I immigrated to America from Russia in 2012 so I wouldn’t have to hide anymore. That hasn’t worked out so well for me.
Hiding our Jewishness was a family tradition. This was an understandable response given that my Ukrainian paternal grandfather, Danil Fyodorovich Bykoder, served 15 years, beginning in about 1923 at the age of 19, in the Solovki labor camp, whose anguishing cruelties were vividly described in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic work, The Gulag Archipelago. My grandfather’s tripartite crime was criticizing Stalin, being an intellectual, and being Jewish.
He was eventually released only so that he could fight on the Finnish front in World War II. He was assured at the time that, postwar, he could go back home, having paid his debt to Russian society for his putative betrayal. Instead, after the war, he was consigned to another forced-labor camp, in Vorkuta. He eventually returned to Kyiv, where he became an engineer, married, and had two sons, including my father.
And then, once again (like a pinball caroming around), he was forced to move with his family from his native Kyiv to a benighted bend in the road in southwestern Russia to supervise the construction of a leprosy (Hansen’s disease) sanitarium and the housing for the doctors and aides who staffed it. This hamlet eventually became the village of Sinegorskiy, where I was raised. My grandfather died in Sinegorskiy of tuberculosis and pleurisy that he had contracted in the Gulag.
My grandmother then changed my father’s family name to her own maiden name, Usenko, in order to escape the “stigma” of the Bykoder name. So I was born Irina Usenko and raised by my single mother as a nominal adherent to Russian Orthodoxy, though my mother’s actual religion was superstition. She always denied with white-hot indignation that she had any Jewish ancestry. (She did, in fact.) She gave away the potatoes and watermelons she grew in our little farm plot instead of selling them and declared, “I can’t be Jewish, because I’m generous.”
She did believe, however, that a broom resting on its bristles rather than on its slender tip meant that thieves would enter our house in the night. To steal what? Sprouted potatoes? And she insisted that whistling or laughter would attract the Devil to our house. So I laughed sometimes to spite her—and to spite the Devil—but other times stayed silent.
My father, who is circumcised, has never gone to the public baths, not even once, for fear of being found out. Circumcision among Jewish men is not universal in Russia, so his status would be even more noticeable.
Sinegorskiy itself was a kind of miniaturized stage set upon which the ancient rituals of anti-Semitism, catalyzed by foolish superstitions, were enacted. It had never occurred to either of my parents (who never married) to tell me that Sinegorskiy, down to the plumbing and up to the roofs, had been built by my father’s father, a fact that could have given me a bit of clout or credibility with my predominantly non-Jewish classmates. Or perhaps not; neither Jewish contributions to this world, nor Jewish reminders of these contributions, ever did much to blunt the impact of anti-Semitism and in some ways may have exacerbated it.
Nor did it occur to either my grandmother or my mother that “Usenko,” a perfectly fine Ukrainian family name for a man, was less than fitting for a sensitive little girl, as it means “son of the man with a mustache” in Ukrainian. The children at school would place their little forefingers on their upper lips to represent Hitler mustaches when they encountered me. They threatened me, mocked me as a “cheap Jew,” and poured a syrupy Russian knock-off of Coca-Cola over my head. This was my baptism into a culture of fear.
After school, to avoid them, I would walk the long way, through a scrubby patch of forest, to reach the little house I shared with my mother. My only other place of refuge was the Hansen’s disease sanitarium, where I was a young volunteer.
For these reasons, among others, I emigrated to America in 2012, declared and was granted political asylum, and became an American citizen. Now I am Irina Velitskaya, having changed my last name back in Russia because I, too, wished to avoid a certain stigma—in my case, the stigma of a name that represented hiding and shame. “Velitskaya” means “great,” and that was what I’d hoped to be, unfettered by the ugly superstitions of the Old World.
I was safe now.
_____________
Given that my father never spoke of his Judaism and my mother vociferously denied hers, I was half-convinced of my goyishness when, after arriving in America, I took a DNA test.
It showed that I was 71.6 percent Ashkenazi.
I had always been interested in Judaism and the ancient Near East, but this finding galvanized me. After some years spent learning English and saving money, I became a midlife undergraduate student, winning a full scholarship to Berkeley—in the city where Hersh Goldberg-Polin was born—for a double major in classical languages and Near Eastern studies.
It was the best thing, and the worst thing, that has ever happened to me.
If I had done more intensive research before enrolling, I would have come across the testimony of Jewish faculty members such as Ron Hassner, the Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science and Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies. He has told me that an unknown person sprayed graffiti on a Berkeley street corner, personally accusing him of “terrorism” and “genocide” and displaying his phone number and email. After it was erased, the graffiti reappeared. Later, after delivering a talk on the University of California San Francisco campus, two UCSF staff members alleged on X that Hassner had personally tortured and killed Palestinians.
