Essay on Mikhail Iossel’s Love Like Water, Love Like Fire. by Olga Stein

Mikhail Iossel’s Love Like Water, Love Like Fire: The Soviet Jew in Full Colour

Mikhail Iossel’s collection of memoir and lyrical pieces, Love Like Water, Love Like Fire, bears witness to a particular kind of experience — that of living and identifying as a Jew in the Soviet Union (now former Soviet Union) during the 20th Century. To be more precise, the majority of these autobiographical stories deal with Iossel’s own past before 1986, which is when he immigrated to the USA. Highly literary and genre-blending, they serve up a kind of anti-paean to a life Iossel left behind in a country and part of the world whose ideological fashioning differs vastly from the one we’ve been socialized in as Westerners. As these stories suggest, the Soviet-era world is so utterly unlike ours, so prosaic and unsettling at once, that literature aiming to convey this strangeness requires its own narrative strategies. In Love Like Water, Love Like Fire, characters and situations are more the stuff of phantasmagoria than memoir or “realistic” autofiction. Yet Iossel’s artistry is such that anyone born and raised in this country and its paranoia-inducing regime, any reader with an understanding of its mind-numbing, grim totality, would think these stories, their content and form, not just apt, but true to life.

            As a whole, the collection testifies to Iossel’s keen sensibility and unmistakable erudition. There are moments of sly and overt intertextuality, and unmistakable literary panache. One piece, simply titled “Sentence,” and dedicated to the writer and language poet Arcadii Dragomoshchenko, unfolds as an interior monologue in, to be sure, a single sentence. It recalls an semi-illicit gathering of dissident writers in an otherwise empty building in a central part of Leningrad (St. Petersburg since 1991). This piece gives expression to different registers of emotion; part nostalgia and elegy for a bygone youth in a resplendent metropolis, known the world over as “Venice of the North,” it nevertheless homes in on the narrator’s awareness of and anxiety elicited by the city’s governing ethos and of the country as whole.

….there, on the rooftop level of that uninhabited, condemned five-floor building on Chernyshevsky Prospect, a stone’s throw away from the vigilantly guarded U.S. consulate….we, a small gathering of momentarily silent, semiunderground young people….in the middle of a sprawling, empty, dusty loft up at the top of a condemned and otherwise unpeopled Dostoyevskian building, in the stark yellow light from a couple of bare lightbulbs suspended from the concave cracked ceiling…..momentarily silent and not even dragging on the lighted Belomors in our mouths, peering intently out of the dusty and forever winterized yet still drafty cracked old window and into the immense pitch-dark outside, the unconquerable, boreal Leningrad wintry darkness, made darker still by the tiny yellow dots of thousands of windows in apartment buildings near and far, just a small gathering of ten or twenty of us….peering in silence into that great and boundless yellow-dotted darkness that enveloped our part of the vast and great and terrible country to which we solely belonged, the largest and darkest and strongest and strangest and most terrible country in the world, which we likely knew would never let go of us, never release its mortal grip on us, because it owned us by birthright, chapter and verse, body and soul, …and in the end it probably would kill us, too, just have us suffocate to death on its immense darkness and unimaginable gravity of the black hole that it was, even if it was populated by hundreds of millions of people, our fellow citizens, whom we didn’t really know or understand, even though we spoke the very same language….(57-9)

            For the most part, this collection foregrounds the author’s vivid memories and impressions. Iossel is a master of interiority. It must be pointed out, however, that what readers encounter in this collection isn’t confined to the psychological spaces of one narrator — as child, young adult, or older author. Rather, Iossel aspires to represent the psychosocial reality of Soviet society as a whole. This is ambitious but risky at the same time, since both exaggeration and generalization can come across as clichéd. Iossel avoids these and other pitfalls by continually shifting focus, zooming in and then out of a particular scene, narratorial subjectivity, or time frame.

