by Masha Gessen
As we talked, it emerged that this woman was not Jewish. Like many ethnic Russian Birobidzhan families, however, hers had mixed with the Jews. The woman’s son was married to one of Iosif Bekerman’s many granddaughters. All of Bekerman’s three children were married to ethnic Russians, but his favorite granddaughter, Iosif had told me, smiling with his cataract-clouded eyes, strongly identified as Jewish. Yulia “even went to Jewish study classes,” he related, in the big city of Khabarovsk, where she was studying to be a dentist. “Imagine that!” he said. “She told me she would always keep the name, she would always be a Bekerman.” The month Yulia graduated from dental school, about six months before I visited Birobidzhan, she had also gotten married, to an ethnic Russian. As her wedding date neared, Iosif sensed doubts and finally decided to talk to his granddaughter. “I said to her, ‘Take his name.’ I said, ‘You are going to have to live among people, you are going to have to work. You are not going to want to be a Bekerman.’ ” From what I could tell, Yulia had been relieved; she took her husband’s Russian surname and was now living in Khabarovsk, working as a dentist, and saving for an apartment, and her grandfather was very proud of her.
The question everyone asked me before I went to Birobidzhan and after I returned was: Are there any Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Region? I posed it to Valery Gurevich, the deputy governor responsible for everything Jewish in the region, from the children’s song-and-dance ensemble to the statues of imaginary shtetl figures all over the city—a series of illustrations to Sholem Aleichem stories cast in bronze. I felt ridiculous asking a Jew in Birobidzhan if there were Jews in Birobidzhan, but he was a master at answering this question. His answer was “Well…”
He tried to avoid giving me any figures at all—I had to fill them in later—but the gist of his story was this: Before the Soviet Union collapsed, the census placed the percentage of Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Region at a bit over four, which was about four times the percentage of Jews in the general population of the Soviet Union. In absolute figures, that was about nine thousand Jews. But these figures were based on answers people gave to the census taker, an official, in a country where if one had a choice (for example, if one of one’s parents was not Jewish), one did not choose to call oneself Jewish. Just ten years before the last Soviet census, the percentage of Jews in the region’s population had been three times higher—suggesting that it had been diluted by intermarriage but the number of people who had some Jewish roots was a lot higher than the official nine thousand.
So it should come as no surprise that the number of people who emigrated to Israel when this became possible, at the turn of the 1990s, far exceeded the official number of Jews in Birobidzhan. And there were still some Jews left—a couple thousand, give or take as many.
Of them, roughly five people—including Iosif Bekerman, Maria Rak, and Valery Gurevich—were engaged on an ongoing basis with Jewish culture. Of them, only one—Bekerman—spoke Yiddish. There were no Yiddish writers left in the Jewish Autonomous Region.
EPILOGUE
* * *
On February 18, 1981, my parents, my six-year-old brother, and I boarded a plane in Moscow. We had stayed up all night, in accordance with something that had become a tradition: departing émigrés held open houses all night before leaving. Dozens of people came to say good-bye, and I remember that my parents felt socially successful perhaps for the first and only time in their lives—throwing a going-away-forever party is as close as most of us can come to attending our own wakes. I also remember that some people did not come, evidently for fear of being associated with traitors to the Soviet motherland. Thirty-five years later, I recall their names but not the names of the people who were there.
By morning the festivities had grown bleary-eyed and the jokes tedious. There was one that I found increasingly unfunny, courtesy of a colleague and friend of my mother’s, a man who would emigrate years later. “How do you know that the decadent West really exists?” he would ask. By “decadent West” he meant simply the West but as seen from the Soviet Union, where propaganda conventions dictated always adding that appellation. “Have you seen any material evidence of the decadent West’s existence?” We had not, not really, aside from a few paperbacks, bubble gum, a couple of bottles of Pepsi, an impossibly perfect Bic pen owned by one of my classmates, and a set of bright plastic toothbrushes with absurdly large heads for improbably large white teeth, a gift from a visitor only my father had seen. This evidence was circumstantial at best, and inconclusive.
