5/29: Russian Literature and Jewish Moscow

Alexander Pushkin

We had Professor Valshenko again today. I really enjoy having him teach us, because he is always so passionate in his lectures. He gets tears in his eyes when he talks about how literature is no longer the center of cultural life and he stands up and clenches his fists when he speaks of the great masterpieces Alexander Pushkin gave to Russia in his thirty-seven years of life. Today was a lecture on Russian literature. He told us that Russia is unique in that it was always behind Western Europe in its literary movements, but it always wanted to catch up, causing a synthetic blend of ideas. Pushkin, for example, was one of the only writers to create novels in poetic verse. He developed his own genre of literature simply by mixing two different categories.

Valshenko had given us short stories to read the day before, and they were a lot better than many of the American classics. While we had to read about how much Holden Caulfield was pissed off at the world in tenth grade, Russian students were reading stories about a ghost who steals people's overcoats. (The two stories were JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" if you didn't catch the references). The meanings and metaphors in Russian works seem to be much more clear and understandable (probably rooted in the fact that Russia has a large literacy rate, but few highly educated people). The works are meant more for the commoners than the English majors and book critics.

After and quick lunch break and internet session, we took the metro to Jewish Moscow. We were greeted by Felix, a large and animated middle-aged man, who told us that we have one more stop on the metro to go "which is easy to remember, because it's not zero, not three, not two. One!" At the start of the tour he said, "I have a stupid, but important question: Should I speak in English or Russian." The decision was obvious and unanimous.

Felix gave us an hour-long info session on the history of Russian Judaism. In 1861, Tsar Alexander II gave all ethnicities and religions equal rights, but unofficial discrimination began as a result. The Pale of Jewish Settlements was pillaged by pogroms and 1893-1906 saw a large emigration of Jews from Russia to the US. Jews were still very active in the Communist Party (Trotsky and Marx were both Jewish, after all). The Jewish Social Democratic Party (800,000 members) was the larges communist bloc in Russia, and eventually merged with Lenin's party, which was mostly Russians. Trotsky and Lenin decided to have a politburo of three Jews, three Russians and a non-Jew and non-Russian as a tie-breaker. It was Stalin's lucky day (he was Georgian-born). Stalin had an Orthodox Christian education and was raised severely anti-Semitic. His purges reduced the Jewish population in Russia down from a peak of 11% to 0.3%.

Leon Trotsky - Early Jewish Communist

What interested me was how Judaism was considered an ethnicity in Russia. I wouldn't be able to call myself Russian during that time period, even though I lived in Russia. Judaism was your identity and the bureaucracy  even traced it through your father's genealogy (Judaism, the religion, runs through the mother's blood), so you would oftentimes have self-proclaimed non-Jews being given a Jewish identity card. This happened to Boris Pasternak (author of Dr. Zhivago).

Felix was very entertaining, but also a bit provocative. He referred to the rabbi of the synagogue we were in as "very nice, but very boring" and said the word bullshit a couple of times when were were in the synagogue. When he told us that the last census said there were 400,000 Jews in Moscow, but 100,000 also said they were "elves" and 5,000 said they were "mother fuckers," I was taken aback by his crude language on the balcony of the country's largest synagogue. When someone thought they misheard him, he said it even louder and began laughing at his own joke.

After the briefing, Felix took us on a tour of other Jewish sites. We saw the house of the poet Isaac Babel, a statue of Shalom Alechem, a very wealthy synagogue (which apparently got its money by falsely claiming reparations for the Holocaust from the German government), and the National Jewish Theater. The tour was very interesting to me and the rest of the Jewish Caucus (Sam and Isaac), but I felt like the remaining member of the group found it boring and tedious. But I guess that's what having a caucus is for.