Alef: The NEXT Conversation
A Herring Restoration
By Rafi Samuels-Schwartz
We’re standing in the back of a small New York establishment, learning the finer points of how to eat Herring, when Niki Russ Federman looks up at the portrait of her great-grandfather, Joel Russ, hanging on the wall of her shop, Russ & Daughters.
“Young Jews don’t necessarily realize the distinction between the terms ‘Appetizing” and ‘Deli’” she explains. “The word ‘appetizing’ didn’t make it into the American culture, like ‘deli.’”
In a sense, this is true. Today both a pastrami-on-rye as well as bagels-and-lox are celebrated, if not revered, by American Jews trying to connect with the tastes of Eastern Europe’s “Old World” Jewish communities by eating what they call “deli” food. And, while ordering a brisket sandwich can be a delicious way to commune with the past, you simply can’t appreciate “Old World” food without understanding the distinct “appetizing” history, and terminology, of bagels and lox, smoked salmon, herring, and fancy cream cheeses; the food Niki’s great-grandfather Joel sold from his pushcart 95 years ago, and the food that she still sells today, in the store that bears her family name.
In some ways Russ & Daughters, one of the last of New York’s “appetizing stores” is an anomaly: an American store devoted to the particularly Old World specialty of forshpayz, the cold appetizers many Jews ate before their full meals. That Russ & Daughters exists today is both a testament to the quality of their lox, and the dedication of their many fans, both young and old. Niki tells a story of hiking a trail in California, only to be stopped, chatted, and ultimately thanked by fellow hikers who noticed her Russ & Daughters t-shirt.
“It’s not just about the food,” she explains. “There are all these stories wrapped up,” She notes that most encounters, like the one on the California hiking trail, follow the same pattern: “[people say] ‘Oh, I love that place. And then they tell a story.’” It’s these stories that makes Russ & Daughters so special, infusing the shop with an air of authenticity and Old World street-cred, and earning Russ & Daughters’ blog, Lox Populi, a webby award this past year.
As we browse toward the back of the shop a customer turns, and without prompting, remarks that he comes to Russ & Daughters because it represents a “living food tradition” in a way that grocery stores can’t. Introducing himself as Mark, he goes on to order pickled herring, mustard dill herring, and a little bit of bright yellow curry herring as well. We chat for several minutes, and Mark explains that he sees the food at Russ & Daughters as a form of soul (sole?) food.
“My herring restoration,” he chuckles.
As I turn to examine the jars of jams and jellies lining the back wall Mark begins to leave, but is caught by Niki who gives him a big hug. While the the name of the shop refers to Joel Russ’ children, it’s clear that in Russ & Daughters everyone feels like family. We ask Niki about her own familial connection to the Old Country. She explains that she has “herring in her blood” and that working in the shop, surrounded by the food eaten by Jews for centuries, “reinforces who we are in the most primal way.” And, how does Niki feel about the portrait of her great-grandfather Joel looking down over the counter?
“I like that I have to think about him all the time.”
Before we leave, Niki gives us a Holland Herring to sample. Almost entirely uncooked, and covered with diced onions, this is forshpayz “in the raw.” As we sit together eating the fish, I hear other customers toward the front of store laugh, and wish us L’chiam, “to life!” It may be 2009, and we may be on New York’s Lower East Side, but it’s clear that the spirit of the Old Country is alive and well. We can practically taste it.
Thumbnail photo by J_bary, licensed under Creative Commons.
Monologues: Ilya
Ilya is another Ruskee member of the Monologues cast (if you haven’t already seen Boris’ monologue, click here). We didn’t even know Russian soap operas existed on American TV until we heard this guy mention it. You owe it to yourself to witness Ilya’s comic flair in his stream-of-consciousness ramble.
Thumbnail photo by davidden, licensed under Creative Commons.
Foreign Accent Syndrome
By Ruvym Gilman
I’m only half-joking when I say that som
etimes it feels like I’m acquiring the Russian accent that I never had. I was born in freaking Queens, and while Russian did end up being my first language (I was raised by my great-grandmother), I don’t think I’ve ever actually had any sort of foreign accent. But these days, for whatever reason, I’ve been slipping into a Russian accent whenever I hit certain letter combinations:
1. The “ace” in a word like “place” becomes “ess.” So “place” becomes “pless,” and “space” becomes “spess.”
2. The “tion” in a word like “situation” becomes “shun,” but I end up putting a lot more stress at the end of the word and it comes out ethnic-sounding.
