Reassembling the Jewish Matryoshka dolls in my family

Sometime after the second intifada began, when I already lived in Australia, my parents moved from Israel to the famous Crown Heights neighbourhood in New York. They are still there, in a place where the air ripples with rap and Orthodox pop deep into the night while the black-clad Chabadniks pass the time mixing with their black neighbours until their leader, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, makes his comeback from the dead as the Messiah.

Every so often, I beg my parents to move somewhere more conducive to their health – somewhere quieter, with better-quality vegetables in the shops, with less rubbish strewn on the sidewalks. “But this is where I most belong,” my mother always says – not something you’d expect to hear from a former Soviet Jew.

After the Bolshevik revolution, gods were exorcised from Soviet Russia. Most churches and synagogues were shut down or even destroyed. While some strains of Christianity were outlawed, Judaism wasn’t officially banned. However, following the establishment of Israel, it became associated with the state which the Soviet regime deemed evil. So even if you wouldn’t be arrested for worshipping the Jewish God, you were likely to lose your job and be blacklisted in other ways. It was safer to do what most Soviet Jews did – forget their spiritual heritage.

I remember when the Russian mass aliyah began in the late 1980s, how horrified the more traditional pockets of Israeli society were by the hordes of pork-eating Shabbat-ignorant “barbarians” descending onto the Holy Land. Later, however, it became clear that most of those barbarians had a strong cultural Jewish identity.

Paradoxically, it was the Soviet state that wouldn’t let them forget who they were. Every citizen’s ethnic origins were stamped onto their ID cards; the authorities used this information for discriminatory purposes.