“Yes, unfortunately,” he answered, then added that he was eager to leave and didn’t care where he ended up, as long as it was anywhere but here. “Where do you live?” he asked. When I told him California, his eyes widened. “That must be nice,” he said, then cocked his head to look at me more closely. “How did you travel all the way here? Do you have money?” I shrugged, unsure where the conversation was going. “It’s expensive to go to America. Maybe you can help me?” I smiled and sipped my Jim Beam Honey. This might turn into a long night.
Once word got out that I was American, the conversation at the table shifted. A guy sitting to my right said, “I was there once. New York. Actually, it was Brooklyn.” He took a bite of beet salad. “There weren’t many Americans in Brooklyn. Just Chinese and black people.”
“Ah,” I said. “Well… those people are actually Americans too.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said. “But not like the Americans in the center of Manhattan. That’s where they all are.” To say that he was speaking in code would be an insult to the notion of code. For him, “American” equaled “white,” and at this moment, I wasn’t inclined to argue the point.
The talk turned to Ukraine, and the guy on my left got into a disagreement with the guy on my right as to how much the press—both Russian and American—manipulates public opinion. The mood in the room felt prickly, but I wasn’t sure if this was real, or just an unfortunate combination of difficult conversation, feeling out of place, and the ongoing stuffiness in my head. I was glad when the dinner finally ended.
The next morning, I showed up at the synagogue for the prayer service. A half dozen men were in the sanctuary, and one guided me into a small partitioned area with chairs and a coat rack. Ah, yes—I’d forgotten that in Orthodox Jewish services, men and women are segregated. This was disappointing, not only because I’m an agnostic who dislikes random segregation of any kind, but also because I couldn’t see anything beyond the partition walls.
Eventually, both the sanctuary and the women’s area filled up. Rabbi Riss started singing prayers in Hebrew in a strong, resonant voice, and I closed my eyes to let the sound wash over me. Despite the headaches of my visit so far, there was something thrilling about hearing these ancient prayers, especially in a place where people had fought so hard to preserve their Jewish faith.
During a short break, Rabbi Riss gave the congregation, most of whom were elderly, a spiritual pep talk. “Rejoice!” he told them. “Rejoice that you have your health, you can pray, you can move about. You don’t have the life of an invalid. You have everything—yet you say this isn’t life?” He seemed to be speaking to the same malaise I’d sensed at the youth dinner the night before, and I wondered how pervasive it might be in the community these days.
Back at the hotel, my room was stuffy and hot. Mid-September in this part of the world can be quite warm, and the high this week was expected to be in the mid-80s. I lay down on the bed, then noticed an air-conditioning unit embedded high in the wall. Hooray! I found the remote control, turned it on, and sank into my pillow for a quick nap.
When I woke up, my eyes were itching like hell. I went into the bathroom and washed my face—in cold water, since that’s all there was—then went out for an evening walk. I felt the need for some fresh air, both physically and figuratively.
The next morning, I could hardly get out of bed. I spent the whole day in the hotel, AC blasting, and midafternoon I carried my toiletries down the hallway to use the now-communal shower. The rest of the time, I slept, sniffled, sneezed, and rubbed my eyes. The room had a vague odor of cigarettes and seemed coated in an ancient layer of Soviet dust, but I forced myself to stay in and rest, hoping that by the following morning I’d be well.
I wasn’t. At 7:30 a.m., shuffling into the bathroom, I was in for a shock. My eyes were puffy and bloodshot, and one was tearing up. Oh, my god, I thought. I have pinkeye! I’d had it twice in my life, and both times I’d gone straight to a doctor. But that was the last thing I wanted to do here. My one experience with Russian doctors, in St. Petersburg in 1995, had involved a scalpel sterilized with a Bunsen burner, so I felt a wee bit skittish about them.[2] I quickly dressed and left the hotel.
As I ate breakfast at the nearby California Café, my eyes started feeling a bit better. I finished up my fried eggs and coffee, and headed back to the hotel to prepare for the day. But the minute I got up to my room, my eyes started itching again. This wasn’t pinkeye; it was an allergy. I hurried back out again, more annoyed than ever.
My first stop was at School No. 23, where I had an appointment with the director, whom I’d also interviewed ten years earlier. In her tailored suit, with a confident bearing and two cell phones always within reach, Liliya Komissarenko was the kind of put-together, no-nonsense administrator you want running your school. She invited me into her office, but when I asked if she remembered me from 2005, she smiled sweetly and said, “You know, I meet a lot of people.”
I told her I’d visited her at School No. 2 back then, and asked why she was no longer there.
“School No. 2 was destroyed,” she replied. “The building was old and unsafe, so the government knocked it down. We merged with School No. 3, and to make sure nobody felt offended, they decided to name it School No. 23.”
The new school was now the center of Jewish education for Birobidzhan’s children. One thousand students were enrolled—up from 600 at School No. 2 in 2005—and all of them took classes in Jewish culture and history, including a mandatory tenth-grade course on the Holocaust. Around 200 kids were studying Yiddish, which the director called the “native language of our territory.”
“In the nineties, people studied Hebrew when they wanted to leave,” she told me. “Those who were staying studied Yiddish, the language of the settlers—of my parents, my grandparents.” This explained why the train station name and street names in Birobidzhan were written in Yiddish, rather than Hebrew. “We have two Hebrew classes left,” she went on, “but we’re phasing them out. We don’t need to prepare our students to emigrate. We live in Russia!”
I asked how many of the students at School No. 23 were Jewish. “We don’t analyze the population of students by nationality,” she said, with a brusque shake of her head. “It’s not even possible to sort out which nationality they all are.[3] But we study Jewish tradition, which is important to all, regardless. And we follow the Jewish calendar and holidays—Hanukkah, Pesach, Purim, Shavuot. And all the dates that are connected to tragedies of European Jews: Babi Yar, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and so forth. This differentiates our school from others.
“Yesterday was our Rosh Hashanah pageant,” she told me, smiling proudly. “The whole hall was full of students. It’s too bad you didn’t come!” I instantly regretted the day I’d spent resting: it would have been fantastic to see hundreds of students gathered in celebration of the Jewish New Year, rather than lying about miserably in the Hotel Sneezalot.
I thanked the director for her time, then headed off once more to the synagogue. Rabbi Riss had promised a tour of the complex, and I was eager to finish this last bit of research in Birobidzhan, if for no other reason than to get out of that hotel and on to the next destination. Birobidzhan was a fascinating place, but something always seemed to go wrong here.[4]
2
I’d caught ringworm from petting a rescued street cat. To my surprise and dismay, Skin Clinic No. 1 not only sterilized their tools with Bunsen burners, they also had a resident cat that wandered around the waiting room rubbing up against the patients.
3
The director’s use of the word “nationality” might sound odd to Western ears, but in this context it’s understood to mean “ethnicity.” In Soviet times, and even for several years after the collapse of the USSR, passports here identified citizens by the “nationality”: Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Jewish, etc. The practice was discontinued in 1997, but a 2013 poll revealed that 54 percent of Russians would like to see it reinstated.
4
In 1995, what went wrong was that Gary and I had to flee the local police, who came poking around our apartment after neighbors tipped them off that Americans were staying there. (We hadn’t registered our visas locally, which was either an ironclad requirement or not a requirement at all, depending on whom you asked.) We went on the lam, racing to the only safe place we could think of: the home of an American missionary couple we’d happened to meet at a restaurant two days earlier. They graciously allowed us to stay the night, taking care to put us in separate rooms because we weren’t married.