significance of this place, and by extension, the importance of Russia more broadly, in forming Sasha’s identity. After being away for two years, Sasha feels much deeper ties to even mundane components of her surroundings, such as graffiti on the walls of a bus stop, or a May Day
banner, than she had previously; indeed, their presence nearly drives her to tears. This process of self-definition through spatial memory represents a phenomenon that is universal and not merely specific to people from Russia. However, because Sasha and the other émigré characters created by these writers were all born and raised in the former Soviet Union, this sense of memory through space is inescapably Russian for them, and thus continues to form a large part of their sense of Russianness. It also provides a contrast from Sasha’s relationship to her Jewish identity, which was a part of her childhood as well, but rooted in time rather than in space. As Étan Levine notes, in a diaspora context, Jews exiled from Zion have traditionally “inhabited the domain of time” (Levine 4). Thus, this space-based connection to their Russian roots through memory takes on even more value for these characters in the absence of a similarly constructed relationship with their Jewish identities.
As this passage suggests, the relationship that these writers have toward their Russian identities, even when filled with meaning or emotional significance, is often also accompanied by a sense of pessimism and dysfunction. This relates to the melancholia of the “russkaia dusha,” or “Russian soul,” as well as the existential attitudes of some of these characters as a means to more fully define their Russianness. At one point in The Last Chicken in America, the protagonist Masha discusses her memories of Russia and what it means to be Russian with Victor Harlamov, a professor visiting Pittsburgh for the semester from Russia, and with whom Masha is taking a literature class:
The campus was snowy and cold, and, as in Russia, we were wrapped in scarves and coats. He wore a long woolen coat and a fur hat with earflaps.
“What do you miss the most?” he asked.
I said I missed walking in Moscow, traversing old boulevards, the sidewalks glistening in the night, Pushkin Square, the lovers clutching flowers beneath the poet’s statue—the sentinels of love.
He said he also liked the boulevards, and Eskimo Ice cream sticks for twenty-five kopeks.
What Victor missed was Russian brokenness. He said it was the core of the Russian soul. “You see it in poets: Tsvetaeva’s suicide, Esenin, Mayakovsky. But it’s not just the poets. We’re sensitive, foolish, illogical. We live in a state of turmoil, on the brink of being destroyed, steps away from the next drunken bout.”
I knew what he meant, I had my own brokenness. (Litman 94-95)
brokenness of Russian consciousness, seems to offer its own sense of romanticized memory, just as Masha has through her own recollections of the snow-covered Moscow squares of her past.
This connection to the brokenness of the “Russian soul” that Harlamov experiences, and with which Masha identifies, evokes larger issues of how Russianness has related to that concept over time. While Harlamov presents the importance of the Russian soul with passionate
conviction, the model that he describes is more of a clichéd philosophical and sentimental ideal rooted in the past than a serious modern approach to Russian identity. As Richard Pesmen observes: “Russian soul was certainly a myth, notion, image, consoling fiction, trope of romantic national self-definition, and what romantic foreigners came to Russia for” (Pesmen 6). As a result, Harlamov can be seen as representing one strain of thought from bygone days,
ungrounded in the realities of life but instead consumed by clichéd notions based in historical abstraction. Masha relates to the challenges associated with the brokenness that Harlamov describes, but she does not seem to romanticize it in quite the same way. Indeed, this divergence is one of the factors that eventually leads to their estrangement from one another. Masha does not disregard this sense of brokenness and trauma as a component of Russian identity, but she does not put it on a pedestal either. As a result, Masha can be seen as pragmatically Russian; aware of her brokenness, but not consumed with these theoretical constructions of suffering in the same way as Harlamov, who here acts as a representative of contrasting non-émigré Russian culture. This feeling of simultaneous strain and connection is in many ways reflective of the conflicted experiences of these writers as Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés.
actively mock what they think of as the more negative components of Russian identity, while still identifying with many of these traits themselves. Early in What Happened to Anna K., the titular character muses on the nature of what it means to be Russian and the implications of this identity on her own life:
We cannot continue the story of Anna K. without tackling the issue of the Russian soul—velikaia russkaia dusha. Much ink has been spilled on it, no one can adequately articulate what it entails. It is generally agreed that the term is hazy and amorphous, an exclusive gift for the suffering Russians. Does it have anything to do with bitter cold? Communist timetables? Policing grandmothers? The addictive qualities of vodka? Wars fought with little training, shoddy clothing, and primitive equipment? An affection for murderous dictators? Ambivalence about the Westernizing innovations of Peter the Great?...
