The Other History of the Holocaust
Picture a long table covered end to end in crystal bowls filled with cured fish, pickled foods, and salads with an alarming amount of mayonnaise. There’s vodka and black bread on the table too. A man stands up and shouts “Anecdote!”—a common Russian way of announcing a forthcoming joke—and, with a shot of vodka in hand, begins to tell of a conversation in the Soviet Union.
“Comrade Rabinovich, why are you applying for an exit visa to Israel?” asks the Soviet official. “We have built an amazing worker’s paradise!”
“Well, comrade, there are two reasons,” says Rabinovich. “The first is that every night my neighbor comes to my door, drunk and filled with salo, banging and screaming that after they get rid of the Communists, they’re coming for the Jews.”
“But they will never get rid of the Communists,” declares the Soviet official.
“You’re right! Of course you’re right,” says Rabinovich. “That’s the second reason!”
I know this joke, and countless others like it, because like many other Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union, I heard them told repeatedly over the years in the great hall of Russian-speaking Jewish learning: the dinner table. Meals with family and trusted friends were where I learned comedy. These meals with their elaborate vodka toasts, , and—the government and the people. At those meals I learned about the Great Patriotic War and all of our family members who were not sitting there with us because they had died during it. These meals were where I was taught how my parents and our community understood the world and an oral history of what our family had experienced.
