The Nosik

On the 25th day of March, a most remarkably strange event occurred in St. Petersburg.

—Nikolai Gogol

On the 25^th day of October 2025, Professor Teddy Telegraf, who held the Tsures Chair at one of the nation’s oldest land-grant universities, woke up in a foul mood. The only child of Dostoevsky-revering provincial Russian Jews, in his truncated Soviet life he used to be called Fedya Telegrafist. As an immigrant teenager, he assimilated his name to Teddy Telegraf—not Theodor as in Herzl, but Teddy as in Roosevelt. Little did he know! Already in college at Brown, when he decided to become a Jewish revolutionary, Teddy’s choice of first name sometimes raised the sable or astrakhan eyebrows of his fellow radicals, but unchanging it or changing it again would have been de trop even for our young prophet of revision.

The hosts put Teddy up at Loach Motel on the east side of Boycot, about a fifteen-minute stroll from the campus of Cascadia University, once famous for its MFA program, where Sy Levin, C.D. Fabrikant, and other good and great men and women of the tribe, including two past winners of the Pulitzer Prize, had taught in the 1940s and 1950s. Teddy, or rather Professor Teddy Telegraf as he liked to be addressed, Jacobinism aside, was in Cascadia to deliver the annual Judith Butler Lecture in Cultural Politics. The formal invitation was issued by the university’s history department and arranged by Teddy’s colleague Jackson Strider, who held then the recently-endowed professorship in post-colonial studies. The co-sponsors included the Palestine Studies Program, the Judaic Studies without Israel Program, as well as the local chapters of Students from the River to the Sea and Food Workers International. The title of Teddy’s lecture, printed on flyers with black, white, and green stripes, and red isosceles triangles, was “From Soviet Anti-Zionism to BDS: A Radical Jew’s Return to His Spiritual Home.” He was donating half of his not negligible speaking fee to the Edward Said Libraries in Gaza.

Teddy’s plane had been delayed, and from the airport he was driven straight to dinner at the Helmand, an Afghan restaurant, and finally to Loach Motel. The bed was so uncomfortable that Teddy tossed and turned for almost two hours, too tired to get up and read, until he finally collapsed into a vatic dream, from which he woke up drenched in sweat. His dream had the trapping of the truth he so feared, and in fearing it avoided invitations to academic conferences in Israel. . . until the invitations stopped coming.

In the dream, he arrived in Israel with his wife Nadya and their nine-year-old daughter, Hope. While going through passport control at Ben Gurion, Teddy was separated from his family and escorted by two uniformed hoodlums into a room somewhere in the bowels of the terminal. A tall, slender, Ethiopian woman in a sky-blue pantsuit interrogated him, a triumphant smile teetering on her full lips. She knew everything about Teddy, down to their old apartment building number on Lenin Prospect in the city of Sterlitamak west of the Ural Mountains, where his father had once taught Marxist-Leninist aesthetics at the local teacher’s college, and his mother performed abortions at an oil refinery clinic.

“You have no right to hold me here,” Teddy intoned.

“Actually we have every right to hold you here, Dr. Telegraf,” the interrogator pressed on. “In 1989 you and your parents left the Soviet Union on an Israeli aliyah visa, didn’t you?”

“Yes, we did,” Teddy replied, staring into the coffee-stained carpet. “But we never intended to go to Israel,” he added, and immediately regretted having said it.

“What you intended or did not intend is irrelevant,” countered the Israeli interrogator. “The facts remain. You’re obligated to perform your duties to the state of Israel. Pay your debt and you may go as you please. We won’t keep you.”

He was driven in a windowless van to a remote desert location where they made him clear rubble in what he guessed—his captors didn’t engage with him, except for short commands in Hebrew pressed through their teeth—was a kibbutz destroyed by missiles. At night they would take him to a room in a barracks with a corrugated roof. In the room there was a cot, a chair, a sink, a toilet, and a shower head with a rusty drain in the concrete floor. A tray with pita bread, cheese, grapes, and water awaited him when he returned from forced labor. There were about ten captive workers in the group, mostly men but also three women, who were roughly his age and looked like they had lived in America or Canada for quite some time. They weren’t allowed to speak to one another, even when they ate breakfast and broke for lunch in the middle of the day. On the seventh day, he was driven back to Ben Gurion airport.

The same Ethiopian officer who had questioned him on the day of his arrival now briefly received Teddy in her office.

“Dr. Telegraf,” she said with profound disdain. “Be careful. We’re watching you.”

She handed him a Ziploc bag with his U.S. passport, phone, and wallet. Two grinning fellows in uniform rolled out his suitcase and walked him to passport control. One hour later, still torporous, he was on an El Al flight to Los Angeles.

