A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir Read online

  “Of course, we do live in an open society, and you do have the option of filing a complaint with the administration. I know that Lina can be … tenacious, and may urge you to follow this course of action. But I must strongly advise you against it.” The director leaned forward. “The teachers will then have to justify your daughter’s not qualifying for the medal, and instead of a single B she will have to start receiving Cs and Ds. I don’t want that to happen; I don’t want her to be any more upset than necessary. I’m trying to help you. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Dad said. “Thank you for your time and for looking out for Lina.”

  On the walk home, Dad thought how lucky Lina was to have a school director who cared.

  Lina was tenacious. She dedicated the next two years to mastering the medical academy entrance exam in the hope of overcoming the taint on her transcript. Her passion won Dad over, and he hired some of the best tutors in the city to prepare her. Lina took the exam twice. After the second attempt, an administrator from the academy phoned Dad and told him to stop torturing his daughter and send her somewhere she could get accepted. Lina became an engineering student.

  From that moment on, medicine was no longer discussed. “Tomorrow afternoon you’re getting your books, Sunday you’re off, and Monday we’re registering you at Kharkov Polytechnic—get to work,” said Dad, and went out for a walk, ending the deliberations for good. I was three at the time, but even afterward and all through my teenage years I can’t remember having or hearing a single conversation about this event in my sister’s life; the same went for my beatings in school and in the yard. Adapt and endure was how generations of Russian Jews had managed to hang around under the Bolsheviks, and the tsars, and whatever the hell was there before the tsars. My grandfather Lev (my father’s father and my namesake, who died shortly before I was born) was an orphan raised by a yeshiva, a Jewish religious school in a Byelorussian shtetl. Grandpa Lev showed promise in Torah studies, but when the Torah was outlawed and the rabbis killed, he became a factory worker, eventually rising to foreman. Years later, when Dad was sixteen and wanted to become a history professor, Grandpa Lev reminded him that a Jew would never be permitted to join a history faculty, so Dad took a walk and became an engineer.

  Dad excelled in his field: back when Lina was a toddler, he had spearheaded a paper on turbines that was selected for presentation at an international Communist expo in Bulgaria. A week before the trip, a low-ranking KGB sergeant showed up at Dad’s work with a letter from Dad to the expo committee. The letter explained that due to a recently broken leg, Dad would be unable to attend the exhibit and requested that the following [non-Jewish] coworkers represent the project instead of him. The only thing missing was Dad’s signature.

  “But my leg isn’t broken!” Dad blurted out in a moment of idiocy (my father hated lying).

  “Would it help if it were?”

  Dad hastily scribbled his name, went for a walk, and returned the next day, ready to work. Adapt and endure, and those who had allowed themselves to be paralyzed by lamenting over pogroms, anti-Semitism in school, anti-Semitism at work, beatings in the yard, complacent teachers, friction, tides, gravity, and other unalterable factors were ground underfoot.

  Lina was about to enter Kharkov Polytechnic, where nobody cared about her distressed state, where she would need her brain to function in order to have a career and have children. Dad was trying to help her, as were the school director and the administrator from the medical academy. Any way you look at it, Be yourself wasn’t an option—being yourself was the problem.

  * * *

  *1 The Drunken Forest by Gerald Durrell, which covers the author’s wildlife collection expedition to Paraguay and Argentina. Many of Durrell’s techniques for trapping large game can be easily modified for snaring sisters and their boyfriends.

  *2 Karlsson-on-the-Roof by Astrid Lindgren. This tale of a boy and his magical friend is replete with ideas for using common household objects to inflict misery on loved ones. A must-read.

