Maternal Capital
by Joshua Ellison · 01/21/10
At the airport, my driver turned out to be a Kurd from Georgia. It took us almost an hour to find each other in the terminal because his handwritten sign, with my first name, only had three letters right (not the first three). He was dark with round glasses. He led me out to an old car, a Lada, which had no windshield wipers. Every now and again, he would roll down the window and splash water onto the muddy pane, which landed just in front of his face. Then, with an arm out the window, he would wipe in an approximate circle with a few squares of toilet paper.
His English was above average, and he was more interested in America than most I met in Moscow. He showed me a box of cigarettes he had been given by another passenger, probably a while ago: American Spirits, the yellow box with the profile of a smoking Indian. There was one left, and he smelled it lustily before putting it away. I admitted that I hadn’t known there were any Kurds in Georgia, and he told me a bit about his mountainous hometown. He didn’t like Moscow or anything about Russia really, except the money he was making and the open-minded women. All the same, he was ready to go home and marry a Kurd.
We talked about Obama, whom he admired—in a qualified Russian sort of way. Politicians are all shitty, he said, but an African president from America was some kind of progress. At this point the mud was winning, and the windshield was almost solid black. We pulled over to the curb a few times to rinse, but mostly he was driving by memory and guesswork.
We talked a bit about the war between Georgia and Russia the previous summer. And we talked a bit about Vladimir Putin.
“Putin’s a criminal. You know, he’s not even Russian…”
“He’s not?” Instinctively, I knew what was coming.
“He’s Jewish. They all are; all the politicians. They only pretend to be Russians.”
It’s not a new claim. There has been a nationalist fringe in Russia for some time that has openly speculated about Putin’s crypto-Semitism. Not that there’s anything to it, of course, except something that strikes them in Putin as alien, greedy, and conspiratorial; to a certain mindset, that can only mean one thing.
Just the idea of Jews, the whiff of Jewishness, still has the power to arouse something defensive and violent within many Russians. Jews have been an especially nagging irritant to a particular vision of Russian purity and wholeness, an eternal provocation and menace.
In a sense, Russian Jews are living a kind of post-history: a modest, melancholy coda to an epic and dysfunctional relationship. It’s impossible to overstate the impact of the Jews on Russia, of Russia on Jewish culture, or the indelible imprints of Russian Jews on the modern world. Today, many Jews still play important cultural and economic roles in Russia, but years of emigration, assimilation, privation, and discrimination have left Russian Jewry with a radically diminished footprint.
“The Russian-Jewish dialogue is coming to end,” wrote the cultural critic Lev Aninsky some fifteen years ago. Aninsky’s essay, “The Wandering Jew,” sketches the fraught relationship of two peoples who would never fully accept one another but, all the same, could never truly disentangle. Jews were, in many cases, exemplary Russians, but with a lingering and irreducible Jewishness that the Russian experience could not smooth out: “The most miserable of Russia’s sons are leaving their hateful mother.” This was estrangement among family, a filial rupture.
“The sons and grandsons of the Jews remaining in Russia will probably give little thought to their roots,” Aninsky predicted. “Russians will have to find some other people to cast as seducers and scapegoats.” Still, there are plenty of signs— like the fury directed at the often-Jewish and often-loathsome oligarchs, or even the rumors about Putin that I encountered— to suggest that the myth and mystery of the Jews still has a powerful, vexing allure.
And, if this issue of Habitus has anything to show, Jewishness is not something likely to soon vanish from the emotional landscape of Russia, even as it becomes more complex and even opaque. Jewish themes and Jewish characters emerge insistently, though often quietly, throughout these texts. Because there are many time periods covered and many experiences addressed, it would be misleading to draw too definite a conclusion about the nature of Jewish life and writing in Moscow. But Jewishness is embedded deeply here.