            I can account for the collection’s success as both memoir and illuminating social commentary in two ways. First, its author knows Russia, its people, their beliefs and attitudes. His vantage point is that of someone who understands what makes this leviathan tick.^[i] Iossel reached adulthood in a pervasively anti-Semitic country, where many Jews, his parents and grandparents included, nevertheless achieved sizeable professional recognition. A member of the Soviet intelligentsia at one time, he continues to associate with Russian-speaking writers and artists, expats and those still living there. He was a contributor to samizdat publishing, and survived for several years with the liminal status of a “refusenik” (someone prevented from leaving the Soviet Union by its government, but treated as a political undesirable). In other words, he writes as both insider and outsider, an “ex-centric,” in the manifold sense of the term. Second, while Iossel is clearsighted and seemingly dispassionate regarding the good, the beautiful, and the ugly, he consistently brings these antithetical, discordant features of Soviet-era culture and quotidian life into uneasy correspondence; by design, then, these stories generate friction, a frisson if you will, that results either in artfully depicted moments of cognitive dissonance, or tragicomic situations of marvellous and affecting irony.

            Love Like Water, Love Like Fire consists of twenty pieces of varying length. The point of view shifts between the narrator’s precocious childhood and cultivated adult selves as the author interacts with family, friends, and a colourful array of fellow denizens of Leningrad, quite a number of whom spew anti-Semitic vitriol. At times, a much older Iossel, by now an American citizen, interrupts the narrative with meta-commentary to ruminate on life’s unpredictable turns, its many ironies — for instance, the very fact that he’s composing these stories in a country denounced by the Soviet regime as a capitalist hellhole. “Some of the World Transactions My Father Has Missed, Due to His Death on September 14, 1999” amounts to a catalogue of events and famous last words (literally), some trivial, others weightier or momentous. Here too the mood alternates between elegy for a deceased father and wry humour. Among other things, Iossel’s stocktaking is proof that the Soviet government was wrong in its predictions that the West would self-destruct. The West, and America in particular, is still here, at least for the time being; capitalist democracies are not over yet, though that might well come to pass at some foreseeable point in the future, as Iossel intimates, just not in the ways the Soviets anticipated.

            Throughout the collection, the mature Iossel’s authorial intrusions are intended to highlight and satirize only the most glaring of the above-mentioned contradictions, the parts that don’t stand up to scrutiny, or that fall manifestly short of the state’s oft-reiterated assertions that the Soviet Union is the most equitable, contented, and successful of human societies (compared with which the Capitalist West is an unmitigated failure). From what the young narrator observes, overhears, or is told by his relations, we quickly gather that there’s a great deal more amiss in this self-styled utopia. There’s widespread alcoholism and moral turpitude, for one thing. There’s a shortage of housing and personal privacy, as citizens, including those with young children, have to make due with single rooms in communal apartments, where they share kitchens and bathrooms with strangers, who are as likely to be drunks or damaged, embittered people, as rising professionals. To Iossel’s credit, the broken-down folk we encounter in these stories are mostly empathy-provoking personae, providing both singular portraits of people crushed by life’s vicissitudes and instantly recognizable types (as readers who are from the former Soviet Union would undoubtedly concur).

            The former Soviet Union of these stories is a dysfunctional nation-state, a casualty of its own mythmaking, its deep-seated beliefs, prejudices, and the inscrutable, eerie machinations of an authoritarian regime. Moreover, it’s a society showing signs of collective trauma. As already suggested, the affective potency of these pieces hinges on the juxtaposition of mutually incompatible elements. This is most apparent when the rational, truth-intuiting self brushes uncomfortably against state-sponsored dogma, shared beliefs and bromides of Soviet society. “Moscow Windows” is a superb example of the young narrator’s unnerving encounter with the inexplicable and sinister just below the surface of quotidian life.

            In “Moscow Windows,” a teenaged Iossel is staying with relatives in — by the standards of that time — a posh apartment. It’s night time, and Iossel is happy to be in Moscow, “the movable feast of [his] childhood and adolescence.” He reflects on his own sense of pleasure:

Oh, those lovely, warm, cozy Moscow windows, memorialized unto all-USSR collective awareness, by the celebrated composer Tikhon Krennikov and the famed, lyrical poet Mikhail Matusovsky in the eponymous song, “Moscow Nights,” performed on the radio typically by the beautifully voiceless yet soulful Vladimir Troshin, who sounded, somehow, like an old friend of all the Soviet people at once: How I loved them, in my imagination — those yellow- and blue-lighted Moscow windows in the dark, in the tender, gentle, teeming Moscow night! There, beyond those windows, lived and loved and suffered and rejoiced and moved about aimlessly and dreamed abstractly and held hand for hours and stared off into space blankly the regular Muscovites: the ordinary Soviet people just like me,…

     O the soft, comforting glow of Moscow windows in the night! O Moscow, the warrantor of my well-being, the unwitting guarantor of my eternal salvation!