  OLEG AND THE MIRROR

  Kharkov, Ukraine, USSR, November 1987

  In November of the year I entered first grade, about a month after the gas mask drill, a period of unseasonable warmth settled over the city. Early American colonists called this late-fall phenomenon “Indian summer,” because it gave the Indians time for one final raid before suspending their war campaigns until spring. The Russian name is “babye leto” (“old women’s summer”), for it’s the babushki’s last chance to warm their bones in the sun before winter descends for good. Oleg and I didn’t step out of our apartment building: the abnormal weather carried with it an element of risk, and not just for American settlers. An entire platoon of babushki was camped in the yard, any one of whom might start wondering why a pair of first-graders was slinking around outside when there was plenty of homework to be done. Telling the babushki to take a hike was ill-advised (I had attempted it once, with disastrous consequences), which meant that Oleg and I were best off indoors.

  Everyone in my family had gone out to work, to school, or on errands, leaving just us and the empty apartment. We were bored, and amused ourselves by browsing through the various trinkets that Dad had brought home from his trips throughout the USSR. For a while we stayed in the master bedroom, then made our way into the hallway. Nothing special was there, just a couple of bookshelves, a coat rack, and a mirror, placed in the hallway as a courtesy for disheveled guests walking in from the elements. As we passed by the mirror, Oleg looked at me.

  “Are you a zhid?”

  “Zhid” was an ugly word with an ugly meaning. In English the best translation is “kike,” but that doesn’t do it justice, for “kike” is rarely used nowadays in America, whereas “zhid” was heard all around Russia. It meant more than a nasty Jew; it was the term of an epidemic, a sinister cancer many Russians felt was ravaging their country. “Bei Zhidov, Spassay Rossiyu” (“Crush the Jews, Save Russia”) was a common slogan scribbled in the alleyways of Kharkov.

  I was a Jew. I knew that. I didn’t know what that meant.

  “I don’t know,” I said, after a while.

  Oleg was thinking.

  “Let me look at you.”

  I said nothing. Somehow I found myself facing the mirror, straining to see the image through the dirty surface. Behind me, I saw Oleg circling, scanning, searching, trying to pinpoint something.

  “You are a zhid. I know you are. You have the ass of a zhid, the face of a zhid … We learned how to look for them in school.”

  Despite the fact that we lived next door to each other, Oleg and I went to different schools. My parents had lobbied hard to get me enrolled in School Number Three, which was known for being tolerant toward Jews. Of course, I still received my share of beatings, but I suppose it was the school with the gentlest, most understanding beatings that a Jew could get. I thought the other kids didn’t like me. But Oleg was different. He was my friend, my best friend, the veteran of a thousand Battles of Kharkov. Until I stood there with him, I did not make the connection between the beatings and being a zhid.

  Oleg finished his inspection and stood to my left, looking at me in the mirror, his face showing a curious mixture of sympathy and disgust. I wanted to get out of there and away from the mirror, but I couldn’t. I saw a protruding nose attached to a skinny face with thin lips above a long neck. Below was a stooping body with small hips and a flat ass. My familiar image was still there, but overshadowed now by those grotesque features. I wanted the thing in the mirror to be gone.

  “I’ll have to ask my mom about this.” Finally I turned to Oleg. “I’m going to read a bit. I’ll see you later?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  I let him out and watched as he walked across the stairwell to his apartment, just a few feet from mine. I wasn’t angry at him: How can you get angry at someone for speaking the truth? I just turned the lock and leaned against the black leather upholstery stapled to the door.

  A few months ea
rlier, I’d snuck out to the bakery around the corner for some cheese-stuffed vatrushki, and a man with a long mustache started following me. “We’re sick of you,” he hissed, and he grabbed my arm. “Why don’t you all just leave?” I yanked my arm free and spun away, and I felt him chasing me as I sprinted home. I managed to hold on to the vatrushki but I didn’t want them anymore, and the whole time I couldn’t understand why he was holding me if he wanted me to leave, and who “you all” were, and why he was sick.

  Anna Konstantinovna’s face floated up to replace the man’s. She was a tall woman to start with, but the times I stared up at her from the floor, she appeared gigantic. I saw my gym teacher, whose name I wasn’t sure of, winking at the fat kid and the brothers and shutting the locker room door for a long ten minutes. Then I was back in the apartment, overhearing Mom and Dad late in the evenings, when friends came over and they whispered of synagogues and “us” and other bad things. What had been disparate moments of fear and pain swirled around my mind until the answer came to me, resolved itself in the mirror.

