Alef: The NEXT Conversation
The New Years Tree
By Rita Kreynin
I love a New Years Tree. No, not the Christmas fir tree. The New Years fir tree.
What is a New Years Tree you may be wondering? One of my favorite memories from my childhood is that every year, around the middle of December, my parents would get our family a yolka that would be in our living room, adorned with festive lights, decorations, and presents underneath to be opened by my family on the morning of the New Year.
WAIT A SECOND! My family is Jewish, why on earth are we celebrating a holiday that sounds identical to Christmas?
I should clarify. When I was four years old, my family emigrated to the U.S from the former Soviet Union. When I was in the first grade, in an effort to illustrate religious diversity, our teacher split the class up according to which religion was celebrated in the home. Trying to determine where I fit, I explained to the class that my parents were Jewish but that we put up a decorated tree for the holidays. My fellow first graders assured me I must be half Jewish and half Christian because a tree in my house must have meant that I celebrated Christmas.
That day I came home very confused – were my parents keeping something from me? Not according to my mother.  She explained to me that because religious observance was discouraged under communism in the Soviet Union, people didn’t celebrate Hanukkah or Christmas. The New Year was the holiday celebrated by all Soviets and at the heart of the celebration was the decorated yolka, which was introduced to imperial Russia by Peter the Great in the late 17th century. To offer a little history — in 1916 the yolka was first banned by the state church council and thereafter by the Soviet officials, but in 1935 the ban was lifted and New Years became an official state-recognized holiday. From 1935 until 1991, when the Soviet Union crumbled, New Years was one of the most beloved holidays in the land.
My parents stopped putting up a real New Years tree in our house around the time I was eight, when they figured out that, in America, Jews don’t have fir trees in their homes. When I begged really hard, I managed to convince them to assemble a fake tree, but only succeeded in that a few times. These days, the aroma of pine needles coming off of a Christmas tree makes me nostalgic and giddy. If my apartment were big enough, I would probably get a New Years tree this holiday season. It would be lovely right next to my menorah.
Photo by Ed Bierman, licensed under Creative Commons.
Hebrussia
By Vicki Boykis
The first day of my first Hebrew class on my first semester of college, I figured out that Russian and Hebrew were exactly the same when I saw that the letter “shin” (ש ) looked exactly like the letter “sheh” (Ш) in my first language – Russian. I was tremendously relieved knowing I’d be able to slack the whole semester with Hebrew and Russian much closer than I’d first believed.
I’d spent the summer feverishly, hungrily trying to learn Hebrew with the zeal of the members of the first aliyah. I went on my second emotion-filled leadership trip to Israel in the August before I started school. On the trip, I decided it was embarrassing that I didn’t know any Hebrew beyond b’seder (”Alright”), sababa (”cool”), and the urgent eifo sherutim (”where are the bathrooms”). I was also sure that Israelis were constantly talking about me. Why else would they be laughing?
I zealously self-administered the alef-bet that summer, watching the way the unfamiliar, uncomfortable letters moved in the wrong direction on my laptop screen and trying to memorize ways to write them. It never occurred to me that this was the same path my fellow Russian Zionists had taken a hundred years earlier: going from Russian, and sometimes Yiddish, to Hebrew. In their wake, and in the wake of the early 1990s post-Soviet aliyah to Israel, they had left imprints of Russian on the Hebrew that I had also hoped to make my own.
On my first day in Hebrew class, watching the teacher, Ruti, scrawl curly-scary cursive across the board, I didn’t expect that in a few short months she would use the word balagan in a sentence and I would snap to attention. Balagan means mess in Russian, a pandemonium. In Hebrew, I would find out, it meant the same thing, and was used to describe messy situations, from the Middle East peace process to a traffic jam in Jerusalem.
During those first couple weeks, we ventured beyond shalom. This was when we paddled into those uncharted territories of kal, pa’al, and piel- the phantasmagorical verb structures. But then, jobnik, nudnik, and other –niks would somehow pop up, from the Russian ending “nik” which means doer of whatever the “nik “is attached to. Shkolnik (the last name of Levi Eshkol before he went Sabra) means schoolboy in Russian.
We crept deeper and deeper into the jungle of Hebrew verbs and everyday objects I didn’t know -kiseh, ofanayim, miklat- and I without latching them on to any other European languages I knew, I felt small and completely detached from a connection to the Hebrew language and to my own Hebrew culture.
But every now and again, a small beacon of Russian would light my way. Every time my Israeli friend said, “Nu,” I would be reminded of the same Russian word, what my parents said when they were impatient with me. After I procured a mangal during my internship in Tel Aviv, I was happy that I was able to do so with the knowledge that mangal in Russian, just as in Hebrew, means a small portable grill.
At the end of my formal learning of Hebrew in college, I finally became comfortable using the language, speaking it out loud to myself. I’d even begun to dream in Hebrew (dreams that, for some reason, included Moshe Dayan 90% of the time.) As I was penetrated this strange and wonderful language-my peoples’ language, I finally realized that Russian-my other peoples’ language- already had. As I wandered into shin, I wasn’t alone, because sheh was there right along with me.
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.
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