Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: anima russa

http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/90145/soviet-unions/
 
 
The lounge was made to feel completely underground—red curtains
obscured all natural light, and candles flickered. Russian waitresses
with onyx eye make-up and black wigs posed as belly dancers straight
out of The Arabian Nights.
 
To find the place, we had to turn on a few side streets, go down a
discreet staircase next to an apartment complex, and press a button
beside an unmarked black door. Three short rings later, we were
greeted by a round Russian man with a shiny bald head and quickly
ushered inside.
 
“It’s exclusive,” Dasha whispered to me as we traipsed down the
stairs. “They don’t want to bother with just anybody.”
 
Dasha, Anastasia, and Nastia, native Russians in their twenties, made
the orders: pomegranate hookah, tea with milk, tea with lemon,
chocolate-covered almonds, and fruit beer. Dasha, an icy blonde, and I
sat next to each other at the low table while the other two women sat
across from us smoking gold-tapered cigarettes.
 
We began with talk about the stinginess of Dasha’s recent ex. “A
Russian woman should only have to pay for her candy and stockings,”
Anastasia, draped in fur, informed me. As the newcomer, having just
moved here from New York on a fellowship, I had Russian romance
lessons to learn. We continued with necessary nastiness about his new
girlfriend. “In this day and age, if a Russian woman isn’t beautiful
by 30, she’s just stupid,” Nastia, very tall with black hair, said,
making the case that plastic surgery solves everything. Dasha had new
prospects: an Italian diplomat and a Finnish entrepreneur. “We look
for foreigners,” Dasha explained.
 
Soon the conversation turned to me. I mentioned a few disastrous dates
I’d been on since arriving and then made the typical four-single-women-
at-a-lounge conclusion: “Men are impossible.” Anastasia and Nastia
murmured their agreement, blowing smoke rings.
 
“Except Jewish men,” Dasha interrupted. The three of us looked at her.
She crossed and uncrossed her legs and signaled to the waitress for
another drink. “The best men are Jewish.”
 
I turned to Dasha. “You’re Jewish?” I asked. She smiled, fiddling with
the diamond cross around her neck. “Of course I am Jew,” she said.
“Jewish men are stylish and important men. And they are the most
generous. You must date Jewish men.” Anastasia and Nastia nodded
seriously, as though Dasha were imparting the secret to successful
dating.
 
I leaned back and took a deep drag off the pomegranate hookah. I was
in St. Petersburg—a city that 100 years ago had forbidden Jews’
residency. The only exceptions had been Jews who openly converted to
the Russian Orthodox Church, or Jewish merchants with connections. In
rare cases, Jews who had served in the czar’s army for 25 years were
permitted to live in the city.
 
When Daniel Chwolson, a great early 20th-century intellectual in St.
Petersburg, was once asked why he had converted to Russian Orthodoxy
from Judaism, he answered: “Out of conviction.”
 
“Out of what conviction?” he was asked. His answer: “Out of the
conviction that it is better to be a professor in St. Petersburg then
a melamed [Hebrew schoolteacher] in Shklop.”
 
Now, in a trendy lounge, a young Jewish Russian woman was flaunting
her Jewishness and her trysts with Jewish men like it was a fabulous
accessory, akin to her black fur coat.
 
***
 
When thousands of Russian immigrants began flooding Israel in the
1990s, the joke was that for the first time in history, people were
trying to alter their official papers to say that they were Jewish.
Since my move to St. Petersburg this fall, I’ve been taken aback by a
similar trend: Everyone I meet is excited to have their metaphorical
Jewish papers. Jewishness has a new social currency—especially when it
comes to dating.
 
Before my move, my sole association with Russian Jewry, like so many
American Ashkenazi Jews, was that of my lineage. Unless I was
discussing the refusenik movement of the 1970s or taking the
occasional subway ride to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, Russian Jewry was
the family photographs on my living-room walls.
 
In one, my great-grandfather, a Hasidic rabbi from a shtetl outside of
Minsk, Belarus, looks out sternly from an oil portrait above our
piano. In another, my grandfather and great-aunt, from the same
shtetl, gaze with somber eyes in faded black and white. On a table in
our foyer is another black-and-white photograph of another great-aunt,
a classic babushka.
 
