In these late days I’m in a reflective mood, and I often look at the large local map I keep in the bureau drawer. On the map, the oblast’s form is so irregular that it is still not immediately recognizable nor memorable. I know that countries often parody their own shapes. The Italians, for example, tirelessly exploit their cartographical image to promote their football teams and footwear industry. I once saw the Irish island figured as a small bear behind the wheel of a car. I have yet to see such a caricature of our autonomous region, not even by our most imaginative local cartoonist. Beyond our borders, the map attenuates toward tundra and desert, hills of naked rock, the great unknown Bureinsky Range, unpronounceable Manchurian place names, all of it virtually uninhabited.
And here I am, an insignificant spot on this improbable map, shlepping my groceries in a badly worn plastic shopping bag along a wind-carved boulevard that is as wide as a ravine and is neither the Arbat, nor Delancey Street, nor the Rue des Rosiers, nor the Allenby Road, but is in compensation named after Shalom Aleichem. The shopping bag is emblazoned with the scratched and faded photograph of an ample young woman posing shirtless on a similarly ample motorcycle, the American flag behind her. Well, so here I am: after sixty-five years of terrestrial existence, the thought continues to amaze me. Like Larissa, I insist against all reasonable argument that my presence on this map is too unlikely to have occurred by chance. It requires resolute design.
And what of Larissa? Is any of this history her design, or was hers a chance contribution? Standing in the shadows at the Komzet Hanukkah party, was she waiting to be made part of history? Was she really the lonely, unconnected girl that Israel took her to be?
Not quite. First, her future lay before her as readable as a book, her patients awaiting her, anesthetized, on an unbroken line of white-sheeted trolleys. And there was a boyfriend, an engineering student active in the Party and also a Jew—though a lanky, tennis-playing one with sandy hair and a Ukrainian’s blue eyes. Ilya and Larissa had known each other for more than a year and had begun to make the small, necessary adjustments in their habits of living and dreaming. And they had made love once, imperfectly, a few weeks earlier, shortly before the Festival of Lights.
She didn’t tell Ilya right off about Israel—what was there to tell?—but she mentioned the Jewish homeland.
He scowled.
“That’s for what we fought a revolution? To create another Pale of Settlement? In China?”
“It’s a theoretical question, a philosophical one,” she said. “How should the Party break the cycle of repression and pogroms?”
“Through the international revolution of workers and peasants. There are significant numbers of Jews in nearly every Soviet republic and in nearly every European country. Jews will survive only if class solidarity overcomes national differences—that is where their salvation lies, as internationalists. Jews are the original internationalists.”
“But isn’t that the end of Jewish identity? Doesn’t that mean the Jews will eventually assimilate into nonexistence?”
“Neither Marx nor Lenin ever wrote anything contrary to assimilation; they foresaw it as a historical consequence of industrialization. And it’s already happening. Do I really live any differently than a Russian student? I speak and write Russian, I obey no dietary laws, my holidays are the Soviet ones, it’s no difference to me whether the girl I marry is Jewish or Gentile. So what?”
That was a misstep—she thought they had agreed he would marry a Jewish girl, herself—but Ilya was pleased with himself, even as he felt the wind shift. By the time he finished his speech the probability that they would make love again that night had declined to something less than even. Yet he didn’t regret his stand. In the forceful assertion of doctrine lay a satisfaction that could not be found in lovemaking.
“Ilya, self-determination has been promised to more than a hundred nationalities. The Kalmyks, the Tatars—they all have homelands. Why shouldn’t the Jews?”
“Because Jews are not Kalmyks or Tatars. Lenin was very explicit about this: the Jews have no scientific claim to nationhood because they have no territorial ties. It’s living in Kalmykia and Tatarstan that defines what it means to be a Kalmyk or a Tatar. What do the Jews have to do with Birobidzhan? Why would they want to live there? Do you want to live there?”
It was a rhetorical question, but it startled Larissa. She realized it was not the first time since the evening on the Arbat that she had imagined living in Birobidzhan.
She didn’t repeat Ilya’s objections to Israel. But the next time he came to call on her, she declared that she already had a beau. Standing in the corridor under the righteous gaze of the dormitory guard, she said she was willing to continue her comradely friendship with Israel, but would understand if he did not. Her statement emerged flat and metallic, without conviction—though she meant every rehearsed word. By the time she had finished, she was annoyed at Israel for forcing her to deliver the speech. A more considerate man would have promptly interrupted her, said a few words in polite acknowledgment and saved her the discomfort.
Israel waited for her to finish but didn’t appear to hear her. He proposed that they attend a film. He had already invited Rachel. Larissa didn’t want to go, she needed to study, but she agreed anyway, weighted by the obligation to cement the friendship she had just proposed.
The film was something forgettably Bolshevik. Coming from the cinema, they walked along Hertsen Street and Israel performed feats of clairvoyance, anticipating his rival’s objections.
“We had no territory, so we couldn’t develop as a normal people, but now we have a territory. Everything that has plagued the Jewish people for two thousand years—their divorce from the land, their insularity, the ghettos and the shtetls, the blood libels, the pogroms, the dependency on exploitative capital—will be finished. We will witness—in our lifetime!—the evolution of an entire race. The Jews will develop a relationship with the land, work it with their own muscle and intelligence, and in the process develop a proletarian culture. And this will happen outside the historical conditions that developed anti-Semitism in Europe, specifically, capitalism. Birobidzhan has already won support from the Soviet government, and it will also draw assistance from the international proletariat and progressive world Jewry. Even the American Jewish capitalists have promised us money! This is a country where we can raise our children as Jews, teach them Jewish culture, speak Yiddish—and at the same time serve the Soviet state!”
And so on, into the night and the following days and weeks. Israel talked about almost nothing but Birobidzhan, neither about his family nor his past, nor did he ask Larissa or Rachel about themselves. The words our children hung in the air like smoke from a small explosion.
Was this the first time that Israel had fallen in love?
No. His best friend on the Komzet presidium, Leo Feirman, counted at least two previous courtships in the last year or so. Each time, Israel had believed that he had found his future wife, and his disabusement eventually brought him paralyzing, unutterable grief. Leo also knew that Israel had done the bouquet trick before—which didn’t make it a less sincere or less gallant gesture, only less of a sudden inspiration. He thought that Israel was foolish in thinking that love was something to be decided in a moment and then won by argument and siege. But as the weeks passed and he witnessed Israel’s resolve and intimations of success (Larissa was reading his annotated copy of Lenin’s book on nationalism), he reconsidered his disapproval. He himself was not married. An old Bundist, a portly, hard-boiled veteran of tsarist prisons, the seizure of the Winter Palace, and the forced collectivization of agriculture, Leo was willing to concede that his theories about romantic love were not fully developed.