Post-Soviet Passover in COVID
софия собко / Sophia Sobko
I first learned the story of Passover at my friend Julie’s house ten years ago in Berkeley. I found comfort in her mom’s radical politics (she had been part of the Weather Underground!) and in the way the chorus of secular Jewish voices stumbled through the seder, trailing off halfway through each prayer. My own parents, of course, had no idea I was there. Had I told my mom, she likely would have rolled her eyes, or worse yet, done nothing at all.
My parents, like many Jews who grew up under the anti-Semitism and state-enforced secularism of the Soviet Union, largely considered Judaism irrelevant. To this day, some Soviet parents, driven by fear and trauma, hide their Jewishness from their children, or else disapprove when they discover that many of us are now choosing to explore our own Jewish identities. In my family, the most common response to my recent Jewish pursuits has been silence, as with the still unacknowledged photograph I sent my mom of the siddur (prayer book) that I painted by hand. This silence has caused a particular kind of pain: the more I come into myself, the more distance between us grows.
While my family was well aware that we were Jewish (Soviet Jews are the last to forget- it was stamped in our passports), by the time I grew up in the late 1980s in Moscow, explicitly Jewish religious and traditional practices were not a part of our daily life. Forced assimilation had taken our tradition from us in waves: hundreds of years of anti-Semitic violence, state-enforced Soviet secularism, the threat of Nazi extermination, and continued anti-Jewish sentiment. The only bit of Hebrew I heard in childhood - Hine ma tov u'ma na-im / Shevet achim gam ya-chad - ironically came to my family through an Orthodox Christian, who taught my parents modern Hebrew in preparation for our planned immigration to Israel/Palestine. (This move never happened, as we came to the U.S. later that year instead, but the melody still plays in my head from time to time.)
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In recent years I have ventured deep into my Jewish identity, participating in four organized Jewish retreats just this year (among them queer Talmud camp and Jewish artist retreat), and attending High Holy Day services for the first time, where I received approving nods from American Jews who had seen me around. As a post-Soviet Jewish immigrant, the imagined beneficiary of the 1970s/80s movement to “Save the Soviet Jewry”, my participation in American Jewish spaces is always fraught. Still, I have pushed through my feelings of alienation in order to reclaim Judaism for myself and my ancestral line, and have even found joy in building community and learning songs that are at once new and strangely familiar.
This year, however, Passover- the Jewish holiday of struggle and liberation, the holiday most aligned with my politics and values- launched me deep into an isolated grief. In the morning, not realizing it was Passover, I called my mom to ask her questions about two family photographs she had recently sent me. In them I see my grandfather’s parents and grandparents, the last generations of Russian and Ukrainian Jews who were observant. I then spent the rest of the day transcribing the testimonials of queer Soviet Jewish immigrants like myself, listening to their stories and painstakingly recording them word by word.
By the time evening came, the alienation that I have come to expect on Jewish holidays (but that I am usually able to endure) swallowed me up. As others hosted virtual seders with friends and family, making the most of a bleak situation, I sank deeper into the grief of not having had access to these stories, songs, and symbols for the first three decades of my life. As I considered joining an online seder, I couldn’t bear to feel this alienation exacerbated through the chill of a computer screen. I called my partner, a 2nd-4th generation white Ashkenazi American Jew, who has been navigating her own grief and loss in recent months, and unleashed on her an entire sea of sadness and rage. She listened patiently and reassured me that tending to my grief in this moment was as great an observance as any.
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As she signed on to her seder, I thought of the many other American Jews showing up resiliently to host and attend Zoom Passover celebrations. With a bit of resentment I considered that this resilience, especially for the white Ashkenazi Jews, is sometimes itself a privilege, predicated on a certain removal from systemic violence. Many Ashkenazi American Jews have been able to maintain and pass down Jewish stories, songs, traditions and practices at least in part due to the protection and safety afforded to them by whiteness. While early generations of European immigrants in the U.S. undoubtedly faced challenges to assimilation (and many of their families experienced the resulting pain of disconnect from their heritage, language, and relatives that I am experiencing today), their acceptance into whiteness has nevertheless granted them the protection to not be the ethnic/racial other, extending to us the benefit of the doubt that we are human, and not a threat to those in power. This preferred status was first extended to European immigrants legally through the Naturalization Act of 1790, and deepened in the 20th century through the governmental white affirmative action programs of the 1930s and 40s, including the New Deal, G.I. Bill.
