I had no idea about any of this. Not the baby dead in the pogrom, not Grandma Liza’s ban on Maria’s religious food. Only when Mom and I were in her kitchen making our gefilte tribute to Maria did I find out.
Suddenly I understood why Grandma Liza had looked pensive and hesitant whenever she mentioned the dish. She too had run from her Jewishness back in Odessa. To her credit, Liza, who was blond and not remotely Semitic-looking, became enraged, proclaiming herself Jewish, if ever anyone made an anti-Semitic remark. Granddad Naum… not so much. About his family past Mom knows almost nothing—only that his people were shtetl Zionists and that Naum ran away from home as a teen, lied about his age to join the Red Army, and never looked back.
In Jackson Heights, Mom and I are both ecumenical culturalists. We light menorahs next to our Christmas trees. We bake Russian Easter kulich cake and make ersatz gefilte fish balls for Passover. But our gefilte fish this time was different—real Jewish food. We skinned a whole pike, hand-minced the flesh, cried grating the onion, sewed the fish mince inside the skin, and cooked the whole reconstituted beast for three hours.
The labor was vast, but for me it was a small way of atoning for that August day in Odessa.
Returning to twenties Bolshevik policies, I reflected again on how kitchen labor, particularly the kind at Maria’s politically equivocal NEP home canteen, got so little respect in the New Soviet vision. Partly this was pragmatic. Freeing women from the household pot was a matter of lofty principle, but it was also meant to push them into the larger workforce, perhaps even into the army of political agitators.
I haven’t mentioned her yet, this New Soviet Woman. Admittedly a lesser star than the New Soviet Man, she was still decidedly not a housewife-cook. She was a liberated proletarka (female proletarian)—co-builder of the road to utopia, co-defender of the Communist International, avid reader of Rabotnitsa (Female Worker), an enthusiastic participant in public life.
Not for her the domestic toil that “crushes and degrades women” (Lenin’s words). Not for her nursery drudgery, so “barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying” (Lenin again). No, under socialism, society would assume all such burdens, eventually eradicating the nuclear family. “The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin,” predicted Lenin in 1919, “only where and when an all-out struggle begins… against… petty… housekeeping.”
In one of my favorite Soviet posters, a fierce New Soviet proletarka makes like a herald angel under the slogan DOWN WITH KITCHEN SLAVERY, rendered in striking avant-garde typography. She’s grinning down at an aproned female beleaguered by suds, dishes, laundry, and cobwebs. The red-clad proletarka opens wide a door to a light-flooded vision of New Soviet byt. Behold a multistoried Futurist edifice housing a public canteen, a kitchen-factory, and a nursery school, all crowned with a workers’ club.
The engine for turning such utopian Bolshevik feminist visions into reality was the Zhenotdel, literally “women’s department.” Founded in 1919 as an organ of the Party’s Central Committee, the Zhenotdel and its branches fought for—and helped win—crucial reforms in childcare, contraception, and marriage. They proselytized, recruited, and educated. The first head of Zhenotdel was the charismatic Inessa Armand—Paris-born, strikingly glamorous, and by many accounts more than simply a “comrade” to Lenin (Krupskaya being strikingly not glamorous). Ravaged by overwork, Armand died of cholera in 1920, desperately mourned by Vladimir Ilyich. The Zhenotdel mantle then passed to Alexandra Kollontai, who was perhaps too charismatic. Kollontai stands out as one of communism’s most dashing characters. A free-love apostle and scandalous practitioner of such (the likely model for Garbo’s Ninotchka), Kollontai essentially regarded the nuclear family as an inefficient use of labor, food, and fuel. Wife as homebody-cook outraged her.
“The separation of marriage from kitchen,” preached Kollontai, “is a reform no less important than the separation of church and state.”
In our family, we had our own Kollontai.
As Russian families go, mine represented a rich sampling of the pre-Soviet national pot. Mom’s people came from the Ukrainian shtetl. Dad’s paternal ancestors were Germanic aristocracy who married Caspian merchants’ daughters. And Dad’s mom, my extravagant and extravagantly beloved grandmother Alla, was raised by a fiery agitator for women’s rights in remote Central Asia.
When I was little, Alla cooked very infrequently, but when she bothered, she produced minor masterpieces. I particularly remember the stew my mom inherited from her and cooks to this day. It’s an Uzbek stew. A stew of burnished-brown lamb and potatoes enlivened with an angry dusting of paprika, crushed coriander seeds, and the faintly medicinal funk of zira, the Uzbek wild cumin. “From my childhood in Ferghana!” Alla would blurt over the dish, then add, “From a person very dear to me…” And then the subject was closed. But I knew whom she meant.
Alla Nikolaevna Aksentovich, my grandmother, was born a month before the October Revolution in what was still called Turkestan, as czarist maps labeled Central Asia. She was an out-of-wedlock baby, orphaned early and adopted by her maternal grandmother, Anna Alexeevna, who was a Bolshevik feminist in a very rough place to be one.
Turkestan. Muslim, scorchingly hot, vaster than modern India, much of it desert. One of the czars’ last colonial conquests, it was subjugated only in the 1860s. A decade later, Anna Alexeevna was born in the fertile Ferghana valley, Silk Road country from which the Russian Empire pumped cotton—as would the Soviet Empire, even more mercilessly. The lone photo we have of her, taken years later and elsewhere, shows Anna with a sturdy round Slavic face and high cheekbones. Her father was a Ural Cossack, definitely no supporter of Reds. In 1918, when she was already forty, a midwife by training, she defied him and joined the Communist Party. By 1924, she and little orphaned Alla were in Tashkent, the capital of the new republic of Uzbekistan. The Soviets by then had carved up Central Asia into five socialist “national” entities. Anna Alexeevna was the new deputy head of the “agitation” department of the Central Asian Bureau of the Central Committee.
There was much agitating to be done.
The civil war thereabouts had dragged on for extra years, Reds pitched against the basmachi (Muslim insurgents). With victory came—as elsewhere—staggering challenges. Unlike the Jews, Uzbeks weren’t easy converts to the Bolshevik cause. If Russia itself lacked the strict Marxian preconditions for communism—namely, advanced capitalism—agrarian former Turkestan, with its religious and clan structures, was downright feudal. How does one build socialism without a proletariat? The answer was women. Subjugated by husbands, clergy, and ruling chiefs, the women of Central Asia were “the most oppressed of the oppressed and the most enslaved of the enslaved,” as Lenin put it.
So the Soviets switched their rallying cry from class struggle and ethno-nationalism to gender. In the “women of the Orient” they found their “surrogate proletariat,” their battering ram for social and cultural change.
Anna Alexeevna and her fellow Zhenotdel missionaries toiled against the kalym (bride fee) and underage marriage, against polygamy and female seclusion and segregation. Most dramatically, they battled the most literal form of seclusion: the veil. In public Muslim women had to wear a paranji, a long, ponderous robe, and a chachvan, a veil. But veil sounds so flimsy. Imagine instead a massive, primeval head-to-knee shroud of horsehair, with no openings for eyes or mouth.