Yet, Anna decided, shards of the Russian soul might have lodged themselves inside her, unwilling to be removed. She loved to drink, even if it often made her combative and depressed afterward, for reasons she could not pinpoint. She had a fatalistic binary mentality—things tended to be wonderful or terrible; there were few nuances to her failures. Like a child, who builds castles with the aim to destroy, so Anna was tempted to topple her own best efforts—a hard-earned employment contact she didn’t follow up on, a phone message from a promising romantic prospect ignored until it was too late. She didn’t believe or didn’t want to believe in therapy as a cure for any of these ailments. Most damningly, even at the height of her pleasure—splashed by sun on a beautiful spring day or in the middle of an engrossing activity requiring all her
concentration—she was engulfed by an overall feeling of doom.
The Russian soul had come to claim her, extinguishing all that was sanguine and buoyant, all that was American inside her, leaving only the Siberian Steppes, the crust of black bread, the acerbic aftertaste of marinated herring, the eternal, bleak winter. At least that was what she told herself. Her Russianness, her immigration, had given her the license to tell that story. (Reyn 13-15)
For Anna, this examination of what constitutes Russianness is a decidedly negative one, rooted in a great deal of melancholy and negativity, and she satirically tackles several aspects of Russian identity that she finds ridiculous. Indeed, many elements of backwardness
“Indifference to the Enjoyment of Others” and “Fondness for Politically Incorrect Jokes” (14). Reyn’s use of farcical humor advances a narrative that, in many ways, being Russian is
something that is irrational and chaotic; for Anna, it is worth mocking.
However, satirizing Russian identity and focusing on the negative ways in which it may be expressed through Anna’s actions and that of the other émigrés around her does not mean that Anna lacks a connection with her Russianness. Indeed, perhaps most crucial to conceiving Anna as Russian seems to be her own admission that despite holding three other major American, Soviet, and Jewish identities, the sway of her Russianness often drowns out those identities. Anna regretfully notes how her Russian outlook has led to feelings of gloom that cancel out the comparatively positive aspects of other identities, “extinguishing all that was sanguine and buoyant, all that was American inside her.” On one of the most profound existential levels, Anna finds herself defined within her psyche as inescapably Russian; her velikaia russkaia dusha has remained a part of her long after physically leaving Russia behind.
These writers present many aspects of what it means to be Russian in a negative and undesirable light. The idea that Russianness is related to regressive qualities and adverse situations emerges in all of these works, and when the authors engage their Russian identities, they often do so in a way that reinforces their decisions to emigrate and remain in America. However, depictions of cultural, linguistic, and sentimental identity repeatedly emerge to demonstrate that these authors are still fundamentally Russian on an existential level.
CHAPTER 2: “I’M A JEW, TOO”:
VISIONS OF A UNIQUE JEWISH IDENTITY IN TRANSITION
Jewish identity is one of the most important themes for these authors, and the characters in each of their works seek to define and understand the relationship between themselves, their Jewishness, and the broader American Jewish community. This process of self-discovery and introspection in the primary literature evokes many related questions that have been explored by the Russian-speaking Jewish émigré community in the United States since arriving here over the last 35 years. These émigrés have had to reconcile their unique experiences as Jews with many of the ways in which their established American Jewish counterparts experience their Jewish identities, often acting and thinking quite differently from each other. Due in part to the challenging environment in the former Soviet Union, for many Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés, Jewishness is often centered on issues of ethnic and national identity and memories of the anti-Semitic persecution that they had faced in the former Soviet Union, rather than religious practices or cultural traditions. Gitelman notes in his study of Jewish identity in Russia and Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union: “Post-Soviet Jews do not consider the items relating to the tenets of Judaism essential to being a ‘genuine Jew.’ For them the most essential ingredients of Jewishness are matters of feeling and memory…” (Gitelman 103).