We were searched at the airport, under ruthless fluorescent lights. The customs officer decreed that my drawings had to stay in the country, along with my box of pencils and paper, but not an inlaid brooch from my great-grandmother, which I would soon lose myself. My little brother’s yellow plastic gun was scrutinized. My relatives and a few of my parents’ friends waved tirelessly from behind a steel barrier. A bus took us to a Vienna-bound plane.
The plane’s destination was part of an elaborate charade. Our exit visas—small sheets of greenish-white paper, folded to make a book of three pages—were now our only identity documents, since we had been stripped of our Soviet citizenship as a condition of leaving. Fittingly, when we forfeited our Soviet passports, we lost the only identity documents that would list our nationality as Jewish—it was our citizenship that had been Soviet. Now we were “stateless” in the eyes of the world, though the visas said we were leaving the Soviet Union to go to Israel to take up permanent residence there.
The right to leave had been won, through hard work, by the joint efforts of Soviet Zionists and their supporters in the United States, but by the time it had been granted, in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union had long severed diplomatic ties with Israel. This meant, among other things, that a plane could not go directly from the Soviet Union to Israel, and neither could the Jews. Vienna, the nearest capitalist—Western—city to Moscow, became the way station. For the many beneficiaries of the right to leave who were not Zionists, this layover was a stroke of luck, a chance to break ranks and declare their intention to seek asylum in the United States—or Canada, or Australia, or, for the reckless and hopeless few, a Western European country that would never accept them. My parents were planning to take this option in Vienna, as were most of the people on our plane.
It was a plane full of people with one-way tickets and nothing to show for themselves but the greenish exit visas and one suitcase per person. The concentration of loss and hope made the air in the cabin feel thick. The plane sat on the runway for what seemed like hours. Would it ever take off? Did the West actually exist? I looked out the window, ready to watch the snowed-under landscape of my homeland recede in the gray morning light, but we sat and sat on the runway, and my supply of anticipatory nostalgia slowly evaporated.
A black Volga, an elegant Soviet rip-off of the classic Volvo, pulled up to the plane. Every refugee inside tensed, all of us gripping our exit visas. In terrified silence, we observed as two uniformed men exited the car, flanking a prison-pale man in black. By the time they had climbed the stairs into the cabin, someone’s whispered “Mendelevich” had spread from head to tail. When they entered, I saw that the pale man was handcuffed to each of his uniformed companions. They released him, he sat down, they exited, and soon the plane took off.
All of us owed our right to leave the Soviet Union in large part to Yosef Mendelevich, the man who was now flying with us. In 1970, Mendelevich led a group of Jews in an effort to hijack a plane in order to fly to Sweden, where they planned to ask for help in getting to Israel. The group never got off the ground, or even on the plane—they were arrested near the airport hours before the planned hijacking. All of them were sentenced to long prison terms, and most were eventually released into foreign custody. Mendelevich had served nearly eleven years before he boarded our plane, which would take him to Vienna and from there to Israel. My parents’ plan to tell the Israeli officials in Vienna that they did not want to make aliyah had just grown that much harder: t
hey would have to do it in proximity to, and possibly in the presence of, a man who had risked all and sacrificed more than a decade of his life for their right to move to the Jewish homeland. (My parents still carried out their plan, in spite of considerable, and unsubtle, pressure from the Israelis in Vienna.)
