"Atem ve'anakhnu: lihiot russim beyisrael" ("The Pilgrim Soul: Being a Russian in Israel") by Ilana Gomel, Kinneret Zmora-Bitan, 175 pages, NIS 74

Once a colleague of mine - a Ph.D. student in philosophy, a man in his thirties - approached me in the library and struck up a conversation about Russians in Israel. He was troubled by the fact that a million people with a culture different from his own had come to Israel and were sitting in our midst, "and nothing has been done. We have to learn about their culture. Russian literature - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin - should be added to the school curriculum."

"Dostoevsky should be part of the curriculum in any case," I answered. "But I doubt it would help you feel any closer to the Russians in Israel, who seem so different. Actually, I think there are other ways."

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"Do you have Russian friends?" I asked him. No, he replied. "Are there any Russians at the parties and gatherings you go to?" No, he replied. "Have you ever had a Russian girlfriend?" Again he said no. "But to tell you the truth," he added, "when I meet a girl, it doesn't matter how pretty she is. The minute I hear a Russian accent, her beauty diminishes by half."

I stood there with my mouth hanging open, at a loss for words.

If we were having that conversation today, I would urge my colleague to read Ilana Gomel's book, "Atem ve'anakhnu: lihiot russim beyisrael" ("The Pilgrim Soul: Being a Russian in Israel"). I'm sure he would love it. It would provide him with the basics of "Russian cultural mythology," the vocabulary of the "Russian cultural experience," and a supply of positive and negative stereotypes for dealing with these one million people sitting in his country. The book would give him a supposedly indigenous, and definitely scholarly, basis for an attitude that he had already adopted - to love Dostoevsky but not Russians, to teach the beauty and grandeur of Russian culture in school, where it is important, but to avoid contact with real-life Russians, with their Russian accents. On top of that, he could easily identify with the author on the most intimate level. She also swears she will never fall in love with a man from her country of birth.

"The Pilgrim Soul" does not profess to be empirical research, nor is it a work of fiction. It is an essay-like work, personal in tone, in a genre that is quite common and accepted in Russian intellectual circles. There are many reasons to welcome such a book. It offers an important perspective, which we are beginning to see more and more in sociological, anthropological and historical writing, and which has already begun to bear some intriguing intellectual fruit. In contrast to the dominant viewpoint in the not-so-distant past, where the cultural repertoire of new immigrants was once considered detrimental to the absorption process and something that should be uprooted, a growing number of studies are showing how immigrants, as groups and individuals, use that cultural repertoire to carve out a niche for themselves in their new society and to maneuver within it.

In addition, Gomel's book stands out for its breadth. It does not present the "Russians in Israel" as if they were living in a vacuum or some kind of "Russian ghetto" - an image that exists mainly in the mind of Israeli media people. She weaves the Russian experience into the convoluted fabric of Israeli life, betwixt and between controversial issues such as Mizrahi identity versus European identity, religion versus secularity, globalization, New Age thinking - and last but not least, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In this respect, the author takes an important and courageous step, drawing a correlation between different "blood types" - of people killed in the Holocaust, the Gulag and terror attacks (the blood of the Palestinians is missing, although perhaps that is too much to ask). "If there is any lesson to be learned from the story of the Russians," she writes, "it is the lesson of a blood-soaked past threatening to repeat itself as Israelis reflect on a Jewish jihad in response to Islamic jihad."

Lead weight

This historic "past," as we see from Gomel's book, bears down on the Russian Jews with special intensity. History never leaves them alone. It sits on their shoulders like a lead weight. But more than that, it decides everything for them - what they buy in the supermarket, how they pray, make love and dress, and, of course, how they vote. According to Gomel, Russia's dark history explains everything that the Russian immigrants do. It guides their thinking, their dietary habits and their fashion choices here in the new Middle East. Throughout the book, the author uses this history to explain all the "Russian peculiarities" in Israel: the prostitution phenomenon; attitudes toward the body and sex; interpersonal relationships and social behavior; love of math and science; Islamophobia; right-wing politics; a penchant for conspiracy theories; and finally an obsession with witch-hunts, a symptom of the Russian traitor syndrome. You come away with the impression that the Russians have some mysterious device for transmitting history from one generation to the next.

In other words, next time you encounter a Russian cashier at the supermarket or a Russian nurse at the hospital, next time you open the door for the packers on moving day, or are called in to speak to your Russian boss at the high-tech firm where you work, look for the gloomy ghosts of Russian and Russian Jewish history hovering around their heads. Russian history, always portrayed in historiography as painful, chaotic, unlucky, dictatorial, corrupt, paradoxical and full of secrets, has also gathered up Jews in its embrace. They, too, became partner to traumas built on shame and megalomania.