When he traveled, Teddy liked to turn on a detailed auto-reply: It is normal for me to take two days to read my emails and even longer to reflect on the matter and respond thoughtfully. The culture of immediacy is not compatible with the kind of life I aspire to lead. Still in bed, Teddy groped for his smartphone to discover a text message from his wife, who was also an ex-Soviet Jew and also an academic, best known for her book Nazis with Red Passports: How the Soviet Aliyah Destroyed Israel’s Democracy. Nadya’s text said: There’s a review of your book in that dirty rag, I thought you should know. Just as we think these Jewish fascists couldn’t sink any lower, they keep surprising. I’m so sorry. Hope and I miss you lots.

Nadya’s warning was about a review of his new book, Jews of Indeterminacy: A Soviet History, in Scrolls Magazine. When Teddy saw the byline, “Karl Kremen,” he knew it would be a public evisceration. This was, in fact, the pen name of three professors: Simon Krikoun of the Franciscan University of Pennsylvania, Bentzion Stolyar of the College of Montefiore, and Masha Klauberg of Annapolis. They were a Soviet literature specialist, a Yiddishist, and a historian of Eastern Europe, all three of them Soviet-born like Teddy. Jointly they had been reviewing books since graduate school. The review bore the title How the Soviet Jews Mate. Teddy looked over the beginning and middle but froze as his eyes took in the beginning of the closing paragraph:

Professor Telegraf aims to reveal to the world the “bitter truth” (p. 13) about that special, allegedly amorphous and areligious type of Jew: Homo Sovieticus Judaeus. Despite its fervor and commitment to the principles of criticism dictated by the latest plenum of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Telegraf’s book fails to convince. Like a tipsy acrobat, jumping from one Soviet Jewish author to the next, he explains everything with the term “indeterminacy,” while the only thing truly indeterminate is the author’s own thinking about Jewish identity.

And then something extraordinary happened. Teddy couldn’t bring his smartphone closer to his eyes because the screen was hitting against something hard yet with a fleshy tip—as in the old joke his maternal grandfather used to tell about a man with a Jewish accent sounding out the Russian word tsar’ and emphasizing the soft final consonant r: tsar’ s miagkim konchikom (literally, tsar with a soft little tip). Teddy felt something stuck between his face and the phone screen. Was it the pillow corner or a bruise on his forehead from having been accidentally hit by his daughter when they played intifada? After examining himself in the bathroom mirror, he concluded that the foreign something was actually his nose. Well, not his own nose but another nose having jumped onto his face from the pages of a Ukrainian-Russian satirist who had quite a penchant for grotesque Jewish bodies. Except the original Nose, the one that walked off the face of a certain collegiate assessor in imperial St. Petersburg, that Nose was noble, straight, shaped like a facet of an Egyptian pyramid. And this one, the one that had replaced Teddy’s cute nosik, was a caricature, the kind of Jew-nose that the Nazis used in posters about racial defilement: huge, hooked, unstoppable. Teddy Telegraf stared at himself with horror, and the motel’s spotted mirror made him recall with acute nostalgia the happy days of his Soviet childhood in Bashkortostan, when he looked almost like a perfect little Slavic boy, or perhaps a little Turkic boy, but never, never a Jewish boy.

His talk was scheduled for noon at the Student Union so that more students could attend. It was already past ten o’clock. Feeling dispirited, Teddy showered and tried shaving but soon gave up—the new nose was getting in the way. He put on a tight black suit and wrapped himself in a keffiyeh as he had been doing since October 7. On his diminutive frame of a gawky teenager, the checkered shawl looked almost like a poncho. As he walked to campus, searching for a place to grab breakfast, Teddy came upon a Starbucks. An angry crowd was demonstrating in front of it. There were about forty people, both students and townies. Many of them, like Teddy himself, wore keffiyehs. Some waved black-white-green-and-red flags, others held banners and signs: Food Workers for Palestine; The Many Will Defeat the Money; Israelis Are the New Nazis; Defund the Police. Couldn’t they come up with something new? Teddy caught himself thinking and strangled the blasphemous thought.      

Only three people opposed the demonstrators, Israeli flags held up high. One of the supporters of Israel was a dignified gentleman sporting a white goatee—a professor of Holocaust studies whose work Teddy used to admire in graduate school. His stern face projected deep contempt for the demonstrators who would have attacked him had it not been for a barrier of three police officers who stood guard in front of the Starbucks, expressions of deep boredom on their lumberjack faces. Upon seeing Teddy’s keffiyeh, the demonstrators greeted him with the words, “Welcome, brother.” The Chekhovian professor of Holocaust studies recognized Teddy and turned away his funereal gaze. “Free, free, free Palestine!” the demonstrators chanted, and Teddy stood with them, furtively touching his nose. He finally entered the Starbucks. Having reinforced himself with a soy latte and an everything bagel toasted extra dry, Teddy exited through the back door. On the way, as he cut through a small dusty public garden with a playground, a dog with a perfectly chiseled long face and human silver curls ran toward him, barking with affected ferocity.