Mendelevich was twenty-two years old when he attempted to hijack that plane. For several years before that, he had spent his Sundays in the Rumbula Forest outside Riga, as part of a small group of Jews cleaning up the place where tens of thousands of Jews had been executed—and on the way to which Dubnow had died. In 1964, the Jewish activists of Riga won the right to place a large stone on the site. It was the only monument to victims of the Holocaust erected in the Soviet Union, and the authorities had made their permission contingent on two requirements: the monument had to include Soviet state symbols, and it could not contain the word “Jewish.” The large piece of black granite bore the words “To the victims of fascism” in Latvian, Russian, and Hebrew, and, on the other side, featured a hammer and sickle and the dates “1941–1944.” It was consistent with the Soviet narrative, in which Hitler’s victims had been the “anti-fascists.”
Mendelevich and a small group of young Jews began not only to meet at Rumbula on Sundays but to form a group Jewish identity, for the first time since their parents’ and grandparents’ generations had been massacred in that forest. They also made contact with the few surviving representatives of those generations and learned about Zionism from them.1 The plot to hijack an airplane took shape and, even in its failure, became one of the most important events of the new movement for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. That evening in February 1981, all of the passengers of our plane had dinner in a large hall at a refugee camp in Vienna. Mendelevich wore a wide-brimmed black hat, and his black clothes and his paleness now read as Orthodox rather than “prison.”
The American Jews who had lobbied for Mendelevich to be released from prison, and for all of us to be released from the Soviet Union, expected every one of us to look like that—as if we had emerged from a turn-of-the-century family photograph, as if we had been perfectly preserved at Ellis Island for seventy-five years. Their Jewish identities began with those old photographs and vague stories of their forebears coming from someplace in what may or may not have been Russia.
To me, being Jewish was the shape of my nose, the color of my eyes and my hair, and the notation in my documents, all of which kept me from being like other people. For my parents, it was the source of their greatest fear—that their children would be kept from becoming who they could be and, more immediately and more to the point, that their children would get hurt. My parents knew precisely what they feared: both of them had been blindsided by college admissions committees that had rejected them for being Jewish. For both of them, Jewish was what they were and what they did not want to be.
When I was in my early teens, my mother’s dinner-party conversation with a near stranger accidentally dispatched me to a clandestine festival of Jewish song held in a forest outside of Moscow. Attendees took a commuter train out to the designated station, then walked for a while, following discreet signs pinned to trees or drawn with a stick in the sandy ground, until the woods thickened and then opened into a clearing. There we laid down some logs to form an auditorium; we sat, and the space in front of us became the stage. Men and women, very young and just young, single, in couples, and in trios, usually with a guitar or two or three, took turns standing in front of the small crowd and singing. Their repertoire was limited: “Hava Nagila,” “Tum Balalaika,” “Shalom Aleichem”—in slightly varied arrangements and invariably passionate renderings. I had never heard any of these songs before, yet I felt that I had grown up listening to them. For the first time in my life, I felt that I belonged to a community of people.
When we arrived in the United States, the Jewish community in Boston assigned us to a well-meaning suburban family to help us in the acculturation process. Our relationship with them played out in accordance with a scenario followed by tens of thousands of pairings of Jewish families around the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. They were nice. They wanted to celebrate Shabbat with us and help us find our way to a synagogue. They wanted to facilitate my belated bat mitzvah and my brother’s bar mitzvah, this one in a timely manner, God willing. All my parents wanted was the option, finally, of not being Jewish. I wanted something marginally more complicated: unlimited access to Yiddish musical schlock.
Decades later, I read Mendelevich’s interviews about groping in the dark for any information about being Jewish, collecting scraps of holiday traditions and music. His path had begun in the Rumbula Forest.2 Later still, I read Simon Dubnow, who was shot in his old age for being too slow to walk to the Rumbula Forest. Dubnow finally released me from thinking that our community-assigned mentors had been more Jewish than I was.
And what of the place where Dubnow’s autonomist vision should have been realized? It was the least Jewish of all. In the Sholem Aleichem Library, in Birobidzhan, in the tiny room that houses what the library describes as the “national collection,” I found a single book published in Yiddish, in the 1990s. Printed on the cheap paper that carried so many important words in that decade, it is a poetry collection, a bilingual Russian-Yiddish edition. Good poetry is always a surprise, and a couple of the poems struck me and stayed with me. I tracked down the author.
