This is Lu, and She is Russian

Last time someone introduced me like that was a couple of months ago.  I have been in America for almost 20 years now, more than I have been in Russia. 

At first I got pissed.  Really pissed. Then I realized, "You know what? That's right, I am Russian, so Пошли вы все на хуй!"  Oh yeah, by the way, that means, " I love you all".

;-P

So next time, someone introduces me as Russian, I will just say IN RUSSIAN "I love you all". And you'll just have to trust me that this is exactly what it means.

A Wandering Jew

Sometimes it takes a tragedy to achieve a profound understanding.  Sometimes we don't see what's right under our nose, until we are stripped of all that we keep close to our heart, but what prevents us from seeing the Truth.  And when we are left empty, but free, that's when the wisdom of God fills our heart and guides us to the greater understanding of our Selves.

The Wandering Jew by Marc Chagall

And so, I have received a revelation.

Ever since I moved to the US, I have struggled with my identity, not fitting in with the Russian, Jewish, or American culture.  I couldn't understand who I was, and I was fighting to determine where I fit in.  I didn't feel Jewish enough, for, as many people mistakenly assume, Jewishness is a religion.  But I wasn't religious, never having read the Torah, or Talmud, and never having stepped into a synagogue.  However, I always felt profoundly Jewish, and suffered for my identity being reflected in my last name and the size of my nose back in my home country.  Nevertheless, I couldn't fit in with the religious Jews, or American secular Jews, the stereotyped spoiled JAPs and ferklempt housewives of Long Island.  Neither would I fit in with the Jews of Israel, I've felt more and more, learning how much hostility they have among each group, and the close-minded primitive hatred a lot of them harbored against Palestinians.

In the first years of living in the US, I still felt strong ties with the Russian culture of my home country.  I listened only to the Russian music, closed off from the world by my Walkman.   I read mainly Russian literature, and wrote poetry in Russian.  As if I still desperately tried to hold on to the only identity I knew and felt comfortable in -  the Russian one.  Everything Russian was good, and everything American was evil and wrong.  I was secluding myself from the outside American culture, but try as I might, my knowledge of English and generally curious nature opened me up more and more to the culture of the country of my chosen refuge.

As the years passed, I've absorbed more and more the bits and pieces of American culture.  At times, I'm startled when people still refer to me as Lu from Russia, thinking they are talking about someone else.  I feel at ease in the world of directness and friendliness, which is the American Soul.  It hurts me greatly now to see this Soul be pillaged by financial troubles, and separation and fear brought on by senseless wars for "our freedom".  I have many American friends, of different faiths or no faiths at all, of different ethnicities and colors. But every once in a while, I am struck with the thought of how huge our differences are, and how many of them can't even comprehend a different life style or point of view.  (And why don't they salt their food??!!!?)

So here I was stuck in the limbo between different personalities of mine, and never quite fitting in any of them.  Until I shut off my obsessive depressive thoughts, and forced myself to calm down and let God take care of all the crazy things in my life.  I came across a powerful message in a great book, which is keeping me connected to the ultimate source of my people's belief's - Kabbalah.  The book "The God-Powered Life: Awakening to Your Divine Purpose" is written by Rabbi David Aaron,  who has studied Kabbalah most of his life and translated it for the laymen, like myself.  Rabbi Aaron recounts a famous Mark Twain's quote, "All things are mortal, but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?" According to Rabbi Aaron,

10 Signs That I'm More American Than I Realized

After visiting Mississauga and Toronto, Canada, for several days, and getting a general feel for the country, I realized that Buffalo rubbed off on me much more than I thought.  I actually found myself missing certain concepts and items that make me feel proud to be an American.  I also experienced a culture shock from some Canadian eccentricities. Here's a compiled list of 10 items that made me realize how much I missed my good ol' wing-eatin, shorts-wearin-year-round Buffalo, the city of good neighbors.

1.  The use of 1 and 2 dollar coins. (I still can't figure out a difference between a nickel and dime, for God's sake, and you throw those at me??)
2.  Lack of crime. (Toronto and Mississauga are among the safest cities in Canada, although I did see a handcuffed man led by the police from the Toronto Subway.)
3.  No ghetto.  (At least not in Downtown, but even after searching online, I couldn't find any.)
4.  No Canadian rap or hiphop.  (Justin Bieber, anyone? Puhleez!)
5.  White middle-class suburban ghetto chic wear.  (See #4. Puhleez put da hood back in da hoodie.)
6.  Lack of spoken and/or unaccented English.  (You can't even fathom how frustrating it is not to be able to eavesdrop on people's conversations.)
7.  No rednecks. (Nope. No gun-toting, flannel-shirted, mullet-sprouting, mustachioed men, I looked.)
8.  Forming a polite patient single file queue to board a streetcar. (Seriously???!!!)
9.  No Buffalo Bills or Saber's jackets with shorts and sneakers. (Darn, I missed the Buffalo uniform.)
10.  No fat people.  (I saw only ONE morbidly obese lady WALKING, not riding a cart, in all three days in Canada.)

