An Update (finally) and a Few (too many) Words about How I've Spent the Holidays

            Well, of course, a lot has happened in the more than three months since I first posted to this blog.  I’ve been two times to Kyiv, Ukraine’s green, grand-scale, and quite active capital city, one time to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and on a much-needed and wonderful weeklong trip to visit Sam.  I completed the group Russian course I was taking for my intensive language study period, became closer with my two classmates, and said goodbye to them as they left Odessa for home – Dresden, Germany and Portland, Oregon, respectively.  I learned about America and the English-speaking world in ways I never expected to over here and probably never could have at home, as I ate in restaurants and shared long conversations with West Point cadets and a British Foreign Service Officer who recently returned from a three-year posting in Bosnia.  I was lonely and home sick and thought about visiting New York for the holidays (the ticket deal I was considering sold out, but now, though I would love to see family and friends, I’m content staying here).  I began my one-on-one Russian tutoring with a fantastic and classy literature professor and started my research.  I conducted my first interview entirely in Russian.  I survived Ukraine’s Swine Flu quarantine and Odessa’s first blizzard of the season.  I bought my first winter coat.  I began weekly language exchanges (we speak half the time in English, half the time in Russian) with an Odessan martial arts instructor and a local NLP psychologist.  Of course, there were (and are) many more people, events, and experiences, both large and small, which make up my daily life here and which I am now neglecting to mention, but this post is not about my daily life.  This post is about something that many people like to contrast with daily life and to categorize as wholly different: this post is about holidays.

            I got the idea to write this post the other night when I met my friend, Leah, for dessert, after having arrived from my second trip to Kyiv on the train that morning.  Leah is a Reed College graduate who has been in Odessa for three months, teaching English and volunteering for a non-profit that helps street kids (she designed their website: http://www.thischildhere.org/).  She arrived in Ukraine with her boyfriend, Michael (who is here to study Russian), after working for the UN in D.C. and an NGO in Haiti, volunteering in Spain, riding a bike across Europe to Italy, and working with friends on an Italian winery.  She spent a lot of her childhood in rural Wyoming, as her parents worked with horses in chosen poverty (her words), and even made their family’s home inside a school bus for a while.  Leah has been a really wonderful friend here, and I’m sad to see her leave this Monday, when she will fly to Italy for a month before returning to D.C. and her old job at the UN to work until she and Michael move once again for graduate school (he studies the intellectual history of fascism between the two world wars, she was a biology student in college but is now looking to pursue counseling psychology).  Leah deserves a whole post of her own, but, what I had meant to say before is that I met her for dessert a few nights ago and began telling her about a Chanukah party I attended at a fancy nightclub in Kyiv. 

            “Wow,” she responded, “you have had the most bizarre holidays here.”  She was right.  Though I hadn’t thought of it as a trend before she noticed, I have had some pretty remarkable holiday experiences so far, quite different from any in my American past.  Consequently, I thought it might be worthwhile to try to share with you how I have spent the major holidays so far in Ukraine: the fun, the disturbing, the lonely, and the stirring.

Rosh Hashanah: 

            Without having almost any connections yet with Odessa’s Jewish community, I try to figure out how to observe the Jewish New Year on my own.  I decide to do the one thing I know to do on Rosh Hashanah – go to synagogue, the only synagogue I know of at this point: the city’s largest and most visible – a huge (not surprisingly) Orthodox synagogue, with a Kosher food stand out front, which I have passed by on my way to school and is easy to locate on all tourist maps of the city. 

