moscow: arrived on a night train from st. pete’s, virtually fresh as daisies. unfortunately we withered fast under the formidable glare of the city. by afternoon, i was determined to get out of my soggyair/overdose of DISers/homesickness/arab summit induced funk, which meant that i had to find a real seder. creative alternatives not an alternative. mel and i met in the lobby, wrangled for an hour with the harried, incompetant hotel folk (you can’t really blame them: our hotel boasts 6,000 beds and is a perfect example of why huge bloated bureaucratic structures are, um, bad) and got a taxi complete w/ driver who knew the way. only visually of course; he couldn’t just direct us. no problem. as soon as we arrived and i crossed the threshold of the shul, i felt the pollution slide off of my aura. jews! russian jews, sure, so like real russians they look guarded if not unhappy. but unlike real russians, i could communicate with them (!!) using a funny overexcited mix of hebrew and yiddish. managed to figure out there would be a seder in two hours and to acquire tickets.
mel and i killed time in an elegant cafe where we thoroughly confused the waitstaff by refusing free bread and ordering french fries, chocolate, and tea. we caught the tail end of services back at the synagogue. i cried. i’m so damned sentimental. something about the beauty of the building and reciting the same prayers i could hear anywhere with a sizeable number of people, who just looked familiar somehow (i was like, hey! i have your body!) got to me. i think we made the community nervous. they invited us to the seder for free, sat us at one of the two women’s tables, smiling at us occasionally and otherwise left us alone. one old man attempting to chat with us communicated only that “russia is bad for jews.” that we’d kinda figured. the seder was fascinating and the longest i’ve ever sat through. the rabbi leading it did not skip words, and more often he elaborated on them with long speeches in russian. we hung in there, regardless, and afterwards a nice man walked us back to our hotel.
this morning a blue sky greeted us, as though to say just kidding about yesterday, and we trekked through the kremlin underneath it. first a wait in line, then a cross under the gate of a metal detector where guards snapped at boys carrying bags, and we were there, in the fortress, the Kremlin, baby — only now it’s a musuem. of dresses. the name that struck fear into every american thirty years ago presently is a showcase for tsars’ apparel and their ornate excesses. once they sparked the revolution; now our guides seem indulgent, if not proud.
there’s no mention of recent history (the past 100 years) anywhere. a couple statues of lenin. a handful of hammer and sickle insignias on the roofs of buildings. busts of stalin or his face on little dolls on vendors’ carts as they hawk history to tourists as kitsch. but no more. is is too recent maybe for them to distance themselves enough to memorialize? it’s just bizarre not to see any evidence of their rather unorthdox road to democracy.
lovely lunch today and long walk. despite persistently scowling/barking russians and the memory of the fact that yesterday policemen stopped batches of DIS boys and had to be paid off, i’m feeling friendlier to the city. it’s beautiful in spots and certainly in a complicated, unique way. i’d love to come back in ten years, see what’s changed.