As I woke up this morning, the idea of spiritual harmony between two peoples — American Soviet Jews and Black Americans — continued to haunt me. To be haunted is the peril of living beyond dogma and slogan words. With freedom of thought comes “disorientation, wandering, directionless” angst. Good angst to improvise the old proverb “Good Trouble.” And so I continue to examine life out of curiosity, a Black Sheep amidst Black American family members.
My first encounter with the Nikki Giovanni effect came in junior high school, Salem Church Junior High School to be more precise. The time was somewhere around 1972 and 1973. Richard Milhous Nixon was still President. I was in the zone as a student politico at my southern, small-town suburban 96% white school. There was no sense of racial solidarity among us 37 black students. Zero race solidarity, although we all knew by now we were Black Americans. We made friends regardless of race. We ate lunch with our friends. Race did not matter. That was a good thing, a noble end, the thing our ancestors dreamed of.
One day, a black student transplant from the City of Richmond arrived at our school. The schools in Richmond were 82% black with some approaching 99% black in demographics. The new student brought his lived experience to our school. “We should all sit together as Black students during lunch,” the new student declared. Most of us were puzzled at the suggestion. Huh? Blackness as activism and revolution, of a sort.
We all went along with the idea. Maybe, this new black student from the city knew something we country mice did not know. Thus was born the Black Table in a school of the New South that never knew segregation. I grew bored at the Black Table. None of the other students were seized with political ambition. No one was taking about political intrigue on Student Council. The conversations left me indifferent. And so I left the Black Table because why be bored during lunch?
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Before I make my case for spiritual harmony between American Soviet Jews and Black Americans, there is a striking difference I should note. In her splendid essay “‘We Have Our Own History, Our Own Trauma, and Our Own Experience”, Abigail Pogrebin shared that some Soviet Jews recalled a random signpost of Judaism in their childhood was never conceiving of Jewishness. As participant Gennady remembered, “Don’t tell other people that you’re Jewish.” Aged 43, Gennady was born in Odesa, Ukraine, immigrated (via Austria and Italy) to the U.S. in 1989 at the age of 8. She now lives in New Jersey.
Not my Black American experience.
I was a visible black person. One did not have to guess. Now, there are exceptions out there in the land of Black America. Some did live by the edict “Don’t tell other people that you’re Black.” I have a few distant cousins in this category as does my wife. There is a nice period movie from 1960 about killing the ambers of one's family and past in exchange for whiteness. The movie, I Passed for White is on You Tube and tells the true story of a fair-skinned black woman from Chicago who grew weary of skin-color. She moved to a different city, changed her name, fell in love with, and married, an upper-class white man. To maintain her fiction, she had to tell lie after lie about her real family. The movie culminates in the ultimate lie. I give it a two thumbs up.
I was born one year after I Passed for White (1960) was released. One would think passing for white would be ancient history in my life.
One would be mistaken.
When I was in college, an attractive, olive-skinned woman had a crush on me. She was from the Farmville, Virginia area. One day, she shared matter-of-factly that her brother was passing for white back home in Farmville. This fact was relayed with no particular secrecy or urgency or whispered tone. It struck me as a disorder and unhealthy. The year was 1980, not 1880 or 1780. I felt her brother was committing soul murder, like William Babbitt Haynes in my novel Gotterdammerung.
As a law professor, I had three black colleagues. One colleague's experience offered an interesting slant on passing. Without fail and when I mentioned my three black colleagues to students, a student would look at me surprised and thunderstruck. "No, Mrs. ----- is Mexican." "You mean ------ is Italian." My colleague never felt the need to announce to her class on opening day, "Hey you guys, I'm Black just to get that out of the way!" Smile. No, she just let students make their assumptions. Her son looked white and she was married to a white man, so why would anyone think differently? She never ran away from her race. Her home was a shrine to black culture and consciousness, however, in the public square she felt no need to constantly announce her identity which I can appreciate.
These stories are an American Tragedy, a silent wound hidden from the larger world.
And let’s not forget Dona Drake You go girl!
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Gennady recalled her grandparents doing Jewish things. What does Gennady mean by Jewish things? Her grandparents spoke Yiddish. The family had matzo sometimes. Through intuition and insight, Gennady sort of put it together herself that these are Jewish things, but no connection of why and what.