            I wear a long skirt and long, black sleeves and meet up with the only American Jew I know here – Hannah, a journalist and the wife of a Fulbright Scholar who was in Odessa for fall semester, doing research on terrorism during the 1905 Revolution.  We walk to the synagogue, my first time in dress shoes in Ukraine, and are met by security guards at the door.  They stop us from going in.  “You can’t go in,” they say, over and over again in Russian.  Confused, nervous, and still not at a level of Russian to be assertive, I try to argue with them.  “Why not?” I ask.  “No, you can’t go in,” they repeat.  “You want to see?” one guard asks.  “Yes!”  Hannah replies, happy to be using Russian and recognizing some words, but a bit unsure about what’s going on.  “You can’t watch today.”  “No,” I try to explain, “we don’t want to watch.”  Suddenly, a few Orthodox men come outside and stand on the stairs.  One looks at us.  In Russian, “Hello.  Today is a very special day for us, a very big holiday.  You can’t come in and look today, you have to leave.”  “We know it’s a special holiday!”  I try to say, as Hannah yells, “Rosh Hashanah!”  “We’re Jews from America!”  “Oh!” he exclaims.  “You’re Jews!  Then, of course, come in!”

            Running into lots of people standing around in the hallways, we try to find women to follow and ask what’s happening.  Eventually, after a lot of bumbling and mistakes in Russian (and people asking me if I speak Hebrew), we find out that the service is in the process of moving downstairs from an upstairs sanctuary.  Hannah and I make it to the women’s section, an area directly behind the men’s section, completely crowded with desks and chairs.  People have to move the desks around and push one another to get through.  The women’s section, placed directly behind the men’s, is separated by a large fence, covered by a cloth.  We can see only the tops of a very few men’s heads, and hardly hear their prayers.  I find it almost impossible to follow along: I can hardly recognize (or even hear) the men’s way of chanting Hebrew, pages numbers or names of prayers are never called out, and the women around chat or fidget or stare at the walls.  At one point, one older woman comes around, pointing the younger girls to a certain prayer, and saying, “This is very important.”  Aside from that, I try to see if I can understand the Russian translation in the prayer books and observe the women.  Their knees and elbows are all covered, but many wear rhinestone-speckled jackets that say phrases in English like, “Rock and Roll.”  I listen to a little girl teach some Hebrew to her mother.           

            Trying to see into the men’s section, I feel as if I am watching a play, which I have read (maybe even seen) many times before and adore, and the performance is and has been going on the stage, but they have forgotten to lift the curtain.  I struggle to listen to the actors’ muffled words, try to stretch myself to hear familiar props dragging along the floor, try to follow the plot I know so well through small clues and imagination.  I can’t.  The curtain is too thick.  Hannah and I leave after a little over an hour.  I return home alone, feeling unfulfilled. 

Yom Kippur:

            Feeling unsuccessful with my Rosh Hashanah, I decide to try a different synagogue for Yom Kippur.  I’ve found one more synagogue on the map and I venture by myself to Chabad.

            Security lets me in without a word, and I make my way up to the women’s section: this time located in the balcony.  In many ways, I prefer this – I can see the prayer leaders, see the ark, see the Torah, see what the men are doing, and hear quite well.  One of the prayer leaders yells out the page numbers in Russian, and I have a much easier time keeping up, at least with which part of the service we’re on.           

            I look down at the men, and at the other women also watching the men, and feel almost like Waldorf and Statler from The Muppet Show, those puppet critics who sit up in the balcony and look down upon the show, criticizing and joking.  For a fleeting second, I have the thought that maybe, in some ways, the women are in a position of power.  We’re positioned physically above the men, able to look down, observe, clearly see, and perhaps even evaluate what’s going on down there.  For a moment, I glance at the other inhabitants of the balcony, and feel like we’re in on some big secret together: like the men think they’re controlling everything, when we’re really up here, on top, pulling the strings.  I feel for a second that, as the men are on the ground, fulfilling obligations and rules and showing off to one another, we’re free in the balcony, free to be critics, spectators, judges, free to gaze on the men and share in some quiet evaluation or understanding.  Isn’t there power in being an observer?  But then, as the men yell and clap and dance and laugh, and the women watch them stilly, quietly, (jealously), I remember that this “freedom to observe” is far more a prohibition on participation, a ban on being allowed and encouraged to truly take part, to influence, to impact, to change.  I try to open up and be impacted by the service, to take part in some way, lonely and separate among many individual women in the balcony, as they watch their husbands and sons pray.  Feeling a million miles away, I decide to go home.