Back in Sinegorskiy, I had had to take the long way to and from school to avoid my anti-Semitic classmates. Now, as a student in good standing at Berkeley, one of the world’s most distinguished universities, I must take a detour many days, both ways, to get to my classes at Dwinelle Hall and other locations, because Berkeley’s famous main gate is effectively closed to free passage for students by pro-Hamas demonstrators. I sometimes am forced to avoid the Bancroft Library as well because of the intimidating protests there. Hassner’s symbolic protest of these judenrein blockades (he slept in his office for a time) was what led to the doxxing and slander he has endured.
I find myself feeling as though I am a leper.
The detour that I and other students use requires us to step from stone to stone across a little creek. It’s no big deal (except, I assume, for disabled students), and I’m used to it. But when it rains and the creek rises, students must take a longer detour that adds 25 minutes to our morning and evening trips.
I’m used to a great many things. Recently, a friend asked me whether I wore a Star of David proudly. “Of course,” I said—but I had forgotten that I tuck my Star of David inside my top when I ride the BART subway system to campus from my apartment in a nearby city. As I later explained to my friend, “If someone attacks me on campus, I can scream and run. But on the BART, I’d be trapped, and no one would help me.”
Then my friend asked me whether I display a mezuzah. Again, I said, “Of course,” but then I was forced to acknowledge that I have placed it on my inside door frame, not on the outside where it belongs, so that my apartment will not be targeted.
And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut said. I have become numb to the posters all over campus depicting Netanyahu as a beast with dripping fangs, and to the daily chants on campus of “Globalize the intifada” and “The only solution is intifada revolution.” I walk to and from class surrounded by an all-pervasive miasma of contempt for my very existence as a Jew. Curiously, even though I am Russian, my national background is never the reason I fear for my safety, nor are there any audible chants or visible posters denouncing Russia or threatening its destruction, despite the fact that Russia indisputably started its war with Ukraine by means of an invasion. The fact that Israel, on the other hand, was the entity that was invaded—by the Iranian proxy group Hamas—seems of no interest or relevance to Berkeley’s anti-Israel mobs.
I did object when a guest lecturer in one of my classes claimed that Netanyahu once said, “I wish death to all the Arabs.” When I pointed out that this was a fabrication that was subsequently disseminated by the Jordanian media, she doubled down, saying we “would have to agree to disagree.” No, we didn’t; I wrote a letter of complaint. But I don’t object when certain other professors take certain anti-Semitic actions, for fear of jeopardizing my grades and my future as an academic. In the same way that I tread carefully from stone to stone across that small creek to get to my classes, I must navigate cautiously (here at Berkeley and, perhaps in the future, at the graduate school that accepts me) around those professors—even some professors of Hebrew language and Jewish studies!—who have well-documented reputations for anti-Semitic or virulently anti-Israel rhetoric.
In short, I find myself in the same terribly awkward position of Jews everywhere in the Diaspora now. I am afraid, so sometimes I hide my Jewishness, just as my mother and father did. And then I become ashamed that I am hiding—having emigrated to America for the freedom of speech and religion it offers its citizens—so I speak out boldly for Israel and the Jews.
And then, some of the time, I become afraid again.
This isn’t just about me, of course. Nor is it just about Jews or Zionists. It is about anyone who cares about academic freedom, and the freedom of Americans anywhere to speak their minds and to assemble peaceably without fear of the kind of intimidation happening on the Berkeley campus and that could erupt again anytime against any group, Jewish or otherwise, that the mobs disapprove of.
The Algemeiner described one such incident of intimidation that occurred last winter:
In February, a mob of hundreds of pro-Palestinian students and non-students shut down an event at its Zellerbach Hall featuring Israeli reservist Ran Bar-Yoshafat, forcing Jewish students to flee to a secret safe room as the protesters overwhelmed campus police. Footage of the incident showed a frenzied mass of anti-Zionist agitators banging on the doors of Zellerbach. The mob then, according to witnesses, eventually stormed the building—breaking windows in the process, according to reports in The Daily Wire.
Nothing has changed in the autumn of 2024, my junior year at Berkeley. The impending defeat of Hamas and, soon enough, Hezbollah, has not made the marchers any less furious and hateful. Not long after the murder of Berkeley native son and American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, I passed a small group of students holding an impromptu memorial for him, featuring a long banner depicting his now-familiar face. From behind the banner, where a group of terrorist-sympathizers stood, came the sound of mocking, triumphant laughter. I felt chilled to the bone.
My father was a math and physics professor at another great university, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, up until the day he was attacked by a group of Chechen students. They beat him severely, demanding a better grade for one of their number, and called him a “gorbonosyy” and a “zhidyara” (you can look up these viciously anti-Semitic terms if you want to, but I am quite certain they won’t brighten your day). After that, my father resigned and has lived a quiet life in the village of Kholmskaya, nine kilometers from Sinegorskiy. He is an unassuming, mild-mannered man who steps carefully wherever he goes.
But I am different. I live in America. I don’t have to hide. Or, to be more accurate, sometimes I do hide, but I shouldn’t have to. Not even in the belly of the beast at Berkeley. Not even in a network of great but deeply compromised universities across America that I have come to think of as the Gulag Academia.
I won’t be afraid. I am afraid. But I won’t be afraid.
Photo: AP Photo/Michael Liedtke
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