My Jewishness is defined by a passport I never had, issued by a country that no longer exists. When my parents left the U.S.S.R. in 1989, their passports, like those of other Soviet Jews, were confiscated. For this honor, my parents had to pay the equivalent of three times their monthly salaries. In addition to the official fine for abandoning the crumbling communist utopia, the traditional Soviet levy of French perfume and chocolates was slipped under the table to various officials. I was 10, too young to have a passport snatched and resentful of the apparatchiks who would be eating my chocolates.
The word “passport” is believed to come from the French passer, to pass, through either a port or gate of medieval city walls. But the document itself dates back to the Old Testament, and the Jewish prophet Nehemiah may have been the world’s first passport holder. A royal cup bearer and favorite of the Persian King Artaxerxes, Nehemiah was granted leave to rebuild Jerusalem, then under Persian rule. To insure his safe passage, Nehemiah asked for letters from the king “to the governors beyond the river,” a kindly beginning of an unkindly system. Over time, governments realized that passports not only facilitated travel but also provided an effective means of controlling burgeoning populations.
Under Peter the Great in the early 18th century, the Russian Empire began requiring both internal and external passports of its traveling subjects. These papers listed their faith, social class and occupation. Since Jews were banished from many Russian provinces, barred from government professions and subjected to quotas at universities, the passport system became a tool to limit Jewish mobility.
Jews were delighted when, after the Communists seized power in 1917, the loathsome passport system was abolished. From Leon Trotsky on down, they made up for lost time and streamed into government posts and other jobs long off limits. It was but a brief moment. Stalin was of one mind with the tsars and, in 1932, he reinstated the passport system for the ostensible purpose of tracking counterrevolutionaries. Instead of religion, the new state noted the “nationality” of its comrades in the infamous nationality-identifying “paragraph #5.” Most Jews declared themselves Jewish, but did so unaware that nationality would soon become a fixed matter of inheritance. Upon reaching the age of 16, all children were automatically assigned the “nationality” of their parents; only children of mixed marriages had any choice in the matter.
The internal passports my parents dutifully handed over shortly before we left stated that my dad was a Jew (evrei) and my mother a Jewess (evreika). In a regime that called discrimination the exclusive plague of capitalism, paragraph #5—like similar clauses in passports of other European nations in the past—had become the great facilitator in a policy of quasi-official anti-Semitism. When my blue-eyed grandmother was young, she saw previously available jobs suddenly vanish after presenting her passport. Although brought up in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, Dad had to go to a Russian university because the Ukrainian schools wouldn’t have him. And, on top of the already draconian travel restrictions for all citizens, Soviet Jews were singularly suspected as potential defectors.
On the kindergarten playground, nobody asked for my passport, but somehow the girl on the green metal crocodile knew my “nationality” anyway. We were dangling amicably on its swings when she began to push me off. When I wouldn’t budge, she called me zhidovka, kike, a word whose meaning I did not quite know but that I had heard enough to know the appropriate response. Like an insulted animal, I left a perfect imprint of my teeth on her arm. Later my parents shrugged their shoulders at the scolding teachers. They petted me privately for my act of defiance and boasted of it to their friends.
In my mind, biting anti-Semites was more Jewish than any religious tradition. Most of my parents’ friends were Jewish or married to Jews, but they were a decidedly secular bunch. In the center of Kiev, the ornate Brodsky Synagogue—once attended by Sholem Aleichem and Golda Meir—had been turned into a puppet theater, one of many creative uses the Communists thought of for confiscated religious buildings. I remember visiting its unimpressive and bland replacement with my parents to buy matzoh under the eyes of KGB monitors, an otherwise forgettable experience. To me, being Jewish mostly meant eating my grandmother’s gefilte fish and listening to my parents’ friends deliver their best Jewish jokes. (“An African exchange student is sitting on a bench in Moscow reading a Yiddish newspaper. An old Yid stops and says to him, ‘What, is it not enough that you are black?’”)