3. The “ease” in a word like “please” becomes “ez.” “Please” becomes “plez.”
4. The “teen” in numbers like “sixteen” becomes “tien.” “Sixteen” becomes “sixtien.”
I’m getting frustrated just thinking about it. I admit that in the last year or two, I’ve used a forced Russian accent just to sound funny because I still find that imitating Borat at certain opportune moments is incredibly entertaining. Perhaps, as punishment, this has contributed to the slip into foreign-accent mode even when I’m not playing it up. Part of me also blames getting older as well as the effects of some genes I think I inherited from my dad. These genes not only make me sound like him, but also result in me making the same sorts of mistakes when it comes to remembering a word or a name as just slightly off from what it actually is. For instance, my dad always calls Natalie Portman “Natalie Portnoy.” You can see how he’s kind of remembering the right thing, but not exactly.
I’ve been thinking about what’s happening to me, and I’m beginning to see my life as a slow but steady path towards a total Russian accent, sort of like a march towards senility. I have, however, come across another explanation – a condition known as “Foreign Accent Syndrome” which causes people who have experienced certain brain traumas to develop random foreign accents. Check out this clip from ABC News about a woman they interviewed who developed the condition. It’s wild.
I don’t really remember experiencing any sort of particular brain trauma, but considering that I spent most of the last 3 years working at a corporate law firm, perhaps that has something to do with it.
Photo by prodman, licensed under Creative Commons.
To Brighton
By Rita Kreynin
One recent Friday afternoon, I headed south on the Q train to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, the Mecca of life for immigrants from the “old country.” The trip was inspired by a desire to speak with some old Russian people and collect their stories about moving to America. My own family is from Minsk (now a part of Belarus, but formerly a part of the Soviet Union), and I only moved to Chicago at the age of four, so I thought of it as a nice little project – a chance for me to flex some of my Russian-speaking skills, take a few photos of classic babushka-types, and answer the call of the hunger pangs that had me aching for some old-fashioned borscht.
Walking down Ocean Avenue I found myself immediately immersed in what felt like a town from the Eastern bloc – Russian deli‘s and restaurants lined the streets in this neighborhood dubbed “Little Odessa,” full of Ukrainian transplants. As I strolled along the Brighton Boardwalk, I thought it would be easy to strike up conversations with a handful of Russians. Questions and camera in hand, I was ready to ask them about where they were from, whether they were nostalgic for their former country, and if they missed the cold winters and the endless nights from back home? Since I had the Russian on my side (albeit somewhat “broken” in the delivery) and I’m friendly, polite, and pretty harmless looking, I figure this would be a cinch. Russian people love me, especially old ones, so how hard could it be?
Apparently, incredibly difficult. What I failed to realize is that a lot of these people came from oppressive societies, worlds run by Communist stooges, secret police, and spies, where neighbors rated out neighbors for the promise of a better job or apartment or just an opportunity to get a personal obstacle out of their way. It seemed that a lot of them still house discomfort and distrust for people who try to get information from them and then try to take their picture to go along with this information. The startled reactions I got when questioning the people I met made me feel like I was a spy myself, sent directly by Stalin’s ghost. It’s as if they feared that anything they said to me would get entered into some KGB database in Moscow. Or, worse yet, as my boyfriend ruefully joked, that one slip-up would get them deported back to the old country.
After explaining that I was merely writing a story on varying immigrant experiences and wished to include them, a few people candidly (and grudgingly) opened up to me, but were still vehemently against having their photos taken. The following are their stories:
Alexander V.
I met Alexander as he walked down the Brighton Beach Boardwalk gleefully handing out brochures for a get-out-the-vote rally to reelect Mayor Bloomberg. Alexander is an outgoing and animated man in his early 70’s, politically active, and very well traveled. He moved to Brighton Beach roughly ten years ago to be with his daughter and grandson who settled in Brooklyn in the 1980s. Since then he has been back to Moscow about a dozen times to visit his son who still lives there. A dual citizen, Alexander thinks of himself as Russian but is very invested in American politics. He could not believe that I was Jewish, arguing that I did not look Jewish at all! I proceeded to speak to him in a Hebrew intermixed with Yiddish and that convinced him.
