At the synagogue, I was surprised to see dozens of people milling about the grounds. There was a class of uniformed kindergarteners, a group of students from the nearby Sholem Aleichem University,[5] and a couple of Americans with an interpreter. Rabbi Riss was giving a tour, alternately describing esoteric elements of Jewish faith with more quotidian information about how the community here survives.
“The government pays for School No. 23, and it pays for Sholem Aleichem University,” he told the group. “It pays for our Sunday school, where we teach Jewish traditions, history, and Hebrew. And every two years, we have a big Jewish festival here, and many international artists come. The government pays for that too.”
“Today, Birobidzhan is a political place, not just cultural,” he went on. “They’re trying to show that we have a big Jewish life here.” This was an unusually honest assessment. With official figures showing just 1,700 Jews living here now, the amount of money pouring in to support the synagogue and various activities was, per capita, quite high. It was obvious that the Russian government wanted this place to survive.
With anti-Semitism a perennial problem in Russia, this was a good public relations move. In the Soviet era, Jews were repressed as a matter of course—denied entrance to universities, denied housing and jobs, decried publicly as enemies of the USSR. As the Soviet Union creaked toward its end in the late 1980s, record numbers of Jews fled; in 1989 alone, more than 70,000 left the country. As of 2010, just 159,000 Jews remained in Russia, a fraction of the 1930s peak of nearly 900,000. Of the Jews still here, the vast majority are in Moscow, many others are in St. Petersburg, a handful are in Birobidzhan, and the rest are scattered in tiny pockets elsewhere.
Yet even if the government’s support here seemed like a PR move, Rabbi Riss seemed sincere in his desire to provide spiritual support for the Jewish community. In this, he admitted facing a fair number of obstacles. For one thing, he’d relinquished his Russian citizenship when his family left Birobidzhan back in 1991, and so far he’d been unable to get it back. “I’ve been trying to get a Russian passport for 11 years,” he told me, “but every time, they say, ‘You did something wrong with the paperwork.’” His wife and children all had Russian passports, but as an Israeli citizen, Rabbi Riss was forced to repeatedly apply for temporary work visas, adding an extra layer of complication to his commitment to stay.
There were other problems. “My wife doesn’t like it in Birobidzhan,” he said. “The first year was very difficult—there’s no place to get kosher food, and it’s so far away from everything.” His wife wasn’t alone in her aversion to the place: after Mordechai Scheiner left in 2008, Rabbi Riss said, they couldn’t find another rabbi willing to move here. So for three years, Birobidzhan had a beautiful new synagogue, but no rabbi.
“We would have a better life in Israel or Moscow,” Rabbi Riss admitted. “But this is my mission. I will stay here as long as I can.” True to form, he broke into a big grin. “On the bright side, there’s no anti-Semitism here. When I walk around, everyone says ‘Shalom!’ even if they’re not Jewish. In Moscow, I felt like people would say bad stuff, or sometimes curse. But here, it’s like in Israel.”
That seemed a bit of a stretch. Yet once again, thanks to government funding, the new wave of students at School No. 23, and this determined young rabbi, it seemed the Jewish Autonomous Region would continue to survive.
I was starting to think Birobidzhan might be the end of me, though. As soon as I got back to the hotel room, my eyes started to burn again. Now I was angry: I charged down the hallway to ask the dezhurnaya if I could switch rooms. “Do you have any nonsmoking rooms in this hotel?” I asked.
“They’re all nonsmoking,” she said.
“Then why is there an ashtray in my room?”
“Eh, it’s empty!” she said, with a flick of her hand.
I considered changing hotels but was convinced the others would be no better, and at least the Vostok was right in the center of town. More important, leaving a prepaid hotel room seemed like an unnecessary extravagance that only a wasteful American would consider. I didn’t want to be that person.
The other option was to leave Birobidzhan altogether. I was actually ready to leave, but because the town isn’t directly on the Trans-Siberian line, fewer trains came through, and there were none to my next destination, Chita, until two nights hence. I booked a ticket, then consoled myself by thinking, just 48 more hours in that damn room. My eyes hadn’t begun itching until I’d turned on the air-conditioner, so I resolved to leave it off, no matter how hot the room got.
The next morning, though, I woke up as itchy-eyed as ever. I called Rada, a young Russian interpreter who’d struck up a conversation with me at the synagogue. She’d given me her number, and though I hadn’t planned on using it, now I felt desperate. “Do you know of any apartments I could rent just for one day?” I asked. “I’m leaving on the train late tomorrow, but need a place for tonight.” Rada leapt into action, making a few calls, and she even joined me to look at a couple of apartments. But they all seemed just as dusty as the Vostok, so after a couple of hours, we gave up. Grateful for the help, I invited Rada to dinner that evening. Just 36 hours to go.
I couldn’t stand the thought of going back into the hotel, so I went to a café and had a cup of tea. Then I sat outside on a park bench, until a swarm of tiny mosquitoes attacked. I started walking, wandering first past the train station, then to the Philharmonic Hall, then down by the river. At one point, I looked up and saw a jet contrail, which startled me as much as if I’d seen a UFO—that’s how off the beaten track Birobidzhan felt.[6]
Finally, with the sun setting, I came back and sat on a bench across from the hotel. A big electronic billboard was blaring the same advertisements over and over, and I started to memorize them. My favorite one was for a window supply company called Okna Etalon (Standard Windows), because their jingle was set to the melody of the Passover song “Let My People Go.” I sat waiting for their ad to cycle back around, so I could sing along: “Ok-naaa E-taaaaaa-LON!”[7] At long last, 27 Okna Etalons later, it was time to meet Rada for dinner.
I took her to the nicest restaurant I’d found in Birobidzhan, an Italian place one block from the synagogue. Over plates of pasta and pizza, we chatted in English, and gradually I started to feel good again. My cold was abating, my eyes were no longer itching, and tomorrow night I’d finally be moving on to a new city.
When I got back to the hotel—for my final night there!—I sent Randi an e-mail. “I’m so ready to get to the next destination, I can’t even tell you,” I wrote. “I am really hopeful that these random irritations will stop happening and I can just settle into the trip.”
I hit “send,” shut my laptop, and lay back on my pillow. Within minutes, I was asleep.
In the black of night, my eyes popped open. The bed is wet. The bed is wet!
Where was it coming from? Was it coming from… me? I staggered out of the bed and felt my way to the bathroom, banging into the dresser and my suitcase along the way. I switched on the light and looked down, but I couldn’t figure out what had happened. Was that water on my legs? Oh, god. No, no, no. It wasn’t water. It was pale, watery diarrhea.
My stomach lurched. How did this happen? I hadn’t even felt anything until it was too late. I started cleaning myself up, then realized in a flash of horror that it might be all over the bed too. I hurried out and pulled back the blanket: the sheets were stained. I yanked them off the bed and carried them into the shower stall, where I began trying, unsuccessfully, to scrub them clean using tiny travel packets of Woolite a friend had given me for the trip. As I hunched over them, with tears in my eyes and my guts rumbling, I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake coming back for this third journey.
5
Founded in 1984 as the “Birobidzhan State Pedagogical Institute,” renamed in 2005 as the uninspiring “Far Eastern State Socio-Humanitarian Academy,” and renamed again, in 2011, as the “Amur State University named after Sholem Aleichem.”
6
The nearest airport is in Khabarovsk, more than 100 miles away. It’s surprising how strange an airplane in the sky looks when you haven’t seen one for a few days.
7
My second favorite was for a business called Klatch. I thought this was another Jewish reference (