Have you ever read any books that perfectly articulate how you see the world?  Books that you can show to your friends when you don’t feel like explaining your life view and say, “Here, read this, and you will understand me?”  Shush, A Memoir-Growing up Jewish under Stalin by Emil Draitser, is such a book for me.

There are a couple of books that really explain what being Russian/Jewish is all about:  From Lenin to Lennon, Sashenka, and  The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, which is written by one of the writers that I deeply look up to and plagiarize try to imitate in writing style, Gary Shteyngart.

They all have slightly different takes on growing up Jewish in the Soviet Union.  This one is the closest to what my grandpa has so far told me of life back then. It also explains several questions people often have about Russian Jews:  Why are we not religious?  Why don’t we have Russian names?  How were we mercilessly targeted by the Soviet authorities?  And how are Russian Jews different from Russians?

This book explores all of those themes, particularly the dichotomy of “us” and “them.”  The overarching theme of this book is how Emil (nee Samuil) Draitser grew up imbued with Soviet propaganda and a constant fear of  anti-Semitism that distanced him from his Jewish relatives.  He only discovered the positive aspects of being Jewish after he immigrated to America when he was 37.  He first noticed and started exploring this topic when an academic friend of his mentioned that he spoke at a lower volume whenever he said the word “Jew.”

This piece of information is hardly surprising to anyone growing up in the Soviet Union and even Russia today.  As a Jew, you were constantly put on alert and denigrated in ways that are hard to imagine living in America.  “The Jewish problem” was mulled over both by Soviet officials and the common drunkard at bars.

As Draitser writes, it was so bad that he was constantly looking over his shoulder and disassociated with any Jews in his family, changing his name from Samuil to Emil to seem more Russian.  This was a common phenomenon.  In this same way, my grandfather Zalman became Evgeniy and my grandmother Sarra became Soniya.  Their last name of Gorivodsky was still suspect, but not as bad as, say, Rabinovich, who is the archetypal but of all Russian jokes against Jews.

It’s so bad that even I, brought up mostly in America, still have a stigma about saying the word Jewish to non-Jewish Russians.  For example, if I’m meeting someone Russian I don’t know, I’ll never bring up that I’m Jewish unless it’s mentioned.  I’m not embarrassed to be Jewish in America, but with Russians, it always seems different.  Like I’m afraid they’re going to pogrom me in five minutes. Or offer me a deal on an illegal Chinese cell phone at the very least.

There is always the mentality among Russian Jews that anyone seen doing anything distinctly Jewish is a sucker. Obviously this has faded with life in America, but I was surprised while reading this book at how many of these feelings are still active in me and how they have been developed over several generations.

Even if you’re not a Russian-born Jew raised on dranniki (latkes), pogroms, and Mikhoels, I think you’ll enjoy this book to get a perspective at a unique time in history (Odessa during Stalinism) and someone who maps out very well how he finally reconciles his identity. Draitser really strives and succeeds in recreating the Odessa of his childhood for you and along the way traces the steps of how he is slowly indoctrinated into a Soviet viewpoint, and how he slowly , with help from his family, regains his Jewish heritage. [Insert pithy post-WWII Yiddish phrase here to end the review.]

For those of you who live on another planet (or possibly not in Jewlandia in which case you are hereby pardoned,) Ivri Lider is a very popular Israeli musician.  Not only has he had more hits than Micahel Tyson, he has also publicly come out as gay and still remained successful and popular, which  is a tremendous accomplishment in the fickle world of showbusiness.

Thanks to the kind generosity of 16th Street JCC in DC, I scored two tickets to go see Ivri Lider at 9:30 Club.   Tanya went as my date, because you can never have too many Russian girls at an Ivri Lider concert. Also, we were outnumbered by Israelis. How do you know there are Israelis at any given concert? When the flyers outside specifically state that the artists requests you don’t take any pictures or video and as soon as the lights go off, you hear the sound of 10 Sony D-120s turn on and snap away. It was comforting to be in the presence of so many people blatantly breaking laws and social boundaries and strangers talking loudly into my ear. I felt like my internship in Tel Aviv all over again.

If you’ve read my Jewlicious post on Ivri, you’ll see the first two paragraphs regurgitated. Because I’m lazy.   What I really wanted to talk about here is the feeling I got when I went to concert.

Every day, I work, live, and play in America.  It’s hectic here, people are sometimes unfriendly, and the barista is under enormous pressure to get your order out in three seconds or be scolded.  America is a great place for opportunities, but cold, and at times, leaves you burnt out.   When you are at work,  your mind is constantly on deadlines, on brisk English, and on power lunches.

When you come to a concert for an Israeli artist,  something changes.  The mood softens, time slows down, and you see lots and lots of Israelis. And suddenly, you don’t feel like you’re in the United States anymore.  You feel like you’re on the Frishman beach, on a July night, and it’s sunset.  The music is far away, coming from a bar on the beach, and you are sitting in the sand with a hookah in one hand and a slice of watermelon in the other while techno pipes in from far away over the melting sun.  The tension fades away. People start talking in Hebrew and checking their cell phones, but it’s not a check for work email. A check to see that it’s 11:00 and it’s a summer night and their friends are just coming down to get the party started.

