Habitus

by Yuri Slezkine · 01/21/10

I became Soviet in 1963 when the USSR beat Czechoslovakia in the World Hockey Championship on an empty-net goal by Leonid Volkov. I became Russian around the same time and for the same reason. I became exuberantly Soviet in 1964 when I joined the Octobrist (Lenin’s Grandchildren’s) League, and then again briefly in 1966 when I was admitted to the All-Union Pioneer Organization.

I became half-Jewish in 1967 when I told my father that Mishka Ryzhevskii from apartment thirteen was a Jew, and my father said, “Let me tell you something.”

I became mostly Jewish around 1968, when I became anti-Soviet. My father, who was already anti-Soviet, did not have the option of becoming Jewish.

I was officially classified as Russian in 1972 when I received my internal passport (on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday). I was temporarily reclassified as Soviet in 1978 when I received my external passport (on the day I was hired by the Ministry of the Merchant Marine).

I became Swedish for a day and a half in 1978 when I borrowed the identification papers of one Gunnar Gunnarsson (place of birth Göteborg, permanent residence Boda) for the purpose of surviving a visit to the rebel-held part of Sofala Province in the People’s Republic of Mozambique.

I became a published author in 1981 when Progress Publishers printed my Portuguese translation of L.M. Maksudov’s Ideological Struggle at the Present Stage. My attempt to translate a manual on mechanical engineering for Peace Publishers was aborted due to my unfamiliarity with the subject matter.

I became Iouri Slezkine in 1981 when the Department of Visas and Permission of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR received special permission to transliterate my name into French. I was dismissed from the All-Union Union of Communist-Leninist Youth and from the Soviet Army reserve.

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by George Szirtes · 11/01/06

My Jewish Budapest did not exist. If it did exist it failed to inform me, if, indeed, it informed anyone. It might have existed in whispers, in tones of voice, in the sharing of certain unspoken, or little spoken, or not-spoken before the children, anxieties, but then I was a child and I had never heard of it. Furthermore I was not a Jewish child and neither was my brother, because, as you could have checked for yourself by a cursory physical examination, we were not circumcised. That we did not speak Hebrew, had never knowingly entered a synagogue, and had participated in no Jewish festivals or ceremonies, was further proof of the same fact.

True enough, our father was Jewish, he never denied that. He looked Jewish, that is if looks themselves can be Jewish. He had deep soft dark eyes and a considerable nose; indeed he still has the nose, and will, I expect, hold on to it now for the rest of his life; or maybe one should say, it has held and will hold on to him, it being a relatively small organ among many larger organs on the greater body to which it clings. My father was Jewish by accident, it seemed to me: the accident of his nose. Whether that was a minor or a serious accident, I couldn’t tell. But then the entire, as-yet-untried, ground of our being (to borrow a phrase from Paul Tillich) was necessarily unclear.

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