Whatever you may make of Arkady Kovelman, you would be hard-pressed to call him an optimist. Sitting last week in his book-lined office in the Center for Jewish Studies and Jewish Civilization at Moscow State University, Prof. Kovelman is deeply ambivalent about the future of Jewish culture in Russia - as ambivalent as he is about the future of Russia itself.
A slim, dignified-looking man with a shock of white hair and a neatly trimmed beard, he stares out of the window into the late afternoon sun. March 15 - the day after Vladimir Putin won Russia's presidential elections in an anticipated landslide - has turned out to be the beginning of an unusually warm week for the late Moscow winter.
Across the street from the university gates, fire trucks are still parked outside the Central Manezh Exhibition Hall, which was gutted the previous night by an enormous fire of disputed origins, rumored to have been started by entrepreneurs of an underground building project wishing to circumvent the city's preservation laws. A short distance beyond the scorched fa ade of the still-smoldering building, the Kremlin rises behind fortified walls.
"The last time the Manezh was on fire," Kovelman tells me, "was in 1812, when Napoleon's army approached the city. We in Russia have survived a long period of stagnation. Now, one finally has the sense that history is at work again.
"Russians," Kovelman explains, "have a high sense of existential absurdity, which is our consolation. The saddest things can give you joy because of their rhetorical power. Looking at the burnt Manezh, I can't help thinking that we are living in a fireball that is not just Moscow but all of Russia, and which could bring forth either regeneration or destruction.
"When one talks about a Jewish revival in the former Soviet Union," Kovelman continues, "one needs to distinguish between the revival of Jewish life and the revival of Jewish culture. I would compare the status of Jews in contemporary Moscow to their status in 1930s New York. They are extremely dynamic and prosperous, yet Jewish culture in Russia is not flourishing. Right now people here are immersed in building a new life, and it will take time to recreate this life into new forms of cultural expression.
"The Jews," he adds, switching easily from English to Hebrew as he speaks, "have the illusion that they are permanently here, but our lives depend not on the Russian state per se but on the power of a willful president. Putin, like the traditionalist Russian czars, leans towards religion rather than towards reformists and liberals. Yet if he changes his mind about the Jews, everything will be lost."
IN RECENT years, a semblance of religious piety has become a sign of bon ton in fashionable Russian society. At The American Bar and Grill, where a buffalo and a Native American jostle for space on the paper placemats, the menu boasts a special Lent section. A similar Lent menu appears at a trendy caf adjacent to the city's Music Conservatory, where the newly wealthy can quench their thirst with $7 cups of cappuccino.
"As a Jew in Russia today," Artyom Wahrhaftig tells me when we settle down there after a concert on the eve of election day, "you have three options."
A bearded, bespectacled man in his early 30s, Wahrhaftig is the host of The Orchestra Pit, a well-known television show on Russia's culture channel.
"The first option," he explains, raising his head from his teapot to examine the crowded caf , "is a masochistic one - internalizing the historical hatred of Jews and turning it into self-hate. The second option involves a pragmatic approach - denying who you are in order to get ahead. If neither of these options suits you, you can become what I call a 'professional Jew' working in cooperation with Habad, The Jewish Agency, or some other foreign organization that has come here to foster Jewish life. The way I see it, though, all these organizations are in the end what the Russians call 'Potyomkin Villages' - a series of artificial facades, superficial simulations of a life that does not really exist."
I pondered Wahrhaftig's remarks the following morning, as I headed into the countryside north of Moscow with several foreign correspondents.
In Chyornaya ("Black" in Russian), we met an aging, destitute farmer by the name of Sergey Bakunin who had whiled away the morning drinking and thinking. As drunk as he was, his disillusion with both by Russian communism and post-communism reflects a widely felt mood in Russia today. Swaying unsteadily on his doorstep, he declared it was time for Russia to acquire for itself a foreign president.
"Bush! Bush! Bush!" he cried out into the surrounding expanse of pristine snow, raising his arm in an unsteady military salute when we walked away.
As the car wound on through rolling hills dotted here and there with the new dachas of prosperous Muscovites, I thought of Jonathan Safran Foer's recent novel Everything is Illuminated. Its protagonist, a young New York Jew, travels to the former Soviet Union to search for his family's roots in a place not at all unlike Chyornaya or Chernyatina, with their small wooden houses and desolate air.
Yet it was difficult for me to imagine the young Jewish intellectual who organized our expedition to the countryside - a brilliant Cambridge-educated writer who returned to Moscow after a decade abroad to write for the British press - conceiving of anything like Foer's self-reflexive meditation on the vicissitudes of post-modern Jewish identity. Nor, however, could I imagine him or Wahrhaftig sitting through one of the sentimental theatrical renditions of shtetl life that have come to stand for "Jewish culture" for many Russian Jews.
"Most Jewish members of the Russian intelligentsia today are an integral part of the Russian culture, but being Jewish is not part of this world," Vika Mochalova told me in her office at the Moscow Science Institute. She is a professor of Jewish history who heads Sefer, an umbrella organization for academic Jewish studies that has become an important part of Russia's evolving Jewish community.
"In my youth," Mochalova says, "Jewish culture was completely missing from everyday life. Actively cultivating a Jewish identity was abnormal - it was either an act of heroism or a crime."
OVER THE past two decades, nearly all Russian Jews with a strong sense of Jewish identity have left Russia, most of them for Israel. The Jewish intelligentsia remaining in Russia's metropolitan centers, I began to realize, was caught in a double bind. During both the Soviet and the post-Soviet eras, they worked hard and underwent complex processes of acculturation in order to gain their place among Russia's cultural elite.
