“But it’s two a.m. on the thirteenth,” I told her. “Check-in time is noon. I wouldn’t have wanted to wait that long to get into my room.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “We put people in rooms as they arrive. It’s the thirteenth today, so you should have booked for the thirteenth. Very simple. That’s your mistake.”
Now I was irritated, but it made no sense to argue. As she fiddled with papers behind the desk, I looked to the side and saw a freestanding rack labeled “Souvenir Shop.” The only items displayed were a dozen small, framed paintings of black-hatted Jewish men in various poses—carrying menorahs, playing poker, playing clarinet while floating in a flock of birds, staring a giant fish in the face. They were bizarre, bordering on anti-Semitic, and I wondered idly why the hotel didn’t just carry postcards instead. Then, the woman interrupted my reverie by asking how I wanted to pay for my room.
I handed her a credit card. “Ohhh,” she said, and pinched it between her forefinger and thumb as though handling a rare document. She fished around under the desk, pulled out a handheld credit card reader, and said, “I never do this. I hope I don’t mess it up.” She ran the card through the slot very, very slowly. Not surprisingly, it didn’t register. “You have to do it a little faster,” I told her. “Don’t be afraid.” She tried a couple more times, and finally the card registered.
She peered again at her computer. “It says to type in the last four numbers on the card,” she said. “And then press oak.” Press oak? She was speaking Russian, but she said this last word in English, like the tree. I leaned over the counter to look, and on her computer screen was a prompt with the word “OK.” This was becoming a very entertaining hotel check-in.
After some hesitation, the woman managed to type in the four numbers and press “oak.” Then she told me my room number and wished me a good night.
“And the key?” I asked.
“There’s a dezhurnaya upstairs,” she told me. A dezhurnaya! In the Soviet era, hotels always had dezhurnayas—ladies stationed on each floor who kept the room keys and monitored comings and goings—but I hadn’t encountered such a system in years. Birobidzhan truly did seem to be stuck in a time warp, which was perhaps not surprising, considering the odd history of the place.
In the late 1920s, more than two decades before the State of Israel was established, Joseph Stalin decided to create a Jewish homeland in Russia. But not just anywhere in Russia: the government’s decree designated land “near the Amur River in the Far East”—a desolate, swampy outpost 4,000 miles away from Moscow. If the map of Russia were a dartboard with Moscow at the bull’s-eye, Birobidzhan, nestled above the northeast corner of China, would be the spot where a drunk guy accidentally chucked his dart into the wall.
To convince Jews to move there, the government offered free railroad passage, free meals along the way, and 600 rubles to each settler. Soviet propaganda organs produced pictures of smiling workers hauling grain and driving tractors, all of them tanned and happy under the perpetually sunny skies of Stalin’s promised land. Thousands of Jews took up the government’s offer, coming from not only Russia but all over the world—Argentina, the United States, even Palestine—to settle in the new Jewish region.
Some came to escape anti-Semitism. Many came because they had nothing, and therefore nothing to lose. And even more came in the early 1930s to escape starvation, as tens of thousands of Soviets began suffering and dying under Stalin’s brutal collectivization policies in Ukraine. As waves of migrants continued to flow here, the Soviet government in 1934 designated the area as the Jewish Autonomous Region, with Birobidzhan as its capital.
This sounded pretty, but the reality was less so. The defining characteristics of the Jewish Autonomous Region were freezing winters and blisteringly hot summers with clouds of ravenous mosquitoes. So, even though 41,000 Jews arrived during that first decade, 28,000 of them turned around and left by the end of 1938. Yet new migrants kept on coming, and by 1948 the region’s Jewish population had swelled to 30,000. Then came a sudden, brutal wave of anti-Jewish repression, as the Soviet government closed schools and synagogues, arrested writers, and drove Jewish cultural and religious life underground. From that point on, the Jewish population here began a slow decline.
A visitor to Birobidzhan during the Brezhnev era might hear older men speaking Yiddish in the park, but apart from that, not much marked this place as a onetime Jewish homeland. Glasnost led to a modest revival of Jewish culture in the 1980s, but it also led to a new, possibly final, exodus, as thousands of Jews took advantage of newly relaxed travel laws to leave the country. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the floodgates truly opened, and thousands more streamed out, including most of the remaining Jews of Birobidzhan. By the end of 1992, fewer than 5,000 Jews were left here.
So, when Gary and I arrived in Birobidzhan in September 1995, we weren’t sure how much—if any—Jewish culture we’d find. I asked around to see if there was a synagogue in town, but nobody seemed to know. A taxi driver agreed to take us on a search, and after driving in circles, we managed to find a small wooden building with wrought-iron Stars of David in the windows. I knocked on the door, and a short, white-bearded man wearing a yarmulke answered.
This was Boris Kaufman, the self-appointed keeper of what turned out to be Birobidzhan’s only synagogue. There was no rabbi in Birobidzhan, Boris told us, so there were no official prayer services here. But twice a week, he led services for a small group of mostly elderly women. “Please join us for the next one, if you’d like,” he said. We eagerly accepted, excited to witness a service in this historic remnant of the once-thriving Jewish Autonomous Region.
When Gary and I arrived at the appointed time, Boris asked me to put on a headscarf. I wasn’t familiar with Jewish rituals, so I didn’t think anything of it, but once the service started it quickly became clear that Boris was making up his own rules. Because what we ended up witnessing was more evangelical tent revival than Jewish service.
Boris read from a Hebrew prayer book, shuddering and rocking back and forth in apparent religious ecstasy, while the old women, weeping and waving their hands, called out verses from the New Testament. “Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and life!’” one shouted, as Boris rocked in his chair, a little smile on his lips. It was a jarring scene, as Boris later acknowledged. “Perhaps it bothers some people that we worship Jesus here; I don’t know. I’ve never asked them,” he told me. “But it’s not as though we took over the synagogue from Jews who wanted to hold services. The generation of older Jews who used to come gradually died out, and no one else came to fill the void.”
Yet Boris, who was ethnically Jewish, also told us he wanted to see Birobidzhan’s Jewish culture preserved. Every morning before the sun rose, he and his mentor, a twenty-something former Yeshiva student named Oleg Shavulski, sang Jewish prayers. A slender, sad-eyed man with a neatly trimmed beard, Oleg taught Boris how to wear the tefillin and translated Hebrew words the older man didn’t know. When we asked about the Jesus-worshiping gatherings in the synagogue, he sighed heavily. “Boris is confused,” he said. “But he will come around eventually. One does not come to the truth in one day or two days. It takes many days.”