Текст книги "Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking"

Автор книги: Anya von Bremzen

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_{CHAPTER TWO}

1920s: LENIN’S CAKE

When I was four, I developed a troubling fascination with Lenin. With Dedushka (Grandpa) Lenin, as the leader of the world proletariat was known to us Soviet kids.

For a grandfather, Vladimir Ilyich was distressingly odd. I puzzled over how he could be immortal—“more alive than all the living,” per Mayakovsky—and yet be so clearly, blatantly dead. Puzzling too how Lenin was simultaneously the curly-haired baby Volodya on the star-shaped Octobrists badge of first-graders and yet a very old dedushka with a tufty triangular beard, unpleasantly bald under his inescapable flat cap. Everyone raved about how honest he was, how smart and courageous; how his revolution saved Russia from backwardness. But doubts nagged at me. That cheesy proletarian cap (who ever wore such a thing?) and that perpetual sly squint, just a bit smirky—they made him not entirely trustworthy. And how come alkogoliks sometimes kicked his stony statues, mumbling “Fucking syphilitic”? And what awesome revolutionary, even if bald, would marry Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, who resembled a misshapen tea cozy?

I decided the only way to resolve these mysteries would be to visit the mausoleum in Red Square where Vladimir Ilyich—dead? alive?—resided. But a visit to the mavzoley wasn’t so easy. True, it stood just a short distance from my grandma Alla’s communal apartment, where I was born. All I had to do was walk out of her house, then follow the block-long facade of GUM department store into Red Square. But here you encountered the mausoleum line. It was longer than the lines at GUM for Polish pantyhose and Rumanian ski boots combined. No matter how early I’d trudge over, thousands would already be there in a mile-long orderly file. Returning in the afternoon, I’d see the same people, still waiting, the bright enthusiasm of a socialist morning now faded from their glum, tired faces. It was then I began to understand that rituals required sacrifice.

But the foremost obstacle between me and Lenin’s mavzoley was my mother’s dogged anti-Soviet hostility. When I started kindergarten, where instructive mausoleum field trips were frequent, she forbade me from going, warning the teachers that I threw up on buses (true enough). On class trip days the kindergarten became eerily peaceful—just me and cleaners and cooks. I had instructions to sit in the Lenin Corner and draw the mausoleum and its bald occupant. The red and black stone ziggurat of the low little building—that I could reproduce perfectly. But the mysterious interior? All I came up with was a big table around which my kindergarten mates and Dedushka Lenin were having tea. On the table I always drew apple cake. All Soviet children knew of Lenin’s fondness for apple cake. Even more, we knew how child-Lenin once secretly gobbled up the apple peels after his mom baked such a cake. But the future leader owned up to his crime. He bravely confessed it to his mother! This was the moral. We all had to grow up honest like Lenin.

Actually, the person who knew all about Lenin and the mausoleum was my father, Sergei.

In the seventies, Dad worked at an inconspicuous two-story gray mansion near the Moscow Zoo on the Garden Ring, discreetly accessed through a courtyard. Most passersby had no clue that this was the Ministry of Health’s Mausoleum Research Lab, where the best and brightest of science—some 150 people in many departments—toiled to keep Lenin looking his immortal best under the bulletproof glass of his sarcophagus. The hand-washing and sterilizing of his outfit, of his underwear, shirts, vests, and polka-dot ties, were strictly supervised at the lab, too, by a certain zaftig comrade named Anna Mikhailovna. A physics of color guy, Dad manned the kolorimeter, monitoring changes in the hue of Lenin’s dead skin. (In his seven years there, there weren’t any.)

