Here is a snobby review of a seemingly snobby book claiming to have as a goal to explain "Russians" to Israeli cultural elites. Both are written by Russian immigrants desperately trying to fit in. While we do not learn anything new about "Russians" we can learn a whole deal about the culture of pretense and assumed superiority that is the culture of today's Israeli elites.
Haaretz:
Gloomy ghosts
By Yulia Lerner"Atem ve'anakhnu: lihiot russim beyisrael" ("The Pilgrim Soul: Being a Russian in Israel") by Ilana Gomel, Kinneret Zmora-Bitan, 175 pages, NIS 74
Once a colleague of mine - a Ph.D. student in philosophy, a man in his thirties - approached me in the library and struck up a conversation about Russians in Israel. He was troubled by the fact that a million people with a culture different from his own had come to Israel and were sitting in our midst, "and nothing has been done. We have to learn about their culture. Russian literature - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin - should be added to the school curriculum."
"Dostoevsky should be part of the curriculum in any case," I answered. "But I doubt it would help you feel any closer to the Russians in Israel, who seem so different. Actually, I think there are other ways."
"Do you have Russian friends?" I asked him. No, he replied. "Are there any Russians at the parties and gatherings you go to?" No, he replied. "Have you ever had a Russian girlfriend?" Again he said no. "But to tell you the truth," he added, "when I meet a girl, it doesn't matter how pretty she is. The minute I hear a Russian accent, her beauty diminishes by half."
I stood there with my mouth hanging open, at a loss for words.
If we were having that conversation today, I would urge my colleague to read Ilana Gomel's book, "Atem ve'anakhnu: lihiot russim beyisrael" ("The Pilgrim Soul: Being a Russian in Israel"). I'm sure he would love it. It would provide him with the basics of "Russian cultural mythology," the vocabulary of the "Russian cultural experience," and a supply of positive and negative stereotypes for dealing with these one million people sitting in his country. The book would give him a supposedly indigenous, and definitely scholarly, basis for an attitude that he had already adopted - to love Dostoevsky but not Russians, to teach the beauty and grandeur of Russian culture in school, where it is important, but to avoid contact with real-life Russians, with their Russian accents. On top of that, he could easily identify with the author on the most intimate level. She also swears she will never fall in love with a man from her country of birth.
"The Pilgrim Soul" does not profess to be empirical research, nor is it a work of fiction. It is an essay-like work, personal in tone, in a genre that is quite common and accepted in Russian intellectual circles. [link]
posted by: jrtelegraph
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