Faina G.
Born in Kyrgyzstan, Faina moved to Nikolaev, Ukraine for school in her late teens. After forty years of living in Ukraine with her husband, she moved to Brighton Beach in 1999 when her son won a green card. She admits that she was not too keen on leaving all her family and friends in Ukraine, but decided that her son and his family would have more economic opportunities in the U.S. While Brighton Beach is the eminent Russian neighborhood in the U.S., Fayina kept repeating that it is simply just not the same as her homeland.
Inna K.
Inna K. is a lovely, energetic woman in her mid 60’s who I met in line buying chicken cutlets at a butcher shop. She told me how much she loves Brighton Beach, how she has made many wonderful friends here, and how her relationship to Judaism has flourished since moving to the United States. Inna left Minsk with her husband and two teenage children in 1987. In Minsk, Inna worked as a nurse but constantly faced hostility for being Jewish. When her family received exit visas to leave Minsk for Israel, they first went through Italy where they obtained visas to move to the U.S. Inna could not stop raving about how fortunate she is to live in the U.S. (her son is a doctor!).
Walking around Brighton Beach and meeting Alexander, Faina, and Inna gave me a clearer sense of the complexities of the immigrant story. It was striking to see just how much distrust a lot of these people had even though the negative experiences from back home were now decades behind them. I guess the past sticks with us whether we want it to or not, and as different as things might be in an adoptive country, the memories of the motherland are never too far from the heart.
With my work done as best as I could manage, I found myself incredibly hungry and was off to chow down some borscht as originally planned. Nothing seems to warm the soul more than a nice bowl of cold borscht. Oh the irony.
Thumbnail photo from homepage by genial23, licensed under Creative Commons. All photos on this page used with the permission of Rita Kreynin.
I've Got a Crush on Regina Spektor
By Richard Skeen
Unlike most of my Jewish friends, I didn’t have a Bubbe who regaled me with stories of the “Old Country.” I loved my grandmothers, but they were modern and American (one was actually a part-time rancher!) and simply didn’t fulfill my longing for Jewish tales of sad, forbidding places that, in my mind, represented the soul of the Jewish people. I wanted a personal history full of daring escapes from menacing Cossacks, of warm borscht soup and klezmer tunes, wise old Rabbis and alien-sounding names. I wanted Russian roots to enhance my Jewishness and figured a Bubbe was the ticket.
Soon after arriving to New York City from Oregon, I found a Jewish girlfriend with Old Country Russian roots, at least on paper. While I imagined that her deep brown eyes carried generations of Lithuanian Shtetl wisdom, and her brooding moods were by-products of oppression and pogroms, the truth was a little tamer. And her mother, the Bubbe I’d hoped to score in the match, was anything but: an Upper East Side contemporary art dealer, she had little interest in things Jewish or Perestroika.
With time, my Bubbe-longing faded. But it all came back in a flash when I discovered my perfect woman – Regina Spektor. In a faux KGB hat and a wicked smile – compelling if not quite beautiful on the cover of her Soviet Kitsch album – it was love at first sight. And her music – brilliant, quirky, funny, and wise – immediately struck me as, well, as something that could only come from a Russia-to-the Bronx (with a couple of years in a New Jersey Yeshiva) soul who had serious “Old Country” cred. Part of the anti-folk scene, Spektor’s songs are full of funny language and Jewish references. She uses a heavy New York accent on some words as an ode to the City, and her lyrics on songs like Samson and Laughing With are almost Dylan-esque in their biblical knowing. I was smitten, Spektor was part Russian-Jewish temptress and part Old Country Bubbe, always easily available on my iPhone. My desires were fulfilled.
Fortunately, Spektor’s talent justifies my crush, including the frequent Facebook uploads and disproportionate presence on my play lists. And truthfully, my wife may even understand, because listening to my former-Soviet crush while I prepare Shabbas cholent is almost as good as having my very own Bubbe.
Photo by jmtimages, licensed under Creative Commons.
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