‘My Soviet passport told me that I am a Jew’
Alexander Smukler reflects on antisemitism, communism, and the drama of his son’s brit milah
It’s not as if there isn’t news coming out of Russia’s war on Ukraine. On Sunday, Ukrainian drones hit military targets in five areas inside Russia, including Siberia. The attack, led by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, had been planned for 18 months. The drones, which had been Trojan-horsed into Russia, demolished nuclear bomb carriers that were very valuable but so old as to be irreplaceable. And the United States knew nothing about it until it happened.
This operation unavoidably brings to mind the similarly long-planned, completely hidden Israeli attacks that blew up Hezbollah’s pagers, the men who carried them, and much of the terror group’s immediate threat.
But this week, our analyst, Alexander Smukler of Montclair, who grew up in Moscow and left the Soviet Union only months before it collapsed, in 1991, was thinking about the antisemitism that’s rising around us now, how he came to know he was a Jew back then, and the parallels and stark differences between the Soviet Union then and the United States now.
He was driven by his fears about younger Jews’ connection to Israel. “For years, the Jewish world in the diaspora had been fascinated by the miracle of the creation of the state of Israel,” he said. “Now we find out that the young generation does not value Israel as a major pillar of our identity.
“The murders at the Jewish Museum two weeks ago pushed me to think about modern antisemitism. There’s the United States; we can talk about France, where a synagogue and a Jewish center were desecrated a few days ago. We know that a lot of antisemitic incidents happen every day in Great Britain.
“And that made me think about growing up in the Soviet Union.
“I was born in a very, very assimilated family,” Mr. Smukler said. “We could never say the word Jew, or talk about Jewish traditions or Jewish holidays. The word Israel was forbidden.
“My father, who was born in Kyiv, and my mother, who was born in Moscow, excluded those words not because they wanted to but because they lived with incredible fear. They didn’t want their children to learn about the Jewish background because they wanted us to be assimilated and become Russian.
“My mother was a hardline Communist. She always told me that when we build communism, there will not be Jews or Black people; everyone will be equal and everybody will enjoy their lives in friendship and love. That’s how she thought and dreamed about the world, that it would be filled with love, equality, friendship, peaceful coexistence, and trust.
“My father was born in 1926. He was fluent in Yiddish. He went to a cheder” — a traditional Jewish school — “when he was about 4, and he learned traditional Jewish subjects, in Yiddish. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of cheders like that in Ukraine.”
That lasted for about three years, Mr. Smukler said, and then the Soviets converted the cheders into schools, where students learned secular subjects, but the language of instruction continued to be Yiddish, although Russian was introduced as well. (Never Ukrainian, Mr. Smukler said; “the Ukrainian language always was suppressed because it was a symbol of Ukrainian independence.”)
“Around 1938, right before the Holocaust and World War II, the Communist party decided that Jewish schools had become centers of so-called Jewish nationalism, and they were not raising people who would become real members of the socialist system,” he said. “Instead, they thought, the Jewish schools were part of the capitalist system.
“So in 1938 they closed all of them and erased Jewish education.” Jewish students went to Soviet schools like everyone else.
By the time he and his sister were born, “my father wanted to forget his Jewish knowledge,” Mr. Smukler said. “He never, in my entire life, ever said a word of Yiddish in front of me, even though he understood it perfectly and could speak it perfectly. Whenever he spoke Yiddish with his father, they closed the door, so the kids couldn’t hear it.”
What about his mother? “She never learned Yiddish,” Mr. Smukler said.
So the knowledge that he was Jewish came to him only in little, unconnected bits of information at first. “My grandfather, my father’s father, was a little window where I could learn a little bit about Israel,” Mr. Smukler said. “Despite strong pressure from our parents not to teach us anything about Israel or anything Jewish, he violated that rule and helped me learn.” His grandfather had a shortwave radio, and at times they could go into a closet and listen to Kol Yisrael, the Voice of Israel, as it broadcast news and connected Jews.
“My grandfather told me why Israel was involved in the Six-Day War, but I was 7 years old then, in 1967. But in 1973, when the Yom Kippur War took place, I was already 13.” When his grandfather explained it to young Sasha, as Mr. Smukler is known, it made sense.
Then there were other odd things that didn’t make sense until later.
“My grandfather gave me an envelope with money in it when I was 13,” Mr. Smukler said. “It would have been my bar mitzvah day, but I didn’t know it, and he didn’t tell me. But that envelope was a bar mitzvah gift.”
In 1989, when he and his wife, Alla Straks, had their second son, “I tried to find a mohel for his brit milah in Moscow.” It is worth noting here that Mr. Smukler was a leader in the Russian Jewish community by then; the generation of refuseniks who were a bit older than he already had managed to get out, but he and his contemporaries were still there and still fighting.