“Leave it, Starlet,” a plump teenage girl with long braids called out to the dog. “I’m really sorry,” she said to Teddy. “She’s very emotional.”

“Keep your God-damned Jewdle on a leash!” Teddy yelled at both the girl and the dog with such visceral rage that the girl quicky leashed the dog and started pulling it away.

Teddy’s lunchtime presentation to an audience of about two hundred students didn’t go well. He was troubled by the bad review of his book, but even more so by the new member of his body. As he tried to muster his usual pathos of “both a witness to, and a survivor of, Zionist propaganda,” his new nose touched the rim of the microphone, and his voice would go flat. Teddy kept trying to lock eyes with Professor Strider, as if to signal that they didn’t bring him to Cascadia for nothing, that he wouldn’t disappoint his host during the Q & A.

As soon as Teddy finished his prepared and well-practiced remarks and clicked to his last slide—a photograph of what he refereed to as “Netanyahu’s thugs”—the audience erupted with questions. Teddy turned to Jackson Strider, as if asking him, “What’s wrong?” His host only gave him a cold smile and invited “the folks” to line up behind the two microphones installed in the aisles.

The first speaker, who had greenish hair and was wearing baggy denim overalls, introduced themselves as “Latina, Jewish and Ukrainian” and asked: “Professor, do you support the slogan ‘From the River to the Sea’?”

“Well, look,” Teddy replied, his voice growing feeble, “this depends on the context. If—”

The person with greenish hair cuts him off. “Do you support a Palestinian state within its historical boundaries?”

“Surely, surely, you can appreciate from my talk that I actively support an independent Palestinian state. And I oppose Israeli aggression,” Teddy said, his voice parched. “I want to see a democratic Palestinian state and a democratic Jewish state as partners in peace.”

“Wait, folks,” said a deep, humid voice from the back of the auditorium. Teddy couldn’t see the face because the speaker was wearing a black ski mask. “Looks like we got ourselves one of them liberal Zionists.”

The auditorium went crazy. Many voices were screaming, and in their furious chorus Teddy could make out the words “Denounce Israel” and “Free Palestine.”

Jackson Strider, the host, who had been standing in the back of the room beside a campus police officer, walked toward the stage, where Teddy was all alone. Strider was in his mid-fifties, ruddy and athletically built, his long wheat-colored hair gathered in a ponytail. He cleared his throat, made a pacifying gesture as if compacting the air with his right hand, and spoke in the voice of the actor William Hurt playing the Soviet police investigator in Gorky Park:     

“Friends, as the one who invited Professor Telegraf to Cascadia, I would like to set the record straight. I’ve known Teddy Telegraf for many years. I haven’t read his new book on Soviet Jews, but his first book, The Prize Lobby, I know very well. An important exposé of the Nobel and other major prizes and the behind-the-scenes Jewish dealings. Professor Telegraf is certainly a valuable ally in the Jewish community. And yet”—and here Strider’s voice soared—“as I recently argued in my essay ‘The October Theses,’ published in the International Journal of Anti-Zionism, most ex-Soviet Jews have been indoctrinated by Zionists to such a devastating degree that they could never fully shed their origins and join our struggle.”

“Jackson, colleagues, wait. Let me explain.” Teddy spoke with all the strength he still had left in his lungs.

The masked man from the back moved up the aisle, grabbed a microphone, and shouted: “I knew it! He’s only doing it for money.”

A bespectacled, red-headed student in preppy clothes and a white and green keffiyeh had gotten hold of a microphone and admonished the gathering: “Let him speak. Don’t interrupt. Go ahead, Professor Telegraf.”

“Thank you.” Teddy picked up the microphone. “You misunderstood what I meant. And actually I should explain that I’m not a typical Jew. . . not Ashkenazi. . . ”

“—ass kicking Nazi,” the masked man mocked him. “The hell you’re not.”

“Stop it,” the redhead blushed as he spoke into the other microphone. “Let the professor finish.”

“I come from Bashkortostan,” Teddy continued, his voice trembling. “We had a small community of ethnic Bashkorts who became Jews in the ninth century under the influence of Khazars. This is why I don’t even look Jewish. . . I mean, look at me. . . I’m often taken for a Turk,” Teddy said as he passed his right hand over his face.