Dad and those of his rank of course were never allowed near the “object” itself. That required top security clearance. Mere mortal researchers practiced on “biological structures”—cadavers embalmed in the exact same glycerin and potassium acetate solution as the star of the show. There were twenty-six practice stiffs in all, each with its own name. Dad’s was “Kostya,” a criminal dead from asphyxiation and unclaimed by relatives. On Dad’s first day his new colleagues watched cackling as he nearly fainted at a display of severed heads. It was a pretty gruesome, over-the-top place, the lab. Embalmed limbs and fetuses bobbed in the basement bathtubs. But my father quickly got used to the work. In fact, he came to quite like it, he says. Because it was classified as dangerous to employees’ health, the job brought delightful perks. Shortened work hours, a free daily carton of milk, and, best of all, a generous monthly allotment of purest, highest-grade spirt (ethyl alcohol). In his reports, Dad noted the alcohol’s use for cleaning “optical spheres,” but he often came home with the robust smell of mausoleum spirits on his breath. Behold Soviet science.

I was sufficiently older and smarter by the time of my father’s necroemployment that Lenin no longer bewitched and bothered me. But certain curiosities linger even today, such as:

What did Lenin and his fellow Bolshevik revolutionaries actually eat?

Mom, on the other hand, has no such curiosity. “Over my dead body!” she almost bellows at my suggestion that we reproduce some Lenin-esque menus. Although she does chuckle when I mention Dad’s pet cadaver. Her own memory of his mausoleum days is just the alcohol breath, and she doesn’t find that one amusing.

Mom has her own notions of how the 1920s should be dealt with gastronomically. Rightly, she characterizes the decade as a fractured chaos of contradictory utopian experiments and concessionary schemes leading nowhere—all forgotten once Stalin’s leaden hand fell in the thirties.

“For us today,” she propounds, ever the culture vulture, “the Soviet twenties are really remembered for the writers. And the avant-garde art—the Maleviches, Rodchenkos, and Tatlins on museum walls all over the world!”

So besides digging into family history for her grandmother’s gefilte fish recipe, Mom assigns herself the task of leafing through art albums to troll for food references.

And I’m left to tackle Lenin. Dedushka Lenin.

From my kindergarten nanny, Zoya Petrovna, I knew that her dear Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in 1870, some 430 miles from the Kremlin, in the provincial Volga town of Simbirsk. Volodya (the diminutive of Vladimir) was the smart, boisterous third child of six in a large and happy family. At the cozy Ulyanov homestead there were musical evenings, tea in the garden gazebo, gooseberry bushes for the kids to raid. Mom Maria—a teacher of Germanic and Jewish descent—cooked stolid Russo-Germanic fare. The family enjoyed Arme Ritter (“poor knights,” a German French toast) and lots of buterbrodi, the open-faced sandwiches that would become staples of our Soviet diets. About the proverbial apple cake reliable scholarly sources are silent, alas.

The Ulyanovs’ idyll ended when Volodya was sixteen. His father died from a brain hemorrhage. The next year his older brother Alexander was arrested and hanged for conspiring to assassinate the czar. Most historians see Alexander’s fate as the trauma that radicalized the future Bolshevik leader. They also acknowledge the influence of Alexander’s favorite book, Chto delat’? or What Is to Be Done? In 1902 Vladimir Ilyich borrowed the title for a revolutionary pamphlet he signed using for the first time his adopted name: Lenin.

The original was penned in 1863 by an imprisoned socialist, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and is widely acknowledged as some of the most god-awful writing ever spawned under the northern sun. A didactic political tract shoehorned into a breathtakingly inept novel, it gasses on and on about free love and a communal utopia populated by a “new kind” of people. Writers as disparate as Nabokov and Dostoyevsky mocked it. And yet, for future Bolsheviks (Mensheviks too) the novel wasn’t just inspirational gospel; it was a practical guide to actually reaching utopia.

Vera Pavlovna, the book’s free-loving do-goodnik heroine, inspired Russian feminists to open labor cooperatives for poor women. And Rakhmetov, its Superman of a revolutionary, became the model for angry young men aspiring to transform Russia. Half Slavic secular saint, half Enlightenment rationalist, this Rakhmetov was ascetic, ruthlessly pragmatic, and disciplined, yet possessed of a Russian bleeding heart for the underprivileged. He abstained from booze and sex and grabbed his forty winks on a bed of nails to toughen up—a detail gleefully recalled by any former Soviet teen who slogged through a ninth-grade composition on What Is to Be Done?

