SOME STEPS IN THE PAST: AN ATTEMPT AT AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by Mikhail Yeselson
11. AM I--A JEW?
That is the question! I had kept it in my mind for many years, since about the middle of my former life in the former Soviet Union.
Those were the times when services of Jewish religion and studying of
Jewish history were really forbidden. Remains of vanishing Jewish customs and Yiddish were conserved only in the small Ukrainian and Belorussian provincial towns, which appeared in places of preceding shteteles, and in the far outskirts of some cities.
Languages--Yiddish and Hebrew--were going out of regular usage from the past time. Even in my grandparents' families, the father and the mother had spoken between them in Yiddish only if they did not want their children to understand what they were talking about. My father had attended Yeshiva for some years before the Revolution when he was a kid. Apparently, he somehow knew the Jewish languages, but he had never displayed this at home and, moreover, in his working place.
My parents were journalists. I grew up in a big capital city that was the center of Soviet anti-Semitism. Russian language was my native; Russian literature brought up my mind.
So I did not know the Jewish languages, history, customs and religion--what the sort of Jew was I? From what sources did I discern that I was a Jew?
This problem was not only mine. After a graduation, I changed some jobs and began to work in a big two-thousand-worker research institute, in a field of R&D. Sometimes we, several Jews working there, met occasionally and discussed it among our other "eternal problems."
The question was: if Soviet Power did not separate Jews from other people, if we did not share a suffer from hard humiliations and oppression because of being Jewish, if our passports were not marked by the record "a Jew"--would we self-identificate ourselves as Jews? The regular answer was: no, we would be completely assimilated.
It was our answer, the answer of the Jews who grew up in big cities, and had approximately similar life experience and the similar social status. We understood that the Soviet Jews from other regions, having different life conditions, could have different opinion.
But now, looking back from another country and time, I think that this answer was wrong. At least, it was wrong for me, and eventually for many others.
Jewish people went such a long way in the Diaspora, on the dust of many roads of the Antic centuries, the Middle Ages, and the Nowadays. Under pressure of life circumstances on this way, part of them had changed their belief, or had lost it, or did not have it since day of birth.
And what about those men and women, what about people who lost their Jewish G-d? Did they know, did they realize that they were Jewish before? Can it really be true that previous Jewish generations did not transfer anything to them through darkness of millennia, placed deeply inside their souls and influencing their self-identification? If yes, what exactly?
...This thinking has always made me frozen with mute perplexity and admiration: how could it be at those times, many thousands years ago, among total barbarousness, when roughly tangible, big and small g-ds sat on every tree, swam in every lake and splashed in every stream, how could it happen, that our ancestors understood and accepted monotheism, became to believe in their invisible G-d? What a powerful imagination--and powerful abstract thinking--were required for designing this idea! Sweet feeling of participation to this great event fill up my soul with proud and delight.
I think that ability in strong abstract imagination, which made so many Jewish mathematicians, violinists, and chess grandmasters, is the invaluable gift that we inherited from our forefathers, the flame, which reflections enriched minds and souls.
The other gift is a deep love to books, esteem to the black signs on the white paper, transferring the memory of previous generations to following them. Because Jewish people have always considered that link of generation is absolutely necessary for saving their nation in the Diaspora, they attached great importance to the written Law, conserved inherited language, establishments and assignments. This order, prescribed in ancient times, then entered people's flesh and bone.
I knew from my mother that in small, poor Ukrainian shteteles the biggest honor for rich(!) man was to welcome in his home well-read yeshibotnik, who was graduated--or had merely some education--from yeshiva. Let him marry your daughter, let him make nothing, feed him and drink him, if only he is sitting and reading Torah and Talmud! Because if he is doing that from dawn to dusk, the shine of his erudition will cover life of the family, which give him a shelter, bringing them respect and naches.
So, love to books and reading, feeling up my life with sense and contents, is the other gift from the far ancestors.
Finally, the third that is above all. I liked to read about the hidden and forbidden history of my City, and I was interested in real history of country and people, among which at least four or five generations of my progenitors lived. Nevertheless, when I talked to ingenious inhabitants the country (to my friends!) about this topic, I had a strong inner sensation that it was their history, not mine, that I was a stranger in their world, the nowhere man. And I knew distinctly--through their hidden gestures, their grins, their shrugging--that they had the same filling.
Even when I was talking about the Russian literature that I loved so much, I had felt the same. Was that my native literature or their? Where were my grandgrandgrandparents in the Pushkin's times? I did not know that but in the times of Word about Igor's troops my forefathers undoubtedly lived in another country.
Well, my friends belonged to aboriginal population and believed that their forefathers also lived here, that their roots were here, that their language was the language of this land, that this land was theirs. What did I have instead all of that?
My people were getting left their state and land, ravaged by wars, more then two thousand years ago, going out around the warm Mediterranean See, scattering in the Diaspora, absorbing the culture of the countries they were walking throughout, feeling the alien influence but trying to save themselves as nation, building their synagogues on new places and teaching their children antiquated language of the Law. Could they conceive the homecoming? Could they conceive it, accepted and persecuted, moving very slowly, going out and getting accustomed, when temporary shelter was changed in a while into permanent home?
Some years ago, before my departure, I had a sleepless night, for the first time in my life hearing Kol Nidre from London. Voices of faith and fate, echoes of the Long Way entered inward, bringing strange, vague visions from the past. Repercussions of Spain, Italian, German music spoke about interconnection of cultures, about that nobody lived in the world alone and aloof, making image of my people, plodding on Europe's routs, more extension and deeper. When I thought after about this night, I got pensive. It seemed to me that unrecognized feeling of the Path, a weak breath of the air faded long ago, has lived in my mind ever.
It seems to me now that just this perception of simultaneous belonging to antiquated motherland, which was left in the depth of centuries, and my people, scattered all over the globe, belonging to Erez Israel and the entire world, the complicated perception of Jewish heredity that was hidden in a far corner of my soul--just this feeling made me a Jewish man besides of transient circumstances of my life.
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Mikhail Yeselson, 1996