Five-Oh

On the completion of the Glorious Five-Decade Plan

I don’t have a lot of childhood pictures of myself. Home photography was both a luxury in the Soviet Union and a highly technical pursuit. Provided one could afford to own a camera, one was expected to know how to manage its inanely complex inner workings just to be able to load the film, and my household, containing myself, my profoundly untechnical mother and my grandma, clearly wouldn’t know what to do with any of this shit. Whatever visual mementos of my childhood and adolescence my mom still has stashed away somewhere in her house in Western New York were courtesy of street and studio professionals or family friends. None of my birthdays, none of my vacations and absolutely zero of my soccer or volleyball matches are preserved on film.

This picture, for example, was taken by an enterprising fellow in the streets of Chișinǎu, Moldova, circa 1988, and depicts a thoroughly unremarkable Soviet teenager in his full wintertime finery, including the mandatory ushanka hat and the ubiquitous olimpiyka track top. I was too shy to refuse the dude the three rubles he brazenly demanded. The photo arrived at my home address in Bender, Moldova, several weeks later.

Now there is a Yiddishe punim just waiting to be masterfully rearranged in the Soviet Army!

The gem below, on the other hand, comes via the Moldavian SSR passport service and depicts a not-too-typical 10th-grade student at the Glorious Railroad Workers Common Educational Institution No. 13 (a single building on the outskirts of Bender housing grades 1 through 11), in that it contains several major violations of the Soviet Schoolboy Code of Conduct. My hair, for one, is definitely way past the Approved Loyal Young Communist Pioneer Standard and is creeping dangerously beyond the Social Degenerate Beatles Admirer Red Line, into the extremely unsafe Criminally Jewish Dissident Rebel Zone. I was suspended several times for it before the school kind of gave up on me. The shirt, unbuttoned at the collar and neither Regulation Blue nor Holiday Regulation White is yet another blatant wad of spit in the face of the communist system.

If nothing else, this look had earned me a well-deserved reputation as a daring maverick.

Shockingly, the teenstache didn’t prove to be a chick magnet

I didn’t have that much of a choice but being one, mind you. Being blatantly Jewish meant having to fight almost every single day in school. It meant having to endure (or not, as was my choice) slurs from some teachers; my “geographichka”, for example, once described me as “the perfect example of all the worst traits of his people.” It also meant taking physical abuse from others, as my gym teacher, an Afghanistan vet, hated my becoming the captain of the volleyball team so much, he once cornered me in the locker room and, extremely expertly, leaving no marks, beat me up until I could barely breathe. He saw himself honor-bound to prove to a filthy Jew that true physical prowess was forever beyond his aspirations.

Luckily, the second picture was taken only about a year before I left the hellhole of the communist iteration of the Russian Empire behind for good. Many things have happened since. I got married, divorced, married again. Two sons, whom I am immensely proud of, have happened in between. I became an engineer, hated it, became a sportswriter for a Russian newspaper, loved it and then quit it once Russia decided it was going to become a fascist empire again, reinvented myself again as a school teacher, and am loving it fiercely.

All the hair is gone now and not really missed. In fact, I have surprisingly few regrets for having reached the age when most Soviet-born males are expected to embrace cirrhosis if not altogether leave the premises.

The punim is not any less Yidishe, of course

I am doing what I love, I am confident in my convictions and passions, I fight for right causes, I am proud of who I am and what I do. I will never be rich and don’t aspire to it. Whatever small platform I have, I use it to advocate for democracy, against fascism and, occasionally but blatantly, flaunt my outrageous, inexcusable Jewishness in ways that would have made my teachers’ brains explode had they not succumbed to alcoholism long ago. And if sometimes I also use it to bemoan my unfortunate choices of sports teams (Bills, Sabres, Orioles AND Tottenham! Oy vey!), I feel like I’ve earned that right.

So, as I am sitting now in my parents’ house in the midst of Lake Effect Snow Belt, preparing to celebrate my 50th with friends and family, and bemoaning mom’s lack of visual testimony of my ever being small, I can at least confidently say that feeling nostalgic longing for those years isn’t obligatory.

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate, and may the happiest decade of your life be the one you are living in now.