Russian Jews and African Americans
Siegel, Lee
Ameeting was called a couple of months ago at the not-for-profit Jewish agency where I've taught English as a second language (ESL) on and off for several years to recent immigrants from...
...The main idea was that demonstrating to these Russian Jews the similarity between their situation as "niggers" in the former Soviet Union (FSU) and the nightmare of being black in America might expand their sympathetic capability...
...These lingering mental images had at least three results...
...her hope!—tried to abstain...
...After class, he solemnly expounded to me that only poor blacks had small craniums, not the comfortable family with the respectable house whose success demonstrated their intelligence...
...A man from Kiev insisted that a group of black teenage girls he had seen on the train were not communicating in a human language...
...Petersburg with the theory of racial intelligence, one day described the trouble he had encountered in finding a place to live...
...It was a favorite and richly nuanced word among them, SUMMER • 1993 • 369 which they applied generally to American life...
...The administrators of the agency's ESL division had decided that the problem of racism among the immigrants should be addressed somehow...
...All the teachers had stories...
...Black English, in fact, was the most popular target of RussianJewish scorn...
...One woman from Odessa named Irina, however, squat and solid with tender eyes, who had been four months in America with her husband and two sons—her future...
...The Russians shook their heads when recounting these experiences...
...and the Russians had shifted uncomfortably in their seats, as they always did at the mention of crime or violence...
...Many immigrants—especially the Russian-Jewish immigrants —uproot their lives and journey to a foreign land in hopes of being colonized...
...Most Russian Jews, however, didn't need to be reminded of their status in the FSU, since their encounters with African Americans plagued them with a struggle between an instinctive sympathy on the one hand and a self-recognition that filled them with terror on the other...
...Using it partly consoled these timidly aggressive people for not yet being able to partake in the American aggressiveness that swirled everywhere around them...
...African Americans were "monkeys" and "animals...
...Proposals for teaching racial sensitivity were exuberantly offered...
...Having spent years waiting in line in the former Soviet Union, the Russians could not understand why their taking seven minutes to finish a sentence should drive black municipal employees into a frenzy...
...Vladimir, the insecure young man from St...
...Whoever answered immediately hung up...
...But I certainly was not going to tell her what to think...
...Deborah began by asking us for examples of racial prejudice among the clients...
...A week later, my upper-level class of seventeen 370 • DISSENT people voted in a classroom exercise to allow Haitian refugees into this country...
...People were telling anecdotes at the teachers' meeting, repeating the ugly stories, some of them mimicking Russian accents or imitating their grammatical mistakes...
...The teachers left the room in haste, everyone going their separate ways as usual, their bags bulging, their arms full, migrating to another job, to another relationship, to the coast of another hopeful project, if nothing else then to the shore of a blissfully forgetful sleep...
...The fear haunted him that he wouldn't have enough money to go to school and that he would end up as a clerk somewhere...
...He told this story on himself red-faced, yet relishing the mastery of telling it well, to the almost uncontrolled hilarity of the other Russians...
...Now sixteen hands waved around her in an affirmative vote...
...I entered an empty classroom with about fifteen other instructors who taught advanced levels...
...Professional ESL teachers work for the agency, but so do painters, writers, composers, actors, cabaret singers, photographers, playwrights and graduate students...
...The meeting was over...
...Nevertheless, Deborah closed on a cheery note and urged us to make clear to the Russians—who had given up their old lives partly because of all the good things they had heard about the First Amendment—that you can't say whatever you want in America...
...He himself had wanted to be a dentist in the Soviet Union, he said...
...It took him four months to find a small studio in Queens...
...Petersburg argued that black craniums were smaller than the average human cranium— a Jew saying this...
...When they applied the term to describe black conduct, however, they meant the breakdown of order: "impoliteness" represented the tip of violence, chaos, destruction...
...Many Russians still fused memories of the footage the Soviet regime had shown over and over again of Watts and Detroit and Newark burning with their fears of the dangerous neighborhoods they currently lived in...
...Impolite," they said softly...
...Most of the suggestions that I heard had to do with encouraging the Russians to see themselves in the "Other...
...The hands continued to be held high, directed upward...
