Last update - 00:00 09/11/2006
Painting over the Russian mosaic
By Yitzhak Laor
"Atem ve'anachnu" ("You and Us") by Elana Gomel, the Israeli Condition series [in Hebrew], Kinneret/Zmora-Bitan, 175 pages
During one of the first demonstrations against the recent war in Lebanon, marchers in Tel Aviv were attacked by a Russian-speaking man who tried to rip a poster written in Russian out of the hands of some protesters, also Russian speakers. The attacker was not interested in the Arabs and Jews who were marching near his victims (for Israelis, that "mixture" is often enough to trigger racist outbursts of violence). For a moment the demonstrators froze, reluctant to hit the man; they did not even rush to the aid of their attacked friends. Then, however, one of the people under attack responded himself, with a vengeance - wielding not his fists, but a video camera. The assailant retreated and once again spoke out in Russian.
I admit that at some point I was no longer able to follow what was going on. And still, what left the strongest impression on me was the man's rage: How could those people be Russian and yet be protesting side by side with left-wingers? Or something of that kind. And yet this thing, leftist Russians, is not all that rare. The largest protest rally of that war was led by two women, an Arab and a Jew, the latter speaking with a strong and lovely Russian accent. Both were members of the Taayush Jewish-Arab coexistence movement.
In her book on Israel's Russian population, Elana Gomel propagates this self-evident matter of the Israeli right wing and the immigrants from Russia. Indeed, there is room to examine the connection between someone like Avigdor Lieberman and the large immigration wave of the 1990s, which was turned over to the immigrants of the 1970s. Anyone who fails to distinguish between these two phenomena falls into the trap laid by Gomel in her embarrassingly shallow book.
Not that the author is in favor of the "right wing and the Russians" - but, boy, does she enjoy talking about how leftist Ashkenazi Israelis misunderstand the Russian right-wing sympathizers, as if she had the key to all of our hidden secrets. And like some femme fatale she sashays before you with the key, and as you go deeper and deeper into the book you realize that the key does not open any door, and that the door itself is on some stage, with no wall behind it, leading nowhere. Need this be said even more clearly? Gomel lacks all ability to observe human beings and has no talent for seeing anyone but herself.
What the book does contain is an uninteresting summary of the author's own past. Uninteresting, because in order to write about the Russians in Israel, you have to go to Neveh Sharett, to Ashdod, to Upper Nazareth, to Kiryat Shmona. For those privileged few among that community, usually immigrants who came here in the 1970s and were entrusted with the hundreds of thousands who came during the 1990s - for them, it is much easier to write sentences like: "The Russians ... came to the Jewish state and discovered to their distaste that they had come to a tiny, Levantine and unimportant country with mosques, camels, heat and bad theater. They searched for the Promised Land and found the cafes on Sheinkin Street. They wanted heroism and found hedonism."
Forget the camels
Forget the camels, forget the small country. If I were the editor of this series, I would say to Dr. Gomel: Look, lady, maybe you are a department head at Tel Aviv University, like the cover says, and maybe you are worthy of that institution, and maybe you weren't accepted there on some immigration-absorption budget and were not preferred over the locals - whether Mizrahi Israelis or just native-born ones, not to mention Arabs. But please put in your book an interview with the Russian who "discovered that this country has mosques," and speak to a Russian who saw some beautiful mosques in Bukhara and knows something about Islamic beauty.
And while we're at it, we'd also like to read an interview with the immigrant intellectual, who still writes poetry using the same meter as Mayakovsky and still enjoys a certain old-fashioned Bohemianism and detests those "Israelski primitivski." Why an interview? Because we want to get to know him, to understand why he thinks what he thinks and where he came from. Was it really from St. Petersburg, or Moscow, or Kiev, or perhaps from one of the dozens of towns in the Urals or Ukraine? And maybe his life was hard there and is even harder here, and beyond blaming communism for his hard life, he is also much less wrapped up in Hebrew or Western culture than Gomel thinks. Or maybe she would like to think of herself that way, while she drops hints about her wisdom, her liberation, her loves, instead of writing about the millions of immigrants living in Israel, which lured them to come so that they would change the demographic balance - that is, in order to extend privileges to non-Jewish Russians rather than other non-Jews, i.e., Arabs.
