{"id":1215,"date":"2023-08-04T07:58:02","date_gmt":"2023-08-04T14:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/live-usc-dornsife.pantheonsite.io\/alexander-zholkovsky\/?page_id=1215"},"modified":"2023-11-29T09:29:16","modified_gmt":"2023-11-29T17:29:16","slug":"evrey","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cAre You a Jew?\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
\n\n \n \n
\n\n \n

Alexander ZHOLKOVSKY (USC, Los Angeles)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cM.K. Tikhonova said of [Yuri] Tynyanov that he turned Griboyedov into a Jew.\u201d (From Lydia Ginzburg\u2019s journal.)\u00a0[1]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0\u201cHe even turned Pushkin into a Jew!\u201d O[mry] Ronen exclaimed. Only later (<\/em>Moscow News, June 1996) . . . was [Nikolai] Khardzhiev quoted to the effect that Tynyanov\u2019s favourite object of meditation was which Russian writers were Jewish and the extent of their Jewishness.<\/em><\/p>\n

M.L. Gasparov[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

They say that when Hemingway was a kid he was a Jew, too!<\/em><\/p>\n

From a song<\/p>\n

The work is easy but disgusting. Personally I loathe being the favorite of Rabindranath Tagore, while the prophet Samuel is always asked to answer the same questions: \u2018Why is there no butter on sale?\u2019, or, \u2018Are you a Jew?\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

Ilf and Petrov,\u00a0The Little Golden Calf<\/em>\u00a0[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

Over the course of his journal entries it transpires that Gasparov was Jewish, too. As for me (to satisfy Tynyanov\u2019s curiosity), I\u2019m three quarters Jewish, including the two quarters that count for Jews\u2014my grandmothers. I was raised in a one hundred-percent Jewish family, moreover one that had suffered for its Jewishness. My maternal grandparents both died at Babi Yar, while my stepfather (L.A. Mazel) was fired from his job in 1949 during the campaign against \u201crootless cosmopolitanism.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in our family\u2014intelligentsia, atheist, and (Soviet) internationalist to the core\u2014one didn\u2019t talk about things Jewish. Or if there was such talk, it went on when I wasn\u2019t in the room. So I grew up without an ounce of Jewish self-consciousness.<\/p>\n

The first time anyone called me a\u00a0yid<\/em>\u00a0was when I was about ten. It happened in the front yard of our building, on the Moscow street then known as Metrostroevskaya (Ostozhenka).<\/p>\n

\u201cYid<\/em>,\u00a0yid<\/em>, and your lover Irochka Shangayt is a\u00a0yid<\/em>, too,\u201d chanted the aspiring young hooligans next to the sledding hill. They didn\u2019t back up this anti-Semitic statement with physical violence and so the impression it made on me was of a purely philological nature.<\/p>\n

First of all, it was interesting to try on the word\u00a0yid<\/em>\u00a0for size, to see how it fit me personally. Until that moment I knew it only as something abstract, as part of the poetic line: \u201cThe\u00a0yid<\/em>, the\u00a0yid<\/em>\u00a0runs along a rope.\u201d (Another version of the saying\u2014\u201cThe\u00a0yid<\/em>, the\u00a0yid<\/em>\u00a0shivers on a rope\u201d\u2014was ominous but no less mysterious.)<\/p>\n

Second, I was puzzled by the word \u201clover,\u201d which sounded way too grown-up for me.<\/p>\n

Third, I had finally learned the name and surname of the cute girl, half my age, who used to come to our yard with her sled. I would eagerly pilot her down the hill, keen to the sympathy I read in her eyes. Thanks to the extraneous gaze that had linked the two of us, her face has stuck in my memory. When I examine it in retrospect I recognize Semitic traits, despite the light hair and a nose that had only just begun to bud. The girl was already a bit chubby, and I fear that later on she must have become altogether well upholstered.<\/p>\n

Fourth, I was intrigued by the exotic-sounding surname Shangayt. Did it derive from Shanghai? Only much later did I realize it was Jewish\u2014a Russian transliteration of the German (and hence Yiddish) word for beauty:\u00a0Sch\u00f6nheit<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Even when, during my university days, I became a fan of Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum and, later, Sergei Eisenstein, I didn\u2019t group them together along ethnic lines. (Perhaps the phrase \u201cRussian<\/em>\u00a0formalists\u201d affected me in this regard.) When I had learned to do just this, I left Tynyanov out of the mix for a long time. (His surname got in the way.) As for Propp, it was quite well known that despite his dubious first name and patronymic (Vladimir Yakovlevich), he was an ethnic German.<\/p>\n