It is also worth noting that it was illegal to give your son a bris.
Despite his connections, “I could find only one mohel,” Mr. Smukler said. “He was Chabad, and very deeply underground. He was so secret. And he was 84 years old.
“After he performed the bris, my son got so sick.
“The brit milah was completely forbidden,” Mr. Smukler said. “It was a forbidden religious operation. It was considered a crime. And it wasn’t only aimed at Jews. It was also anti-Muslims. Muslims do circumcisions.
“The punishment was that the Soviet Union could take your baby away.
“So everyone performed it secretly, and by 1989 I couldn’t find a mohel. I had eight days, and even for me, one of the leaders of the Jewish community, I couldn’t find anyone until I went to Chabad.”
The day after the bris, the Smuklers’ son got sick.
“He got an infection from the bris,” Mr. Smukler said. “In normal life, you get an antibiotic. He was eight days old. We would have gotten an antibiotic cream or ointment or powder to put on his infected penis, and that would solve the problem.
“But we couldn’t. We couldn’t bring him to a doctor. We were afraid that if we did, we’d lose him. They would take him away from us. We couldn’t go anywhere. He got worse and worse and worse, and eventually he developed a fever.
“We knew that we were losing our newborn baby.”
Then Mr. Smukler had an idea. “I had a teacher, a mentor, and friend, Professor Mika Chlenov. By that time, in 1989, he was a leader of the Jewish underground movement in the Soviet Union. I called him, and said, ‘I don’t know what to do. As soon as I go to the hospital with my newborn baby they will take him away and I will never see him again.’”
But if he can’t see a doctor, he will die.
“Mika said, ‘I knew only one doctor who performed circumcisions for the refusenik families. He was a urologist, and he did it for many years, but he left to go to Israel. There’s no one else I know.’
“And then Mika said a funny thing. He said, ‘Here is his home phone number. Call on this number. Maybe someone is still living in his apartment who can tell you what hospital he was working at, or maybe there is somebody else at the hospital who is still secretly performing circumcisions in the hospital after the doctor left.
“There was less than a 1 percent chance of success, but this was my only hope. It was a hard Russian winter. My son was born on December 1, we had the circumcision on December 8, and when I talked to Mika about 10 days later, my son’s penis was disgusting because of the infection, which was obvious, and he was dying.
“So I called that number, called a person who already had left for Israel. And a man’s voice answered, and I said, ‘I am calling this doctor’ — it’s funny but I cannot remember his name — and I said ‘I got your number from Dr. Chlenov. Is there any chance I can come to talk to you? Do you know Dr. Rubinsky — that’s a made-up name because really I just can’t remember — and he said, ‘I am Dr. Rubinsky.’
“I said, ‘But you left for Israel!’ and he said, ‘Unfortunately not, because our paperwork was delayed, but actually we are leaving tomorrow morning. Our flight is tomorrow morning.
“I said, ‘No, you are not leaving tomorrow morning. My son is dying.’ And he said, ‘Young man, forget about it. Hang up now. I am not going to miss my flight for a second time.’ And I said, ‘Listen, Doctor, I will tell you that you are not leaving now. I will do everything possible to make sure that your plane does not leave Moscow with you on it.
“‘Because my son is dying.’”
The two men agreed that “I will bring my son to him right away, right now,” Mr. Smukler said. “It was 5 p.m., in the dark time of winter, but I said, ‘The only option for you to leave tomorrow or tell me who else in Moscow can save his life is to do it now. And whoever saves his life will be rewarded. I will do anything to save my son’s life.’
“I came to his house by taxi. He opened up my son’s clothing and he turned white. Physically white. Then he understood that my son really was dying.
“He said, ‘Run to the hospital.’ He jumped into the taxi with me and my son and we rushed to the hospital where he used to work. He had been the head of the urology department. He ran to the operating room, and his former employees were so surprised to see him. They said, ‘Dr Rubinsky, why are you still here?’ And he said, ‘I can’t talk now. This is an emergency.’
“Ten minutes later, my son was in the operating room. The doctor opened up his penis and cleaned it — or whatever it was that he did, I wasn’t in there — and gave him a strong antibiotic. He said, ‘I did my best. Pray for him. If the fever goes down, he will be fine. And I am leaving to Israel tomorrow morning, and no one else can help you.
“And then he injected another antibiotic, and he gave me more to bring home, and he said, ‘You can’t leave the child in the hospital, because this is an adult urological department.’ So we went home. And the next day my son woke up without a fever, and this guy left.
“He is an angel. And I can’t even remember his name.
“God saved us. And now my son is 35 years old, and we are having his wedding in London in two months.”
(What about Mr. Smukler’s wife, Alla? “She was not capable of doing anything then,” he said. “She’d just had a child, and she had another child at home.”)
