By Ilya Magid


Jewish Vignettes

* *
Russian Jew in America

A Dialogue between a Customer and the Cashier in the Stop@Shop.

Cashier: A box of tea , chocolate, two bottles of Pepsi-Cola, a bottle of orange Juice, potatoes, meat, Polish kielbasa, two rolls of paper towels, two dozen eggs.
$14 20.

Customer: I have coupons from the Boston Globe; this is free; two rain checks; double coupons, triple coupons. So, all my purchases are free. You have to give me $2.27.

* *
I went with my shopping cart to the trolley. At the trolley stop I saw my neighbor. We waited for the trolley together. He asked me, "Where are you going?" I lied and told him, "I am going to my children". (If I told him that I was going to a shop, it is possible he would also go to that shop and I did not want him to go with me. I had to go beyond the stop for the shop.) He answered me, "Someone should never go to his children with an empty cart".

* *
If parents give money to children, both the parents and children are happy.
If children give money to parents both the children and parents begin to cry.

* *

That was the time before the revolution.

An old Jew was dying in a shtetel. Other Jews stood around him. They said, "Tell us your secret, why are you making such good tea?"

The old Jew answered, "I give advice to you, Jews do not pity tea."
(The old dying Jew prepared strong tea with a large quantity of tea in the teapot.)

* *

Interview at the American Embassy
(Before the emigration)

Clerk from Embassy: "In your passport you are Russian, but on your birth certificate you are a Jew?"

Man: "Do you understand what the situation in the Soviet Union was like?"

Clerk did not ask him any additional questions.

They gave him the status: REFUGEE.
(In America people with the status of refugee receive many more benefits than people with other statuses.)

* *

Irina Magid

Once my Russian friend from Russia asked me by telephone, "What are the names of your great-grandchildren?" I answered,"They are Basya, Shlomo and Levi." In a month I received a letter from her, in which she asked me again to repeat my great-grandchildren's names. Thinking that I called their nicknames, she asked me to give her their real names. I wrote her back a letter and explained to her that Basya, Shlomo and Levi are not nicknames, but real beautiful Jewish names. Those names are strange to the Russian ear.

Jews in the Soviet Union gave their children Russian names.

" * *

From a lecture in the Jewish Center by PhD.

In the Jewish historiography in the Soviet Union there was a 70-year gap. That was a taboo topic. All literature required for writing Jewish history was saved in a special division of the central library [spezchran]. Only PhD specialists could go there. They had a special password and identification paper with them for their Job. Doctors, who did not have the proper paper, could not take out, for example, the Jewish encyclopedia by Dubnov, issued before the revolution.


* *

If only…
One Jew told me, "What were Jews waiting for in Czarist Russia in the over-populated shtetels, were there no prospects for the future." The communists' termination of the pale allowed Jews to drive in to the city to enter Universities, etc. The price for that was closed synagogues, cheders, yeshivas, Jewish culture, etc.

But in the February revolution of 1917 in Russia, when the government of Kerenski came into power, among other acts there was the termination of the pale for the Jews. If the communists had not crashed the government of Kerenski, the development of the country would have gone the way of the bourgeois democratic countries. Some Jews would have moved from shtetls to the cities, and would have studied in Universities. Jewish religion and culture would have been saved. Russia would have repeated the American way of development.

Editor Steven Siegel

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