Personal Essay

Cutting board with chopped carrots and potatoes for soup

Why I stopped cooking Russian soups – on habits and muscle memory

Food, Personal Essay /

(A version of this appeared in the February issue of my newsletter, the Soviet Samovar.) Winter came late this year — it only properly snowed in early January and I finally felt like I could breathe again. Winter has always been my favourite season, and now I rely on that blanket of snow to, quite literally, blanket my climate anxiety for a few months every year. […]

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Walking to the site of a Holocaust mass grave in Romanow, Ukraine

On #FirstSurvivor and the Russian-Jewish Holocaust experience

Personal Essay, Soviet-Jewish History /

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day—sharing some thoughts on the Russian-Jewish Holocaust experience. There’s a thread making its way around Twitter about #FirstSurvivors, asking people about the first survivor they ever met. This was my response, which I’m posting here too, with some tweaks, before it disappears into the abyss of updates. Like many Russian-Jews, there is no “First Survivor” in my family, because the Holocaust

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Lost in Immigration: People I Will Never Know

Immigrant Experience, Personal Essay /

This photo was taken a few nights before we left the Soviet Union forever. To my knowledge, it is the only photo that exists of me with all my (at that time living) grandparents. That’s them, in the front row. My paternal grandmother, then my maternal grandfather (holding me), and my maternal grandmother next to him with my cousin. My parents are the two people

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My grandfather and his siblings as a Red Army soldier at the outset of WWII, in approximately 1941.

Looking to the Soviet past to understand Remembrance Day

Personal Essay, Soviet-Jewish History /

I properly met my maternal grandparents for the first time shortly before my 10th birthday. Until then, they had been photographs and letters I couldn’t read and Russian storybooks that arrived periodically in the mail. They were the sound of my parents shouting down the telephone line, because in the long ago 1980s people sounded as far away as they really were and did not

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Soviet-Russian seder traditions - Syrian Roasted Lamb Shanks recipe

Stumbling into Syrian cuisine while searching for a Soviet-Russian seder tradition

Food, Personal Essay, Recipes /

It starts, as these things so often do, with food. My (non-Jewish) partner and I, recently reunited after a short separation, in the sad bachelor apartment where he had temporarily landed. Where familiar lonely kitchen things still glared at me woefully, bereft of their mates that had landed up in my kitchen. Where we bumped into each other, all corners and angles and elbows still

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makeup, cosmetics, glass-3081015.jpg

The Russian make-up brigade

Personal Essay /

Early in January, I spent a weekend at a planning retreat for Limmud FSU Canada (it’s the first ever Limmud FSU in Canada, and yes, expect to hear more from me about it soon). We were all asked to bring an artifact that spoke to our Russian selves, and as part of the identity-digging activity that accompanied the artifacts, I ended up writing a series

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Vyertolyet - or wooden helicopter toy - a word I often forget in English

Apparently, there are words I still don’t know in English. Like apron.

Immigrant Experience, Personal Essay /

I forgot the word for helicopter the other day. For the rotor, actually. And I didn’t forget so much as remember it in the wrong language. My brain froze up and then offered me nothing but a very Russian “vyertolyot“. The end result is that I have a toddler who will never know what those non-airplane things in the sky are called. I actually have

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building, ruin, kgb-701008.jpg

My KGB file – Yes, there was probably a file with my name on it

Immigrant Experience, Personal Essay /

*Updated at bottom Excuse me while I continue to geek out on Soviet government memos… As I flip through, I’m continually amazed at the level of specificity in these memos, and to realize that “Big Brother” genuinely read all letters received from North American activists and government officials. (Paging Amnesty International.) We like to complain that the government doesn’t listen to us (even as we

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