     O this! O that!

     “But why, Marat — why in the world did [Lev Konstantinovich] decide to come back to the Soviet Union?”  I asked, unexpectedly even to myself, puncturing the comfortable silence between us (108-109).

            The Lev Konstantinovich fifteen-year-old Iossel is asking about had only hours before turned up unexpectedly at his relatives’ door. He’s wild-looking, an uncommunicative man who makes baffling pronouncements. Iossel’s cousin, sixteen-year-old Marat, supplies the hair-raising backstory: In the 1930s, Konstantinovich was a brilliant young Jewish physicist. He studied with his Soviet mentor in England, where he married an Englishwoman and had a son with her. Soon after WWII broke out, he was ordered to return to the USSR (“and this is where the story gets murky,” explains Marat). Just days after landing in Moscow, he was arrested and sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labour in a gulag in either the Magadan or Kolyma region for being a British spy. His wife, who had accompanied him back to Moscow, committed suicide. Their son was “was placed in an orphanage of the enemies of the people,…and subsequently transferred to a mental institution, his permanent residence ever since” (100).

            For the teenaged Iossel this tragic story of a man, now a mere shell of his former self, fails to add up. For one thing, why would anyone who was actually guilty of spying return to Russia to face certain arrest?^[ii] Konstantinovich is an anomaly, out of keeping with Moscow itself and with his relatives’ well ordered life. Iossel can’t parse or justify Konstantinovich’s ruined life to himself. His cousin’s explanation only serves to exacerbate his unease, for according to Marat, Konstantinovich had his entire “permanently concussed brain removed,” after a near-fatal accident near his prison camp, and replaced “as part of some supersecret experiment” with a “completely empty one,” that left him “a perfectly blank slate of a human being.”

            Unlike the more enlightened reader of Love Like Water, Love Like Fire, the young narrator has no knowledge of, say, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, or the climactic torture and interrogation scenes in George Orwell’s 1984, or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian We, whose first Russian-language edition wasn’t published in the USA until 1952 and wasn’t made available in the USSR until 1988 (such works, in addition to percipient witness accounts, more overtly underpin the harrowing title piece at the end of the collection). “Moscow Windows” operates outside of this literary frame of reference. On the other hand, the teenaged Iossel in “Moscow Windows” would probably have known of the Jewish writer Isaac Babel, and of the circumstances surrounding his arrest in May of 1939 and execution on January 27, 1940 (indeed, Babel’s influence is discernible throughout the collection). He’s also familiar with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Subtly referenced in “Moscow Windows” are Solzhenitzin, Nikita Khrushchev, his amnesty for political prisoners, and the “Secret Speech” he gave in 1956, on the occasion of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where he criticized Stalin’s purges. In the last decade of Stalin’s rule, these purges increasingly targeted prominent Jewish writers, artists, and senior apparatchiks.^[iii]

            Toward the conclusion of “Moscow Windows,” the impressionable Iossel is profoundly troubled by the very notion that Konstantinovich is “a man with no past” (101-2), as Marat puts it. Deep down he suspects that this pitiable man was falsely accused and unjustly punished. This is disconcerting for a young person who has been inculcated to believe in Lenin’s and Stalin’s moral superiority and spotless leadership. Thus preoccupied, unable to sleep, the narrator suddenly recalls the terrifying story Marat had told him five years earlier about Giordano Bruno and Jan Hus, both burned at the stake for heresy. It had such an effect on his overactive imagination that Iossel, ten years old at the time, started to “scream, completely out of [his] mind with horror” (114). At fifteen, the narrator isn’t perturbed to the same extent, but he can’t stop dwelling on the meaning of memory and its loss in a manner that brings to mind Eric Voegelin’s concept of Metaxy, denoting two antipodal and irreconcilable states of existence:

I lay silently in the dark,…I wondered what it would feel like — at some point in your life, just out of nowhere — to forget everything about your past, lose all memories of yourself as a child, as a young man….with no recollections preceding the moment of your death, no memories to rely on for your eternal salvation, how odd, how terrible! … when the past is all we have and all there is….Forgetting was inconceivable to the one who remembered, as death made no sense to the one still alive (115-6).