All in all, I wouldn't be able to live in Canada, because it's too safe, too civilized, and too clean. Even the graffiti looked very polished and happy.  There was no angst, no struggle for the pursuit of happiness, because most people looked pretty relaxed and happy already.  No one looked like they just lost a house, or a job, or were diagnosed with a horrible disease and couldn't afford healthcare.  Maybe it's because they have FREE healthcare system?

No, I definitely couldn't live in a country like that, with no problems and cheery disposition.  Life would be way too boring.

Matushka Rossiya (Mother Russia)

By now I'm used to the perfectly uniform rows of two-storey plastic doll houses with neatly cut green lawns on most streets of suburban Americana.  Sometimes I'm even comforted by this vision of prosperous conformity, with every citizen religiously mowing their lawns and sprucing up their garden patches on a weekend.  However, it still feels fake, like living a doll life in a doll house of some Barbie commercial, complete with a cute plastic Barbie-mobile and Barbie's Furry Friend pet cat.  (Ken is mostly at work).  After all these years of living in Suburbia, my heart still yearns for the chaotic urban noise, graffiti, and crowded streets.

Hence, I'm repeatedly struck by the bouts of nostalgia and yearning for the stone buildings with fleshy and muscular caryatids holding up the century-old homes of history. Mind you, those never existed in my provincial Russian hometown of Belgorod, which was filled with the Soviet Realist architecture and ugly 5-storey cardboard cutout apartment houses, lovingly dubbed Khrushchevka, as they sprouted like unwanted weeds during Khrushchev's reign in the 1960s. (For more on pictures of typical Soviet and Russian architecture, click here.)






No, what I'm yearning for is the perfectly preserved pieces of memory of some of the beautiful cities visited during my childhood, like Odessa in Ukraine, a loudmouthed melting pot of Jews, Greeks, Germans, Turks, Ukranians, Russians, etc., and Riga, a polished, reserved, and cultured capital of Latvia.  For fear of a huge culture shock, I dread visiting my hometown and all the people left behind, so the perfect solution to my worsening nostalgia is to visit the next best thing - my childhood havens.

Riga has been on my mind for several years.  I get struck by a vision of its cobblestoned streets of the Old Town, while I'm teaching a class, or I get a whiff of a salty Baltic sea air, while grocery shopping in Wegmans.  It seems I simultaneously lead two lives, one in America, and another in Riga, in some other parallel dimension.  The obssession with Riga has become so bad, that I'm struck by nightmares of being back home in Russia, and feeling the ecstatic belonging in my soul, only to wake up to the freshly groomed lawns of foreign Barbieland. Those dreams, accompanied by gut-wrenching emotions and tears, are enough to spoil my whole week and take it out on my unsuspecting pampered students and poor dutiful Ken (who luckily spends most of his waking hours at work).



So, what's the solution?  The easy answer is - to travel back to Riga.  But the hard thing is - to travel back to Riga.  One: No one is able to accompany me, and I'm horribly scared to travel alone. Two: I'm afraid to have a culture shock and discover that Riga of my sweet candied childhood dreams is no more.  Three: If I travel back home, at least I want to show my home to my lovely Ken, so he can see what I grew up in, but Ken is always at work, and unable to travel. Four:...............Well I'm sure I'll be able to come up with something.



So there you have it.  Thus is life of an immigrant, between two worlds, never belonging fully to either one - his native land or his host country, but always longing to be simultaneously in both.

Where Are You From? - Part II

For anyone who has ever been assaulted by the Question, whether you are a traveler to distant lands, or an immigrant to America, here's a complied list of possible answers:

Question: WHERE ARE YOU FROM?
Possible Answers: 1.  Nowhere.
                               2.  Planet Earth.
                               3.  My mom's belly.
                               4.  Why?  Are you Border Patrol?
                               5.  K-Pax.  That's about 1000 of your light years away.  Now if you
                                    excuse me, I have a beam of light to catch. (Check out the trailer)
                               6.  I am Cornholio! I need a TP for my bunghole!  Are you threatening
                                    me? (Check out this awesome video!)
                               7.  I am from the Planet X-5721 in the Adromeda Galaxy.  I come in
                                    peace.  Take me to you leader.
                               8.  The question is where am I NOT from!
                               9.  We all come from the Goddess. ( Check out the song) 
                              10. And where are YOU from?
                              11. I am from clothespins, from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.
                                    I am from the dirt under the back porch. (Black, glistening, it tasted
                                    like beets.).... (Check out the poem)

Feel free to post any other possible answers that you may come up with.   