study of Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés living in New York City in the early 1980s,
Markowitz describes an interview with a man named “Maxim,” who tells her: “American Jews want us to be Jews their way—on the second day we are here. They can’t understand that we are Jews our way” (Markowitz 1993 60). The idea of these émigrés viewing themselves as Jewish, but doing so distinctively “their way” is something that thoroughly pervades the characters and situations that these authors create, and the conflicts and issues related to Jewishness among Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés in the United States have provided a crucial source of material for these writers in finding their place on the American literary scene.
Due in large part to the substantial discussion of Jewish themes and issues in their writing, this group of writers has frequently been classified as a part of the Jewish-American literary community by scholars such as Morris Dickstein, who describes how as émigrés, they “turned more Jewish, as if licensed by the strong Jewish presence in American literary culture” (Dickstein 129). The heritage of Jewish-American literature includes such prolific and
works and reinvigorate the field of Jewish-American literature; to Weber, these authors “represent a fascinating new chapter in a long tradition of Jewish immigrant writing” (B8). According to this line of thought, while there are still unquestionably many Jewish authors active on the contemporary American literary scene and writing about Jewish characters, it is the distinct experiences of these Russian-speaking émigrés of negotiating and adapting their Jewish identities in a context of transcultural migration that has enabled them to approach issues of Jewishness in their works from an otherwise unfamiliar perspective. As the Russian-speaking Jewish émigré community as a whole has been forced to examine its definitions and applications of Jewish identity in an American context, these writers have found an outlet for describing these conflicts in their literature, subsequently achieving mainstream appeal among American
audiences and literary critics.
reside within the Russian Empire, as Eli Lederhendler points out in his examination of Tsarist-era Russian Jewry (see Lederhendler 22).5
However, as Steven Cassedy observes, changes to Russian law in the mid-nineteenth century that permitted Jews to enroll at government-run universities and subsequently settle anywhere in the Russian Empire upon completion of a degree were responsible for the
development of a small but increasingly influential Russian Jewish intelligentsia (see Cassedy 8). Similary, as Shaul Stampfer notes, during the late-nineteenth century, there was a great deal of internal migration by Jews within the Russian Empire in order to take advantage of increasing economic opportunities (see Stampfer 42). Thus, even as the vast majority of Jews remained disconnected from Russian culture at the onset of the twentieth century, the foundations had been laid for Jews living in Russia not only to join mainstream Russian society and relocate to new cities, but to play a leading role in debating and resolving the contemporary philosophical and political issues facing Russia.
This process of integration hastened after the Revolution in 1917 and the subsequent establishment of the Soviet Union. Some Jews, such as the members of the Jewish Social Democratic Union, commonly known as the Bund, opposed the Bolsheviks during the initial struggle for post-Revolutionary power (see Salitan 12), as did many older Jewish members of the Russian intelligentsia (see Ettinger 10). However, as Gitelman observes, many Jews came to support the eventually victorious Soviet government in the wake of anti-Semitic violence by supporters of the White Army and after the implementation of progressive Soviet legal reforms which benefitted Jews (see Gitelman 301). Many Jews believed at the time that there was a new possibility for successful integration within a state that had defined itself along the basis of
5 According to Lederhendler, in the 1897 Russian Census, 96.5% of Jews in the Russian Empire
participation by many different nationalities, among which the Jews were to be included, with a secular Jewish culture that would be rooted in the Yiddish language, as David Shneer notes (see Shneer 11).