Russian society was deeply anti-Semitic when those photographs were
taken. Pogroms were government issued. There was little to eat. I am
reminded of a Yiddish shtetl song my mother, a Yiddish translator by
profession, once taught me: Zuntik bulbes, montik bulbes,  Dinstik uhn
mitvoch bulbes,  Donershtik uhn fraytik bulbes.  Ober shabbes in a
noveneh a bulbeh kuggele  Zuntik vayter bulbes. (Translation: Sunday
potatoes, Monday potatoes, Wednesday potatoes, Thursday and Friday
potatoes. But on the Sabbath for a change a potato pudding.) Between
this and the lyrics to Fiddler on the Roof’s “Anatevka”—overworked,
underpaid—my stereotype of Russian Jewry was complete.
 
As I prepared to move, I thought about how my Belarusian grandfather
had come to New York City 80 years ago in order to learn English and
make a life for himself and his family. And as I began to study
rudimentary Russian, I couldn’t shake the lingering and lovely thought
that this was my grandfather’s childhood alphabet. Learning simple
greetings and the words for “black tea” connected me to him and his
lost world, both of which I longed to understand.
 
The next time I met Dasha, over wine in a fashionable, factory-style
café above an art gallery called the Loft, I pried her about the
comments she made at the club. She waved to various artists drinking
at different tables and then turned back to me. “It’s simple. If you
don’t like a man, I tell you it’s because he is not Jew,” she said in
her accented English.
 
“But your past boyfriends weren’t Jewish,” I said.
 
“But they should be,” she said. “My father is the most remarkable,
generous man, and that is because he is Jew.” She smiled at a Spanish
painter whose exhibit was on display at the Loft. He approached, air-
kissed, and they exchanged pleasantries in Russian, but she shook her
head as soon as his back was turned.
 
“Such an arrogant, annoying man,” she said. I dug into my carrot cake,
but then couldn’t resist asking: “Not a Jew?”
 
Dasha’s St. Petersburg is far removed from pogroms, her Judaism has
nothing to do with shtetls, matzoh balls, and potato blintzes. She
avoids potatoes to maintain her figure. Yom Tov and Shabbat, she says,
don’t figure into her identity. She insists it’s all about the men.
 
But it’s clear to me that that’s just a line. Her enthusiasm for
Jewish men is about something far more sweeping: newly acquired
excitement at the concept of a religious identity. After 70 years of
repression by the Soviet Union and hundreds of years of anti-Semitism,
to be able to freely express Jewishness is exciting and intriguing.
 
***
 
Judaism is experiencing an active revival across St. Petersburg. There
is a Reform synagogue, built in 2007, and the Grand Choral Synagogue,
built in 1893, is now run by an American-born Chabad rabbi. There is a
Jewish Community Center and a Jewish senior citizen center. There are
organizations dedicated to educating Jewish youth. There is a St.
Petersburg Hillel, which hosts weekly Shabbat dinners. Many of these
organizations receive funding from American Jewish organizations and
philanthropists.
 
After Saturday dinner at a weekend retreat this fall for young Jews at
a St. Petersburg hotel, a young woman approached me. “Tonight,” she
informed me, “we are all going to leave and go to a Jewish Halloween
party. We’ll stay at the club all night and come back here in the
morning.” We got into her car and cranked up “I Love You Like a Love
Song” as we sped through the winding avenues of St. Petersburg.
 
The club was subterranean and the waitresses there were dressed up as
cats, vampires, and butterflies, serving Bloody Marys. Fake cobwebs
dangled from the archways. A woman dressed in a skintight silver
jumpsuit belly-danced in the middle of the floor, while men dressed as
robots performed a light show behind her.
 
The theme was Halloween. This I could tell. I wasn’t sure where the
Jewish aspect came in until the round of introductions began.
 
“Naomi is the daughter of a rabbi!” a friend screamed over the
pounding music, referring to me.
 
“I didn’t know a rabbi’s daughter could dance!” said a Georgian boy
I’d just met.
 
“I just started taking classes with a rabbi!” a girl with a cat mask
chimed in.
 
“Welcome to Jewish Peter!” her boyfriend said.
 
We l’chaimed to shots of vodka with cherry juice.
 
The place was packed. A rhythm developed immediately: dance until
covered in sweat, dash outside to the freezing temperatures, smoke a
cigarette, and dash back in. I was told repeatedly that everyone young
and everyone Jewish in St. Petersburg was there.
 
“WHO ORGANIZED THIS PARTY?” I yelled, over techno music.
 
“Kreme! This is a Kreme party!” said someone in a mask.
 
