To Be Unafraid is to Tempt Fate

Margarita Gokun Silver confronts fear and identity, tracing her journey as a Jew from the Soviet Union to the United States.

Shekhinah, painted by the author, was inspired by the concept of the divine feminine and by the kabbalistic interpretation of shekhinah as a protective maternal presence during the Israelites’ exile.

Editor’s Note: When I was twelve, my family hosted a violinist and former Soviet refusenik who left behind his career and everything he knew to start over in the United States. He sought freedom and safety, but as Margarita Gokun Silver reflects in this essay, even in a place of refuge, the sense of security for Jews often remains elusive. — Howard Lovy

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When I look for the painting I’ll donate to the Artists Against Antisemitism auction, I come across a piece I began on the day of the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. I’d just finished a new sketch—an analog alarm clock in a bottomless box, open cosmos behind it. Meant to symbolize the bounds of existence, the finiteness of life, the limited space and time we, humans, inhabit on Earth, the sketch stopped being philosophical when a breaking news alert arrived on my phone. Instead, on that day in October 2017, it began to feel like an eerie prophecy.

I’m a Jew and, for me, Jewishness has always been conjoined with fear. To be unafraid is to tempt fate: If you’re too sure of the space you occupy in the society or presume that space is safe, you’ll be proven wrong. The moment you relax and begin to believe that, at last, you are like everyone else is the moment you’ll learn you aren’t—and never will be. It happened to my grandfather’s ancestors during the Spanish Inquisition, it happened to my grandmother’s family during the Russian pogroms, it happened to too many of my relatives during the Holocaust, and it happened to me when I was in third grade.

***

I first learn what it means to be Jewish in a classroom full of nine-year-olds on the Southwestern outskirts of Moscow, USSR in 1978. The drizzle and the low, dark sky of the late October morning make the otherwise cold, fluorescent lights inside the school cozy and warm. Zoya Valentinovna, our teacher, has stepped out for a fifteen-minute recess, no doubt to escape the mayhem of a hundred under-ten pupils running around a hallway. Some of my classmates are playing tic-tac-toe on the black board, the chalk scraping wins and losses. Others are jumping rezinochka, the Chinese rope. And a small group, the one I eventually join, gathers around Zoya Valentinovna’s desk where—unguarded and full of grades and behavior notes—lies the teacher’s journal.

While someone watches at the door, the bravest amongst us—a boy with curly, chestnut hair—opens the thin, graph-ruled notebook. The first stop, a double-page spread, seems of no interest for there are no grades but everyone looks anyway. Our surnames and names are listed in one long, alphabetized column, all written out in the neat cursive of a teacher obsessed with immaculate handwriting.

“Look,” one of the boys says. He points to the column that immediately follows our names—so important it is that it precedes those with our addresses, our home telephone numbers, our birth dates, and the names of our parents. There, spelled out line by line in the same careful script, is each pupil’s natsional’nost’, the ethnic origin. “She is a Jew!” The boy exclaims. His finger hovers around my name. Evreika, a Jewess, is written where his bitten nail touches the paper.

Only my name is marked with that word.

Everyone turns to look. Suddenly, it’s quiet; there is no more scraping of the chalk, and even the noise from the hallway now sounds like it’s emanating from a deep well. Despite the heat blasting off the old radiators, I feel the chill of the Moscow autumn.

I don’t realize it then, but in that split second everything in my life changes. I become the other—the one who doesn’t belong; the hated minority; the only pupil in the class whose name isn’t followed either by the customary ‘Russian’ or by the term for a more tolerated Soviet ethnicity. Although I don’t associate my Jewishness with anything yet, prickly fear spreads all the way to the tips of my fingernails. Something about his pointing and everyone looking makes me lower my gaze, pull my neck deep into my shoulders, and wish that the floor in our shoddily constructed building would cave in.

A month after being ‘discovered’ I stand in a row of freshly minted Young Pioneers and together we make our first Pioneer salute. I’m wearing my new crimson tie over the formal uniform, my cheeks are red with excitement, and I cannot wait to get home to tell my family that now I, too, belong to the greatest youth organization of the Soviet Union. But, instead, that afternoon I scale the stairs of our apartment building in tears. “Igor called me scum,” I sob into my grandmother’s apron while she fries potatoes with onions, my favorite lunch. “He said Jews killed Lenin!”

She sighs and shakes her head. Her chest—the chest of a physician who lived through and survived Stalin’s Doctor’s Plot—lifts and falls in labored breathing. “I’m so very sorry, Ritochka,” she says using the diminutive of my name. “He shouldn’t have done that. We can talk to the teacher about it if you want.” I nod vigorously because at nine I still want the adults to advocate for me, still think my mother’s trip to the school can fix what’s broken, and still believe I can belong. I don’t know that later in the evening my parents and grandparents will decide not to speak to anyone. They understand something I don’t: Jews don’t make waves in the USSR. They don’t speak up because doing so will remind people of who they are and threaten the already precarious space they occupy in the Soviet society.