By the time I got punched in the stomach by an older boy in second grade, I knew exactly what zhidovka meant. I felt betrayed by a place where I felt I’d belonged. In obvious ways, I was indistinguishable from the other students, with my pressed brown uniform, a red star with young Lenin’s golden face pinned to my white apron and a giant white hair bow only slightly smaller than my head. Like the others, I enthusiastically sang “Let there always be sunshine, let there always be Lenin, let there always be me!” and ferociously raked leaves on subbotniks—the Saturdays devoted to performing volunteer work, a Bolshevik tradition loathed by the adults. But, on the day I wobbled to my grandmother’s house clutching my gut, there was no question that I was different after all.
It had been silly of me to think I would ever fit in. With a Georgian first name, olive skin and slanted eyes, I was never going to pass for a legitimate Slav, no matter what was recorded in my parents’ paragraphs #5. A Ukrainian woman once even marched up to my mother and demanded to know whether my father was a “nigger or an Arab.” And then there was the tricky matter of the rolling “r,” so beloved of the Russian language. Like many Soviet Jews, I couldn’t “rrrrrrr” to save my life. Even the great Lenin, who was just one quarter Jewish, couldn’t. But my parents, unlike Lenin’s, took me to a speech pathologist, who had me spitting cotton and reciting water-torture combinations like “Na gore Ararat rastet krasnyi vinograd” (“Red grapes grow on Mount Ararat”).
Just as I was learning to roll my ‘r’s, Mikhail Gorbachev bowed to U.S. pressure and removed most of the restrictions on Jewish emigration to Isrrrrrrrael. Our friends began to greet us with the inevitable question of “Are you getting the hell out of here?” One day, Dad pointed to a banana shape on the map called California and informed me that I would one day attend a university there for smart people, called Berkeley. We left by train on August 1989, two suitcases each.
Unlike Nehemiah, we did not pine for Jerusalem. The Israeli government tried to reassure everyone that our historic homeland was waiting for us with open arms, but word had already filtered back that there were few jobs for the mostly professional Soviet Jewish wave flooding into the tiny country. The prospect of living in a Middle Eastern war zone likewise held little appeal. Besides, as my mother quipped, “You can’t convince your child that we are the Chosen People in a country full of Jews!”
In Vienna, we joined the league of “dropouts” who declined to fly out to Israel as planned and declared their intent to emigrate to the United States instead. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) sent us on to Italy, where thousands of Soviet Jews waited anxiously in legal limbo. The U.S. Embassy in Rome, overwhelmed by applicants and increasingly doubtful whether we could be considered refugees in the age of glasnost, was growing bolder in issuing rejections.
Passportless and exhausted, we settled in the little seaside town of Torvaianica, near Rome, where my parents worked illegally to supplement our HIAS subsidy. My father, a computer engineer, fixed roofs and boilers. Mom, an emergency room physician, learned to speak Italian and worked as a massage therapist. I spent many an afternoon staring at the Mediterranean Sea from the balcony, eating ice cream, struggling with kinetic theory and memorizing the poetry of Pushkin—my parents’ idea of a third grade curriculum.
After eight months of waiting, my parents, defeated, applied to stay in Italy permanently. The Italian guard monitoring the long line of blacks and Arabs was overjoyed to see two white figures in the queue outside the immigration office, and dragged them to the front. Coincidence or not, a week later the U.S. government recognized us as refugees. A Jewish community in the exotically named place of West Palm Beach had agreed to sponsor us and end our “Italian vacation.” My parents were given a sealed brown envelope, stamped with “REFUGEE STATUS: SECTION 207.” This they handed to officials at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York for our “white” cards, predecessors to the coveted green ones.
Florida struck my 11-year-old self as a land of palm trees, giant mansions and people with white teeth fearful of venturing from their air-conditioned cars. Our assigned “buddy family,” charged with introducing us to America and Jewish life, was rich, well-intentioned and completely clueless. At a Fourth of July party, the adults clumsily tried to mimic our “traditions” by pouring my dad an orange juice glass full of vodka and expectantly waiting for him to drink it up. More successfully, I was showered with no fewer than five Barbies, a plethora of other toys and my first American clothes, for which I?am eternally grateful.
