'It Is a Very Different World'

From an interview with Ilya Kaminsky, the Ukrainian American poet born in Odessa:

“I am a Soviet Jew whose holy books are Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Babel and Grace Paley and I.B. Singer and Bernard Malamud and great medieval Jewish poets of Spain and Bialik and Amichai and Kafka and Edmond Jabès and many other great Jewish authors of past and present.

 

“In Odessa, being Jewish was, of course, also the question of language. Odessa Russian is very Yiddish-influenced language; it is quite different from Russian in Moscow or St. Petersburg.

 

“Isaac Babel is the major writer who wrote in that language.

 

“Let me begin afar: One day, I came home and I remember on the kitchen table a book was open. Yes, the book was by Isaac Babel, a writer from Odessa, a wonderful short-story writer. Let me begin further even more afar: Odessa is a strange part of the former Soviet Empire. It is a Russian-speaking city in Ukraine where, at that time, the population consisted largely not just of Russians or Ukrainians but Jews, Moldovans, and so forth. Some Bulgarians, some Greeks were still there. My Russian literature teacher was of German origin. So it was one of the very few actually international cities in the Soviet empire, and the language they spoke — although it is considered a Russian-speaking city — the language was kind of made up. Not exactly a Finnegans Wake type of speech but a language wherein you go to the market to buy cheese and you would hear new ways of creating a sentence. That is the kind of tonality, these fresh registers of speech are what interests me. It feels like home.

 

“So, back in that moment of finding the open book by Babel on the kitchen table, I looked at the story and I realized, Oh, this is not the language that people speak on TV, this is not the language of government officials, not the language of the Soviet bureaucracy, this is the language that my parents speak to each other. One spoke the paragraph aloud and one smelled home. That, for me, was the beginning of stories or poems.

 

“In addition to that, being Jewish in the former USSR is quite different than being Jewish in this country. Here, it is a religion. There, it is an ethnicity identified in your passport. But even if somehow (which was the case for many people) in your passport it says that you are Russian, your neighbors still look you in the face and see exactly who you are. And when they hit you, they aim directly in your face. It is a very different world.”