  I peeled myself off the leather door and went to bed. It wasn’t even dinnertime, but I felt tired.

  The last two things I said to Oleg were lies. Other than passing encounters on the stairwell, I never talked to him again. And I didn’t even consider asking Mom anything. I remembered her dragging me along to meet with Anna Konstantinovna after the first few beatings, and the way her hand crushed mine on the walk home afterward, and her anger made me feel worse. In a country where parents didn’t trust their kids and people got arrested for “holding subversive Jewish gatherings” in their houses, what could she have told me? What did she know about being a Jew besides the persecution? I don’t know if I understood all of that at the time. What I did know was, this was something Mom couldn’t help me with.

  I tried hard to forget about the whole thing. I didn’t want to be pitied. I hated myself and I wanted others to hate me. I wanted to surround myself with an aura of hatred. Mirrors became enemies, and anything good in them was transparent, like a vampire’s reflection. I stayed in the apartment and read fairy tales and stories from faraway lands. The reminders of being a zhid still came, at school and in the yard, but over time something else began to creep up on me, in addition to the fear. I considered the bullies lucky: they only had to see me once in a while; I had to live with myself every day. I envied them.

  DISARMING THE ADVERSARIES

  Kharkov, Ukraine, USSR, Spring of 1988

  Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns; why should we let them have ideas? —Joseph Stalin

  Tat-tat-tat-tat rattled the rotary dial, Dad’s fist clenched and pale as he gripped the black receiver. “I’ll take two bags … that’s fine. Same as last year? Good, I’m leaving now.” He replaced the receiver, grabbed a bag stuffed with rubles and flour, and hurried out into the rain.

  Purchasing matzah in Kharkov required money, flour, and discretion. The money went to the underground bakers who operated out of apartments throughout the city. But even with the reforms that had begun to creep into Soviet society, it was still dangerous for the bakers to purchase large quantities of flour in the springtime. To avoid drawing attention, the suppliers asked customers to contribute flour along with rubles; that way, today’s buyer provided ingredients for tomorrow’s client. Discretion was necessary, because possession got you anything from a heavy fine to the loss of your job, depending on the political climate. For Dad, discovery likely meant being unable to work as an engineer. The bakers could face imprisonment.

  Dad hopped on the trolley, mixing in with the rush-hour bustle, then ducked down a predetermined alleyway and exchanged bags. He returned, visibly relieved to lock the door, and instructed me to follow him into the kitchen.

  “We are going to eat matzah,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  He wasn’t sure, but he thought Passover was sometime around now.

  For a man who risked losing his beloved career, Dad didn’t know much about Passover. There were no holiday traditions, no family gatherings, no Seder services (definitely illegal), and if you were crazy enough to try hosting one, good luck finding someone who spoke Hebrew or knew the prayers. Many lost track of when the holiday fell, since Passover, like Easter, is a day that shifts from year to year. Matzah was all that was left, that and rain. “It’s Zhid Easter,” the ordinary Russians would grumble when the first nice day of spring was ruined by a downpour. “Weather always turns shitty on Zhid Easter.” It was as good a way as any to remember a forgotten holiday.

  Incidentally, Christmas didn’t fare much better. Christmas was effectively destroyed by a series of anti-religious campaigns starting in 1928, shortly after the Revolution. But the people still needed a winter holiday to tide them through the dark nights, and that’s when one of Stalin’s propaganda geniuses suggested it would be much easier to co-opt an existing tradition rather than contrive a new one. Stalin agreed, and as a result, Christmas trees, presents, songs, and decorations were uprooted, cleansed of religion, and transplanted over to the New Year. Under this system, families were ordered to celebrate the New Year with New Year’s songs around a New Year’s tree adorned with New Year’s ornaments. Santa moved, too: every New Year’s Eve, jolly, white-bearded Grandfather Frost, who looked exactly like Santa, would drop by in his sleigh with goodies for the children. This revamped holiday celebration debuted in 1935, seven years after the old, religious Christmas was outlawed. People are good at adapting, especially at gunpoint, and after a few winters the new tradition took hold nicely and no one but the old folks thought of or remembered what had been done before.