“WHAT’S KREME?”
 
“They throw four parties a year! Best parties!”
 
I coated my throat with vodka and spiced honey. I turned back to my
dance partners. “WHO IS THE HEAD OF KREME?”
 
I vaguely heard Sasha, a nickname for Alexander.
 
Alexander and I met for lunch at Golden Café, one of three kosher
restaurants in St. Petersburg. The walls were made of white brick, and
the food was classic Russian fare: borscht, spicy Georgian chicken,
shredded cabbage and carrot salad, and endless cups of black tea. The
only notable Jewish features were photographs on the wall that
resembled the ones in my home and the three visibly Orthodox
businessmen eating lunch at the table next to ours.
 
Alexander—who, like many Russians I interviewed, declined to give his
last name—discussed house music and mash-ups and explained his
fascination with the obscure Gabrielite sect of Judaism. Then
Alexander told me about his method for planning Kreme parties,
something he began doing, along with two girls, five years ago. They
are never on Shabbat or Yom Tov. “Not too many big, popular places
give us Saturday night,” he said.
 
Alexander started Kreme, he said, because he asked himself, “What’s
the best party I go to? A party where I walk into a bar and know
everybody.” One goal is to “show Jewish youth a lot of different
clubbing in the city.” Kreme rarely repeats locations. Parties are
typically thrown on holidays like Hanukkah and Purim, but not on
Passover because you can’t drink beer.
 
I mentioned Tel Aviv’s great nightlife, assuming he’d agree, but
Alexander shook his head. “My girlfriend and I couldn’t find one
kosher restaurant in Tel Aviv,” he said.
 
***
 
On another day, at Terminal Bar, located on the stylish Ulitsa
Rubinsteina, a street filled with jazz bars, Thai food, and English
pubs, I ordered a Prosecco and watched the bearded Russian next to me
read the newspaper and drink Hennessy on the rocks while he chain
smoked.
 
I was there to interview Sid, one of the three Jewish men who opened
Terminal in 2010, now hugely popular. Sid emerged from the back, wild-
haired and wild-eyed. I asked him how he was doing. “I haven’t seen
myself for a few days,” he said. “But my friends say I’m doing good.”
 
He poured himself a glass of Bushmill and lit a cigarette. “This is a
bar for your grand-daddy,” he said in English. “A bar where he shouts
at the bartender.” Sid affected a cranky old man voice. “ ‘What? Red
wine, white, what’s the difference?’ This is the kind of bar for
someone who gets up and says, ‘Should I kill myself today or should I
drink? Well, I should probably have a drink.’ ” Sid told me that he
had nothing against young people, but frankly, “I don’t need no puke
in my corner, no drugs in my toilet, and I’d prefer no screwing on my
piano.”
 
I approached the Jewish questions delicately. “So, the three of you
are all Jewish, yes?”
 
“All Jews,” he answered. “My grandmom was Jewish, my mom was Jewish.
We don’t serve kosher food or kosher drinks, but we’ll never make it
secret.”
 
Then Sid added, “Actually, for a while I wanted to put the Star of
David on the entrance sign of our bar. When I asked a rabbi about it,
he said, ‘Sid, don’t worry, they’ll put it there for you.’”
 
***
 
Several nights later, I find myself at the Grand Choral Synagogue—
enormous and pink—with dozens of other young Jews. The dinner, hosted
by Chabad, is interrupted every few minutes with toasts.
 
“Have another shot!” my tablemates encourage. This is the closest I’ve
come in St. Petersburg an American college fraternity.
 
The toasts are cheerful and unruly. “To the unity of Jews in Sukkot
all around the world!” “To the Jews who are not able to celebrate!”
“To the iPhone 4S! S-stands for Sukkot!” “To kasha, which doesn’t make
you fat!” “To my shlamaziel of a son-in-law, who doesn’t deserve my
daughter but produces such beautiful grandchildren!”
 
“To this beautiful night!” is the next toast.

 out of The Arabian Nights.
 
Curiosita`: la danza del ventre nel Golfo Persico e` stata introdotta
nei primi locali del genere (fine anni '70 inizio anni '80) da donne
russe.
 
Ancora oggi, molti chiamano questi spettacoli "russian show".

 “My girlfriend and I couldn’t find one kosher restaurant in Tel Aviv,” he said.”
 
http://www.kosherdelight.com/IsraelTelAvivKosherRestaurants.shtml
 
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