            Though the majority of the stories in Love Like Water, Love Like Fire are narrated from a limited first-person perspective, a number are framed by or fold into themselves stories of relatives, chiefly Iossel’s parents and grandparents. Such pieces as “Our Entire Nation,” “April 1st, Sunset Hour,” and “First Death,” as well as the title story, present a more expansive social, historical, and psychological canvas or context for the characters we encounter in the collection. These portrayals are microcosms of lives lived, of Jewish and non-Jewish Russians, following the Communist Revolution, during Stalin’s reign and the succession of politburo leaders after his death.^[iv]

            Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) itself functions as an essential part of the historic and cultural backdrop in Iossel’s narratives. It’s Russia’s most majestic and most dolorous of large cities — an erstwhile capital that, as Iossel explains, should never have been built. Founded by Peter the Great, a determined and brutal ruler, on a marshland and floodplains with forced labour, St. Petersburg became known as the “city built on bones.” The city bears the scars of recrudescent violence, and its people manifest their own brand of historical trauma. This is especially true of post-World War II Leningrad, the period of Iossel’s youth, since the process of recovering and rebuilding from the 900-day siege by German forces took several decades.

            What’s pertinent here is that the city shaped Iossel’s cultural imaginary, and this comes across in the ambience he evokes in his stories.^[v] Leningrad has a marked atmosphere, never failing to provoke a mixture of awe and estrangement in the narrator. Iossel is drawing on literary modernist and symbolist forerunners like Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913-16). The farcical piece “Klodt’s Horses” revolves around the Bronze Horseman, a statue of Peter the Great, which is an ominous presence in Bely’s novel. Iossel’s appropriations — the use of symbolism and stream-of-consciousness devices, the suggestion of a lurking, demonic menace — come with a noteworthy twist, then, and for this too there are literary models. Among them is the long-censored masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov (composed between 1928 and 1940, but not published until 1969). Additionally, there is Isaac Babel’s oeuvre, and the lesser known Summer in Baden-Baden, Leonid Tsypkin’s luminous novel (published in 2001, twenty years after its completion). Iossel is clearly drawing on Babel’s use of symbolism and mood in “Flying Cranes” (more on this below). I believe, moreover, that any writer wishing to engage fully with Love Like Water, Love Like Fire must attend to the literary and moral aims of a book like Summer in Baden-Baden.^[vi]

            Tsypkin’s novel is a study of Dostoyevsky, his life in St. Petersburg, and the time he spent in Baden-Baden, the gambling capital of Germany. Significantly, this stylistic coup of a novel, despite elements of homage, is by no means a tribute to Dostoyevsky; instead, its Jewish author’s main objective was to cut down to size, to ridicule, one of Russia’s most venerated literary figures, who also happened to be a pernicious anti-Semite. Tsypkin achieved this by using Dostoyevsky’s own tropes against him. Summer in Baden-Baden is a brilliant and stunning act of subversion, a turning of the tables on Dostoyevksy and the larger ambient aspects of Russian culture with its tradition of anti-Semitism and persecution. In Tsypkin’s novel, Dostoyevsky is a character endowed with many of the unseemly qualities he himself used to depict Jews in his novels.^[vii] It’s crucial to recognize, then, that Iossel is working within what by now should be considered a literary counterculture: it’s one that attempts to reclaim and recoup an ethnic identity diminished through centuries of denigration by the dominant culture, and that employs intertextual means to connect with similar acts of literary contestation, or to cast doubt on “national” literature, principally its ingrained anti-Semitism.

Jewish Identity and the Reclaiming of “Otherness”

In Love Like Water, Love Like Fire, instances of dissonance or inner turmoil are the foci of authorial attention. The narrator reflects variously on Communist dogma, the mysterious workings of the Politburo, and perennial anti-Semitism. These nagging questions are fundamentally about “truth,” faith, and, most significantly, personal identity. They are also the layers of conscious and subliminal sediment that accumulate over decades, so that we recognize the narrator’s statements in a number of the pieces as the product of genuine grappling with notions like citizenship, loyalty, betrayal, and, relatedly, Jewishness.