Six months after our arrival, we packed our stuff in a $600 maroon Pontiac and drove cross-country to the Promised Land: California. When we arrived in San Francisco and saw streets full of pedestrians and cable cars rolling along the hills, the city was declared “European” and therefore habitable. It was in San Francisco that we carved out our kind of Jewish community. Dad reconnected with the all-Jewish engineering team from Kiev he had been working with even before I was born, installing supercomputers across Central Asia. My parents found jobs, dropped their food stamps and paid back HIAS for our flight to the States. Once again there were get-togethers over kabobs, latkes, Russian caviar, heavy salads, candy, Moldovan wine, Soviet jokes and vodka—this time in the proper glasses and quantities. When we finally got our green cards, I was disturbed to see that we were called “aliens,” which made me think of antennaed extraterrestrials.
As my English improved and my Russian became broken, I grew more militant in asserting my Soviet Jewish identity. I was angry with Americans, especially American Jews, who viewed us all as “Russians.” I saw it as nothing less than an assault on our Jewishness. They may have lobbied for decades to bring us here but Russia, to them, was nothing but a land of vodka and mail-order brides. To any American Jew unlucky enough to inform me that her “grandmother was Russian,” I would launch into a heated lecture on the internal passport system. My mom advised me to relax but I fantasized about thanking our benefactors with an on-site immersion course in Soviet Jewish culture. Our tour would offer courses on geography (Minsk is not “near” Moscow), history (Soviet Jews fought in World War II like everyone else in Europe) and, of course, rides on the Moscow metro, where American Jews with Semitic noses could learn how “Russian” the Jews were there. Upon completion of the course, fake Soviet passports would be issued, complete with paragraph #5.
Before that fantasy could become a reality, however, I needed a passport of my own. A Gap-wearing teenager fond of sour gummy worms and Beverly Hills 90210, I marched to the Immigration and Naturalization Service building in downtown San Francisco full of excitement. My immigrant imagination, doubtless influenced by too much American television, expected a grandiose oath ceremony. I envisioned a tall African man in colorful robes on my right, an Asian grandma in her finest silk on my left—eyes all shining with patriotism as we received the most coveted passport on the planet.
But it turned out to be just me and an INS officer in a dark room full of papers. Sadder still the officer informed me that, because she was not feeling well, mine would be an “abridged” oath. After just a question or two, it was over, and I had my passport. My father, relieved that I managed to reach home without destroying the precious document, snatched it for safekeeping and placed it in his beige leather suitcase—the one that provoked my parents’ cries of ostorozhno! (careful!) anytime I came near it.
Much later, studying Russian politics at Dad’s beloved Berkeley, I thought of the irony of fate when it came to paragraph #5, finally removed from Russian passports in 1997: Just as I was receiving my American passport, ethnic Russians and Ukrainians were discovering—and sometimes inventing—Jewish roots en masse, in hopes of emigrating to the United States or Israel.
I’ve gotten good mileage from my American passport and more than my fair share of questions about it as well. A few years ago, I was stopped on the border between Armenia and Georgia, birthplace of my great-grandfather. Looking over my passport, the guard asked me if I was an American. “Yes,” I confirmed in Russian. He smiled but did not seem to believe me. I was exhausted from riding for hours in a rickety marshrutka—one of the many minibuses overstuffed with goods and people without safety belts in the mountainous region—and felt like telling him that my nationality was none of his business. “And maybe Chechen,” I said at last, shooting him my best fiery look.
“Maybe,” he answered, handing me back the passport. I was lucky I hadn’t tried the stunt on the Russian border, where guards lacked his sense of humor.
The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has written, “A passport is not a document that tells us who we are but a document that shows what other people think of us.” Paragraph #5 told Soviet citizens exactly who they were—whether they liked it or not— and where they stood in society. By making it easier for anti-Semites to discriminate against Jews, the ugly clause inadvertently strengthened our Jewish identities.
My father has always told me that I could misplace my cash, my credit cards, even my head when traveling, but that I should never lose my passport, that it is the most precious thing I carry. Unlike the passport taken from him in 1989, mine is silent on my Jewishness. Sometimes, our most important documents should be silent on the things that matter most.
Nonna Gorilovskaya is assistant editor of Moment. Her book review, “Stranded in Absurdistan,” ran in the August 2006 issue.
