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The memoirs, stories, and essays collected in this book tell the history of a generation of Russian Jews who grew up in a culture in which Chekhov’s name is iconic and settled in America during the third wave of emigration in the late Soviet period. This is the history of a generation that survived World War II, Stalin’s postwar antisemitic campaigns, and Brezhnev-era discrimination in education and employment. The book’s second half follows that generation in America and their struggle to adjust to life in a new country.
“The story of Soviet Jewish life is going increasingly into oblivion. It does not mean that people forget about it. Rather, it increasingly appears as a black-and-white or, sometimes, sepia image. Emil Draitser’s narrative, by contrast, is full of color—in the full palette of the time.”
— Gennady Estraikh, Emeritus Professor, New York University
“The brilliance of Draitser’s narratives lies in his exposure of moments of truth, tiny and large, for individuals of one cultural community—Soviet Jews—that lay bare deeper truths reflective of the human experience more universally. This is precisely what makes his prose Chekhovian. At times readers will laugh out loud at some of the situations and observations shared by narrators and characters in the texts: Draitser’s sense of humor and especially his irony are a reflection of his birthright as a Jew from Odessa. In many of his narratives, events unfold in a larger historical context of hatred and violence, making Draitser’s messages of warmth and kindness particularly powerful and inspiring.”
— Benjamin Rifkin, Professor of Russian and University Provost, Fairleigh Dickinson University
“From Odessa to New York, a world crossed an ocean.
Chekhov in Brighton Beach is the story of a generation of Russian Jews shaped by Soviet Odessa and scattered through emigration. With a blend of memoir and personal essays, Draitser chronicles his childhood during the Second World War, the antisemitic campaigns of the Stalin years, the everyday realities of being Jewish in the Soviet Union, and the complicated decision to leave. Draitser’s journey takes him to Brighton Beach, where émigrés recreated a piece of the world they had lost—a ‘Little Odessa’ filled with Russian literature, Jewish memory, family traditions, and Odessa’s acerbic humor.
Draitser captures the absurdity and pain of Soviet Jewish life alongside the dislocation, nostalgia, and unexpected possibilities of starting over. Chekhov in Brighton Beach is a touching portrait of a community—and a culture—that crossed an ocean without leaving its old world behind.”
— Jarrod Tanny, Block Distinguished Professor in Jewish History, University of North Carolina Wilmington
Born in Odesa, Ukraine, Emil Draitser emigrated to the USA in 1975. Professor Emeritus at Hunter College of CUNY, he is the author of twenty books of artistic and scholarly prose. A laureate of the Mark Aldanov International Literary Prize, he has also received three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
Acknowledgments
Notes on Transliteration and Translation
Foreword by Konstantin V. Kustanovich
Preface
Part One. World War II and Russian Jewry
- Salty Water
- Fathers at War
- An Arrow Piercing the Throat
Part Two. Late Stalinist Antisemitic Campaigns
- Black on White
- One Passover in Odessa
- A Revolutionary Étude
- To Moscow, to the Central Laundry…
Part Three. In Brezhnev’s Russia
- A Note Found Accidentally
- A Mosquito in Amber
- Before Jumping into the Precipice
Part Four. Emigration and Its Travails
- Dvorkin
- Chekhov in Brighton Beach
- Prophet
- A Whistle Made from an Apricot Pit
- A Letter That Was Never Sent
- Our American Passover
- A Wedding in Little Odessa