            Iossel uses a combination of approaches to emphatically assert his Jewish identity. Given Russia’s historic antipathy to Jews, this acts as a form of contestation in and itself. Some of the references to Jewishness appear innocuous on the surface. For example, in the aforementioned “Moscow Windows,” the narrator muses: “Still and all, I wondered whether or not I would remember my present, fifteen-year-old self, many eons into the future — just a sleepless little Jewish Soviet kid from Leningrad lying quietly flat on my back late at night in Moscow and thinking of whether or not he would be able to remember that very precise moment” (117). Yet the reference to the danger of “not remembering my previous selves” in the concluding section of the story also plays, in light of Konstantinovich’s lost memories, on the possible loss of Jewish identity and more than three thousand years of collective history.   

            In “The Night We Were Told Brezhnev Was Dead,” the narrator’s recollection of his visit to Lithuania causes him to meditate on the Soviet government’s official policy towards Jews, which was meant to effect an erasure of their distinct ethnicity. The following passage describes the policy, which includes silencing of discussions that pertain to the Holocaust:

…what with all but a tiny percent of Lithuanian Jews murdered during the first year of World War II — something I and many other Soviet Jews did know, if without quite knowing how we knew it, even though….the school history textbooks made no mention of [the Holocaust] whatsoever, or of that very word, Holocaust, unfamiliar to the absolute majority of Soviet people. [And the very word, Jew, incidentally, was one that anyone, and especially the Jews themselves, was supposed to be embarrassed by a little, ashamed of a bit, sort of, as if having been born a Jew in the USSR was a sin…which it was, actually, in the eyes of the country’s rulers and many millions of its people — even though we were nominal Jews, strictly speaking — Jews in designation only, so to speak, since hardly any of us knew the first thing about Jewish history or a single word of the Jewish language, which was called Hebrew, and which was banned from private study, under penalty of law, and…(83-84)

            More overt demonstrations of prevailing anti-Semitism take the shape of insults directed  nonchalantly at the child narrator. Random strangers disparage him, but also those who appear to be close to the child. In “Our Entire Nation,” Lyuba, the nanny, a simple country girl charged with the child Iossel’s daily care, says to him in a moment of exasperation: “God, you son of a bitch, you stupid little kike….I’ll kill you” (147). Anti-Semitism is ever-present in the Soviet psyche even when it’s just below the top layer of awareness; it’s just waiting, Iossel wants readers to see, for some trigger to manifest itself.

            A cleverly constructed homage to Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, “Flying Cranes” starts with the injury and death of a pet turtle who escapes onto the balcony of the family’s new apartment and falls five stories down. When the boy narrator descends to the courtyard to look for his fallen pet, he’s immediately subjected to a verbal lashing from two loquacious old women. In this layered narrative, instead of Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov, an educated, bespectacled Jewish journalist in charge of pro-Soviet propaganda being browbeaten by commanders and soldiers in the Cossack Division of the Red Army, it is the eight-year-old Iossel, a child who only half-comprehends the anti-Semitic pejoratives and hostility directed at him.

“You look like a Jew. Are you one?” One of them asked…. “The bane of humankind, that’s who they are. Human locusts!” She said bitterly off into space. “They are everywhere, like rabbits! Like locusts! Their men ought to be neutered!” (150).

            “Flying Cranes” recapitulates the theme of cruelty toward humans and animals in the sketches collected in Babel’s Red Cavalry — “Salt,” for example, and “My First Goose” in particular. The image of animals being speared, killed, or captured, skinned, and consumed, is a recurring one in the story. Moreover, the narrator’s peregrinations outside then inside the building he and his parents have just moved into (in a part of Leningrad that’s under construction) turn into a series of surreal, phantasmagoric encounters with neighbourhood delinquents and thuggish workers hired to complete the drywalling and painting of the building’s units. These men, who are boorish in ways readers from the FSU would immediately recognize, nevertheless demonstrate a modicum of native intelligence when commenting on their country’s politics (in fact all of the alcoholics and average Joes in Love Like Water, Love Like Fire possess a degree of wry humour and common wisdom that make their pronouncements on life in the old Soviet Union facetious and insightful). At the same time — with an apparent nod to the Cossacks of Babel’s tales — the workers in “Flying Cranes,” exude barely suppressed violence. They terrify the boy narrator, threatening to kill his mother if he doesn’t immediately bring them alcohol they assume is plentiful in his family’s apartment.