And to eat?

For Rakhmetov, an oddball “boxer’s” diet sufficed: raw meat, for strength; some plain black bread; and whichever humble fare was available (apples, fine; fancy apricots, nyet).

As I reread Chto delat’? now, this stern menu for heroes strikes me as very significant. Rooted in mid-nineteenth-century Russian liberal thought, culinary austerity—not to say nihilism—was indeed the hallmark of the era’s flesh-and-blood radicals and utopians. The father of Russian populism, Alexander Herzen—Chernyshevsky’s idol, admiration alas unreturned—had condemned the European petite bourgeoisie’s desire for “a piece of chicken in the cabbage soup of every little man.” Tolstoy preached vegetarianism. Petr Kropotkin, the anarchist prince, avowed “tea and bread, some milk… a thin slice of meat cooked over a spirit lamp.” And when Vera Zasulich, a venerated Marxist firebrand, was hungry, she snipped off pieces of wretchedly done meat with scissors.

True to the model, Lenin qua Lenin ate humbly. Conveniently, his wife, Krupskaya, was a lousy cook. On the famous “sealed” train headed for Petrograd’s Finland Station in 1917, Lenin made do with a sandwich and a stale bread roll. During their previous decade of European exile, the Bolshevik first couple, though not poor, dined like grad students on bread, soups, and potatoes at cheap boardinghouses and proletarian neighborhood joints. When she did cook, Krupskaya burned her stews (“roasts,” Lenin called them ironically). She even made “roast” out of oatmeal, though she could prepare eggs a dozen ways. But she needn’t have bothered: Lenin, she reported later, “pretty submissively ate everything given to him.” Apparently Lenin didn’t even mind horsemeat. Occasionally his mother would send parcels of Volga treats—caviar, smoked fish—from Simbirsk. But she died in 1916. So there were no such treats in 1918 when her son and daughter-in-law moved into the Kremlin, by the wall of which I would later brood over the endless line for the mausoleum.

Ascetic food mores à la Rakhmetov carried over, it might be said, into the new Bolshevik state’s approach to collective nutrition. Food equaled utilitarian fuel, pure and simple. The new Soviet citizen was to be liberated from fussy dining and other such distractions from his grand modernizing project.

Novy sovetsky chelovek. The New Soviet Man!

This communal socialist prototype stood at the very heart of Lenin and company’s enterprise. A radically transforming society required a radically different membership: productive, selfless, strong, unemotional, rational—ready to sacrifice all to the socialist cause. Not letting any kind of biological determinism stand in their way, the Bolsheviks held that, with proper finagling, the Russian body and mind could be reshaped and rewired. Early visions of such Rakhmetovian comrade-molding were a goony hybrid of hyper-rational science, sociology, and utopian thinking.

“Man,” enthused Trotsky (who’d read What Is to Be Done? with “ecstatic love”), “will make it his purpose to… raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness… to create a higher social biologic tongue type, or, if you please, a superman.”

A prime crucible for the new Soviet identity was byt (everyday life and its mores)—to be remade as novy byt (the new lifestyle). A deeply Russian concept, this byt business, difficult to translate. Not merely everyday life in the Western sense, it traditionally signified the metaphysical weight of the daily grind, the existentially depleting cares of material living. The Bolsheviks meant to eliminate the problem. In Marxian terms, material life determined consciousness. Consequently, novy byt—everyday life modernized, socialized, collectivized, ideologized—would serve as a critical arena and engine of man’s transformation. Indeed, the turbulent twenties marked the beginning of our state’s relentless intrusion into every aspect of the Soviet daily experience—from hygiene to housekeeping, from education to eating, from sleeping to sex. Exact ideologies and aesthetics would vary through the decades, but not the state’s meddling.