            Back in my apartment, I try to come up with little ways to make this Yom Kippur meaningful for myself, though I mostly feel lost.  Ignoring the prohibition on work, I look up the most important prayers and sections of the Yom Kippur liturgy online, things I either missed or didn’t feel connected with during the service, and read them aloud, in English and Hebrew, hitting myself in the chest for each sin as tradition dictates, alone in front of the computer screen.  To look back on my year, I fill out a reflective questionnaire on this new High Holidays website that will be locked into a virtual vault and e-mailed back to me next Rosh Hashanah.  I sit on the ground in my apartment and try to atone, try to look back on the past year and think about how I want to do better this time around.  I watch a famous cantor sing Kol Nidre on YouTube.  I read articles about the meaning of Yom Kippur.  All in all, I feel pathetic for not coming up with more creative ways to make this day meaningful.  I feel that the Judaism I really care about is impossible to do alone and wonder: am I just not strong enough to create the Jewish life I want by myself, or, is the fact that this Judaism can only be manifested through community what makes it so powerful?  I break the fast alone, with a dinner like on any other day.

Halloween: 

            Lyuba, another Fulbrighter who is researching contemporary Ukrainian literature in Kyiv, came to visit for the weekend.  On Halloween day, we went to the beach (in jackets), a thrift store, and walked around.  In the evening, we went out for dinner at Kompot, a somewhat strange, very popular restaurant here that does Soviet-style home cooking in a super-chic, trendy sort of way.  While eating (Lyuba had a bowl of lightly fried little fishes and buckwheat with white mushrooms, I had basically a vegetable quiche), I receive a call from my friend, Dave, telling me that the play we had tickets for that night had been canceled because of the Swine Flu quarantine.  “What?!  What Swine Flu quarantine?” 

            Lyuba and I run over to the theater.  Signs reading, “Quarantine” and “All plays canceled from November 1^st” are plastered all over the windows and billboards outside.  We push our way to the ticket window, through a constantly growing crowd.  “Is the play tonight canceled?” Lyuba asks.  The woman working at the window crinkles her nose and looks at us with condescension: “Is today November 1^st?”  With a bit of time to spare before the start of the play, we rush back to my apartment to check the Internet for news of this “quarantine.”  Lyuba’s phone begins flashing with text messages of warning from her Ukrainian friends back in Kyiv.  In response to the first deaths from H1N1 in Western Ukraine, Prime Minister Yuliya Timoshenko has announced a country-wide quarantine: all schools and universities are set to be closed for 3 weeks, all public gatherings are banned (including election rallies), theaters are closed, and inter-regional travel may be restricted.  Lyuba becomes nervous about returning to Kyiv the next day.

            We make it back to the theater to see “Viy,” Nikolai Gogol’s folk horror story, about a haunted church and other ghouls and monsters.  Jack-o-lanterns glow surprisingly in the windows of the theater.  The performance is quite different than I expect: imagine a rock opera in the genre of Jesus Christ Superstar crossed with over-the-top stunt shows at Disney World--complete with a flying coffin. 

            After the play, we walk half an hour to a party at Dave’s apartment – my classmate from Oregon.  On the way, we pass a couple of people wearing surgical masks (a site to become quite normal for weeks to come, but, particularly apt on Halloween!), and stop to buy American candy to complete our Halloween.  We hang out in Dave’s apartment with mostly other students from Dave’s and my language school: two Norwegian guys pretty much on vacation, and a Belgian girl and an Italian girl, who are studying Russian to become interpreters. 

