Ironic Pessimism of Soviet Truth

Rivka Yeker

In 2010 and in his 70’s, Leonard Cohen stood on stage for three hours, serenading a sold-out Chicagoland crowd. My babushka, to the left of me, did not understand all of his words and yet she would say, in Russian, that his music is poetry. 

As Jews, we are pulled to anything that sounds sad, as long as it has a story. We are a contradicting people, and it mostly comes from us perpetually escaping persecution since the beginning of our time. Over the phone, I first try to explain this (intergenerational trauma) to my mother. She says psychology just wants to put a label on everything, a deflection. I then try to explain it to my father and he says, that means everyone is fucked, right? 

The other day, when I chose to see my family on the night of my birthday rather than spend it with my friends — my brain has been guilt-tripped with the “priorities” lecture since childhood — my mother video taped me on her iPhone while my babushka recited her toast. It was, as expected, about an ominous future where I have children. And that she hopes my children will be happy and healthy. I said in my heavily-accented Russian, babushka, I am 23 years old. What about right now? She replied with, I wish you health and happiness every day already. 

The very existence of being a Kogan (my mother’s maiden name) means that you will always experience illness. Some sort of unadulterated chronic pain. My mother said, if you’re not feeling pain, then you’re not really living. So often, attempts to make one feel better that are said in Russian, especially if a Jew is saying it, sound deeply upsetting. And, the most bewildering part, is the speaker’s belief that it is optimism. 

While this has always stunned me, I have grown to understand why such sad sentiments are embraced as positive ones. People’s nervous systems are unreliable narrators — and so the only way to make sense of what we endure is to reject and be distrustful of everything that doubts our self-devised (and environment-influenced) moral code. This applies to anyone, but I am specifically speaking about Soviet Jewry, because that is what I know best. 

To find meaning and a solution to all atrocity is a coping mechanism. When one’s nervous system is so traumatized that the limbic system remains in fight or flight, logic is a distant enemy. Everything is an emotion, a reaction — my mother would call this her personality, but a personality is comprised of experiences, one’s own vast lifetime of witnessing and being witnessed. For me, this is easy to process because I decided to confront this cycle with my hands outstretched pushing against whatever lightning bolt of pain poisoned my bloodline. My mother critiques my approach because I’m unleashing something my family has never confronted before — the truth about why we physically and emotionally suffer, rather than just blaming the weather or our menstrual symptoms or each other. 

This requires digging and writing more poetry. It requires looking at more family photographs and asking my babushka what her mother Riva wanted most in the world, writing more short stories trying to interpret moments of loss and triumph, hearing my paternal dedushka reflect on what it was like to lose his mother Sheina at five years old, listening to totya Raya speak about a time before she was 95, requesting that my father not polish their history but tell me the difficult parts, like the Pesach story where he had to discretely bring matzoh home from Raya’s house because if he was too obvious, children would point at his matzoh, and call him a baby-killer Jew. 

This morning I ate Russian honey cake for breakfast with tea and read a book that made me want to write again. Today is Rosh Hashanah and I am listening to Leonard Cohen. I wrote nothing about what I was expecting to write, but maybe I will do that in an Instagram caption or think about it until Yom Kippur arrives. Tonight I will bake apples in an oven, and stop by a grocery store to buy too much for a Rosh Hashanah celebration I helped put together, with a Jewish organization that preserves Ashkenazi Jewish culture and the Yiddish language. 

Somewhere an ancestor is shaking their head at me for the way I live my life, and simultaneously watching over my back. I would like to call them God. I would like to believe they are guiding me through this never-ending terrain of unknowing. 

I would like to believe I am fulfilling some sort of familial prophecy, as small as it might be, I would like to believe I am providing some relief to our overworked souls. .