I am not saying, of course, that the present can be understood without the past. The opposite is true: Without historical depth, many of the "ethnographic" explanations of the present become superficial and the quantitative sociological findings turn banal. But these attempts (as well as my own) to explain the behavior of Russian Jews on the basis of so-called "Soviet cultural heritage" or their experience as a persecuted Jewish minority, make me uncomfortable. Such explanations have an arbitrary, ad hoc feel about them. One day the sociologists claim that Russians reject this or that because they reject anything that reminds them of Soviet ideology or culture, and another day they say the Russians behave in a certain way because this was the norm "back home" in Soviet Russia.

The inability to hook up with Israeli collective grief after the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, for example, is explained by the Russian immigrants' contempt for formal displays of emotion and official ceremonies. On the other hand, the tendency of Russian women to use abortions as their sole method of contraception is said to be a holdover from normative behavior in Russia. Their hatred of Mizrahi Jews (of Middle Eastern origin), say the historians, comes from the imperialistic Russian Orientalism that the immigrants brought with them. Their attitude toward Arabs in Israel goes back to living in a society where state-sanctioned prejudice was legitimate. At the same time, their criticism of the authorities is explained by the fact that the Jewish intelligentsia was traditionally anti-government.

Using history this way, in my opinion, reduces multidimensional historical discourse to cultural essentialism. An over-simplistic approach of this kind is the product of looking at history in a linear and deterministic manner that does not, in fact, exist. There is continuity to history, but there are also breaks. Cultural myths and ethos will be perpetuated and even strengthened by some groups, and discarded, deliberately or not, by others. Within the social construct, cultural paradigms may be preserved or rigorously safeguarded in some instances, or transformed or even forgotten in others. Thus employing history to explain the present is always problematic, tendentious and selective.

Stereotypical thinking

What bothers me in this kind of reduction is that history becomes so linked to the stereotypes that it becomes very hard to separate them. Gomel does not set out to debunk the stereotypes. Her goal is to "look beyond them." In the long run, that turns out to be an attempt to portray them as a kind of "historical imperative." Instead of looking beyond the stereotypes, she sinks deeper into the proverbial bog.

Sometimes her stereotypical thinking is very obvious, like when she describes her friend, as a "typical Russian beauty preyed on by sweaty Israeli men eager for the cool touch of ancient Europe." But even when the stereotype is more subtle and understated, Gomel never strays beyond the "prostitute-intellectual" classification. The "authentic" Russians in her book are either cab drivers and cleaning ladies, or scruffy intellectuals making prophetic statements about the destiny of "the people" (this time, the Jewish people) in kitchens thick with cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes. Anyone who does not fit into this binary equation is diagnosed as suffering from "identity confusion" or "devoid of any significant markers of their place of birth, or racial and cultural affiliation."

Too bad we don't hear the voices of Gomel's Russian students in the English department at Tel Aviv University, or the voices of teachers, doctors, computer programmers, secretaries, government officials and bank clerks. Too bad that history is allowed to paper over all the different styles of Russian-ness developing in Israel, influenced by such critical factors as educational background, profession, social class and place of residence.

Maybe Gomel's lack of class sensitivity is a product of that same "historic trauma." But I disagree with the deterministic model that draws a direct line between early Orthodox Christianity and Sonia and Natasha from Rishon Letzion. I disagree with her theory that the behavior of Russians (or immigrants in general) in their new surroundings is a function of their "history" or their "cultural baggage." Why? Mainly because perceptions and behavior patterns are changed by the very encounter with new surroundings and culture. They are changed by the very fact of coming to a new place and ranking differently in the hierarchy. They are changed by the experience of moving itself, and yes, also by the absorption problems that Gomel finds so distasteful.

Moreover, some of the perceptions and behavior patterns of the Russians are born during this process of settling in. They are a consequence of coming into contact with a new social and ethnic order. In Israel, Russian immigrants almost across the board adopt the "Jewish intelligentsia" model as the one that will bring them the most cultural capital in a society where openness to Western values is considered a good thing. One does not find this among the Russian Jews who settled in Germany, for example.

In light of all the above, "The Pilgrim Soul" is not a book about Russians in Israel. That much is clear. According to Gomel, "the Russians in Israel, who have been pushed to the sidelines in so many ways, are playing out the ancient Jewish drama of multiple roles and split identities." I say that Gomel's book is the one pushing them to the sidelines and using them to play out that drama.

Yulia Lerner is a doctoral student in anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and director of the "Russian Forum" research project at the Van Leer Institute.