Cosmopolitanism and the cult of Russian culture - rather than American-style identity politics - continue to be this elite's values. Its Jewish members do not want to be perceived as fostering a national or nationalistic culture. And even if they did want to feel closer to Judaism, they had little in their cultural background to steer them towards it.
Coming from the outside and posing the kinds of questions I had been asking - essentially taking for granted that my interlocutors would be more Jewish than they were - I was asking them to endanger their cultural position for an unfamiliar notion of Jewishness to which they were not at all sure they wanted to belong.
According to Rabbi Berl Lazar, appointed by Putin in 2000 to be the chief rabbi of Russia, "A lot of connections to the Jewish community are based on economic need, which is greater outside of Moscow. Today 15,000 children are enrolled in the Chabad school system. Then there is the older generation that comes for communal help. Still, 98 percent of Russian Jews are not part of any Jewish community structure."
Today, Jewish children and young adults who enroll in Jewish educational structures and community programs feel more Jewish than they would have 10 years ago, and can live a normal life that involves an emotional connection to Judaism. Yet these structures hardly touch the country's Jewish intelligentsia, which is indispensable to any significant attempt to foster a living Jewish culture in Russia today.
"You remind me of what I and other people I know went through when we got to Israel in the early 1990s," I am told by Grisha Tseltzer, who returned to Moscow four years ago after living in Israel for 12 years.
"You arrived with a certain notion of what you were looking for, but then reality informed you that you had the wrong idea of what things were actually like. The question of whether there is or isn't a viable Jewish community in Moscow is a difficult question. The answer is that it exists, but that for 70 years Jews in Russia lived according to implicit laws completely different from those which shaped the lives of American or Israeli Jews."
Under communism, Tseltzer notes, there was an underlying sense of support among Jewish people. Yet even today, official forms of cultural and social organization immediately raise suspicions.
"In Israel, it was natural for people to want to confront and understand their new reality in order to survive, and the clash between the world they came from and the world they found themselves in produced an intellectual and artistic community that actively engages with questions of place and identity. Here, however, people have no compelling reason to engage with these questions. They're not sure they want to bet on this horse called 'Jewish culture,' especially since the horse itself is so amorphous. The ones who do, do so for very personal reasons."
When he returned to Russia to work for the Joint as coordinator of Jewish community centers throughout Russia, Zetlzer felt compelled to cope with both ideological and existential questions concerning the future of Jewish cultural life in Russia.
Last year, a club by the name of Darkon (Hebrew for Passport) opened in Moscow to Russians returning from Israel, several hundred of whom arrived at the rather posh nightclub on opening night bearing their Israeli passports as membership cards. The club closed after a month. Nevertheless, one wonders whether the temporary or permanent return to Russia of people like Tseltzer is going to become a significant force in forging a new understanding of Jewish culture there.
"Sefer," Tseltzer notes, "is an example of cultural success in the academic field because it is a project that evolves through research and study and will eventually lead to meaningful work."
Tseltzer's theater group currently works at the Joint-run Nikitskaya cultural center. Yet for other endeavors such as the Biblical Theater Laboratory to succeed, they must have similar access to funding and institutional support. Whether the success of such endeavors will eventually lead to a true regeneration of Jewish culture in Russia, however, remains to be seen.
After enrolling in the prestigious Moscow Theater Academy, Grisha Tseltzer founded the Biblical Theater Laboratory, a group whose eclectic composition includes professional theater people, would-be actors, and students of Jewish philosophy, among others. The group's director is Boris Yochananov, whose star shone with the rise of a new Russian avant-guard during Perestroika and faded with its subsequent demise.
Tseltzer's concept was to use subject matter and themes taken from Judaic texts and employ them as the basis for a new theatrical language that synthesizes word, movement and image.
"I think about it as a form of theatrical Midrash," he explains. In stark contrast to commercial productions of Yiddishkeit, Tseltzer's theater, which is also known as the LaboraTORiA, combines Jewish themes with an avant-garde theatrical language that seeks inspiration in ritual. Significantly, this theater's aesthetic creed is similar to that explored by a number of experimental theater groups in Israel in recent years.
"Yochananov was already interested in a ritual theater, and the biblical subject matter fit perfectly with his aesthetic interests," Tseltzer says. Although being Jewish is not in any way a requirement for joining the group, Tseltzer says approximately 70 percent of its members are Jewish.
A year and a half ago, Tseltzer was also involved in publishing an anthology of Jewish plays newly translated from Yiddish into Russian called Half a Century of Jewish Theatre 1889-1926. A second volume is currently in the works.
"It was an attempt to close a historical gap that must be addressed in order to foster a new vision of Jewish culture," he says.
Tseltzer's group is also working on a production of The Golem which, together with other classics of Yiddish theater like The Dybbuk, are published in this anthology.
Contact :
Grisha Tseltzer
Biblical Theater Laboratory-Moscow
e-mail : Z_Grisha@hotmail.com
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The Chais Center for Jewish Studies in Russia,
Institute of Jewish Studies Faculty of Humanities,
Mount Scopus Jerusalem 91905 ISRAEL,
Tel.: 972-2-588-3505 Fax: 972-2-588-3688
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The Jewish University in Moscow
9 Mokhovaya, Suite 329,
Moscow 103009, Russia
Tel/fax: (095)203 3441
E-mail: jum@cityline.ru
Web : http://www.jum.ru/aboutus.htm
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