A period of initial acculturation that saw many Jews living in the former Soviet Union leave the shtetls behind, achieve fluency in the Russian language, and become active members of Soviet society and the intelligentsia, was followed by a period of renewed anti-Semitism and discrimination after the Second World War and the creation of the State of Israel. As Slezkine describes, following the establishment of Israel, many Soviet officials began to view Jews as “an ethnic diaspora potentially loyal to a hostile foreign state,” which, combined with a belief by the Soviet government that Jews had permeated the Russian-Soviet intelligentsia and subverted the foundations of Russian identity in the nationality-centric Soviet state, led to a hostile paradigm that defined many Jews as “traitors twice over” (Slezkine 297). Eventually, anti-Semitic discrimination became institutionalized in official Soviet policy in areas such as education and employment to the point that many Jews sought to emigrate from the Soviet Union to the United States and Israel (see Goldman 338). It is in the background of this inequality and sense of historical exclusion toward Jews throughout the course of Russian and Soviet history that the titular character in What Happened to Anna K. reflects during a trip to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City:
This Saturday, they were at the Guggenheim to see the “Russia!” show. Nine hundred years of masterpieces, the posters said. The lobby teemed with Russians, other New Yorkers, and tourists….
They decided to begin at the bottom, to circle their way up, to skip the ruddy canvases of socialist realism.
exclusion of the Jews. And now, as an immigrant and a Jew, she could only be one of these awed Americans, ogling the work of a foreign country. (Reyn 40-41)
For Anna, these national treasures of Russia, despite their beauty, seem largely out of place to her as a Jew born in the former Soviet Union. In a very literal sense, Anna’s perception of exclusion is rooted in reality, as her ancestors were almost certainly not present for the
creation of the medieval icons or the tapestries that are on display—there simply were not many Jews living in Russia when such artifacts would have been made, and those Jews that were there would have had minimal cultural ties to the non-Jewish population, especially in the context of art produced by the Russian Orthodox Church. However, absence during the production of artifacts or symbols of a national culture does not necessarily preclude later identification with them by immigrants or others who lack ancestral ties to the culture of origin. An example of this has already been described in the earlier chapter on Russian identity, in which a young Vladimir listens to his grandmother retell the Russian folk tale of the Baba Yaga in The Russian
Debutante’s Handbook.
The issues of terminology raised in this passage, in which Anna points out how within the confines of the Russian language “one was either a ‘Russian’ or a ‘Jew’ (one annihilated the possibility of the other),” also demonstrate the presence of this sense of exclusion among Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés due to their identity as Jews. This is true in the sense that, according to Soviet nationality policy, “russkii” and “evrei” were specific national identities that were written into one’s passport and were not interchangeable in a basic legal sense, let alone on a cultural level. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, many Jews, both in the former Soviet Union and the United States, rarely use the term “russkii” to describe themselves, even as the English term “Russian” has been assigned to them both externally and, increasingly, by the émigrés themselves. In a Russian-language interview with sociologist Sam Kliger conducted by writer Aleksandr Burakovskii, both Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés, the term “russkii” is repeatedly placed in quotation marks when used as a label to describe the Russian-speaking Jewish émigré community, even as the term “russkie evrei” is repeatedly used without quotation marks, demonstrating the extent to which Russian and Jewish identities continue to feel
exclusive to many Russian-speaking Jews (see Burakovskii 517). Even in a context of
emigration, in which Burakovskii is free to omit the quotation marks when he writes the word “russkii,” and Anna is free to think of herself as both Russian and Jewish without being
While there were some sporadic respites from this discrimination, including the initial
development of a Soviet Yiddish culture between the 1920s and 1940s (until its repression by the Soviet government after World War II), as well as several largely unsuccessful attempts to revive the use of Yiddish after the 1950s and attract more Jews to the distant Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Birobidzhan, as Igor Krupnik notes, these limited measures failed to engage many Soviet Jews on cultural terms (see Krupnik 80). Nor did they distract from the issues of everyday discrimination that many Soviet Jews still faced. In addition, the Holocaust and the Second World War, while not stemming directly from Soviet policies, also took a heavy toll upon many Jews living in the Soviet Union.