As some Ashkenazi Jews negotiated assimilation into U.S. whiteness through the 20th century, living both the material benefits and psychic losses, my own family in Russia and the Soviet Union continued to be deemed ethnically undesirable. Just this week my mom recovered an email from a distant relative who had reconstructed my grandfather’s family tree. As we looked over the document together I learned that my grandfather had had a sister who had died in 1919 of starvation following a pogrom, during which the Jewish houses in the shtetl were raided, the wealth was seized, and many women were raped. Two hundred Jews, including the rabbi, were killed.
Twenty years later, as the United States abstained from entering WWII and turned away desperate Jewish refugees, both of my grandfathers fought the Nazis, while my grandmothers were evacuated to Siberia and the Caucuses, narrowly escaping massacre and starvation. My great aunt, left alone at 15 at the time of the war, survived the blockade of Leningrad off the rations of dead soldiers from the hospital where her aunt worked. My own father was born just after the war ended. He tells me that even in the supposedly multicultural Soviet Union he was taunted for being the only Jew in his class. One day some children tied him to railroad tracks, leaving him to die. As he finishes the story, he waves his hand across his moist eyes, signaling that it’s time for me to stop asking questions.
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These stories are recent. Their residue gathers in my furrowed brow, my bitten down fingernails, my achy gut. As a first-generation Soviet Jewish immigrant, the first in my long ancestral line to be considered part of a racially dominant group, trauma is both a recent memory and a passing one. On the one hand, I recognize the legacies of this systemic violence in the ways my own parents minimize my emotions and refuse to affirm my pain, a tactic for their own survival. On the other, my lived conditions differ significantly from those who came before me. Like American-born Ashkenazi Jews I, too, have now inherited the protections of white supremacy. I stand on the precipice, about to freefall into whiteness, likely already falling.
Maybe one day I will have kids and maybe, hopefully, I will raise them to know the story of Passover. They may host seders with their friends and go on ancestral journeys to “the old country.” If they are white, they may feel the dull ache of whiteness, and may try to compensate by abstracting ancestral pain and identifying with imagined, idealized ancestors. I am glad that they won’t have to know this pain viscerally in their bodies, of course, the way my grandparents and parents had to. But I will also make sure they know the ugly contradiction, the one that I wish would be articulated at every Passover seder, as white American Jews speak of struggle and freedom: that it is in part because of whiteness— ie., the systemic violence committed on native people, black people, and people of color— that we are able to continue these traditions in the first place. Our freedom has come at the expense of others, indeed is dependent on the dispossession and suffering of others (including Jews of color), and so it is no liberation at all.
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It’s Wednesday, the first night of Passover during COVID-19. I feverishly write down my feelings. I call a dear friend, another queer Soviet Jewish immigrant, who has been struggling all day with her own complicated relationship to Passover. As we twirl ribbons of grief and anger around one another, my body begins to burn up. I get off the phone in a hot daze and extinguish my fever in a lavender salt bath. I am grateful for the bath, the apartment in which I can shelter-in-place, the food in the fridge, my friends.
My partner, returning from the Zoom seder, calls to check up on me. My nervous system has settled, and I am more able to receive her comfort. She listens to me carefully and then says, “Passover is about sharing stories, getting together and retelling them every year so they are not forgotten. That is exactly what you and your mom did this morning when you looked at those photos together. And it’s what you’re doing when you’re collecting and transcribing Soviet Jewish stories.”
I want to make a joke about her Saving the Soviet Jewry (part 2), but I think she’s right so I bite my tongue. I’m learning and preserving these stories for my own healing, and in hopes of eventually passing them down to others. I am the link between the ancestors who suffered and the maybe-progeny, who will likely be born into complicity and who will hopefully resist it however they can. As I renew my own commitment to this charge, on Passover and every day, I am reminded that, along with rescinding wealth, power and land, part of the work is knowing my ancestors, passing down stories, articulating the contradictions, and grieving the ruptures and losses of the past and present.
I cannot resign myself to forever adapting to American Jewish spaces as they are, as I have often done thus far. Instead, so long as I’m in them, I must bring my full self to shape these spaces, to make them more expansive and welcoming for more people, and more accountable to those most impacted. And perhaps most importantly, most sweetly for my own soul, I must join with other post-Soviet Jewish immigrants to create our own, authentic forms of observance: queerly, Sovietly, Jewishly, for the liberation of all people.