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Authors: Anya Von Bremzen
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at the Shabbos table staring down at the floor, lips pursed, not touching a thing. She was fourteen years old and had just joined the Komsomol, the youth division of the Communist Party. After dinner she rose and declared: “Mother, your fish is vile
religious
food. I will never eat it again!”
And that was it for the Brokhvis family’s Friday gefilte fish. Deep in her heart, Maria understood that the New Soviet Generation knew better.
I had no idea about any of this. Not the baby dead in the pogrom, not Grandma Liza’s ban on Maria’s religious food. Only when Mom and I were in her kitchen making our gefilte tribute to Maria did I find out.
Suddenly I understood why Grandma Liza had looked pensive and hesitant whenever she mentioned the dish. She too had run from her Jewishness back in Odessa. To her credit, Liza, who was blond and not remotely Semitic-looking, became enraged, proclaiming herself Jewish, if ever anyone made an anti-Semitic remark. Granddad Naum … not so much. About his family past Mom knows almost nothing—only that his people were shtetl Zionists and that Naum ran away from home as a teen, lied about his age to join the Red Army, and never looked back.
In Jackson Heights, Mom and I are both ecumenical culturalists. We light menorahs next to our Christmas trees. We bake Russian Easter kulich cake and make ersatz gefilte fish balls for Passover. But our gefilte fish this time was different—
real Jewish food
. We skinned a whole pike, hand-minced the flesh, cried grating the onion, sewed thefish mince inside the skin, and cooked the whole reconstituted beast for three hours.
The labor was vast, but for me it was a small way of atoning for that August day in Odessa.
Returning to twenties Bolshevik policies, I reflected again on how kitchen labor, particularly the kind at Maria’s politically equivocal NEP home canteen, got so little respect in the New Soviet vision. Partly this was pragmatic. Freeing women from the household pot was a matter of lofty principle, but it was also meant to push them into the larger workforce, perhaps even into the army of political agitators.
I haven’t mentioned her yet, this New Soviet Woman. Admittedly a lesser star than the New Soviet Man, she was still decidedly not a housewife-cook. She was a liberated
proletarka
(female proletarian)—co-builder of the road to utopia, co-defender of the Communist International, avid reader of
Rabotnitsa
(
Female Worker
), an enthusiastic participant in public life.
Not for her the domestic toil that “crushes and degrades women” (Lenin’s words). Not for her nursery drudgery, so “barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying” (Lenin again). No, under socialism, society would assume all such burdens, eventually eradicating the nuclear family. “The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin,” predicted Lenin in 1919, “only where and when an all-out struggle begins … against … petty … housekeeping.”
In one of my favorite Soviet posters, a fierce New Soviet
proletarka
makes like a herald angel under the slogan DOWN WITH KITCHEN SLAVERY , rendered in striking avant-garde typography. She’s grinning down at an aproned female beleaguered by suds, dishes, laundry, and cobwebs. The red-clad
proletarka
opens wide a door to a light-flooded vision of New Soviet byt. Behold a multistoried Futurist edifice housing a public canteen, a kitchen-factory, and a nursery school, all crowned with a workers’ club.
The engine for turning such utopian Bolshevik feminist visions into reality was the Zhenotdel, literally “women’s department.” Founded in 1919 as an organ of the Party’s Central Committee, the Zhenotdel and its branches fought for—and helped win—crucial reforms in childcare, contraception, and marriage. They proselytized, recruited, and educated. The first head of Zhenotdel was the charismatic Inessa Armand—Paris-born, strikingly glamorous, and by many accounts
religious
food. I will never eat it again!”
And that was it for the Brokhvis family’s Friday gefilte fish. Deep in her heart, Maria understood that the New Soviet Generation knew better.
I had no idea about any of this. Not the baby dead in the pogrom, not Grandma Liza’s ban on Maria’s religious food. Only when Mom and I were in her kitchen making our gefilte tribute to Maria did I find out.
Suddenly I understood why Grandma Liza had looked pensive and hesitant whenever she mentioned the dish. She too had run from her Jewishness back in Odessa. To her credit, Liza, who was blond and not remotely Semitic-looking, became enraged, proclaiming herself Jewish, if ever anyone made an anti-Semitic remark. Granddad Naum … not so much. About his family past Mom knows almost nothing—only that his people were shtetl Zionists and that Naum ran away from home as a teen, lied about his age to join the Red Army, and never looked back.
In Jackson Heights, Mom and I are both ecumenical culturalists. We light menorahs next to our Christmas trees. We bake Russian Easter kulich cake and make ersatz gefilte fish balls for Passover. But our gefilte fish this time was different—
real Jewish food
. We skinned a whole pike, hand-minced the flesh, cried grating the onion, sewed thefish mince inside the skin, and cooked the whole reconstituted beast for three hours.
The labor was vast, but for me it was a small way of atoning for that August day in Odessa.
Returning to twenties Bolshevik policies, I reflected again on how kitchen labor, particularly the kind at Maria’s politically equivocal NEP home canteen, got so little respect in the New Soviet vision. Partly this was pragmatic. Freeing women from the household pot was a matter of lofty principle, but it was also meant to push them into the larger workforce, perhaps even into the army of political agitators.
I haven’t mentioned her yet, this New Soviet Woman. Admittedly a lesser star than the New Soviet Man, she was still decidedly not a housewife-cook. She was a liberated
proletarka
(female proletarian)—co-builder of the road to utopia, co-defender of the Communist International, avid reader of
Rabotnitsa
(
Female Worker
), an enthusiastic participant in public life.
Not for her the domestic toil that “crushes and degrades women” (Lenin’s words). Not for her nursery drudgery, so “barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying” (Lenin again). No, under socialism, society would assume all such burdens, eventually eradicating the nuclear family. “The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin,” predicted Lenin in 1919, “only where and when an all-out struggle begins … against … petty … housekeeping.”
In one of my favorite Soviet posters, a fierce New Soviet
proletarka
makes like a herald angel under the slogan DOWN WITH KITCHEN SLAVERY , rendered in striking avant-garde typography. She’s grinning down at an aproned female beleaguered by suds, dishes, laundry, and cobwebs. The red-clad
proletarka
opens wide a door to a light-flooded vision of New Soviet byt. Behold a multistoried Futurist edifice housing a public canteen, a kitchen-factory, and a nursery school, all crowned with a workers’ club.
The engine for turning such utopian Bolshevik feminist visions into reality was the Zhenotdel, literally “women’s department.” Founded in 1919 as an organ of the Party’s Central Committee, the Zhenotdel and its branches fought for—and helped win—crucial reforms in childcare, contraception, and marriage. They proselytized, recruited, and educated. The first head of Zhenotdel was the charismatic Inessa Armand—Paris-born, strikingly glamorous, and by many accounts
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