As I already mentioned once or twice, I did not find out that I were Jewish until I was 12 years old. Once the word of my nationality got out, it was kind of like letting a genie out of the bottle – no way to put it back.
I was terrified of being a Jew in the USSR.
Suddenly, I started noticing other Jewish kids in my school and in my neighborhood. No one advertised being Jewish, but we gravitated towards each other nonetheless. Safety in numbers.
Rodik was the first Jewish kid I became friends with. He was a year younger with me, a small wiry black-haired kid who never went anywhere without his dog. The dog, a tiny spotted white and auburn mongrel was fiercely loyal and wouldn’t let anyone come near Rodik without a lot of barking and growling. Eventually, once that dog accepted me, he became my protector as well. Rodik and I became close friends, not because we had a lot in common, but rather because we were both Jewish.
Rodik’s apartment building, a five-story khrushevka identical to mine, was a danger zone to me. Two of Rodik’s neighbor’s, one of whom was my classmate, were viciously anti-Semitic. Vasiliev, a tall heavyset perpetually angry kid tormented me since fourth grade. Even before he knew that I was Jewish, he’d wait for me after school and beat the shit out of me. When he found out my nationality, the bullying got even worst. The second tormentor was Zheldak. To this day I don’t know if that was his real name or a nickname. Zheldak was an equal opportunity asshole who tormented everyone. He wasn’t an anti-Semite or a racist, he hated everyone equally. He would assault kids who were bigger and stronger than him, sometimes getting into bloody fights against two-three people. He did not target anyone in particular. If he needed money, he’d take your money or beat the crap out of you. If he liked your shoes, or your jacket, he’d take that too. I’m not sure why he did not end up in juvie, or why he did not get expelled from school. Actually, come to think of it, in my 17 years in a Soviet and post-Soviet public school, I have never seen anyone expelled for fighting. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, that was the philosophy.
There is strength in numbers. Being among others gives us a sense of safety, both perceived and real. The more we were tormented, the more Rodik and I hung out together. I liked playing guitar and he was obsessed with dogs. I loved photography and he collected postcards. Along with Rodik’s dog, we roamed the city after school and on weekends. Rodik helped me scour the perpetually empty shelves of hobby stores for rolls of Svema Foto 64 black-and-white film and darkroom chemicals, and I followed him around to flea markets to look at postcards of dogs. When we encountered Vasiliev, the tiny dog would pull at the leash and viciously bare his teeth at our tormentor; as small as the dog was, Vasiliev would not dare to attack us when that dog was around. If we encountered Zheldak, we would try to cross the street, or enter a busy store to avoid any interactions with that insane kid.
Eventually, two more kids joined our little group – Grisha and Zhenya. Grisha was a tiny immaculately dressed bespectacled kid, incredibly smart and very polite. His parents doted on him and thought that I was a bad influence. When Grisha’s grandmother found out that I was on a rock-climbing team and that my parents would let me go on weeklong climbing/camping trips, she decided that my parents were irresponsible and that my “adventurousness” might somehow infect her grandson. When I would visit their apartment, the grandmother would huff disapprovingly and go to her room. Eventually she warmed up to me (after she found out that I also played chess and guitar), but it took almost a year to get into her good graces.
Zhenya and I were friends for a long time. We were both on the rock-climbing team, and we spent a lot of time jamming together (we both played guitars), but he did not know that I was Jewish, and vice versa. Zhenya was a quintessential hippy – long shaggy hair, oversized shirts, and old torn jeans.
Once the four of us – Rodik, Grisha, Zhenya, and I found out about our common nationality, we banded together. We were like the Jewish Beatles, and I tried very hard to be John Lennon.
I was very careful to keep my Jewish and non-Jewish lives separately. My Jewish life consisted of hanging out with Rodik, playing chess with Grisha, and jamming with Zhenya. My non-Jewish life focused on rock climbing and photography. I was still good friends with Anton and Kirill, both of whom were more adventurous than my Jewish buddies and made for better partners-in-crime when I needed to sneak into a plastics factory, or to traverse a peat bog.
Both the plastics factory and the peat bog adventures were driven by my desire to become a journalist, and even though they have nothing to do with being a Jew in the USSR, they are worth mentioning, even just for their entertainment value.
After Gorbachev ended the invasion of Afghanistan in 1989, many of the soldiers who came from the war suffered from severe PTSD. Many others came back addicted to opium or heroin. Suddenly, drugs became a problem. Or at least they became a problem that we heard about on TV and from the newspapers. We started finding used syringes in playgrounds and overdosed addicts started flooding hospitals. Just like smoking was a curiosity that many kids of my generation tried “just to be cool”, Soviet kids of the late eighties and early nineties started experimenting with drugs. Around the same time, disposable syringes made an appearance in the Soviet Union.