“Stop lying,” the masked man yelled. “Just look at his nose. Jew, Jew, we recognize you!”

As the audience exploded with ugly laughter, Teddy recalled in a flash how once, in 1984 or 1985 in his Soviet school, he ran across the schoolyard from the local hoods who were pursuing him and chanting, “Get the little sniveling Zionist.”

Teddy wasn’t sure what possessed him, but he dropped the microphone, dashed across the stage, and then down the back stairs of the building. He ran for all he was worth across campus, even though no one was chasing him. He continued to run down the thoroughfare linking the campus with downtown Boycot, his eyes scanning the buildings he passed in search of a safe space. As his side vision registered the sign Chabad Houseprominently displayed on the fence of a Victorian mansion, he knew it spelled salvation. Teddy opened the gate, ran up the steps, and furiously banged on the front door.

As he heard footsteps inside, he yelled, “Help me! I’m a Jewish professor. They are after me.” And then he added in Yiddish, “Helf mir, helf mir.”

The bearded man in a black kippah who opened the door was in his seventies, his shoulders and chest robust although he was stooped in the back.

“Come in, come in,” said the bearded man.

Teddy stepped into the hallway of Chabad House, still unsure what to do or say next.

“Hello Fedya,” the rabbi said, switching to Russian. “I remember you and your parents from Santa Marinella. It’s been a long time. 1988, right?” The rabbi smiled with merciless glee.

In a flood of technicolor memories that washed over him like Tyrrhenian waves in August, Teddy saw a seedy little park off Via Aurelia, his bespectacled father in a plaid shirt and Soviet-issue cream tussore pants (his father refused to wear shorts even in sweltering Italian heat), and his own thirteen-year-old self, both of them walking briskly past chess-playing war veterans and Giuseppe the fruit-seller who sold overripe peaches and plums to Soviet refugees waiting for America. They are walking toward Rav Ariel, not today’s aged lion of Judah but a handsome young Jew who had left Zhitomir in the 1970s and was now based in  Santa Marinella as a predstavitel—representative—of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. “Rebbe, he’s a bar mitzvah already,” says the former professor of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics to the young fearless rabbi. Rav Ariel coils the sticky tefillin straps around Fedya’s arm and tells him in a mesmerizing voice: “Say after me, Fedya, Baruch Ata Adonai Eloheinu. . .” Fedya repeats the rabbi’s incantations and feels some new warmth, not the hot sun of Italy but something else pushing apart the shimmering leaves on the plane trees over his head—something comforting and warm entering his body. . . Almost forty years ago this was, and now Rav Ariel ran Chabad House at Cascadia University, and he, the Jewish-Soviet boy formerly known as Fedya Telegrafist, marched in place in the hallway, afraid to look into the rabbi’s bottomless eyes.

As Rav Ariel led Teddy down the corridor, Teddy saw two preteen girls in long black skirts, high-neck blouses, and cardigans in maroon and forest green. Both girls looked away from Teddy and giggled. He thought the older one bore a striking resemblance to his wife Nadya.

Rav Ariel left Teddy in a large parlor with portraits of bearded men and bookcases choking with sacred books. He came back a few minutes later, carrying a faceted glass of tea in a metal glass holder and three sugar cubes on a small plate.

“You sit here and rest. I have some business to attend to, and then we’ll drive you back to your hotel.” Rav Ariel patted Teddy on his right shoulder and vanished.

Leaning back in his sunken plush armchair, Teddy shut his eyes and rested for a while. He finally sat up, ate a sugar cube, and guzzled down his glass of tea. He took his smartphone out of his chest pocket, scrolled through email headings, which included “Congratulations,” and put the phone away. 

Teddy lowered his heavy head into his hands and discovered that, instead of the fleshy oversized nose, there was nothing, nothing at all, only a rough flatness that felt like the surface of a hot desert. It was then that he heard a deep nasal voice coming from somewhere in the hallway. He looked up and saw a burly Haredi Jew. He was almost twice Teddy’s height, biceps bulging under his tight-fitting black coat. Everything else about his appearance was quite ordinary: the peyes, the black kippah, the metal-frame spectacles, the frayed lapels and bottoms of his pants, except that the young Haredi Jew was Teddy’s former Jewish nose.

“Shalom, Teddy,” said the nose, eyes beaming with mad joy. “My name is Nassi. I’m a student at the yeshiva here in Boycot. Rav Ariel is a little busy and asked me to drive you back. Don’t be afraid, you’re safe. With me, they don’t mess.”

Rolling the salty palm of his left hand over his face, Teddy felt a longing for his departed nose now standing before him like a tower of Jewish might.