Thus, it is not surprising that memories of these past trials continue to form a large component of definitions of Jewishness for these émigrés, even today. As Markowitz states of many Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés: “In America, while they no longer suffer as Jews, their past suffering and that of their parents and grandparents remain a core part of their Jewish identity” (Markowitz 1993 151). This sentiment emerges in a scene in The Last Chicken in America, in which Masha is riding in a car with a condescending family of American Jews who are discussing issues of Jewish identity in the context of the upcoming Passover holiday:
In the car, Pamela asked why Jews celebrated Passover. Kevin said it was because of the Exodus from Egypt. Pamela said that was correct. We must never forget the bitterness of slavery. Nor must we forget about the Jews in Russia, who were still enslaved and couldn’t pray or celebrate High Holidays. It was why they came to America. Because American Jews rescued them.
“Has Masha been rescued?” said Kevin. “Of course she has.”
“She doesn’t seem very grateful.”
“I’m sure she’s grateful. She just hasn’t learned what it means to be Jewish yet.” “Maybe she’ll learn at the pageant,” said Kevin.
“Let’s hope,” Pamela said.
couldn’t have. It meant leaflets and threats and a general on TV promising pogroms in May. It meant immigration. (Litman 68)
For Pamela and her son Kevin, Jewishness is inextricably tied to Judaism, and Jewish identity is impossible to conceive fully without taking part in Jewish religious practices. The option of defining their Jewish identity in the context of persecution and anti-Semitism is not available to Pamela and Kevin as it is to Masha. This is true in large part due to the fact that many American Jews do not experience anti-Semitism on a regular basis, and when it does occur, it is rarely in a government-backed or institutionalized context, as per in the former Soviet Union. Thus, for many American Jews such as Pamela and Kevin, the more proactive or
positive components of Jewish identity, such as attending a synagogue, being a member of Jewish organizations, and adherence to religious practices, such as keeping a kosher kitchen, assume greater importance as a means of being Jewish. For Masha, Jewishness is a simple existential issue that she inherently encounters through her ethnic heritage. Indeed, the disconnect is mutual, as Masha feels that Kevin and Pamela have been coddled by living in a society where they have not had to endure many of the same hardships that she and her family faced as a result of being Jewish. Masha’s Jewishness has been framed in no small part by these memories of persecution and anti-Semitism, even after relocating to a new social context in which she and her family no longer deal with anywhere near the same level of anti-Semitism that they faced in the former Soviet Union. Ironically, much of the judgment and stigmatization that Masha and other Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés now face in the United States comes from their fellow Jews.
former Soviet Union is true in the sense that many American Jews pushed for changes to the immigration policies of both the United States and the Soviet Union to facilitate increased Jewish emigration. However, it is also quite patronizing, as many Jews emigrating from the former Soviet Union often felt neglected by the established American Jewish community once they had arrived in the United States. As sociologist Steven J. Gold notes: “Émigrés would often
complain that they were not assisted in the ways that they desired. This was especially the case in job placement” (Gold 275). To whatever extent that Pamela recognizes that Masha and her family were victims of anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union, her belief that by having brought them to the United States, where they could practice the Jewish religion freely (and indeed, some émigrés have become religiously active, though most have not), fundamentally misattributes the source of the anti-Semitism that Jews faced in the former Soviet Union, as well as their goals in emigrating.
As Laurie Salitan describes, many Jews in the former Soviet Union were hampered by the fact that the fifth line in their passports indicated that they were Jews, tying them to a
prominent, as American Jews have been forced to confront the fact that many of their counterparts from the former Soviet Union are often very distanced from Jewish religious practices and traditions. As Zeltzer-Zubida described, many Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés “felt that they were being forced to adopt an identity that was unfamiliar to them, while at the same time being alienated and excluded from decision making [sic] positions within the
[American Jewish] community and its organizations” (Zeltzer-Zubida 356). Despite this reality, many American Jewish organizations and institutions have engaged in religious outreach toward Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés, as is depicted in this scene from Petropolis. Sasha is
recounting an exchange with her friend Marina about American Jewish religious life after hearing another émigré named Yulia read a Jewish prayer aloud at a fundraiser in Chicago:
Sasha couldn’t help but be impressed with Yulia’s oratory. She wondered if Yulia really prayed, and to what. Suddenly nostalgic for Phoenix, she could almost feel the heat rising from the Taco Bell parking lot where Marina had pompously delivered the news.