A 15–20-minute walk from our apartment building there was a plastics factory that for the past few decades had been producing plastic toy soldiers. As kids, my friends and I used to climb over the fence and through a broken basement window to swipe red plastic Red Army sharpshooters. In the late eighties, the factory was privatized and shifted from toys to medical equipment. The basement that used to store toys now stored crates of disposable syringes. Since in the true Soviet fashion the window to the storage basement wasn’t fixed, the new generation of drug-addicted kids started jumping the fence to steal syringes instead of toy soldiers.
Since I was very experienced in getting in and out of the factory, I decided that it would be a perfect opportunity for me to create a photo essay about teenage drug addicts stealing syringes. One of the problems was high-speed film. In 1990, the highest-speed consumer film was Svema Foto 250, which was OK for normal daylight photography, but wouldn’t work for capturing anything moving in low light. After much consideration (about two seconds) I decided to use a flash. Firing a flash was hardly inconspicuous and would make me instantly visible to any syringe thief climbing out of the broken basement window. However, I felt that I had no choice – if I wanted to get the story, I had to take a risk. I asked Anton to come with me as a backup, just in case if I had to defend myself against an enraged subject of my journalistic aspirations.
Anton and I climbed the fence in the early afternoon and set up camp in nearby bushes. While the light was good, I snapped a bunch of environmental shots – a wide shot of the factory, a tighter shot of the path to the basement window, and a closeup of the broken window itself. We sat and waited. Anton chain-smoked Kosmos and I nervously kept checking the batteries in my flash. My Zenit was set on a small tripod, lens pointed at the broken basement window.
It turns out that waiting for someone to steal syringes is really boring. Eventually, both of us started to nod off. I opened my eyes because I heard movement. Someone was breaking into the factory. Or breaking out of it. Doesn’t matter. I had to get my shot. It was dark and I could barely see anything, but my camera was pre-focused on the window, my flash had fresh batteries, and all I had to do was press the shutter button.
I pressed the shutter button. The flash illuminated the brick wall of the factory, the broken window, and a silhouette of a guard armed with a shotgun. Anton grabbed my camera and started running. I grabbed everything else and followed. Anton, who was much taller and much more athletic than me, jumped the fence in one fluid motion. I paused, trying to get my camera bag to the other side without actually throwing it. I heard footsteps behind me and a voice screaming, “Stoi! Streliat’ budu!”. I finally managed to get my bag over the fence and started to swing my leg over. The guard fired and I felt like thousands of vicious wasps stung my thigh. The guard fired rock salt at me, a common ammunition that security guards used against petty criminals when using live ammunition wasn’t an option.
The guard seemed satisfied with my scream because he no longer kept yelling for me to stop, nor did he try to fire again.
Wincing with pain, I unscrewed my camera from the tripod and Anton shoved it into my bag. He threw my camera bag over his shoulder, grabbed the tripod with one hand, and supported me with his other hand. Instead of going home, we limped to another Zhenya’s house. This Zhenya wasn’t the Zhenya from my Jewish friends’ quartet. This Zhenya was one of Anton’s classmates, and his sister was a nurse. She did not ask too many questions – I guess that in her line of work, an ass full of rock salt was considered a minor injury. She spent over an hour on my thigh, armed with alcohol-soaked gauze, cotton balls, and long tweezers.
Luckily, my grandparents never noticed a pair of pants that just disappeared.
Traversing a peat bog was another journalism-related adventure that went awry. We lived in a neighborhood of Gomel called Festival. When the neighborhood was built, it was on the very edge of the city. However, as the population grew, more and more khruschevkas began to pop up and push the city boundaries farther south. Approximately six bus stops south of our apartment building was a peat bog. That bog was one of our favorite playgrounds as kids. On weekends Anton, Kirill, and I would set off on countless adventures, trying to cross the bog, build bridges across spots of open water, or attempt to catch snakes. As construction around the area intensified, someone decided that it was time to drain the bog to make room for new buildings. I don’t quite remember what went wrong at the time, but one of the early attempts to reclaim land from the bog ended with a spectacular fire. Local newspapers covered the disaster, and the photos of black smoke plumes over sparse clumps of alders looked both ominous and amazing. Images of firefighters shrouded in smoke and backlit by low flames, a closeup of a yellow bulldozer with black scorch marks. I was in school at the time of the fire and missed all the excitement. I showed the newspaper photos of the fire to Anton and Kirill and lamented about how I might never get a chance to photograph a disaster like that.