All of this — these stories, this life — is why he’s so actively Jewish now, Mr. Smukler said. “The Soviets made such a mistake. Of course eventually I knew that I am Jewish, from my grandfather, from listening to Kol Israel, from my parents. I knew they were hiding everything from us. It was forbidden to talk about anything that was Jewish or about Israel. We talked about Russian literature, about science and math and music, but Jewish issues were excluded completely.”
“But I knew that I was Jewish. If I hadn’t known by the time I was 10, I would have known then. I went to the soccer club at my school, and the soccer coach told me, “Listen, Schmukler” — that’s how that very Jewish name was pronounced in Russian — “you are a red-haired Jew. No Jews are playing on this team. If you want to do something, go to the chess club.
“That was the first flashing red light, when I learned that there was something wrong with me.
“I asked my mother why the soccer coach called me a red-haired Jew, and she explained that we are Jewish, that all of my grandparents were Jewish, but right now we’re building communism, so don’t even think about it. We are living in a country where pretty soon everybody will forget about being Jewish, or Uzbek, or Tajik, or Balkan, or whatever. Because we are living in a country that is trying to build equality.
“I was beaten up in school many times because I was Jewish. But I really understood it when I went to get my first passport.” But then, he explained, a Soviet passport had little to do with travel. It was instead a basic identity document, a driver’s license and Social Security card combined. People got passports as soon as they could, not because they thought they’d get to go anywhere — they couldn’t — but because they needed the ID it provided.
Your last name was written on the first line of the Soviet passport, Mr. Smukler explained, and your first name would go on the second line. The third line would be for your patronymic. The fourth line was date of birth. And the fifth line was your ethnic identity. “It was a huge stamp, with the word JEW,” Mr. Smukler said.” Any time anyone opens your passport, they see the huge JEW. It is like wearing a tattoo on your forehead.
“You immediately realize that you are not welcome. That you are different. You are second class. You will be excluded. You will be punished. You are a different class and a different caste. You are untouchable, like the caste in India.”
Other Russian ethnic minorities were listed on that fifth passport line, but anyone who could claim or bribe their way to a claim of ethnic Russian descendants did so. It was much better to be labeled as Russian on your passport, Mr. Smukler said. Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s president from 1991 to 1999, did away with that system, but that’s why the number of Jews in the Soviet Union was undercounted, he added.
“For many years, I’ve wondered what would have happened if I’d been born in a country that doesn’t have a stamp like that on its passports,” Mr. Smukler said. “If I’d been born into a very assimilated family, that was not religious, that was very left, very pro-socialist, and did not want to identify as Jews.
“Who would I be? Would I still be a Jew with a strong Jewish identity, a strong relationship to Israel, and strong concern for my people?
“That’s what made Soviet antisemitism so stupid. Being Jewish then and there had nothing to do with religion. It was a pure blood label — not libel, but label — that we had to carry on us. It’s similar to what the Nazis did with the yellow star. It was a huge mistake. Their theory was that in the pre-communist era, they had to make people equal, and they hoped to develop different, equal nationalities and create a family of nationalities, all coming together. The idea was that when we build communism, people will all be equal and each member of the society will be equal to everyone else. Everyone will be equal. There will be no nationalities. Everyone will speak in the dame language, ever member of society will be equal to every other member, religion will disappear, and there will be no God. Only community, which is the belief that you have to give as much as you can to society, and in return society will give back to you so that you are equal to every other member of society.
“If I had grown up in a very assimilated family who wants to forget their roots in the United States, I probably wouldn’t care about the young people who were shot down in Washington. I wouldn’t care about the demonstrations against Israel in the universities. But because the Soviet Union made me a Jew, I had to learn what it means to be a Jew.”
He’s not suggesting that we’d be better off living in the Soviet Union.
But “the reason that Soviet and Russian Jews have such a strong Jewish identity and love of Israel is because we lived in a country who made us second class. If they hadn’t done it, and without Israel, probably we’d have been another Jewish tribe lost to history.
“Our young generation here now has a much more difficult choice than we had. We had no choice. They do. What I am saying is that identity is our main battlefield. Why do young kids identify themselves as Jews if their parents bring them to synagogue once a year? What will make them Jewish?
“But this new wave of antisemitism showed us that you could be shot just because you’re speaking Hebrew outside a Jewish museum.”
He mentioned an ongoing situation at Alfred University in upstate New York, where warring Jewish students who live at the school’s Hillel House have put up flags — some put up the Palestinian flag, some the Israeli flag. The Palestinian flag is more generally popular on campus, but “there are Jewish students who are united and brave and put up the Israel flag.
“Antisemitism unites all of us,” Mr. Smukler said. But surely there is something better than that.
comments