            A Russian teacher from our school, Alexandra, also joins us, and urges us to move the party elsewhere.  Lyuba heads back to the apartment she’s staying in to get some rest before her (hopeful) early bus ride the next morning, and the rest of us take two taxis to a nightclub called, “Yo.”  This is the kind of club you see on Queer as Folk: three floors, endless bars, numerous, professional DJ’s mixing live, paid dancers, stages, flashing lights of all colors, and huge crowds.  The ceiling is decorated with cobwebs and humongous plush spiders.  I spot a few costumes – quite a few vampires, a soldier, and a man in a Yuliya Timoshenko mask, making out with a short, blonde girl.        

Thanskgiving:

            Both Dave and the Fulbright family in town invite me to the same Thanksgiving party at the house of a couple I’ve never met.  Apparently, this is an ex-pat tradition, and every year this couple tries to bring together all the Americans in Odessa to celebrate Thanksgiving in their home.  I arrive with Hannah and her three-year-old son, Alex, to a humongous apartment, with a kitchen counter so long that it looks like a hotel registration desk.  Children run around dressed as Indians and pilgrims, draw pictures of turkeys, and gather around the TV to watch A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.  The room is decorated with “Happy Thanksgiving” banners and paper turkeys.  A feast is building up, as each guest adds a dish to the already-crowded buffet table: two turkeys, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, pecan pie.  The at least ten tables set up in the gigantic dining rooms are set with turkey and fall-themed centerpieces, Thanksgiving napkins and plates. 

            As I walk around and begin introducing myself to people, I am handed a cup of warm apple cider by a smiling woman.  I ask the many Americans what they’re doing in Odessa, and realize that almost every one of them is a Presbyterian missionary.  We chat about where we’re from in the States and how we ended up here.  Before we get ready to eat, the 40 or so Americans now in attendance bow their heads and pray together.  We get ready to eat, and I see that the napkins at each place are wrapped with Bible verses.  I sit with other students from my school, everyone enjoying the familiar food and discussing the unexpected ambiance.  The power goes out a couple times, reminding us that we’re still in Ukraine.  After the meal, we are handed music sheets and we sing hymns, accompanied by a woman playing the flute.  A man gets up and gives a sermon, reading scriptural verses off his electronic Bible.  We then visit the buffet again for coffee and desert.

            I talk with a lot of people about their missions.  After desert, a man sits down at our table and tells us that America is too tolerant and that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed in the U.S. military, because the only “real” Muslims that exist are the “extremists.”  Somehow, we get on the topic of adultery and homosexuality, and how they are the most heinous of all the sins, because they destroy the family – which is the way God intended humankind to live.  Homosexuality is especially harmful, because the homosexual purposefully chooses to prevent all of his or her possible progeny from being born.  In that way, homosexuals are mass murders of unlimited future generations.   

            This man tells me he moved here in the early 1990’s, because “the people here had been getting Marx and Lenin shoved down their throats for 70 years, and so, I thought I’d bring them some God.” 

Chanukah:

            On the first night of Chanukah, I write down the three blessings for lighting the candles on the first night on a sheet of notebook paper, put it in my pocket, and head to Odessa’s public chanukiah.  I had read on Odessa’s city website that there was going to be a large chanukiah placed right next to the famous Potemkin Steps and that it would be lit each night of the holiday.  Excited that there would be such a proud, open display of Jewishness in Ukraine, I go down to see it for myself.  I walk down Primorsky Blvd., a main promenade right by the port, which is now beautifully decorated in lights for the holiday season.  I take photos of the chanukiah, which has “Chabad” written in huge lettering across the side.  I stand in front of it and quietly read the blessings.