As the Thaw progressed and I grew up a bit, my stepdad thawed out in his conversations with me. When he told me about the persecution of the \u201crootless cosmopolitans,\u201d whose alleged ringleaders included the theatre critics Abram Gurvich and Iosif Yuzovsky, he recalled the bon mot of Boris Tomashevsky, who had also been caught up in the witch hunt. \u201cYou\u2019re Jewish only now,\u201d Tomashevsky told them, \u201cbut I\u2019ve been Jewish my whole life.\u201d (He wasn\u2019t Jewish, but that hadn\u2019t saved him from getting a good working over.)<\/p>\n

It was fashionable to see in Tynyanov\u2019s curly locks a resemblance to Pushkin. (Apparently, Tynyanov himself encouraged this comparison.) It took time and a radical shift of optics, however, to see Tynyanov\u2014and a Jew to boot\u2014in Pushkin. It was even harder to see myself as Jewish. My departure from Russia, on an Israeli visa, didn\u2019t decide matters, either. The process is a slow one, and it\u2019s not clear what it means to be Jewish without Jewish culture and religion.<\/p>\n

\"cartoon\"<\/p>\n

When I finished my book about Mikhail Zoshchenko,[4]<\/a>\u00a0I asked Mark Kompaneyets, a young artist, to do the cover illustration. To get a better grip on the writer\u2019s image, Mark, who grew up in California, took the ambitious route and read Zoshchenko in the original.<\/p>\n

At my request Mark seated Zoshchenko (taken from Bronislav Malakhovsky\u2019s famous 1935 caricature) on a bicycle. The drawing wasn\u2019t bad at all, but Zoshchenko\u2019s eyelids were oddly half-closed, and the nose was on the long side. The artist, though, hotly defended his vision. I pled with him:<\/p>\n

\u201cBut Mark, he wasn\u2019t Jewish!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow\u2019s that? The way he writes, he seems like a Jew to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t able to break the young genius\u2019s creative will (see the cover of my book<\/a>), and his words were etched into my brain. They\u2019ve come back to me now, as I reread Gasparov\u2019s journal. In my own portrait of Zoshchenko I had used my stepdad as a model for Zoshchenko\u2019s mistrust. Had I turned him into a Jew?<\/p>\n


<\/p>\n
\n
\n

[1]<\/a>\u00a0Lidiia Ginzburg,\u00a0Zapisnie knizhki. Vospominaniia. Esse<\/em>\u00a0[Notebooks. Memoirs. Essays] (Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2002), p. 387.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2]<\/a>\u00a0M.L. Gasparov,\u00a0Zapisi i vypiski<\/em>\u00a0[Entries and Extracts] (Moscow: NLO, 2001), p. ???<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3]<\/a>\u00a0Ilya Ilf and Eugene Petrov,\u00a0The Little Golden Calf. A Satirical Novel<\/em>, trans. Charles Malamuth (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961), p. 70.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4]<\/a>A.K. Zholkovsky,\u00a0Mikhail Zoshchenko: poetika nedoverii<\/a>a<\/em>\u00a0[Mikhail Zoshchenko: A Poetics of Mistrust] (Moscow: Skhola \u201cIazyki russkoi kul\u2019tury,\u201d 1999).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":355,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1215","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cAre You a Jew?\u201d - Alexander Zholkovsky<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u201cAre You a Jew?\u201d - Alexander Zholkovsky\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Alexander Zholkovsky\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2023-11-29T17:29:16+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/\",\"name\":\"\u201cAre You a Jew?\u201d - Alexander Zholkovsky\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2023-08-04T14:58:02+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2023-11-29T17:29:16+00:00\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"\u201cAre You a Jew?\u201d\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/\",\"name\":\"Alexander Zholkovsky\",\"description\":\"USC Dornsife Alexander Zholkovsky Professional Site\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"\u201cAre You a Jew?\u201d - Alexander Zholkovsky","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"\u201cAre You a Jew?\u201d - Alexander Zholkovsky","og_url":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/","og_site_name":"Alexander Zholkovsky","article_modified_time":"2023-11-29T17:29:16+00:00","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/","url":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/","name":"\u201cAre You a Jew?\u201d - Alexander Zholkovsky","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/#website"},"datePublished":"2023-08-04T14:58:02+00:00","dateModified":"2023-11-29T17:29:16+00:00","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/evrey\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"\u201cAre You a Jew?\u201d"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/#website","url":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/","name":"Alexander Zholkovsky","description":"USC Dornsife Alexander Zholkovsky Professional Site","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/355"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1215"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7397,"href":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1215\/revisions\/7397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/alexander-zholkovsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}