our perestroikas

Last week my dear friend and colleague Natalia Roudakova went to Russia for a conference, so I got to show Robin Hessman's 2010 My Perestroika to her undergraduate "authoritarianisms" class. Hessman had lived in Russia in the 1990s, working as the producer for the Russian Sesame Street. This film was about Russians her own age:

Just coming of age when Gorbachev appeared, they were figuring out their own identities as the very foundations of their society were being questioned for the first time. And then they graduated just as the USSR collapsed and they had to figure out a completely new life as young adults, with no models to follow.  (-Hessman)

Hessman was strangely absent from her own film, but the way her subjects spoke to the camera evoked a distant addressee, as though they were sharing their experience with someone who would never really know the full story, but whose relationship to them mattered. Did perestroika itself, the viewer might wonder, with its lines for MacDonalds, its blue-jeans, its Pepsi Cola, also have an absent American addressee? Maybe this phantom-like American presence is why the film made me think of my perestroika. I turned fourteen in 1989, and my bedroom was plastered with Soviet gymnasts: Yelena Shushunova, Dmitri Bilozerchev, Svetlana Boginskaia. That year I started taking Russian. A few months later Nadia Comaneci defected from Rumania and the Berlin wall fell. In 1991 I came home from Russian camp, newly enamored of Russian folk songs, a couple of weeks before the putsch that put Yeltsin in power. This coincidence of my personal passions with the riveting geopolitical changes of the early 90's is probably why I stayed in Russian, long after I left gymnastics and choir for other hobbies. And yet I went through high school with the Scorpions' "Wind of Change" playing as background music, but didn't stop to think about the words until years later, when I listened to someone in Ukraine play it on a guitar and sing it in broken English.

When the film was over I looked out at Natalia's students and realized that most of them were born after 1991. They have as little a recollection of Gorbachev's Soviet Union as I do of Nixon's presidency. Chances are good, though, that they, and I, will look back at 2011 as a defining moment, a moment that tied our lives to the enormous, shifting, global politics around us, a moment we lived through but will not have the space to assess for a long time. The other day Mikhail Gorbachev wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times that suggested he is, two decades later, still assessing his perestroika, and still holding out hope:

Looking at those faces, one wants to believe that Egypt's democratic transition will succeed. That would be a good example, one the entire world needs.

proletpen, the rock-opera

Friends, readers, musicians in search of lyrics! Forgive the descent into self-promotion, but I have just gotten word from University of Wisconsin Press that Proletpen, America's Rebel Yiddish Poets will be offered in its attractive hardcover edition at only $26.99, down from its earlier $45 (it can also be purchased electronically for $16.95). I translated the 100 poems in this volume while I was in graduate school, and edited it together with David Weintraub of the Dora Teitelboim Foundation. The book is bilingual. It also features woodcuts by the illustrator Dana Craft. The historical introduction is by Dovid Katz whose father, the poet Meynke Katz, features prominently in the volume. Most of the poems here are from the 1930s, and most of the poets were fellow travelers (if not members) of the CPUSA, which means that there are love songs here to Lenin and red flags. But there are also love songs to people, and sad songs about war and the unforgiving city landscape.


The sentiments in these poems range from political alignment with leaders like Julio Melo and Anna Pauker to vitriolic criticism of the Party. In the five years since the book came out, I have come to see them as emotional documents that give us the tiniest glimpse into the fury of a strange, and often forgotten, episode in American history.

I have a fantasy that a musician will pick up this volume and put together an indie rock album based on these poems. Klezmer would also do nicely.

my enchanted contemporary

The same year I was born in California, Ëzhik was born in Moscow. Yury Norshteyn created him out of 2-dimensional cut-outs, entrusted him with a jar of raspberry jam, and lowered him into a foggy night. The little hedgehog embarks on a journey and gets terrifyingly, blissfully, lost. He encounters danger, love, regret, exhilaration, hopelessness, and finally, a peaceful acceptance of his fate, which (spoiler alert) carries him safely to his destination. I'm never sure when it will happen, but about once a year I pass through a week or two when I must watch Ëжик в тумане every night before falling asleep, in hopes, I guess, of dreaming about a white horse or a very tall oak.