“Last Name, now!”
“What?” My mind raced… I thought quickly… No way this is happening right now… I couldn’t believe I was going to get the complete shit knocked out me, right then and there….
“Last Name, you dirty Jew, what’s your last name?”
Shit…..He was so much bigger than me…. What the hell am I supposed to do?
Believe it or not, this was a pretty common occurrence during my childhood, something that started around the time I was 6 years old and never really let up….
It would start with a bully, usually someone a few grades up, and it would be right after school let out, right in the view and earshot of most of the teachers.
“You’re a kike aren’t you?” He looked around to get the opinion of some of the others.
“We see you hanging out with those Jews… you’re one of them, aren’t you?” He got in closer, and I could see from the stubble on his face and the size of his forearms that he was already an upperclassman, and so were some of his buddies….
I was really stuck.
On the one hand, the beating wouldn’t be so bad since we were right in front of the school. The teachers weren’t blind after all, and if they saw things getting out of hand they would get inside the melee and pull out the aggressor by his ear. After a few choice words like “you shouldn’t let him have it so bad in front of everyone” or ” Vanya, take a break, he’s bloody already”…. After that, then it would be over….
And after all, if I kept fighting them maybe a few more times, they would eventually stop… They only picked on those who didn’t fight back, plus at that point I would gain the respect of some of these assholes, and they would even tell me things like “You’re not a bad fighter for a Jew” when they passed me in the hall… But they’d still knock the books out of my hand…
Shit. That’s one option.
On the other hand, I could lie.
Not a noble option, but isn’t that what they wanted after all? Not really to fight and get bloody, not to get pulled out from the fight by their ear. They just wanted to show that Jews weren’t liked here…. No matter if you’re one or not…
They were just making a statement, doing what they had observed others do numerous other times… After all, this isn’t Nazi Germany, there are still many scars left here by the invading Germans…
No, this isn’t Hitler and Goebbels. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s those who won. It’s those who freed Europe from the ravages of self-determination and the horror of free-markets. It’s the workers Utopia, it’s the Proletarian wet dream…in short, the Soviet Union of the early 1980’s.
And I’m seven. And I’m fucking scared.
So, I lie.
“No, I’m not a kike…My last name is Borovik, I am of good Byelorussian bloodstock… Look at my nose, its straight…Look at me, I’m no Jew…”
And it’s over. Just like that.
Except that this time I know that there’s no point telling the teacher, the one who implores us to be good citizens, to always tell the truth just like young Vlad Lenin did when he was growing up… Funny how when I got to elementary school in the US and in the first week heard the famous story about George Washington and the cherry tree… I immediately panicked….It was all too familiar; just substitute one father of a nation for another, and presto…
Except it wasn’t like that… It wasn’t like that at all, but it took me a while to figure out why Ms. Anderson, the third grade homeroom teacher, would sometimes shoot me the same type of looks I got from my much beloved Larissa Evgenyvna; the 32 yr veteran of pedagogical practice… the one who all the kids brought flowers to on the first day of school and the one who told me in her lovely dismissive voice “Well, what do you want? You can’t change your nationality” the only time I stood up in class to tell her that there were kids outside the classroom waiting to beat me up…
But while Mrs. Anderson in her inexperience dealing with immigrant kids came to resent me because I was so much trouble, with no English and always in the same clothes; my lovely Larissa Evgenyva, the exemplary role model to so many future Soviet leaders, did what a good leader always does, lead the troops by example…
And so in the end, I lied…
Even though I won a few fights here and there, in the end there was no winning…
And I knew it then and there, right in front of the school, as I was seven, the same age my America-born cousins sit in class and learn about placing vowels in words and how to count to 1,000. Count to 1,000?
Wish I had their problems….
This post was written by
benr – who has written 1 posts on DashAmerican.com.
Ben R. was born on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, but as fate would have it, as he finally found a way to get out from its stranglehold grip it fell on its own. Leaving the Soviet Union and coming to the U.S. was in some ways looking for something you're not even sure you're looking for.