“Bolshevism has abolished private life,” wrote the cultural critic Walter Benjamin after his melancholy 1927 visit to Moscow.

The abolition started with housing. Right after October 1917, Lenin drafted a decree expropriating and partitioning single-family dwellings. And so were born our unbeloved Soviet kommunalki—communal apartments with shared kitchens and bathrooms. Under the Bolsheviks, comforting words such as house and apartment were quickly replaced by zhilploshchad’, chilling bureaucratese for “dwelling space.” The official allowance—nine square meters per person, or rather, per statistical unit—was assigned by the Housing Committee, an all-powerful institution that threw together strangers—often class enemies—into conditions far more intimate than those of nuclear families in the West. An environment engineered for totalitarian social control.

Such was the domicile near Red Square where I spent the first three years of my life. It was, I’m sad to report, not the blissful communal utopia envisaged in the hallowed pages of What Is to Be Done? Sadder still, by the seventies, the would-be socialist ubermensch had shrunk to Homo sovieticus: cynical, disillusioned, wholly fixated on kolbasa, and yes, Herzen’s petit bourgeois chicken.

Naturally, the Bolshevik reframing of byt ensnared the family stove. Despite the mammoth challenge of feeding the civil-war-ravaged country, the traditional domestic kitchen was branded as ideologically reactionary, and downright ineffectual. “When each family eats by itself,” warned a publication titled Down with the Private Kitchen, “scientifically sound nutrition is out of the question.”

State dining facilities were to be the new hearth—the public cauldron replacing the household pot, in the phrase of one Central Committee economist. Such communal catering not only allowed the state to manage scarce resources, but also turned eating into a politically engaged process. “The stolovaya [public canteen] is the forge,” declared the head of the union in charge of public dining, “where Soviet byt and society will be… created.” Communal cafeterias, agreed Lenin, were invaluable “shoots” of communism, living examples of its practice.

By 1921 thousands of Soviet citizens were dining in public. By all accounts these stolovayas were ghastly affairs—scarier even than those of my Mature Socialist childhood with their piercing reek of stewed cabbage and some Aunt Klava flailing a filthy cleaning rag under my nose as I gagged on the three-course set lunch, with its inevitable ending of desolate-brown dried fruit compote or a starchy liquid jelly called kissel.

Kissel would have appeared ambrosial back in the twenties. Workers were fed soup with rotten sauerkraut, unidentifiable meat (horse?), gluey millet, and endless vobla, the petrified dried Caspian roach fish. And yet… thanks to the didactic ambitions of novy byt, many canteens offered reading rooms, chess, and lectures on the merits of hand-washing, thorough chewing, and proletarian hygiene. A few model stolovayas even had musical accompaniment and fresh flowers on white tablecloths.

Mostly though, the New Soviet slogans and schemes brought rats, scurvy, and filth.

There were rats and scurvy inside the Kremlin as well.

Following Lenin’s self-abnegating example, the Bolshevik elite overworked and under-ate. At meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars, comrades fainted from illness and hunger. As the flames of civil war guttered, the victorious socialist state came staggering into the century’s third decade “never so exhausted, so worn out,” to quote Lenin. An overwhelming roster of crises demanded solution. War Communism and its “food dictatorship” had proved catastrophic. Grain production was down; in February of 1921, a drastic cut in food rations in Petrograd set off major strikes. At the end of that month, the sailors at Kronstadt Fortress—whose guns had helped to launch the October Revolution—rose against Bolshevik authoritarianism. The mutiny was savagely suppressed, but it reverberated all over the country. In a countryside still seething from the violent forced grain requisition, peasants revolted in every corner.

What was to be done?

Lenin’s pragmatic shock remedy was NEP—the New Economic Policy. Beginning in mid-1921, grain requisition was replaced by tax in kind. And then the bombshell: small-scale private trade was permitted alongside the state’s control of the economy’s “looming heights.” It was a radical leap backward from the Party ideal, a desperate tack to nourish frail socialism through petty capitalism. And it was done even as the utopian New Soviet Man program pushed ahead in contradictory, competitive parallel.