I would have wanted to pass the baton to my sons,
a symbol of our shared grief and our shared pain.
Not a symbol of victories
nor a candy or a wrapper
but a symbol of pain, a symbol of war
in which I did not die.
I was an unforgivably bad soldier in this war,
and I deserve no medals. I don’t even deserve sympathy.
I have betrayed my era
because I lived, like a mouse, in the cellar of silence.
Never mind the era: I
betrayed my own father,
My father, who never returned from the other world war.
I’ve betrayed everyone who did not come home in the 1930s,
everyone who turned to dust, to grass, to trees.
I would have liked to pass the baton to my sons,
but I have nothing to pass on,
save for the grief, the pain, and the happiness I lack,
and the belief that I can still find it.
“It’s about growing up Soviet,” Leonid Shkolnik, the poet, told me when we met. “Nothing else, just Soviet. We knew nothing else.” Shkolnik’s father died while a soldier in the Soviet army at the very end of the Second World War; Leonid himself, conceived during his father’s New Year’s furlough, was born after the war. When he was a small child, his mother moved their family of two to Birobidzhan, where she had a sister—the Shkolniks’ only surviving relative. Shkolnik’s mother worked as an accountant. He went to School Number Two, where most of the students were ethnic Jews and no one ever talked about it. The first time he recalled anyone asking him if he was Jewish was when he was ten or eleven and two Israelis stopped him in the street. That would have been the 1956 visit by the Avidars, the Israeli ambassador and his wife. They gave the boy some Israeli stamps; like many Soviet schoolchildren, he collected these tokens of other countries’ existence.
He told me that it was perhaps this encounter that prompted him, a few years later, to ask his mother to teach him Yiddish; he had heard her speaking the half-forbidden language to her sister. He became the youngest Yiddish speaker in Birobidzhan. And since he also wrote poetry, he fell in with the crowd of Yiddish-language poets—the ones who had been jailed when he was a toddler. They now groomed Shkolnik to become the editor of Birobidzhaner shtern.
He thought of himself as a freethinker; indeed, he was so independent of authority that he sometimes published truncated versions of Politburo members’ speeches—the censorship bureau did not have anyone who spoke Yiddish, so no one could check his copy. Otherwise, editing the
newspaper was an adventureless enterprise, and it hardly occurred to Shkolnik to question whether this should be so. “I was a Soviet person,” he told me. “The whole country condemned Zionist aggression—and we condemned it, too. The paper absolutely had to do it; this was a nonnegotiable part of my job. And the thing is, this was not a trade-off for me—it’s not like I consciously promoted a position I did not support in order to work for the paper; I actually believed it.”
One time—it must have been in the mid-1980s—Shkolnik saw an old Birobidzhan character, an aging man who went hatless year-round, reading the most recent issues of Birobidzhaner shtern on an outdoor billboard. (All Soviet papers were regularly posted on such billboards.) Shkolnik approached him, fishing for a compliment. “This is all crap, the stuff you write,” the man snapped. “You are marching to the orders of TASS [the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union]; all the papers print the same thing.” Then he told Shkolnik that he had served time in the camps, and that was when he had stopped wearing a hat. “Because that’s how the guards tortured us, in minus-sixty weather, making us work hatless in lumber production. When we relieved ourselves, our urine froze. So the weather in Birobidzhan is nothing for me.” The man had spent years trying to get permission to emigrate, and he died in Birobidzhan.
By the late 1980s, Shkolnik was one of the best-known people in Birobidzhan. When the Soviet Union held its first quasi-free election, he ran for parliament on a platform of securing greater autonomy for Birobidzhan and restoring Yiddish-language book publishing. He was elected in 1989 and became, for the Soviet TV-watching public, the face of Birobidzhan.