            “Flying Cranes” ends in a movie theatre with further references to Babel (a woman with a swaddled baby at her breast is in the audience). The “beautiful death” of the hero shown at the end of the film, the mention of his “heartbroken fiancée,” are ironic allusions to the tensions Babel injected into his narratives, as well as to the author’s own execution. Babel was arrested by the NKVD, in the presence of his common-law-spouse, Antonina Pirozhkova, on trumped up charges. He was killed by the very regime and the very ideology he supported with his journalistic work during the civil war that followed the Communist Revolution.

            The front cover of Love Like Water, Love Like Fire displays a blurb by George Saunders: “Iossel is an intense and thoughtful force for decency in the world.” I would agree, except that willingness to stand up for and against those who oppress an entire people isn’t only a matter of decency. For many Jews from the FSU, the urge to defend Jewishness is a full-blown, intensely felt moral imperative. In “National minority, national mentality, and communal ethnicity,” sociologists of migration, David Mittelberg and Nikolay Borschevsky, account for this perceived exigency. They explain that according to available theories of ethnicities, the boundary or line of separation between “us” and “them” is crucial to the sense of distinctness — in this case ethnicity. They also highlight the fact that negative and objectionable categorizations are imposed from outside the group. This occasions pushback from the inside:

The boundary…reifies group identification on both sides of the boundary. Thus, a thorough analysis of ethnicity must take into consideration both the internal group definition, which takes place inside the ethnic boundary and the external classification, which occurs outside or across [it]. External group definitions(s) or categorizations are generally negative in content, based solely on arbitrary factors such as physical traits, language, or cultural differences, and are usually imposed by a dominant ethnic group” (91).

            One recognizes, then, that a reigning motive in Love Like Water, Love Like Fire is the desire to both affirm Jewishness and expose, satirize, and ridicule the commonplace deceits and hyperbole of government propaganda. Iossel likewise attacks the frame of mind — widely held beliefs and attitudes — that perpetuated Soviet-era anti-Semitism. Several of the stories in Iossel’s collection do this conspicuously, but none so well as “Necessary Evil,” which is piquantly subversive and stylistically tuned to capture the sense of disorientation experienced by the six-year-old narrator upon being informed by his parents that he’s Jewish. “Necessary Evil” is serious and funny:

“Why are Jews? Because. Because we are. Because we are not not-Jews…..Only six! How time flies! Then only—when you see that little word, Jew, glaring at you, with mocking jauntiness, from your hammer and sickle’s front page—will you, too, become the real, genuine, no-nonsense, true-blue, irreversible Soviet Jew: one who only is a Jew because he knows he’s a Jew, and also because he knows in his bones that he is a Jew solely for the reason of having been chosen at random, designated to be one, a Soviet Jew….Knowing is tantamount to being….You become it….Think about it: We, Soviet Jews, are no different from anybody else in the Soviet Union, in any meaningful way—well, maybe, indeed, as you mentioned earlier, our noses are bigger than most other people’s, and we tend to speak Russian a little better and excel at sciences more—and yet, at the very same time, we are very different, and how, because we know we are different, we have been told so! ….Moreover, …this feels like an important thought, actually we are substantively different, at this point, too, because the process of absorbing and internalizing the knowledge of our being different, and as a result of that process, we have, willy-nilly, become different” (34-5).^[viii]

            The humour is quintessentially Jewish because it’s self-deprecating but also serves as satire directed at the “rulers-schmulers” of the Soviet government, who categorically define their citizens’ identities by designating them “not not-Jews.” At the same time, for the child narrator, the revelation that he’s a Jew, given the tautological nature of his parents’ explanation, is confusing and disturbing. The child has never connected himself with those people — the ones Soviet people ubiquitously describe in derogatory terms, always marking them out for being Jewish, as if it’s common knowledge that they’re evil. The conversation turns increasingly hallucinatory for the child until the trope of the diabolical Jew begins to play out on several levels at once:

“Being Jews, in other words, is the extremely important and secret quest and whatnot we have been on ever since:…tirelessly to serve the eternal cause of humanity and so on, as the covert agents of that cosmic force for good we just mentioned, only — and there’s the rub, so to speak — disguised as the collective embodiment of, you guessed it, human evil, deep inside the enemy territory, yes, of humankind’s darks side. Pretty neat, huh? Thus, simply put, throughout history we Jews have been performing the crucially important function of being, you know, the universally agreed-upon, by all the peoples, object of hatred….We, collectively, are humankind’s punching bag,….Necessary evil. That’s right. The opposite of evil, but perceived by many if not most, as evil. The secretly good evil….”