Anton had a brilliant idea. “Why don’t we recreate it? The trees around the bog are already scorched, and that bulldozer will probably still be sitting there for the next 10 years. Let’s go there, we can light a bonfire on the edge of the bog, get the flames going pretty high, and you can get your photos.”
Don’t lecture me on journalistic integrity. To a 14-year-old kid with a camera, there is no such thing. I just wanted to get the photos and I wanted them to be more dramatic than the ones in the newspaper.
On Sunday morning, Anton, Kirill, and I set off for the bog. I had my camera bag and Anton managed to get his hands on a small canister of gasoline. Anton was right – the scorched bulldozer was still sitting at the edge of the bog. Firefighters soaked the entire area in water and fire-suppressing foam, so finding dry wood to start a fire proved to be a bit of a challenge. We circled the perimeter of the bog, looking for a dry spot. Eventually, we found the perfect place. I little peninsula of dry land jutted into the bog, surrounded by yellowing elder trees. The trees, the grass, everything was dry. Early morning sunlight filtered through the trees, and I could already imagine my photograph. A wide-angle shot from a low position, black smoke curling through the trees, as the sun rises over the bog.
We collected a pile of twigs, clumps of dry grass, and a few larger branches – basically every piece of dry wood that we could find nearby. We also brought a few chunks of old tires, hoping that burning rubber would create a dramatic smoke effect. Since we did not want to start a forest fire, we dug a shallow fire pit and made sure that there was no dry grass nearby.
I set up my camera on a tripod as close to the ground as possible, loaded a roll of precious Svema 64 color film, and focused the lens on the treetops. I did my best to estimate the camera settings, knowing that the light would change as soon as we got the fire going. I was prepared to bracket my exposure and burn (no pun intended) through the whole roll of film just to get one good shot.
I lay on the ground, my eyes glued to the camera’s viewfinder. Anton poured a few generous splashes of gasoline over the wood and Kirill lit a match. The world disappeared for me. I focused all of my attention on getting that perfect shot. Advance film, change the shutter speed, and press the button. Advance film, change the shutter speed, and press the button. The view in my viewfinder was exactly as I imagined it – bright flames rimmed with black smoke in the foreground, treetops still covered in fall foliage with sunlight filtering through the leaves and the smoke. Perfect!
I was halfway through my roll of film when I heard Kirill scream. I looked up and realized that the ground around me was on fire. A few drops of gasoline made their way outside of our fire pit, and the dry fall leaves and grass began burning quicker than we could run. Anton and Kirill were jumping up and down, trying to stomp out the little islands of fire. By the time I got up, the right sleeve of my polyester jacket melted, burning my wrist. I picked up my camera and the tripod and joined my friends in trying to stomp out the fire. Someone must have noticed the smoke because pretty soon we heard the sound of a fire truck’s siren. We had nowhere to run – the entire tiny peninsula was on fire. Luckily, we spent years exploring the bog and knew every possible path across it. As soon as we saw the approaching fire truck, we dove into the trees and started running to the other side of the bog.
I never admitted to my grandparents how I burned a hole in my jacket sleeve; I did, however, had to wear this damaged jacket for another year.
_______________
In 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist. We sat glued to the TV, watching the attempted coup in August of 1991, the Red Square full of angry screaming people. Growing up under communist rule, we could not have imagined that a coup was even a possibility. The Baltic republics – Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia – already seceded from the Union. Georgia announced its independence. Others quickly followed. In December, Soviet President Gorbachev officially resigned and turned over his presidential powers to Yeltsin, who was now the first president of the Russian Federation. That evening, all channels broadcasted the lowering of the Soviet flag from the Kremlin. The following day, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR formally dissolved the Soviet Union.
Even before the fall of the USSR, we gained more freedom than we ever had before. The fall of the Berlin Wall was followed by the fall of the Iron Curtain, along with Gorbachev’s Glastnost’ and Perestroika reforms. Newspapers cautiously started broaching unheard topics – crime, politics, and sex. State-owned TV stations began to broadcast Western commercials for Colgate toothpaste and Wrigley’s Doublemint gum. With freedom of speech came freedom of religion. Churches that were closed for decades started seeing tentative worshippers. Churches that were converted to museums started renovations. People who worshipped in secret in their basements were able to worship in public. People who have never been religious suddenly found God.
Before the Russian revolution of 1917 Gomel had a fairly large Jewish population. When the Soviets took Gomel from the White Army in 1921, they closed the synagogue and subjected over 5000 Jews to collectivization. In August of 1941 the German army occupied the city and established four ghettos. Initially, about 4000 people were imprisoned there. As more Jews were rounded up from the surrounding areas and the ghettos became overcrowded, the Nazis murdered over 2,300 people in September of 1941 and another 4000 in December of 1941.