Such were the Soviet twenties.

Despite the policy turnabout, famine struck southeastern Russia in late 1921. Five million people were dead before the horrors subsided the next year. But between this famine and the one that would follow under Stalin, the NEP’s seven years lit up a frenzied, carnal entr’acte, a Russian version of Germany’s sulfurous Weimar. Conveniently, the nepachi (NEPmen) made a perfect ideological enemy for the ascetic Bolsheviks. Instantly—and enduringly—they were demonized as fat, homegrown bourgeois bandits, feasting on weakened, virtuous socialist flesh.

And yet for all its bad rap, NEP helped tremendously. A reviving peasant economy began feeding the cities; in 1923 practically all Russia’s bread was supplied by private sources. Petrograd papers were gleefully reporting oranges—oranges!—to be had around town.

For a few years the country more or less ate.

Images of gluttonous conmen aside, most NEP businesses were no more than market stands or carts. This was the era of pop-up soup counters, blini stalls, and lemonade hawkers. Also of canteens run out of citizens’ homes—especially Jewish homes, according to Russia’s top culinary historian, William Pokhlebkin.

Checking in on Mom and her twenties research, I find her immersed in reconstructing the menu of one such canteen. It’s in NEP-era Odessa as she imagines it, half a decade before she was born.

The focus of my mother’s imagining is one sprawling room in Odessa’s smokestack factory neighborhood of Peresyp. Owner? Her maternal grandmother, Maria Brokhvis, the best cook in all of Peresyp. To make ends meet, Maria offers a public table. And there’s a regular customer, dining right now. Barely in his twenties, with dark hair already starting to recede but with lively, ironic eyes and dazzling white teeth that make him a natural with the ladies. Often he comes here straight from work in his suave blue naval uniform. He’s new to Odessa, to his posting in the Black Sea naval intelligence. Naum Solomonovich Frumkin is his name, and he will be my mother’s father.

Naum pays lavish attention to Maria Brokhvis’s chopped herring and prodigious stuffed chicken. But his eye is really for Liza, the second of Maria and Yankel Brokhvis’s three daughters. There she is in the corner, an architectural student running gray, serious eyes over her drafting board. Ash blond, petite and athletic, with a finely shaped nose, Liza has no time for Naum. He suggests a stroll along the seaside cliffs, hints at his feelings. Not interested.

But how could she ever say nyet to tickets to Odessa’s celebrated, glorious opera house? Like everyone in town, Liza is crazy for opera, and tonight it’s Rigoletto—her favorite.

Naum proposes right after Rigoletto. And is turned down flat. She must finish her studies, Liza informs him indignantly. Enough with his “amorous nonsense”!

So Naum, the crafty intelligence officer, turns his focus to the parents at whose table he dines. How could Maria and Yankel refuse such a fine young New Soviet Man for their pretty komsomolochka (Communist youth)?

How indeed?

Naum and Liza would be happily married for sixty-one years. Their first daughter, Larisa, was born in Odessa in 1934.

“So you see,” Mom says grandly, “I owe my birth to NEP’s petty capitalism!”

The enduring union of my grandparents, on the other hand, owed nothing to cooking. Like Lenin’s Krupskaya, Grandma Liza had scant passion for her stove; and just like Dedushka Lenin, my grandpa Naum submissively ate whatever was on his plate. Occasionally, Liza would make fish meatballs from frozen cod, awkwardly invoking her mother Maria’s real Jewish gefilte fish. She even made noises to us about someday making the actual stuff—but she never did. In our “anti-Zionist” State of the seventies, gefilte fish was an unpatriotic commodity. And Babushka Liza was the wife of a longtime Communist intelligence chief.

But I did encounter real gefilte fish as a kid—in Odessa, in fact, the city of my grandparents’ Bolshevik-NEP courtship more than forty years before. And it shook my young self, I recall again now, with the meaning of our Soviet Jewishness. A Jewishness so drastically redefined for my mother’s and my generations by the fervent Bolshevik identity policies forged in the 1920s.