“Jews have their own religion, Sasha.”
“What, they go to church?” Sasha had asked. She’d never seen a religious Jew. “No, a synagogue, and the priest is called a rabbi,” explained Marina. “My grandma remembers her grandma going to one. Now we go, too, with our benefactors. We sit there, and then they give us food and stuff.”
“You pray to Jesus?” “No, to God.”
“To a different god? What’s his name?”
“How would I know?” Marina shrugged. “It’s all in Hebrew. In their English prayer books, they sometimes replace the o with the dash. So I call him Gd. Sounds sort of Vietnamese.” (Ulinich 163)
America. Because Sasha already perceives herself as Jewish prior to having encountered any kind of organized Jewish community or Jewish religious life, she is illustrative of the unique sense of ethnic identification among Russian-speaking Jews that essentially occurs in a vacuum. Indeed, even American Jews who grow up without direct involvement in religious activities or membership to a synagogue might still have some knowledge that such things exist, but they are simply choosing not to partake in them, so their Jewish identity is something that they might place on the lower range of a spectrum of observance. For Sasha and other Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés, without any comparable framework for assessing religious observance or participation, there is no way to see themselves as being more or less actively Jewish than those around them. This represents one reason that outreach by American Jewish organizations and synagogues toward this émigré population has proved so difficult—if they were raised with a secular and ethnic understanding of Jewish identity and already consider themselves to be Jewish by the nature of their existence, then why must they take part in additional Jewish activities?
Jesus. Marina and Sasha’s perceptions of Judaism as an unfamiliar faith that exists through the paradigm of Christianity establish the extent to which the Jewishness of Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés is often quite divorced from actual Judaism. Because, as Remennick notes, many American Jews “probably expected their Russian/Soviet co-ethnics to resemble Tevye and his family, forgetting that for Soviet immigrants those times and places became remote history” (Remennick 190-91), it is possible to understand the dissonance and disappointment on both sides of this cultural and religious divide. These two very distinct understandings of what it means to be Jewish have come to a head in an American context.
Many Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés in the United States feel that they are Jewish simply by the nature of their ethnic identities, leading to a certain degree of freedom and
multiplicity in their thoughts and actions, even to an extent that many American Jews might find illogical or, at the very least, unfamiliar. Kliger points out that a Russian-speaking Jewish émigré can “simultaneously attend a reform synagogue because it is close to his home, invite an orthodox rabbi to officiate at a Bar Mitzvah ceremony, put up a Christmas tree, admire the Russian Orthodox architecture, and learn Buddhist meditation” (Kliger 6). Because Jewish identity is something that is seen as innate by many Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés, it can, and often does, lead to any number of actions or external behaviors that are expressions of
Jewishness, but this identity is not dependent on such actions.
Shternshis how to prepare “kosher pork,” something that would seem contradictory at first, given Jewish dietary prohibitions (the very definition of the word kosher) against eating foods such as pork and shellfish (see Shternshis xiii). Shternshis explains how “in the vocabulary of the Soviet Jews who lived through the government policies of the 1920s and 1930s, the word ‘kosher’ means something that ‘Jews do’… If a Jew prepares pork and eats it in the company of Jews, it is ‘kosher pork’” (xiv). As a result, the idea of a practice becoming Jewish simply because it is being followed by Jews or, at the very least, cognitive dissonance that prevents
self-stigmatization of “non-Jewish” behaviors, can be seen in the history of Russian-speaking Jews both in the former Soviet Union and in America. This idea emerges in a conversation in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook between Vladimir Girshkin and his mother about her recent prayer habits:
Vladimir accepted a glassful of rum. Mother grabbed a post and hoisted herself up until she was on her knees. “Jesus, our Lord,” she said, “please shepherd helpless Vladimir away from his tragic lifestyle, from the legacy his father bequeathed him, from the pauper’s flat which he calls home, and from this criminal Groundhog…” She put her hands together but started to tip over.