My childhood was similar in a way. My grandmother belonged to the family church, Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. My Uncle James Scott stocked the coffee table at Grandma’s house with copies of Black Enterprise Magazine, Ebony and Jet magazines. I once asked Grandma for any slave stories. She shared that her grandfather would open and close the gate to the farm and fan flies off of the dining room table. To use the language of Gennady, “and I sort of put together myself that these are Black things, but no connection of why and what.”
Gennady goes on to explain “I sort of picked up things about the Holocaust and the fact that Nazis didn’t like Jews, and I knew that I was a Jew, but again, nobody really explained how, why, and what.” As for me, I learned from my 4th grade teacher, Helen Friend, about slavery in our Virginia history textbook. It was a distant, remote fact, nothing more. I took my cues from my Grandma born in the 1800s who could only remember two small stories about slavery and her grandfather.
It is upside down world that young students are taught to care more about long ago slavery than my Grandma did. Grandma, born in 1897, passed away in 1983.
Irina, another participant in the American Soviet Jew roundtable, remembered that her “father would buy matzo when I was a kid — for our family and relatives.” As for me, I remember my Dad taking me to a barbershop to get our hair cut. We would sit and wait our turn. Everyone in the shop was black but I attributed no particular attention or significance to our common race. I believe the barber would hand out lollipops. This is what I cared about. There were also copies of Ebony magazine which I would read like a fiend. I remember calendars on the wall for Mimms Funeral Home. My Dad was in his element. This was my childhood, my equivalent of father buying me matzo when I was a kid.
Unlike me, Irina is 41. She was born in Kyrgyzstan (“My grandparents are from Ukraine and Belarus and WWII kind of threw people around.”) and immigrated in 1991 (“one month before the breakup of the Soviet Union) at age 9. She now lives in Livingston, New Jersey. We share memories of a Dad and deliverance of identity in a vivid, concrete way. Matzo as the barbershop.
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Consider how the parallels play out when it comes to the request Pogrebin posed her American Soviet Jewish participants: I Want To Make Sure Our Readers Understand How Dangerous It Was To Be Publicly Jewish In The Former Soviet Union
Participant Margarita bears an interesting name. She shared “I was named Margarita for a reason: to hide our Jewishness. All of my siblings have these saint names — Michael, Matthew, Michaela — and it was to protect us.”
Where shall I start with this parallel? All of my life, people have confused my last and first name. My last name rolls off the tongue and seems like it should be a first name. My first name seems stuffy and a tad formal, if I do say myself. My best friend in grade school gave me an easy one-syllable nickname which has proven to be a blessing in life. My eldest son has his own nickname which he goes by. We are nickname people.
Was I given my name to hide my Blackness? Absolutely, positively 100% percent pound the table NO! My name honors my Dad and Great-Uncle who lived in New Haven, Connecticut. We honor family names in my family. I have two uncles who are named after a parent and a grandparent. My sense is Grandma and her people believed names should honor ancestors. Doing so created a sense of tradition, pietas. We didn’t do the Ibram Kendi thing and make up names out of whole cloth. Not our culture. Not our way of being in the world.
Names were not the place for activism and revolution.
Were we given names to protect us? To be honest, I think people were mindful that mainstream and normal names were a blessing, not a hinderance in life. In my family, we have Dutch names, French West Indian names, English names and Old Family names. Some relatives have chosen names to trumpet Blackness. It is a free country. I do believe there are shades of Margarita’s experience in our family names. However, the point was less to protect us from the outside world. The point was more to honor the next generation with an ancestral sense of self. Hopefully, if one is named the III or the IV (hope springs eternal), one has an extra boost of roots for engaging the larger world. I am always pleased to know Professor John Hamilton McWhorter is the V. His alignment with ancestors was affixed from birth.
More black Americans should return to traditions of naming new-born children after parents, grandparents and great grandparents. Would do the children good.
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The next parallel between American Soviet Jews and Black Americans would be anxiety about how dangerous it was to be publicly Jewish in the former Soviet Union.
Michael, a 75 year old immigrant born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, immigrated in 1989 at age 41, and now lives in Boston. Michael recalled Soviet Jews could “keep Jewish tradition, we have matzos, we’d celebrate Yom Kippur. But we’ll keep it quiet at home like everyone else. You cannot show you’re Jewish, but they knew who is [a] Jew.” My family members who descend from the Great Migration due to a threatened lynching in South Carolina brought that memory of racial danger to New York City. The anxiety found root in activism and a liberation mindset. They literally knew Malcom X, his wife and children. They knew intimately a Black Panther. So, they manifested racial anxiety as aggressively showing one is Black. It is the opposite of Michael’s experience and more akin to those descendants of American Jews who fled Czarist Russia for Ellis Island and New York. In America, one could wear the Star of David in public and be chill. My family members are echoing these Old American Jews of Ellis Island when they wear Kente stoles at college graduation ceremonies, pay homage to Kwanzaa rituals every year, and adorn their home walls with posters of protests and demonstrations.