That first taste of gefilte fish in Odessa still torments me, here across the years in Queens.

“Ah, Odessa, the pearl by the sea,” goes the song. Brought into being by Catherine the Great, this rollicking polyglot port on the Black Sea was by the nineteenth century one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe; its streets remain a riot of French and Italian Empire–style architecture, full of fantastical flourishes.

Ah, the Odessa of my young Augusts! The barbaric southern sun withered the chestnut trees. The packed tram to Langeron Beach smelled thickly of overheated socialist flesh, crayfish bait, and boiled eggs, that sine qua non of Soviet beach picnics. We stayed with Tamara, Grandma Liza’s deaf, retired older sister, formerly an important local judge. Tamara’s daughter, Dina, had a round doll’s face perched on a hippo’s body; she worked as an economist. Dina’s son, Senka, had no neck and no manners. Dina’s husband, Arnold, the taxi driver, told jokes. Loudly—how else?

“Whatsa difference between Karl Marx and Dina?” he’d roar. “Marx was an economist, our Dina’s a senior economist! HA HA HA!!”

“Stop nauseating already into everyone’s ears!” Dina would bellow back.

This was how they talked in Odessa.

In the morning I awoke—appetiteless—to the tuk-tuk-tuk of Dina’s dull chopping knife. Other tuk-tuk-tuks echoed from neighborhood windows. Odessa women greeted the day by making sininkie, “little blue ones,” local jargon for eggplants. Then they prepared stuffed peppers, and then sheika, a whole stuffed chicken that took hours to make. Lastly they fried—fried everything in sight. Odessa food seemed different from our Moscow fare: greasier, fishier, with enough garlic to stun a tramful of vampires. But it didn’t seem particularly Jewish to me; after all, black bread and salo (pork fatback) was Judge Tamara’s favorite sandwich.

Then one day I was dispatched on an errand to the house of some distant relations in the ramshackle Jewish neighborhood of Moldovanka. They lived in an airless room crowded with objects and odors and dust of many generations. In the kitchen I was greeted by three garrulous women with clunky gold earrings and fire-engine-red hair. Two were named Tamara just like my great-aunt; the third was Dora. The Tamaras were whacking a monstrous pike against the table—“to loosen its skin so it comes off like a stocking.” They paused to smother me with noisy, blustery kisses, to ply me with buttermilk, vanilla wafers, and honeycake. Then I was instructed to sit and watch “true Jewish food” being prepared.

One Tamara filleted the fish; the other chopped the flesh with a flat-bladed knife, complaining about her withered arm. Dora grated onions, theatrically wiping away tears. Reduced to a coarse oily paste and blended with onion, carrots, and bread, the fish was stuffed back into the skin and sewn up with thick twine as red as the cooks’ hair.

It would boil now for three whole hours. Of course I must stay! Could I grate horseradish? Did I know the meaning of Shabbos? What, I hadn’t heard of the pogroms? More wafers, buttermilk?

Suffocating from fish fumes, August heat, and the onslaught of entreaties and questions, I mumbled some excuse and ran out, gasping for air. I’m sure the ladies were hurt, mystified. For some time afterward, with a mixture of curiosity and alienation, I kept wondering about the taste of that fish. Then, back in Moscow, it dawned on me:

On that August day in Odessa, I had run away from my Jewishness.

I suppose you can’t blame a late-Soviet big-city kid for fleeing the primal shock of gefilte fish. As thoroughly gentrified Moscow Jews, we didn’t know from seders or matzo balls. Jewishness was simply the loaded pyaty punkt (Entry 5) in the Soviet internal passport. Mandated in 1932, two years before my mother was born, Entry 5 stated your ethnicity: “Russian, Uzbek, Tatar… Jew.” Especially when coupled with an undesirable surname, “Jew” was the equivalent of a yellow star in the toxic atmosphere of the Brezhnev era. Yes, we were intensely aware of our difference as Jews—and ignorant of the religious and cultural back-story. Of course we ate pork fat. We loved it.

