Jerusalem As A Second Language
Published in Issue #25(Excerpt from a Novel)
subscribe to unlock the full story
Jerusalem, 1998
The Russian authorities smashed the keyboard of my piano. Someone was enraged that a Jew would own such an instrument, that we would have such solace in our possession.
I speak of the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union came apart into a collection of smaller countries. I speak of the man-in-charge: brave, but naïve, Mikhail Gorbachev, his dream of a Western-leaning Russia bringing a dollop of sanity into our lives. Gorbachev was the one who said to the Jews what had never before been said: Go, find happiness, find love, good luck, sending us off to other countries in a blizzard of applications and visas and papers stamped in gold leaf.
Allow me to introduce myself: Manya Zalinikov. Zalinikova, if I choose the feminine ending. Russian émigré, now living in Jerusalem..
“Manya, please, do not call us emigrés.”
This is my husband, Yuri, an atheist, like myself, or so I thought, burning with a sudden fever to “live like a Jew.”
“Speak up, Manya, say where we have arrived. Olim, new Israelis, this is who we are.”
Yuri is correct. Our family is now, since eight months, Israeli. But olim does not evoke the sensation of caviar crushed against one’s tongue, of sour cream sprinkled over cinnamon-scented blintzes the size of a thumb, steaming Black Crimean tea, sipped while seated at the stained glass windows of St. Petersburg’s Café Novotny, overlooking the lights edging the Neva River embankment. Nor does it speak of the sting of dry, fresh snow on the skin, of opening night at the Kirov Ballet, Katarina Chedlenko dancing The Firebird.
On the day this atrocity was enacted on my piano, we had already left Russia; Yuri, I, with profound resistance, our daughter, Galina,...
Subscribe now to keep reading
Please enter your email to log in or create a new account.