You are far away, floating on the Mediterranean, smelling the flowers, the salt by the tayelet, the hot, salty foods of the street vendors.  You are standing next to people who are a million miles away and a thousand times more relaxed, and you suddenly feel shy to practice the Hebrew you’ve been dying to use since three summers ago.

You forget for a moment all the issues you had in Israel, and you just viscerally feel the connection that you established to Israel the first time you went.  It’s like the connection you have with your husband.  You can’t really define it.  It’s just always there, enveloping you, a source of strength.

Then, the concert ends, and you are back to reality.   You feel a distinct sense of homesickness that you always feel when you think of Israel even though you’ve never lived there longer than two months, and, at the same time, the pain of guilt.  You’re not Israeli, you didn’t serve in the Army.  How can you love and visit Israel but, for long periods of time, support it from afar? You’re a hypocrite, an armchair Zionist. You struggle with these thoughts every day.  How can you be proud of the fact that you don’t do anything physical for Israel? You are always embarrassed to talk to Israelis who ask you how you know Hebrew.  “Oh, I interned in Israel for two months,” seems equivalent to “Oh, I gave food to hungry Africans by clicking on a website button.” You remain undecided, just like you do every day.

But then Ivri starts singing Kos HaKhula, and, for a moment, you forget about your monumental struggle  and you are back in the music.

Apologies for the sentimental musing.  I ran fresh out of sarcasm.  Come tomorrow for some more, please.

My mom calls me.

“Do you have a candle,” she asks.

“No..”  I think of all the Glade scented candles I have.  She can’t mean those.   Her voice sounds serious.

“Why not?  Don’t you know what day it is?”

I start to panic.  I didn’t know.  I felt like I failed some sort of Jew test.

“No.  What day is it?”

“It’s Holocaust Memorial Day.  Go light a candle.” Oh, I had candles.  But,I wasn’t going to light a Glade Scented (R) Cinnamon Apple candle for 6 million Jews.

I can’t believe I forgot about the holiday whose primary message is “Remember.”  I knew it was coming up, but not exactly when.  That’s the disadvantage of not being involved in a Jewish community.  You have no clue when the holidays are anymore.   One year you’re celebrating Yom Hashoa in Beit Shemesh with Israelis on a cloudless day, the next you’re reading names of victims in the rain on campus.  The next, you’re doing nothing because you are a Big Career Woman in DC and completely forget.  But even if you forget, the fact what happened remains,  and nothing that people say or do, including Ahmedinejad, can really wipe that fact away.

Hannah Szenesh’s song is probably the most symbolic to me of the Holocaust because I first learned it when I was in Poland and my  Israeli chaperone sang it in Auschwitz.   And then, a couple years later, I read parts of Hannah’s diary in Hebrew.  And couldn’t imagine how she wrote such beautiful poetry, but then died in blackness.

So here it is.  Song of a lonely paratrooper, for Yom HaShoa, by a fellow Russian Jew.

Last night, Mr. B and I went to go see A.B. Yehoshua at Sixth and I.  I can’t believe how much they’ve completely renovated what was a stale building and community somewhere on the outskirts of Chinatown to a vibrant focal meeting point for all kinds of DC Jews and at the caliber of speakers they tend to garner.  I am constantly impressed at the amount of work they do on their brand, especially to engage people in their 20s-30s and how meticulously organized all of their events are.  Having been behind the scenes as a Grinspoon Intern for Hillel, I am amazed at how seamless they make it all look.  Trust me, you don’t ever want to be a Grinspoon Intern.  It’s like looking inside the proverbial Sinclarian pro-Israel sausage factory.

Anyway, the reason I came to know about Yehoshua is because of one of my college Hebrew teachers, Nathan, who always tried to imbue in our class a higher sense of Hebrew literature and culture than just learning alef-bet and eating hummus all day to celebrate “being Israeli.”  So when I saw The Liberated Bride in Ben Gurion, I bought it.

It took me a while to get into the book.  Actually, probably three or four tries.  Because it is ENORMOUS.  When I finally did, I read it all the way through.  Coming from off from an Israel high, I pretty much hated the book.  Why did he write about Palestinians so much? Focus on the Israeli identity!  Write more postively about the soldiers!  Why do you have negative Israeli characters in your book at all!

I even had heated arguments about this with my Hebrew teacher, who had previously made aliyah and served in the army, etc.

“I hate Yehoshua,” I said.

“You’ll grow into him,” said Nathan.

“He only writes negative things about Israel,” I said.

“Israel isn’t all positives,” Nathan, the oleh and hayal boded,  said.

It was only after I’d lived a couple months in Israel on my internship that I realized he was right.  Who was I to argue with someone that had had far more experience in Israel than me?  When I lived in Migdal Dizengoff with three other roommates in a 1-bedroom apartment for $1600 a month, I began to understand that Zionism in America often overgeneralizes.