After 1945, a large group of Jews who fled the war returned to Gomel, but none of the pre-war Jewish institutions resumed their activity. The Soviet authorities blocked every attempt to reopen Gomel’s Great Synagogue (which miraculously survived the war). In 1963, when a group of local Jews tried to bring two Torah scrolls into the synagogue, Gomel police treated the incident as an incitement to a religious riot and used force to “break up” the group of would-be worshipers. According to public records, there were over 25,000 Jews living in Gomel in 1959, and more than 26,000 by 1989. After the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, the fall of the USSR, and the declaration of Belarusian independence, most Jews immigrated to Israel, United States, or Western European countries. By the early 1990s, less than 7,000 Jews remained in Gomel[BD1] [1],[2],[3],[4],[5].
By the time my grandparents and my mother moved to Gomel from Vorkuta in the 1970s, few people even remembered that Gomel ever had a synagogue. No synagogue, no Jewish community, no Jewish traditions, no Judaism[BD2] .
In 1992, the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sohnut), an Israeli non-profit organization, came to Gomel to establish a Jewish community for the first time in over seventy years. Consisting mostly of young Israelis who did not speak a word of Russian, they secured a space for a Jewish Community Center and made arrangements with a local public school to use their facilities on Sundays. Somehow, they found people who spoke both Russian and Hebrew, they recruited enthusiasts of Jewish history, amateur musicians, and rabbis from several European countries. They created every possible resource to revitalize Gomel’s Jewish community and help Jewish kids such as myself to find their Jewish identity.
They did not pick the best time to do this. Along with the dissolution of the Soviet Union came a series of economic crises, food shortages, and crime waves mostly related to the newly found ability to own private property. World War II veterans lost their pensions. Old ladies were swindled out of their apartments by newly formed real estate cooperatives. People stood in endless lines to buy basic goods, like milk, sugar, and toilet paper. At one point, I took a photo of an old man, his chest covered in World War II medals, digging through trash for anything that could be sold to recycling facilities. When I developed that photo, I cried.
Many people blamed Jews for their trouble. The historical Russian anti-Semitic cry of “Bej Zhydov, spasai Rossiu[6]” transformed into “Opiat Zhydy stranu razvalili[7].” The perpetual background anti-Semitism of the 80s now became a very active and a very real threat. Israeli organizers, who were kippas and tzitzit, became the obvious targets of insults and threats.
Left to right, bottom row: Maksim, Sonya, Alex. Left to right, top row: Natasha, Leonid, Vadim.
As a teenager, I immersed myself in my own, militant form of Zionism. I never became religious, but the Jewish community and the Sunday Jewish school helped me find the most amazing group of friends I had ever had. I felt safe around them and never had to pretend to be someone I was not. I also became very antagonistic and aggressive towards anyone who even remotely criticized anything Jewish or Israeli. I started to wear a kippa in public, mostly as a metaphorical middle finger to everyone and anyone. On a few occasions, random people in the streets insulted me for being a Jew. One time, a man threw a bottle at me. On two separate occasions, I was physically attacked. After the first physical altercation with a very drunk man who punched me in the face and yelled that the Jews sold the Soviet Union to America, I armed myself. Or rather my grandfather armed me. Carrying weapons was illegal, so we had to make something that did not look like a weapon, was very portable, and could do a lot of damage in a fight. My grandfather and I took a length of woven rope and pulled out the fibers, leaving only an empty woven shell. We then filled the now-empty rope with small steel ball bearings. From the outside, it looked like a regular rope. In a fight, that was a different story. Let’s just say that the next time a couple of drunks tried to beat me up, I was the one who walked away from the fight.
I also seriously began thinking about immigration.
[1] “Homel or Gomel,” [in] Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, 1901–1905, vol. 16, pp. 450–451.
[2] Encyclopaedia Judaica, Thomson Gale 2007, vol. 7, pp. 747–748.
[3] Yevreiskaya istorya Gomelya [online] http:/www.jewishgomel.com/Evreyskaya-istoriya-Gomelya [Accessed: 06 Sept 2020].
[4] Suryn F., “Homel,” [in] Słownik Geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego i innych krajów słowiańskich, eds. F. Sulimierski, B. Chlebowski, W. Walewski, Warsaw 1882, t. 3, pp. 117–118.
[5] Suryn F., “Homel,” [in] Słownik Geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego i innych krajów słowiańskich, eds. F. Sulimierski, B. Chlebowski, W. Walewski, Warsaw 1882, t. 3, pp. 117–118.
[6] Beat the Jews, save Russia.
[7] The Jews destroyed the country again
Dmitriy B. 
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