None of my blood family members wore Kente cloth to virtue signal. I never knew about Kwanzaa until a close cousin married a woman of the Nikki Giovanni culture from Churchill in Richmond. And as for protestors and demonstrators on the walls of homes? The only people I remember on family walls were Jesus Christ, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and family members.
Now, one better understands the Nikki Giovanni effect within a Black American family.
My favorite participant in the roundtable discussion is Lev. Lev is 41 years old. Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, he immigrated in 1992 at age 10 and now lives in Brooklyn. Why is Lev my favorite American Soviet Jewish commentator?
He understands that these categories and labels only take us so far. When posed the question about the dangerousness of living in the Soviet Union as a Jew, Lev answers the inquiry with finesse. I will quote Lev at length as his perceptiveness warrants a full transcription:
What Eugenia is describing in the ‘70s might be very different from people’s experience in the ‘90s when things are starting to open up and we had visitors from Israel and my Dad started a Jewish club openly, which wouldn’t have existed in the ‘80s or the ‘70s, that’s number one. And two is variety across geography: Things in Baku, where I’m from, were famously chill, so to speak. But I think your question assumes that it was all bad, all antisemitic for everyone from 1917 to 1991, and I think there is variety.
Let’s translate Lev’s perceptiveness to my Black American family.
Unlike my New York family members, I never knew the experience of disruption from home. My blood family never fled for their lives to a strange, northern city. My family has been in Chesterfield County since the 1700s. I lack the experience of a violent pogrom as it were. In fact, there was not one lynching in my county after the Civil War. Not one. So, Lev is on the mark when he reminds Pogrebin there is variety in the human condition. Just because one was a Soviet Jew did not mean your life was the same as someone living in Moscow or Baku or the Ukraine. If things were chill in Baku in the 90s, I tell you now things were chill in Chester in the 1970s.
My family from New York will never understand a chill southern small-town for blacks in the suburbs. Their memories are frozen in time, the burning of the family home, the rescue of the children, the specter of a lynching, the better life up North. To be publicly Black and proud was dangerous in Charleston, South Carolina in the early 1900s. The Nikki Giovanni effect finds its natural audience.
I am not the audience for the Nikki Giovanni effect.
Lev knows my Black American experience as an individual. Lev knows variety within groups.
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As I write these musings, I feel alive. To fully live, one must exist beyond dogma and slogan words. I feel it.
Participant Julia is asked about outward displays of Judaism. Julia was shocked when arriving in the U.S. and witnessing outward displays of Judaism. Like Lev, Julia’s life began in a Soviet regime and now Julia calls New York City home. She is 41 years old. Born in Siberia, Julia moved to Estonia (then still part of the USSR) at age 5 and to Moscow at 18, before immigrating in 2006 at age 24.
Julia affirms Lev’s observation. Some places in the Soviet Union were “much more chill, like Lev said.” I long to read scholarship about the Black American experience where people are just living chill lives in the suburbs. No drama, no activism, no revolution. Just living lives, planning for the future, loved by parents and grandparents as the blessed future.
The Nikki Giovanni effect just causes my blood pressure to rise.
I am there with Julia as she remembers the way it was — When I moved to Moscow, I thought it was chill — I was wearing my Star of David necklace.
Now, I want to play devil’s advocate and to be open-minded. My New York relations would argue they are living the dream of Julia. When Julia exclaims, Oh my God, absolutely. It was shocking to me, it is still shocking to me to see that Jews would display, be comfortable with the fact that they’re Jewish, that’s like mind-blowing to me,” my relations might argue they are comfortable with the fact that they’re Black. Why not wear the West African hat with swagger? Why not wear the Alpha Phi Alpha wrist band with flash? Why not attend the Black Graduation ceremony with extreme comfort?
I am the one who is not comfortable with the fact that I am Black. These are arguments I can imagine. They are living Julia’s truth more than me.
It all depends on one’s perspective. I value chill over outward displays of Blackness. One will not see me wearing a Black Lives Matter mask, for example. Why trumpet in public when I know to be true in private? Doesn’t it show high self-esteem to not broadcast the obvious?