But maybe we need it to.  Because without it, I don’t think anyone would have ever made aliyah.  If someone had told me, “You’ll be sick of falafel, sick of how isolating it can feel here when you don’t know anyone even though everyone is all HAPPY AND JEWISH ALL THE TIME, sick of the rude customer service attitude, and sick of how you can’t get ANYTHING on Shabbat,sick of how when people find out you’re Russian they immediately stereotype against you  ” I definitely would have hesitated.

But now after even a couple months in Israel, I feel that I am starting to grow to Yehoshua a little bit.  Or he is growing on me.  He said the same thing in his conversation last night.  He said that Israeli writers are expected to project the Israeli experience in everything they write.  But sometimes, they just want to write about people, not Israelis or Arabs, just the people experience instead of politics.   Sometimes, they don’t want the burden.

And that’s what we in America have to try hard to do; don’t look at Israelis like Paul Newman from Exodus (which, actually, is an excellent movie.)  When you see Americans, do you think of them all as George Washington+G.W. Bush+Donald Trump?  No, we’re all individual people who don’t always have “American” as the forefront of our conscience.  And neither do Israelis, and that was his point.

He also made another very excellent point, that humor is the most important way to get a point across, something that I highly agree with. It’s strange, given that my impressions if The Liberated Bride was that it wasn’t all that humorous, but stuck in langorous doldrums of identity, divorce, and serious topics. I think this was my favorite part of his discussion, because I really came to understand how he worked as a writer, not what he thought of Israeli politics, which is ultimately what the talk ended up being about.

He said that he considered the family unit, particularly husband and wife, to be of utmost importance, because being married day to day is the most challenging and rewarding thing you can do, which I really respect him for.

I still don’t agree with his very left wing views, or the fact that he should be involved in politics at all.  My thought is that if you are respected in your profession, don’t tarnish it by blasting your political opinion, be it right, left, or Ale Yarok.

Overall, he was a lively and animated writer and personage, but one that, as us writers tend to do , liked to hear himself talk a little too much. I’m glad I got to see him, even though I still love/hate him.

Thoughts on Tunnels in Gaza:

Yesterday, Dan and I were listening to an interview on NPR with a Christian Science Monitor reporter who had gone into the tunnels in Gaza. That report is here.

I had always heard that Palestinians used these tunnels only to smuggle weapons, but it appears that they use them as a major food supply source as well:

BLOCK: You say maybe weapons. But Israel has been quite emphatic that weapons are absolutely coming through shipped from Iran and from Syria.

Mr. MURPHY: Well, I do want to emphasize that I haven’t been there in quite some time. It’s possible that this has changed. But after Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah, they took all Fatah’s weapons which had been supplied by the U.S. more or less in Egypt. So, a lot of the tunnel smugglers at that time were telling me that unfortunately, as far as they’re concerned, they’re just businessmen. They’re capitalists red in tooth and claw, that the gun business wasn’t a good business anymore. Gaza quite simply was awash in weapons and they were shifting to other uses. I’m sure that a lot of explosives do move in and out of those tunnels from Egypt that are used to make the rockets that are fired in Israel, and so forth. But I do think that the level of weapons that are coming through those tunnels and the notion that if those tunnels are shut, there would be no weapons in Gaza is at best overstated.

I decided to investigate. I found this very well-produced independent video documenting the development of these tunnels.

It clearly states that they smuggle weapons in through the tunnels, but also that they are a major source food and medicine in light of the blockade against Hamas. Additionally, the Egyptians also sometimes block the tunnels, possibly because by doing so they ensure stability with Israel.

Some have said that, while Hamas is a terrorist organization, it brings stability by building infrastructure, roads, and schools for the people in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas is particularly popular among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, though it also has a following in the West Bank, and to a lesser extent in other Middle Eastern countries. Since its formation in 1987, Hamas has conducted numerous social, political, and military actions. Its popularity stems in part from its welfare and social services to Palestinians in the occupied territories, including school and hospital construction. The group devotes much of its estimated $70 million annual budget to an extensive social services network, running many relief and education programs, and funds schools, orphanages, mosques, healthcare clinics, soup kitchens, and sports leagues. According to the Israeli scholar Reuven Paz “approximately 90 percent of the organization’s work is in social, welfare, cultural, and educational activities”.^[96]

However, the other side of the coin is that Hamas, by making the destruction of Israel its mission statement, it also uses civilians as a human shields, such as in this video, where it shoots mortars from the UNRW school that was bombed a couple days ago: and created an international outcry when clearly Hamas members were hiding there.

Obviously the situation is complicated, but it seems that, despite all the good Hamas has caused to the Palestinian people, it has brought much more harm in the form of deaths because Israeli soldiers were targeting Hamas members that hid in civilian houses just for the propaganda value and by calling itself to the destruction of Israel, closed all means of food supply other than the tunnels via nations’ boycott of the group.

Your thoughts?