     Their words were the shining, lightning-quick little black snakes flitting and darting to and fro on the inner side of my eyelids before shooting upward without a trace into my brain (39-41).

            At the thought that he too is “the necessary evil,” the child Iossel is at first horrorstruck,  imagining that his body is filled with “black, viscous, tar-thick, foul-smelling blood” (44). However, he quickly comes to accepts his new identity and mission. In the middle of the night, he gets up and checks his reflection in the frosted kitchen window. He sees a withered, vampiric version of himself: “I regarded it — that infinitely old, dead face — with some grim satisfaction” (46). He has become the it his parents had spoken of. The internalization process is complete: “‘I am a magnet for evil,’ I said, winking at the dead old me in the windowpane. ‘I am the necessary evil.’” (46). One senses the author’s winking at the reader in every piece of this collection.

Note: Like Water, Love Like Fire is the 2021 winner of The Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed., Verso, 2006, pp. xv–xv.

Babel, I. (Isaak), and Boris Dralyuk. “My First Goose.” In Red Cavalry. Translated by Boris Dralyuk, Pushkin, 2014.

Kat︠s︡is, L. F., et al. Jewishness in Russian Culture : Within and Without. Edited by L. F. (Leonid Fridovich) Kat︠s︡is et al., Trans from Russian by Elen Rochlin. Brill, 2014: 123–131.

Kurbonov, Tohir Hamdamovich. “The Concept of National Mentality and Its Main Functions.” Methodological Research Journal. Vol 2, no. 7, 2021, pp. 32-32, https://it.academiascience.org/index.php/it/article/view/109/97.

Mittelberg, David, and Nikolay Borschevsky. “National Minority, National Mentality, and Communal Ethnicity: Changes in Ethnic Identity of Former Soviet Union Jewish Emigrants on the Israeli Kibbutz.” International Migration, vol. 42, no. 1, 2004, pp. 89–115, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0020-7985.2004.00275.x.

Kellman, Steven G. “The Birth of a Batterer: Isaac Babel’s ‘My First Goose.’” Bucknell Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 2000, p. 10.

Perla, Hector. Latin American and Latino Studies 1. United States, Santa Cruz. 31 Mar. 2011 Speech.

 Schmidt, Camacho Alicia R. Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. New York: New York UP, 2008.

Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Culture Media and Identities Series). London: Sage Publications, 1997.

Rubenstein, Joshua., et al. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom:The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Yale University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001.

Solzhenit͡syn, Aleksandr Isaevich. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Revised ed. -, Bodley Head, 1971.

ENDNOTES

^[i]I have in mind here something like the concepts of “national mentality” and “national psyche.” These concepts are useful in any analysis of literary works dealing with a country’s culture, politics, and history because they are imprecise, hard to define concepts, as are the very features of a nation they wish to address. Yet there is such a thing, just as one can point to a reigning zeitgeist. In “The Concept of National Mentality and Its Main Functions” (July, 2021), Tohir Hamdamovich Kurbonov contributes to the conceptualization of these terms. See Kurbonov.

^[ii]The question becomes relevant once more, given Alexei Navalny’s return to Russia in January 2021, and his immediate detainment on accusations of violating parole conditions, as well as fomenting civil unrest.

^[iii]See “Doctors’ Plot,” and Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov’s book, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. See also Solzhenitzin’s novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in 1962 with Nikita Khrushchev’s approval.

^[iv]To clarify, people living in Ukraine were called “Russians.” Until 1991, Ukraine was officially the “Soviet Ukraine” or Ukraine SSR. Many Jews from the “Pale Settlement” (1791 – 1917) migrated to the lager Russian state after 1917. The Pale of Settlement was a designated area that included all of modern-day Belarus, Lithuania and Moldova, much of Ukraine and east-central Poland, and small parts of Latvia.  See the history of the Pale of Settlement.