  How could thousands of years of tradition—Jewish, Christian, Muslim—vanish overnight? What had become of them, the believers, the martyrs, defenders of the faith? The answer is chillingly simple: the martyrs, they were martyred. They were martyred by the millions. The first thing the Communists did upon attaining power was to exterminate the intelligentsia. They killed the priests, they killed the rabbis, they killed the teachers, they killed the judges, they killed anyone and everyone who was a source of knowledge and inspiration. Artists and writers were taken because they distracted the workers; engineers because there were power outages. Farming elders were killed because of food shortages, which led to more food shortages, which led to more dead farmers. They killed with diligence, they killed with pride, they killed and they killed until there wasn’t a man left who could recite so much as a damned nursery rhyme, and with the leaders dead, their memories banned, the books burned, the relics confiscated (and sold to the West to purchase more bullets), the sanctuaries torn down and refurbished into gyms and Pioneer youth centers, the souls of the people left bare and trembling, the Communists’ goal had been accomplished. The Bolsheviks knew: eradicate the culture, and the rest will wither accordingly.

  * * *

  My grandparents’ generation was the last to know what things had been like before 1917, before the Revolution. By the time Grandpa Lev was a man, he spoke Yiddish, had become Bar Mitzvah, and was intimately connected to his history and customs. Many of his contemporaries lived in rural enclaves, governed by their own rules, their hours anchored by yarmulke and tallisim, prayers and feasts, daily reminders of who they were. Everything, from birth to death, was suffused with ritual and meaning. And, as my mother and every rendition of Fiddler on the Roof point out, Jews in that time were a bit snobbish, and viewed themselves with a certain measure of underdog pride. “The goyim [non-Jews] hate us because they envy us,” the Jews of old averred, “because we have something—we are something—that they will never be.”

  It was far from an idyllic existence; anti-Semitism in my grandparents’ time manifested itself in pogroms, violent raids often sparked by times of strife and unrest. Pogroms shattered and burned, raped and looted; pogroms flared up and pogroms died down, spreading through vast regions or smoldering in local provinces, sometimes petering out for decades at a time. Long centuri
es taught Jews to view them as seasonal calamities, unavoidable evils like famine or drought. The Cossacks and peasants who participated in these medieval riots were goaded by their own, medieval beliefs: Jews were witches; Jews concocted outbreaks of plagues; Jews crucified Jesus; Jews plotted to assassinate the tsars. The difference was, Jews before the Revolution knew what it was like to be Jewish. They possessed a language and rituals that were still connected to the meanings behind them. And as they rose, time and again, from burned villages and charred ghettos, they rose as a people. They rose as Jews.

  “Mayn zun, mayn zun,” Grandpa Lev would say to my teenage father as he scrubbed the grease from his hands after returning home from the tank factory. Dad watched my grandfather illegally rinse the bitter herbs, bless the Passover wine, break the matzah, reestablish the covenant of long ago. Dad soaked in the ancient words, grateful for a glimpse into an already-waning world. My father’s generation had an immediate link to the pre-Revolution era. Dad couldn’t learn Yiddish, or study the Torah, or become Bar Mitzvah, but what he did inherit was a yearning for something his father had once had. It was a blurry vision, but it was enough to draw him down the alleyway with a sack of money and flour, risking himself for an obscure holiday that he didn’t comprehend.

  But the afterglow was rapidly fading. The end of World War II was a watershed moment, for the war had destroyed personal records, and Jews began bribing clerks to falsify their passports, altering names and ethnicities to rid themselves of their Hebrew stigma. The yeshivas were gone, the shtetls destroyed. Many Jews had been herded into urban environments where paranoia and the secret police thrived. City life offered plenty of opportunities for informants to root out unwelcome cultural practices. Being a Jew was no longer a seasonal concern.