Where Are You From?

Having lived in America for almost 17 years, I pretty much got used to the idea that I am an American.  Mind you, it wasn't easy.  For the first two years I absolutely hated and despised everything and everyone American and sorely missed my home country, which made my existence extremely miserable, since America was all around me. Nevertheless, I gradually managed to acculturate and notice my UN-Americanness less and less.

After 9/11, I found in my soul true roots of American patriotism, which for me was a new feeling, since I never actually experienced it while living in Russia, because technically I never considered myself Russian, but first and foremost Jewish. (I know, I know, you are going to tell me that Jewish is a religion, not a culture, but I can argue with you about that the whole evening, especially if I'm accompanied by a nice Kosher bottle of Israeli Cabernet Sauvignon.)

The blow to the Twin Towers was like a blow to my heart; my insides hurt to see New York City (which I consider my soul mate city, if such a concept may exist) suffer and grieve.  That was the first time when I truly felt that I was a full-blooded American, the same as those who were born here, or whose roots went back to the Mayflower.

So. That brings me to the point I'm trying to make.  Most days I don't give a second thought to my ethnicity, or nationality, or country of origin.  I just go about my business teaching, wine tasting, belly dancing, and occasionally writing long-winded boring blogs.  But it always sneaks up on me - that million-dollar question, thrown at me at the most inconvenient moments, catching me completely unprepared, and leaving me momentarily stunned.

And the question is - the drum roll please -

WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

Oh, yes, I remember those first couple of years in the US, when my white average face was unnoticeable in the American crowd, but my accent was my betrayer.  At times I dreaded to even talk to some cashier at Tops for the fear of being assaulted with the usual WHERE ARE YOU FROM? Meant as a friendly matter-of-fact small talk, when asked for a hundred times, it became my nightmare.

This is how the usual conversation would go:

Me: Paper and plastic please.
Cashier (hopefully a cute guy, but at Tops not likely): Oh, you speak with an accent! Where are you from?
Me: Russia.  Oh, could you pack the bags lightly please.
Cashier (excited): Sure.  Russia?! Wow, cool! Which part of Russia?
Me (annoyed, because how the heck s/he would know the parts of Russia?!) Ummm... South.  Near Ukraine.
Cashier (perplexed): Bonus card?  Ukraine?...  Wow...
Me: Yeah, about 8 hours away from Moscow, kinda like Buffalo from New York.
Cashier: That will be $37.14 please. Cash? Awesome.  What is your hometown's name?
Me (SERIOUSLY?????): It's Belgorod.
Cashier: Belgrade? Out of $40?
Me: No, Bel-gO-rOd. It's on the border with Ukraine.  A small city.
Cashier: Here's your change.  Have a nice day.
Me (silently bemoaning): WHY?????

Why? Why ask all these questions, if s/he probably never saw a map of Russia and is too young to even know that once Russia was the Number One Enemy Of The US.  Why care about the part of Russia I am from, or the name of my hometown, which is not very famous, even in Russia itself?  At least most of the time I got out easy, without being questioned about the snow (which will definitely come up in my next blog installment), or "humorously" called a Commie.

After being subjected to this torturous humiliation for several years, I started teaching English and improved my accent enough not to be noticed anymore.  Occasionally the Question strikes again, but now I found a perfect weapon. A case in point:

Stranger/Cashier/Clerk/Policeman/Guy At A Bar: Where are you from?
Me (smile): Amherst.
Stranger/Cashier/Clerk/Policeman/Guy At A Bar (stunned):........... Khmm. Which part of Amherst?
Me: Between Eggert and Bailey. Near North Campus UB.
Stranger/Cashier/Clerk/Policeman/Guy At A Bar (deflated): Cool.

And that leaves absolutely no room for them to speculate on my ethical background, unless they have the guts to pursue the matter further and inquire about my accent and try to guess where I am from in three tries, one of which is invariably that I'm from France.

Thankfully, I have learned to parry the oncoming Question, except when its in disguise.  At a social function:

Colleague (squealing): Oh, Lu, good to see you!
Me: Hi! How are you?
Colleague (gushing): Lu, this is my husband. This is Lu, we work together, she is from Russia!
Me: .................................................... Nice to meet you.
Husband (bored): Hi, nice to meet you too.
Me (silently): RUN!!!!!!!

As you can see, life keeps throwing the mighty Question at me all the time, and I have suffered aplenty because of that.  So my dear friends, colleagues, and readers, please remember, it's an insult, or at least a social faux pas, to ask someone who has lived in America for half of their life about their country of origin, unless it's essential for the immediately following anthropological or sociological comparison of his/her native and host cultures.

I am an American, and I am from Amherst. The rest is not important.