^[v]I’m referring to Stuart Hall’s and Benedict Anderson’s concepts of the “imaginary” and “imagined communities.” Hector Perla, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, provides a succinct and relevant description of an imagined community with reference to Latin American identity. He writes that this identity is “socially constructed through narratives, myths of origins, symbols, rituals, and collective memory…[and] imagined by people who see themselves as part of that group….” There are signs of several imagined communities in Lossel’s work, including the imagined community of the country as a whole, in which Jews are subjected to feelings of “unbelonging,” a word used to theorize the alienation of immigrants and Indigenous peoples in Canada. Alicia Camacho’s descriptions of the migrant community in the U.S. can likewise be applied to Russian Jews and the ways they imagine themselves “in a space neither here nor there.” In Love Like Water, Love Like Fire, Leningrad evinces a shared history and purpose, that of rebuilding after the siege. Yet Jews never entirely fit in with the rest of the city’s dwellers, despite having suffered through the siege along with everyone else. Their Jewishness continues to elicit distrust and resentment among ordinary people.

^[vi]In the essay, “The Discussions on Fedor Dostoevsky at the Moscow Branch of the St.-Petersburg “Free Philosophic Association” as a Russian-Jewish Dialogue,” Leonid F. Katsis writes that “Andrei Bely was not a philo-Semite at all. He was the author of the key Russian symbolist novel Petersburg (1916), which was based on the idea of a combination of the so-called “yellow” danger (concerned with Japan and China), and the Jewish one, which could destroy Russia and even the rest of Europe along with it).” See Katsis’s essay. See other essays in the book by scholars who treat the figure of the Jew across several centuries of Russia’s literary output, such as “‘Diabolic Delight’: New Materials to the Jewish Theme in Russian Romanticism” by Mikhail Weisskopf, and “A Philo-Semitic Narrative in the Anti-Semitic Discourse: The Case of Vyacheslav Ivanov” by Vladimir M. Paperni.

^[vii]From my review-essay, “Loving and Hating Dostoyevsky”: We’re inclined to wonder what motivated Tsypkin to spend three years researching and writing a book about Dostoyevksy. Couldn’t his efforts also be construed as “unnatural”? The answer is to be found throughout the book. Tsypkin viewed Dostoyevsky as immensely gifted. The heroes and villains of Dostoyevksy’s books weave in and out of Tsypkin’s narrative as if they were real—living proof of his genius. And yet, Tsypkin took it upon himself to turn the table on the man who wrote so unflatteringly about his fellow Jews…. And finally, Tsypkin turns him into his own grotesque creation:

…[Dostoyevsky] walked to the big looking-glass…to straighten his appearance, but instead of himself in the mirror he saw the puny figure of Isaiah Fomich, without any clothes on and with the breast of a chicken – and he recoiled, and, Isaiah Fomich recoiled, too – and he started to bombard Isaiah Fomich with the sandwiches he had stuffed in his pockets at the station where he had shouted about the short-changed franc with the piercing scream of a money-lender”  (Tsypkin 119).

^[viii]The hammer and sickle’s front page is reference to Soviet-era passports, which displayed the nationality of the holder on the front page. This identifying information was always potentially damaging to the passport’s owner.

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Olga Stein holds a PhD in English, and is a university and college instructor. She has taught writing, communications, modern and contemporary Canadian and American literature. Her research focuses on the sociology of literary prizes. A manuscript of her book, The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian is now with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Stein is working on her next book, tentatively titled, Wordly Fiction: Literary Transnationalism in Canada. Before embarking on a PhD, Stein served as the chief editor of the literary review magazine, Books in Canada, and from 2001 to 2008 managed the amazon.com-Books in Canada First Novel Award (now administered by Walrus magazine). Stein herself contributed some 150 reviews, 60 editorials, and numerous author interviews to Books in Canada (the online version is available at http://www.booksincanada.com). A literary editor and academic, Stein has relationships with writers and scholars from diverse communities across Canada, as well as in the US. Stein is interested in World Literature, and authors who address the concerns that are now central to this literary category: the plight of migrants, exiles, and the displaced, and the ‘unbelonging’ of Indigenous peoples and immigrants. More specifically, Stein is interested in literary dissidents, and the voices of dissent, those who challenge the current political, social, and economic status quo. Stein is the editor of the memoir, Playing Under The Gun: An Athlete’s Tale of Survival in 1970s Chile by Hernán E. Humaña.

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