Besamim
Brina Novogrebelsky
Baruch atah, Adonai, Elohaynumelechha’oilam, borayminay besamim.
I tried writing a poem about Havdalah, the ceremony that smells like cinnamon some Saturday’s and mint on others, when we bring in the new week. I wanted to write about the significance of besamim— ‘herbs’in Hebrew — in our culture. Instead, I am immobile, tense, struck with the fear that comes before grief.
Jewish poet Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach shared an older poem of hers on Instagram today, Thursday, February 24th. The poem is called “For the Journalists Who Write About Ukraine,” after Steven Lee Myers and Alison Smale’s March 2014 The New York Times article, “Russian Troops Mass at Border with Ukraine.” Kolchinsky Dasbach wrote, “to claim you understand / the workings of the land, the place / where river–bones meet / coal-soil skin. Call it / catastrophe / for Ukraine and pretend / omission lacks intent.” Exactly eight years ago, a revolution ended in this land, the country my father emigrated from. Today the Russian military shoots rockets into his city, the capitol city. In her Instagram caption, Kolchinsky Dasbach, who lives in Philadelphia, writes, “I am as grateful to be far from the devastation as I am frozen by my distance from it.”
The only thing I can do is call my family members and write this silly piece of text, which will be edited, critiqued, graded. I might as well benefit from my only form of processing a violence I am so personally connected to.
When my mother was 22 years old, she was drafted to be a nurse in Chernobyl after the disaster. She travelled from Baranovichi, Belarus, the city she grew up in, with a group of fellow young Soviet nurses, unmarried women who all still lived with their parents. Today my motherland invades my fatherland and I can already see my family’s arguments this Pesach, right around the corner, about which government is more antisemitic, and do you remember the invasion, when your people killed my people, killed our people. And when we thank God for Brooklyn, our promised land, and I say we are a Diaspora people, my father will allude to making Aliyah and my mother will veto this. She has no interest in learning a fourth language.
I don’t know if other Diaspora Jews do this, those who are in Brazil or Canada. It feels specific to my “Russian” Jewish ethnic enclave.My Ashkenazi friends whose families have been in the US for three or more generations can trace their family trees to large swaths of Eastern European land. I can’t imagine them saying “Next year in Russia, Poland, and maybe Lithuania” at their seders.
I am stuck worrying about a nation I’ve never actually known. A history I am painfully familiar with. In 1989 my father came to Brooklyn with his first wife, my brother, and my grandparents. His memories of Ukraine are strictly Soviet memories. His father fought in the Great Patriotic War.
My maternal grandmother left her country twice. The first time was at four years old when the war started. She and her family fled Tolochin for the Ural Mountains, close to Siberia. The second time was when she was sixty.She flew to Brooklyn via Ireland. When I long to connect with my family backgrounds, I am nostalgic for places that donot exist anymore.
My children will grow up in a home practicing the custom of floating roots. Holidays that correspond to Judean agriculture mixed with religion-less practices instated by an antisemitic government. My babies will have passports. This is all a reminder of our multi-generational assimilation to being Soviet, to being American Jews.
Up until recently, I called myself a post-Soviet, first-generation American Jew. This was my nicely packaged label, the most accurate I could be without explaining my entire family’s history. Now I’m not sure how to succinctly describe my identity. ‘Post-Soviet’ isn’t a useful term for me anymore because it’s been thirty years since the Soviet Union dissolved. It is unfair of me to tie myself to countries that have worked so hard to extricate themselves from their Soviet pasts. The term also implies that Ukraine and Belarus, and the thirteen other [now] independent countries cannot exist separately from their colonizer.
Of all my identities, my Jewishness plays the largest role in my daily and long-term decisions. So, I resolve to ‘Jew.’
