Hate: on becoming a ‘bad Jew’

One day, when my father was still a young man, barely thirty, his friends in Odessa began crossing the road to avoid him, while our aggressively blonde neighbour Tanya, and Kolya, the neighbourhood plumber, would point fingers at him and yell, ‘Bloody Zionist!’

True, my father was a Zionist, and so am I. Our politics differ, but like most Jews everywhere, we’re both Zionists in the basic sense of this often-misunderstood word – we believe in Israel’s right to exist. Just as the UN did in 1947, voting Israel into existence. The Soviet Union, too, voted yes.

However, by the 1960s, the tide shifted. The then-KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov, ‘elevated Zionism to the rank of USSR’s primary ideological nemesis,’ writes scholar of Russian history Izabella Tabarovsky, partly to fortify Soviet influence across Muslim countries.

‘Zionist’ became a dirty word. During my childhood in the 1980s, it often appeared on the news: ‘Today Zionist terrorists met with American imperialists, to plot against the communist struggle...’ Zionists were the baddest bad guys. They possessed superpowers. The ‘Zionist lobby’ controlled everything, from foreign media to the quality of underwear sold in our Univermag. And they were Jews. The Bad Jews.

Before my father became a bad Jew, he was a good one. A brilliant physicist, he served the state. Yet even then, things weren’t going well. Newspapers and politicians claimed that in the multiethnic Soviet Union, every minority was equally valued. This didn’t apply to my father. There were limited quotas for Jews at universities, so my Odessit father did his PhD at Siberia’s Novosibirsk university, the only place that accepted him. Later, he worked twice as hard as his colleagues while being paid a fraction of their salaries.