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Authors: Anya Von Bremzen
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overheated socialist flesh, crayfish bait, and boiled eggs, that sine qua non of Soviet beach picnics. We stayed with Tamara, Grandma Liza’s deaf, retired older sister, formerly an important local judge. Tamara’s daughter, Dina, had a round doll’s face perched on a hippo’s body; she worked as an economist. Dina’s son, Senka, had no neck and no manners. Dina’s husband, Arnold, the taxi driver, told jokes. Loudly—how else?
“Whatsa difference between Karl Marx and Dina?” he’d roar. “Marx was an economist, our Dina’s a
senior
economist! HA HA HA!!”
“Stop nauseating already into everyone’s ears!” Dina would bellow back.
This was how they talked in Odessa.
In the morning I awoke—appetiteless—to the
tuk-tuk-tuk
of Dina’s dull chopping knife. Other
tuk-tuk-tuks
echoed from neighborhood windows. Odessa women greeted the day by making
sininkie
, “little blue ones,” local jargon for eggplants. Then they prepared stuffed peppers, and then
sheika
, a whole stuffed chicken that took hours to make. Lastly they fried—fried everything in sight. Odessa food seemed different from our Moscow fare: greasier, fishier, with enough garlic to stun a tramful of vampires. But it didn’t seem particularly
Jewish
to me; afterall, black bread and
salo
(pork fatback) was Judge Tamara’s favorite sandwich.
Then one day I was dispatched on an errand to the house of some distant relations in the ramshackle Jewish neighborhood of Moldovanka. They lived in an airless room crowded with objects and odors and dust of many generations. In the kitchen I was greeted by three garrulous women with clunky gold earrings and fire-engine-red hair. Two were named Tamara just like my great-aunt; the third was Dora. The Tamaras were whacking a monstrous pike against the table—“to loosen its skin so it comes off like a stocking.” They paused to smother me with noisy, blustery kisses, to ply me with buttermilk, vanilla wafers, and honeycake. Then I was instructed to sit and watch “true Jewish food” being prepared.
One Tamara filleted the fish; the other chopped the flesh with a flat-bladed knife, complaining about her withered arm. Dora grated onions, theatrically wiping away tears. Reduced to a coarse oily paste and blended with onion, carrots, and bread, the fish was stuffed back into the skin and sewn up with thick twine as red as the cooks’ hair.
It would boil now for three whole hours. Of course I must stay! Could I grate horseradish? Did I know the meaning of Shabbos? What, I hadn’t heard of the pogroms? More wafers, buttermilk?
Suffocating from fish fumes, August heat, and the onslaught of entreaties and questions, I mumbled some excuse and ran out, gasping for air. I’m sure the ladies were hurt, mystified. For some time afterward, with a mixture of curiosity and alienation, I kept wondering about the taste of that fish. Then, back in Moscow, it dawned on me:
On that August day in Odessa, I had run away from my Jewishness.
I suppose you can’t blame a late-Soviet big-city kid for fleeing the primal shock of gefilte fish. As thoroughly gentrified Moscow Jews, we didn’t know from seders or matzo balls. Jewishness was simply the loaded
pyaty punkt
(Entry 5) in the Soviet internal passport. Mandated in 1932, two years before my mother was born, Entry 5 stated your
ethnicity
: “
Russian
, Uzbek, Tatar … Jew.” Especially when coupled with anundesirable surname, “Jew” was the equivalent of a yellow star in the toxic atmosphere of the Brezhnev era. Yes, we were intensely aware of our difference as Jews—and ignorant of the religious and cultural back-story. Of course we ate pork fat. We loved it.
The sense that I’d fled my Jewishness in Odessa added painful new pressure to the dilemma I would face at sixteen. That’s when each Soviet citizen first got an internal passport—the single most crucial identity document. As a child of mixed ethnicities—Jewish mom, Russian dad—I’d be
“Whatsa difference between Karl Marx and Dina?” he’d roar. “Marx was an economist, our Dina’s a
senior
economist! HA HA HA!!”
“Stop nauseating already into everyone’s ears!” Dina would bellow back.
This was how they talked in Odessa.
In the morning I awoke—appetiteless—to the
tuk-tuk-tuk
of Dina’s dull chopping knife. Other
tuk-tuk-tuks
echoed from neighborhood windows. Odessa women greeted the day by making
sininkie
, “little blue ones,” local jargon for eggplants. Then they prepared stuffed peppers, and then
sheika
, a whole stuffed chicken that took hours to make. Lastly they fried—fried everything in sight. Odessa food seemed different from our Moscow fare: greasier, fishier, with enough garlic to stun a tramful of vampires. But it didn’t seem particularly
Jewish
to me; afterall, black bread and
salo
(pork fatback) was Judge Tamara’s favorite sandwich.
Then one day I was dispatched on an errand to the house of some distant relations in the ramshackle Jewish neighborhood of Moldovanka. They lived in an airless room crowded with objects and odors and dust of many generations. In the kitchen I was greeted by three garrulous women with clunky gold earrings and fire-engine-red hair. Two were named Tamara just like my great-aunt; the third was Dora. The Tamaras were whacking a monstrous pike against the table—“to loosen its skin so it comes off like a stocking.” They paused to smother me with noisy, blustery kisses, to ply me with buttermilk, vanilla wafers, and honeycake. Then I was instructed to sit and watch “true Jewish food” being prepared.
One Tamara filleted the fish; the other chopped the flesh with a flat-bladed knife, complaining about her withered arm. Dora grated onions, theatrically wiping away tears. Reduced to a coarse oily paste and blended with onion, carrots, and bread, the fish was stuffed back into the skin and sewn up with thick twine as red as the cooks’ hair.
It would boil now for three whole hours. Of course I must stay! Could I grate horseradish? Did I know the meaning of Shabbos? What, I hadn’t heard of the pogroms? More wafers, buttermilk?
Suffocating from fish fumes, August heat, and the onslaught of entreaties and questions, I mumbled some excuse and ran out, gasping for air. I’m sure the ladies were hurt, mystified. For some time afterward, with a mixture of curiosity and alienation, I kept wondering about the taste of that fish. Then, back in Moscow, it dawned on me:
On that August day in Odessa, I had run away from my Jewishness.
I suppose you can’t blame a late-Soviet big-city kid for fleeing the primal shock of gefilte fish. As thoroughly gentrified Moscow Jews, we didn’t know from seders or matzo balls. Jewishness was simply the loaded
pyaty punkt
(Entry 5) in the Soviet internal passport. Mandated in 1932, two years before my mother was born, Entry 5 stated your
ethnicity
: “
Russian
, Uzbek, Tatar … Jew.” Especially when coupled with anundesirable surname, “Jew” was the equivalent of a yellow star in the toxic atmosphere of the Brezhnev era. Yes, we were intensely aware of our difference as Jews—and ignorant of the religious and cultural back-story. Of course we ate pork fat. We loved it.
The sense that I’d fled my Jewishness in Odessa added painful new pressure to the dilemma I would face at sixteen. That’s when each Soviet citizen first got an internal passport—the single most crucial identity document. As a child of mixed ethnicities—Jewish mom, Russian dad—I’d be
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