...For a minority of the Russian Jews I have taught and known, their prejudice, violent and intractable, might someday result in a matter for the police...
...Ameeting was called a couple of months ago at the not-for-profit Jewish agency where I've taught English as a second language (ESL) on and off for several years to recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union...
...The nearly forty teachers on the evening shift were divided up into three groups according to the language level we were teaching...
...One was to cause African Americans to be instant targets to any Russian craving a compensatory dislike...
...Conversations, especially over the phone, between black caseworkers in the welfare office and Russians caused the greatest anger...
...This emotion rapidly began to bind the teachers together...
...There was an unspoken sentiment in the room that those Russians who couldn't learn to speak the language of tolerance should go back to where they came from...
...Didn't these people know what had been slowly tearing America apart for two hundred years...
...Her purse had been snatched by a gang of black teenagers (who had little future and little hope and whose families had probably been here for generations) and she was not about to increase the odds against her...
...The teachers at the meeting about racism that night came out of a variety of circumstances, though everyone was white, and nearly everyone hailed from the upper-middle class...
...A larger number have no serious prejudices at all...
...A feeling filled the air that as diverse a group as we were, we shared a common attitude of decency...
...As the supervisor—I'll call her Deborah—handed around questionnaires that asked us to write down our reactions to Russian-Jewish prejudice against African Americans, I wondered whether the incidence of prejudice among immigrants was rising at all...
...Another was to produce the impression that blacks were a kind of communist fifth column carrying on the revolution in American cities through civil disorder, thus tempting the Russians to extend their dislike of the system that had failed them to Americans who to a great degree had been failed by their own system...
...In the end, Irina shrugged and put her arm up in the air along with everyone else...
...Anticipating mysterious and insuperable difficulties during his first months in America, he never called back...
...I had no idea of what she was thinking...
...They fight to be taken prisoner by new values...
...instead it had defined blacks the way a bigot contrives to mentally portray the object of prejudice: as humanity flattened into quantity by an inescapable condition...
...The Soviet regime had cynically aimed to heroicize blacks as rebels against capitalism's depredations...
...At the same time, the force of prejudice perversely sustains them as they walk the thin line between healthy assimilation and the dissolution of their identity...
...Her anger and hurt had been moving when she told the story...
...On either side of her, I imagined seeing her past and a possible future, the brutal manipulation of collective instincts that had doomed Russia, and a sense of collective responsibility that could help save America...
...Or was it that a new mean-spiritedness in America, along with an alarmist and sometimes equally mean-spirited response to it, had made an inevitable if ugly part of immigrant life appear more significant than it was...
...All poor people are less intelligent than other people," he answered, grabbing my arm and shouting at me...
...I asked him if he really thought poor blacks were less intelligent than other people...
...His new landlords were a sympathetic middle-class black family who took pity on him and invited him to eat dinner with them the first evening he came to look at the apartment...
...Some of the responses to blacks were shocking...
...Though most of the teachers had a strong empathy for the Russians, no one could hide his or her indignation...
...Immigrants are not colonizers, after all...
...Didn't these newcomers realize that in a nation crowded with so many different groups, tolerance was as necessary for social cohesion as the right usage of prepositions was for communication...
...He had unfortunately mistranslated the word "unoccupied" from the Russian, and when he called the numbers he had gotten out of the newspaper, he asked for a "free" apartment...
...Aspiring to be positively appropriated, so to speak, by their adopted land, they are hypersensitive to the possibility that they might end up as just plain victims, at the bottom of the social scale...
...An insecure young man from St...
...Most have an antipathy, in varying degrees, toward African Americans, as well as toward other less vulnerable, but still marginal groups...
...All of us were grateful for the relatively easy money...
...It seemed to me that evening that the question—for African Americans no less than for immigrants—was whether prejudice could exist without hatred or the wish to do harm...
...As the last permutation in this chain of preconceived notions, though, many Russians seemed not to dislike blacks so much as to fear the dysfunctional social and political mechanisms that made them, in immigrant eyes, "black," that is, economically disenfranchised...
...An anxious prejudice against a marginal group, one which they perceive to be beneath them, is like a dirty wind that suspends them over the social abyss whenever they imagine a plunge downward...
Vol. 40 • July 1993 • No. 3