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One of the wonderful terms podcaster Lex Fridman has introduced me to is steel manning an argument. In other words, make the strongest case for an opposing side. Steel Man An Argument Here is a steel man argument for my relations from New York.
They might argue that I am cherry picking the American Soviet Jewish participants. I should zero in on the recollections of Yuriy. Born in Odesa, Ukraine, Yuriy immigrated in 1996 at age 10, and now lives in the Bay Area. Yuriy is now 38 years old.
Yuriy remembered the downside of living in the Soviet Union which my New York relations might compare to growing up in a southern, small-town, 92% white suburb in the 1970s. Yuriy lamented that his “parents, born in the early ‘60s, are the most spiritually hollowed-out generation of Jews and it’s not their fault.” Similarly, my relations might contend I am spiritually hollowed-out, that I am missing something as as Black Man, that I must feel energized by the Nikki Giovanni effect. I have heard this argument before, that I am missing something. The argument usually comes from those who perceive Blackness as extremely important or very important to one’s sense of self.
It is not my fault. Sadly, a middle-American upbringing hollowed me out as a spiritual matter just like the parents of Yuriy.
They would next argue that I am experiencing the travails of Yuriy’s grandmother, “who was born in the mid-’30s, kind of has one foot in each world, where she remembers practicing Jewish traditions and religion and also life under the party rule.” The analogy would be I remember an all-black world and also life under white rule, er, the party rule.
I have spent 1/3 of my life in an all-black world. The remaining 2/3 of my life has been lived in the larger world, a 95% non-black world. I’m ok with that. I would even use the descriptor “chill” like my American Soviet Jewish brothers and sisters.
Next my New York relations might argue that “Being Jewish was associated with a real discomfort.” The same goes for me and Blackness. My rejoinder would be I associate Blackness nowadays with dogma. No thanks. Before I knew Blackness, I knew me. And the me before Blackness was always a curious person.
My New York relations would be frustrated at this point. I can hear their collective voices rising in anger. They are not Klingons yet because we are family and we have to see each other at family events like college graduations. One relation might aim for my gut and critique my trans racial idea by quoting Yuriy thusly: In ways, they welcomed the erasure of religion because, like, now we don’t get singled out as much. The relation might exclaim I am calling for the erasure of race, Blackness. Well, I am dead set against racial boxes and categories, dogma and slogan words. It is better to have no race than to have no individuality.
And the relation would pity me as blind to oppression in America.
One young family member would argue I am taking the wrong lessons from the American Soviet Jewish participants. The right lesson is we cannot pretend to march to the beat of the same drummer as everyone else. Alpha Kappa Alpha is real. Jack and Jill is real. Alpha Phi Alpha is real. The Comus is real. The Boule is real. Sag Harbor is real. Martha’s Vineyard is real. I love you but you just don’t understand. And to not spare my feelings, the family member might bemoan I am incredibly spiritually hollow like the parents of Yuriy.
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Conclusion:
I recall visiting my Mom’s grave in Richmond this year. And it was a poignant experience. My daughter talked lovingly to my Mom’s headstone. As my daughter used the terminology of 2024 to talk about what they shared as women, I remembered my Mom. My daughter never knew my Mom, a country woman born in 1940 in the Southside of Virginia and who passed away of cancer in 1990. I knew my Mom and the words my Mom used in life to get along.
My daughter viewed her visit to my Mom’s grave as pregnant with purpose. She viewed my Mom through the eyes of a new generation born in a new century on the West Coast, through private schools and college in New Haven. My daughter talked to my Mom as if my daughter was connective tissue to the New World, how the children of American Soviet Jews might talk to their parents born in Baku and Moscow and the Ukraine.
And as my daughter brought the rallying cry of her new generation into my Mom’s spirit, I looked upon my Grandma’s headstone, a simple marker of one who infused the best of her Virginia soul from the late 1800s into me.
[To be concluded tomorrow.]
That was beautiful. "My daughter talked to my Mom as if my daughter was connective tissue to the New World, how the children of American Soviet Jews might talk to their parents born in Baku and Moscow and the Ukraine." I believe what many of the Giovannis of the world are missing is the spiritual "why" of life. We are all connective tissue, threads between the past, present and future. We learn from and honor those who came before and live in the present to make a better future. The comparison of experiences shows our common humanity. I was very fortunate to have known my grandparents and I talk to them often as I garden and work on our farm. By the way, I really like your interesting name.