Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (8 page)

Naum pays lavish attention to Maria Brokhvis’s chopped herring and prodigious stuffed chicken. But his eye is really for Liza, the second of Maria and Yankel Brokhvis’s three daughters. There she is in
the corner, an architectural student running gray, serious eyes over her drafting board. Ash blond, petite and athletic, with a finely shaped nose, Liza has no time for Naum. He suggests a stroll along the seaside cliffs, hints at his feelings. Not interested.

But how could she ever say
nyet
to tickets to Odessa’s celebrated, glorious opera house? Like everyone in town, Liza is crazy for opera, and tonight it’s
Rigoletto
—her favorite.

Naum proposes right after
Rigoletto
. And is turned down flat. She must finish her studies, Liza informs him indignantly. Enough with his “amorous nonsense”!

So Naum, the crafty intelligence officer, turns his focus to the parents at whose table he dines. How could Maria and Yankel refuse such a fine young New Soviet Man for their pretty
komsomolochka
(Communist youth)?

How indeed?

Naum and Liza would be happily married for sixty-one years. Their first daughter, Larisa, was born in Odessa in 1934.

“So you see,” Mom says grandly, “I owe my birth to NEP’s petty capitalism!”

The enduring union of my grandparents, on the other hand, owed nothing to cooking. Like Lenin’s Krupskaya, Grandma Liza had scant passion for her stove; and just like Dedushka Lenin, my grandpa Naum submissively ate whatever was on his plate. Occasionally, Liza would make fish meatballs from frozen cod, awkwardly invoking her mother Maria’s
real
Jewish gefilte fish. She even made noises to us about someday making the actual stuff—but she never did. In our “anti-Zionist” State of the seventies, gefilte fish was an unpatriotic commodity. And Babushka Liza was the wife of a longtime Communist intelligence chief.

But I did encounter real gefilte fish as a kid—in Odessa, in fact, the city of my grandparents’ Bolshevik-NEP courtship more than forty years before. And it shook my young self, I recall again now, with the
meaning of our Soviet Jewishness. A Jewishness so drastically redefined for my mother’s and my generations by the fervent Bolshevik identity policies forged in the 1920s.

That first taste of gefilte fish in Odessa still torments me, here across the years in Queens.

“Ah, Odessa, the pearl by the sea,” goes the song. Brought into being by Catherine the Great, this rollicking polyglot port on the Black Sea was by the nineteenth century one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe; its streets remain a riot of French and Italian Empire–style architecture, full of fantastical flourishes.

Ah, the Odessa of my young Augusts! The barbaric southern sun withered the chestnut trees. The packed tram to Langeron Beach smelled thickly of 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; after
all, 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 an
undesirable 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 allowed to select either for Entry 5. This choice-to-come weighed like a stone on my nine-year-old soul. Would I pick difficult honor and side with the outcasts, thereby dramatically reducing my college and job opportunities? Or would I take the easy road of being “Russian”? Our emigration rescued me from the dilemma, but the unmade choice haunts me to this day. What would I have done?

In the early 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Jews made their own choice—without anguish they renounced Judaism for Bolshevism.

One such Jewish convert was Mom’s Grandpa Yankel. He too became a New Soviet Man, albeit a short, potbellied, docile one. But he was a fanatical proletarian nevertheless, a blacksmith who under Stalin would become a decorated Hero of Socialist Labor.

Yankel came to Odessa in the early 1900s from a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement—the zone where since 1772 the Russian Empire’s Jews had been confined. Though within the Pale, the port of Odessa was a thriving melting pot of Greeks, Italians, Ukrainians, and Russians as well as Jews. Here Yankel married Maria, began to flourish. And then in 1905, he returned from the disastrous Russo-Japanese War to something unspeakable. Over four October days, street mobs killed and mutilated hundreds in an orgy of anti-Jewish atrocities. Yankel and Maria’s firstborn, a baby boy, was murdered in front of them.

The civil war revived the pogrom of 1905 with anti-Semitic marauding by counterrevolutionary Whites. The Red Army—commanded
by one Lev Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky—vehemently denounced the violence. Jews flocked to the Reds. Too old for combat now, Yankel cheered from the sidelines.

At first the revolution was good to the Jews. The official birth of the USSR in 1922 brought them rights and opportunities unprecedented in Russia’s history. Anti-Semitism became a state crime; the Pale was dismantled. Jews could rise through the bureaucratic and cultural ranks. At the start of the decade Jews made up one fifth of the Party’s Central Committee.

But there was a catch.

Like the Russian Empire before it, the Soviet Union was vast and dizzyingly multiethnic. For the Bolsheviks the ethnic or “nationalities” issue was fraught. In Marxist terms, nationalism was reactionary. Yet not only did ethnic minorities exist, but their oppression under the czar made them ripe for the socialist cause. So Lenin, along with the early Bolshevik nationalities commissar, Stalin, an ethnic Georgian, contrived a policy of linguistic, cultural, and territorial autonomy for ethnic minorities—in a Soviet format—until international socialism came about and nationalities became superfluous.

The USSR, in the words of the historian Terry Martin, became the world’s first affirmative-action empire.

The catch for Jews? Jewishness was now defined in strictly
ethno-national
terms. The Talmud had no place in building the Radiant Future. Reforming and modernizing the so-called “Jewish Street” fell to the Yevsektsii, the Jewish sections of the Communist Party. They worked savvily. Religious rituals were initially semitolerated—in Sovietized form. Passover? Well, if you must. Except the
Soviet
Haggadah substituted the words “October Revolution” for “God.”

In 1920s Odessa, the Soviet supporters Yankel and Maria Brokhvis continued to light candles on Shabbos at their one-room flat in
Peresyp—but without mentioning God. Maria saw no wrong in gathering their three daughters around Friday table; she was a proud Jew. As the terrible times of the 1921 famine gave way to NEP’s relative bounty, she shopped every week at Odessa’s boisterous Privoz market for the pike for her famous gefilte fish. It was her second daughter Liza’s favorite. Maria made challah bread too, and
forshmak
(chopped herring), and bean tzimmes, and crumbly pastries filled with the black prune jam she cooked over a primus stove in the courtyard.

Then one Friday Liza returned from school and sat 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.