Instead of that kind of essay, which is what the author and the series editor announced, we get statements about the love life of the author, who had, by her own account, a rather bold past, including men she loved and men who loved her, even in Hong Kong, and a Turkish husband; she doesn't even want Russian men. And how her mother, Maya Kaganskaya (I only learned of this sensational fact from reading the book), is so smart and is as anti-Israeli as they come, and how even though she has been here since the 1970s - that is, for half her life - Kaganskaya is as close as you can get to the ideal of the exiled Russian, which Gomel herself never quite lived up to, she sadly admits. Because she is a bit bourgeois, but her mother is everything the daughter is not. And this, all this, unfolds over many pages, which are actually supposed to be profiling this stratified, tortured society, of which only a very small part is prosperous, it seems, and which has different types of representatives, usually state-sponsored (the Zionist immigrants of the 1970s). But Gomel can't see anyone but herself.
"I speak of myself, because that is the only way that a person can speak for others," she explains. I have no idea how this contradiction is reconciled, but she continues with her liberal onslaught. "The voice of the collective 'we' is the sound of the machine gun." I understand that she means an automatic weapon, but it's not so clear and the next line is even less so: "Only one voice, for all its caprice and unpredictability, can bridge the gap between cultures, communities and the different histories."
All this is to say that she has no idea what life is like for the one-sixth of our people in Zion that has offered the throne to Avigdor Lieberman, who got himself a nuclear bomb here in our little township.
None of this would be worth discussing had it not become a common mode of speaking and writing among certain educated Russians, who make their living by building a "Russian Israeli identity" tailored to their own image. What do they have to do with the supermarket cashiers and the coffee-shop security guards, the computer technicians and the doctors at local hospitals? What have they to do with the Caucasians, with the Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi immigrants from Azerbaijan or Uzbekistan? What have they to do with the simple anguish of immigrants in search of a better, safer life?
A genuine discussion of the one million Russians who came here must begin with their heterogeneity - with the fact that they have always lived in very heterogeneous societies, as did their intellectuals, who enjoy selling us a certain image of cosmopolitanism. A real discussion should begin with the fact that some of the immigrants are Ashkenazi and some aren't; some found a place for themselves in the Israeli economy, while others are wretchedly poor; some have been assimilated into the "non-Russian" parts of society and live in mixed neighborhoods, while others chose to live in Russian communities; some (20 percent of them) are defined by the Central Bureau of Statistics as "non-Arab Christians," some are West Bank settlers and some celebrate May 9 as their Red Army day.
Any debate of the Soviet past has to begin with a simple fact that Gomel does not grasp: that Jews in the Soviet Union were part of an enormous society. Anyone who does not begin with their mosaic-like qualities, and does not then move on to discuss their place within our own mosaic, won't be able to do anything with his or her "subjectivity." No book about such a large immigrant community can be created without interviewing various "types" or using actual statistics and sociological terms. A book that presumes to be an essay on "being Russian in Israel" must have some familiarity with the simple, down-to-earth Russian community that constitutes the majority of that million-immigrant wave.
The series Hamatzav ha'israeli - the Israeli Condition - began with a brilliant book by Ofer Shelach, the only person in Israel who writes about military affairs without being in awe of the generals. I do not understand how the mistake of publishing Gomel's book came about. Had the subject of the large immigration wave from the former Soviet Union not been totally left behind and left up to the "interpretations" of bad comedians on Channel 2, like that idiot whose name I don't know, the one who used to impersonate a Russian cashier as part of the Israeli sport of "trampling those beneath you as much as you can" - were this subject not so important, there would not even be any need to mention Gomel's unfortunate publication.
Nu, enough already (as my mother would have said, in a Russian accent).