The sense that I’d fled my Jewishness in Odessa added painful new pressure to the dilemma I would face at sixteen. That’s when each Soviet citizen first got an internal passport—the single most crucial identity document. As a child of mixed ethnicities—Jewish mom, Russian dad—I’d be allowed to select either for Entry 5. This choice-to-come weighed like a stone on my nine-year-old soul. Would I pick difficult honor and side with the outcasts, thereby dramatically reducing my college and job opportunities? Or would I take the easy road of being “Russian”? Our emigration rescued me from the dilemma, but the unmade choice haunts me to this day. What would I have done?

In the early 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Jews made their own choice—without anguish they renounced Judaism for Bolshevism.

One such Jewish convert was Mom’s Grandpa Yankel. He too became a New Soviet Man, albeit a short, potbellied, docile one. But he was a fanatical proletarian nevertheless, a blacksmith who under Stalin would become a decorated Hero of Socialist Labor.

Yankel came to Odessa in the early 1900s from a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement—the zone where since 1772 the Russian Empire’s Jews had been confined. Though within the Pale, the port of Odessa was a thriving melting pot of Greeks, Italians, Ukrainians, and Russians as well as Jews. Here Yankel married Maria, began to flourish. And then in 1905, he returned from the disastrous Russo-Japanese War to something unspeakable. Over four October days, street mobs killed and mutilated hundreds in an orgy of anti-Jewish atrocities. Yankel and Maria’s firstborn, a baby boy, was murdered in front of them.

The civil war revived the pogrom of 1905 with anti-Semitic marauding by counterrevolutionary Whites. The Red Army—commanded by one Lev Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky—vehemently denounced the violence. Jews flocked to the Reds. Too old for combat now, Yankel cheered from the sidelines.

At first the revolution was good to the Jews. The official birth of the USSR in 1922 brought them rights and opportunities unprecedented in Russia’s history. Anti-Semitism became a state crime; the Pale was dismantled. Jews could rise through the bureaucratic and cultural ranks. At the start of the decade Jews made up one fifth of the Party’s Central Committee.

But there was a catch.

Like the Russian Empire before it, the Soviet Union was vast and dizzyingly multiethnic. For the Bolsheviks the ethnic or “nationalities” issue was fraught. In Marxist terms, nationalism was reactionary. Yet not only did ethnic minorities exist, but their oppression under the czar made them ripe for the socialist cause. So Lenin, along with the early Bolshevik nationalities commissar, Stalin, an ethnic Georgian, contrived a policy of linguistic, cultural, and territorial autonomy for ethnic minorities—in a Soviet format—until international socialism came about and nationalities became superfluous.

The USSR, in the words of the historian Terry Martin, became the world’s first affirmative-action empire.

The catch for Jews? Jewishness was now defined in strictly ethno-national terms. The Talmud had no place in building the Radiant Future. Reforming and modernizing the so-called “Jewish Street” fell to the Yevsektsii, the Jewish sections of the Communist Party. They worked savvily. Religious rituals were initially semitolerated—in Sovietized form. Passover? Well, if you must. Except the Soviet Haggadah substituted the words “October Revolution” for “God.”

In 1920s Odessa, the Soviet supporters Yankel and Maria Brokhvis continued to light candles on Shabbos at their one-room flat in Peresyp—but without mentioning God. Maria saw no wrong in gathering their three daughters around Friday table; she was a proud Jew. As the terrible times of the 1921 famine gave way to NEP’s relative bounty, she shopped every week at Odessa’s boisterous Privoz market for the pike for her famous gefilte fish. It was her second daughter Liza’s favorite. Maria made challah bread too, and forshmak (chopped herring), and bean tzimmes, and crumbly pastries filled with the black prune jam she cooked over a primus stove in the courtyard.