Vladimir caught her by one shoulder. “That’s a pretty prayer, Mother,” he said. “But we’re, you know…” He lowered his voice out of habit: “Jewish.”
Mother looked at his face carefully, as if she had forgotten something and it had gone into hiding beneath one of Vladimir’s think brows. “Yes, I know that,” she said, “but it’s all right to pray to Jesus. Your grandfather was a gentile, you know, and his father was a deacon. And I still pray to the Jewish God, the main God, although, I have to say, he hasn’t been helping much lately.
“I mean, what do you think?” she said.
“I don’t know,” said Vladimir. “I guess it’s all right. Do you feel good when you pray like that? To Jesus and to… Isn’t there something else? The Holy Something?”
“I’m not sure,” said Mother. “I can look it up. I got a little brochure on the subway.”
“Well, anyway,” Vladimir said, “you can pray to everyone you want, just don’t tell Father. With Grandma losing her mind, he’s been more into the Jewish God than ever.” (Shteyngart 2002 42-43)
how Jewish identity is perceived by Russian-speaking Jewish émigrés. Because Jewish identity within this community is specifically tied to a sense of ethnic and national belonging, rather than a set of prohibitions or required observances, Vladimir’s mother is able to take part in a behavior that many American Jews would consider to be extremely un-Jewish without seeming to feel that what she is doing is improper or goes against her Jewishness. An American Jew consuming a bacon cheeseburger (something that is decidedly un-kosher according to halachic standards) might do so without any sense of guilt or regret. Indeed, a 2013 Pew Research Center Survey of American Jews found that 78% of those surveyed did not adhere to kosher dietary rules (see “Religious Beliefs and Practices”). But the American Jew might do this operating under a recognition that such actions were either a rejection of traditional Jewish law, or in accordance with the theological attitudes of modernity and change endorsed by the more liberal Jewish denominations that are popular in America today, such as the Reform and Conservative
movements. In essence, for many American Jews, these behaviors might be explained as either the triumph of personal desire over established rules, or as having been justified by
contemporary understandings of Jewish observance.
Jewish émigrés, tied so closely to a sense of ethnic and national identity, faces its own set of risks for a population that, at least for its members who eschew Jewish religious and communal life, would have to maintain marriages and families within the Jewish community in order to perpetuate the existence of an identity based in large part on the notion of ethnicity.
The issue of intermarriage has hardly been limited to the Russian-speaking Jewish émigré community; it has been something that the American Jewish community as a whole has
increasingly faced since the second half of the twentieth century. The 2013 Pew Survey “A Portrait of Jewish Americans” found that 44% of presently married American Jews had a non-Jewish spouse, and that there was a steady increase in the percentage of intermarried couples depending upon the decade in which they had been married.6 Children and spouses from such
marriages will still have a place in many facets of the American Jewish community and an identity as Jews that can be reinforced through religious observance, educational programs, and community organizations. However, a Jewish identity based heavily on ethnic identity that lacks ties to the organized Jewish community, as is often the case for Russian-speaking Jewish
émigrés, means that the effects of intermarriage will continue to pose a challenge for this population in particular.
In his research on intermarriage within the Russian-speaking Jewish community in the United States, Kliger noted, however, that the intermarriage rate was comparatively lower than for American Jews as a whole (see Kliger 5).7 In addition, he found that the rate of intermarriage
was higher for those aged between 35 and 54 than it was for those under 35, leading Kliger to hypothesize that many of these younger émigrés were still acculturating to life in the United
6See “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” <
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/>.