            A couple days after the last night of Chanukah, my close friend, Alex, brings me to an invitation-only Chanukah party at one of the trendiest nightclubs in Kyiv.  The party is being thrown by a group of extremely wealthy young guys who feel that organized Jewish life in Ukraine has gotten it all wrong.  At the door, they give out stylish kippot with the group’s name and logo printed across the top.  People are dressed nicely, in Ukrainian clubbing attire but a bit more tone-downed, a bit more refined.  This is the kind of club at which you have to pay to reserve a table, and all the tables are full and being served sushi and steak.  There is a buffet of free latkes, sufganiot, white wine, red wine, and champagne.  There is a cash bar for all other kinds of drinks, including wine bottles costing multiple thousands of dollars that Alex shows me on the menu.  The party begins with the lighting of all the candles on a gigantic chanukiah at the front of the dance floor.  After that, the head Chabad rabbi of Kyiv welcomes everyone and sings a few songs.  I wonder: would a Chabad rabbi in America ever attend, or even support, a party like this?  I ask Alex if all the people here get along with Chabad, if they look up to them, or if people even look down on them.  She seems surprised by the question.  “Of course, they think they’re the real Jews.  A lot of the people here go to synagogue on Friday nights and then walk straight to this club.  The synagogue is just across the street,” she points out the window.

            The party continues with an art auction (for charity?) and then the dancing begins.  Flat-screen TVs line the club, showing photos of Israel, large chanukiot in cities throughout the world, and cartoons of families lighting Chanukah candles.  The bathroom has a crazy basin/waterfall structure for a sink, with a big open space under the mirror, where you can see into (or reach into) the men’s side.

            I sit down at a free bench with some of Alex’s friends.  “What do you think of Ukraine?” one of the girls asks me.  “I really like it!”  I say.  “You’re not bored here?”  I ask her what she means.  “America is so interesting, isn’t Ukraine boring for you?”  Later on, the same girl asks me, “Do you like Decadence House?”  “What’s Decadence House?” I respond.  “Decadence House.  It’s the name of the place we’re in!”  “Oh, yeah, it’s nice!” She smiles and nods.  I look at a card on the table – in English, across the top it reads: “Decadence House.”  “What does the name mean?” she asks me.

Christmas (December 25^th – Catholic/Protestant Christmas): 

            On Wednesday, to my excited and deep surprise, I found out that there is a Reform Jewish congregation in town, and on Christmas night, I attend my first Shabbat service there.  They meet in a 3^rd-floor apartment, decorated with flags of Israel, photos, and children’s drawings.  For the first time in my life outside of America or Israel, a man wearing a kippah shakes my hand (touching women, aside from family, is forbidden to ultra-Orthodox men).  Everyone is welcoming, and there are children, people in their 20’s, and grandparents.  They tell me that this congregation used to have a female rabbi, but that she’s gone abroad to study.  Their new rabbi plays guitar and sings with passion, melodies I can recognize.  The men and women sit together, wherever they want.  The rabbi calls out the page numbers and explains and gives commentary throughout the service.  Also for the first time, I read prayers aloud translated into Russian.  After the ceremony, we sit around a table, have snacks, and talk about the variations in Odessa’s Jewish community and the upcoming presidential election in Ukraine.  I’m proud that I can (for the most part) keep up with the conversation in Russian.  They invite me back.

            Feeling really happy to have connected with and celebrated Shabbat with this group, I walk over to a Christmas party that Leah and Michael have invited me to, and which is, ironically, being held at Audrey’s house – a woman I went out to dinner with just last week, a really sweet American teacher, who works in an orphanage here and was very close with last year’s Fulbright student fellow in Odessa.  At the party, we listen to two Argentinean and Spanish businessmen tell crazy stories and joke about their travels.  I meet multiple people from the street kids organization I mentioned earlier, for which Leah has been volunteering.  We brainstorm lots of possibilities of how I could also get involved, and make plans for me to stop by this week to start volunteering.  Leah and Michael walk me home.  I realize that, for the first time in my life, I have not asked a single person what they got for Christmas, nor have I been asked the same (regarding Christmas or Chanukah presents).   

New Year’s: 

            The biggest holiday of the year in Ukraine.  We’ll see what happens.