It’s safer to retreat into the shadows, to hide.

***

Hiding is how my life begins. Several days after my birth when my feeding regimen is still determined by the midwives of the Moscow Roddom #7, my parents name me Rita, with Margarita as the long version. Despite the association with Bulgakov’s famous Master and Margarita, their intentions aren’t to pay homage to one of Russia’s revered novelists. Instead they want two things: to follow the Jewish tradition of naming a child after a deceased relative and to keep me safe from antisemitism for as long as possible.

My name hails from my mother’s favorite grandmother but in order to protect me my parents make a change. Like other Soviet Jews of their generation, they only use the first letter of my great-grandmother’s name. That’s how Rivka—a very Jewish-sounding name—becomes Rita, and that’s how, for the first nine years of my life, I live like everyone else.

After that fateful morning in school zhidovka, the female version of Russia’s preferred slur for Jews, becomes part of my daily routine. But I don’t blame the perpetrators. Instead, every time someone insults me, I ask myself ‘why?’. I clench my fists, feel my heart thump against my chest wall, and will the tears not to spill, all the while thinking why do I have to be Jewish? Why can't I be like everyone else? At home, in lieu of homework, I spend hours concocting plans to turn myself into a Russian, to find a way to fit back in, to banish the anxiety that’s taken root because I no longer belong. My best friend tells me that when she gets her passport at eighteen, she’ll choose to be written as Russian—the ethnicity of her father—instead of that of her mother, a Jewess. “I’ll have more opportunities this way,” she says. I run home to ask my parents if I, too, can do that. They look at each other and shake their heads. My mother hugs me.

Somewhere in the cupboard of their dresser my birth certificate clearly spells out my natsional’nost’ along with those of my parents. Father: Vladimir Abramovich Gokun, a Jew. Mother: Inessa Israilevna Gokun, a Jewess. Because both of my parents are Jewish I don’t get to choose a more palatable natsional’nost’. In my future passport—just like in my mother’s—the line that we call piatii punkt, ‘the fifth chapter,’ will spell the word Jewess as clearly as the teacher’s journal does. Meant to denote a Soviet citizen’s ethnic group, for the Jews of the USSR piatii punkt is more than just a line with information. It’s a synonym for your place in the society—for the space you’ve been permitted to inhabit. No other ethnicity in the Soviet Union uses the words piatii punkt to explain a lack of promotion, a denial of an exit visa, or—as in the case of my grandfather Israel—an inability to find a job in the zero-unemployment environment of the Soviet Union. “Jewish quotas,” someone offers in candor when he is finally hired after a six-month search and a day before his passport would have been branded with ‘a society parasite’ stamp.

***

By the time I graduate from high school I master the art of hiding. I never draw attention to myself by either participating in class or being involved in the after-school activities of Soviet youth organizations. I learn to stare at my notebook when our history teacher equates Zionism, the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, with fascism and everyone turns to look at me. I choose not to date Russian boys to avoid the panoply of break-up insults, zhidovka among them. And I understand that my life will have to stay inside the clearly defined perimeter defined by the Soviet government: Choose a profession deemed safe by the Politburo to entrust to Jews (engineering), follow the official line and slander Israel whenever directed, and only read banned Jewish writers in samizdat.

When in 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the General Secretary of the Communist Party, his policy of glasnost—openness—spills onto the streets of the Soviet Union. Suddenly it’s no longer enough for us, the Soviet Jews, to keep our heads low, our ambitions average, and our voices inaudible. The newspapers, the radio, and the television are now free to say what they want and extremists begin to slither through the cracks of the rotting Soviet monolith. The famous Russian animosity towards Jews, veiled and masqueraded until now, bursts to the surface. Virulent antisemitic organizations blame the Jews for the failures of the Soviet State and the collapsing economy. Some openly call for pogroms. We spend several nights hiding with lights off in our apartment hoping to stave off potential attackers on the nights when those pogroms are announced. Suddenly belonging to a Jewish community—and the space it inhabits—isn’t only trying, shameful, and isolating. It’s now also dangerous.

Tired of scanning newspapers for new threats and feeling like being a Jew is a crime, I want to know what it’s like to be part of a Jewish community without fear and hiding. It’s 1988 and the Reagan-Gorbachev-brokered wave of the Soviet Jewry’s immigration to the United States is underway. It takes me several months to convince my family to join and almost a year to receive exit visas from the Soviet authorities. We take off from Moscow on a one-way Aeroflot flight in October 1989 leaving our red, Soviet passports with their piatii punkt behind and with them—we hope—the fear and the shame.

***

When after months in immigration we land in Manchester, NH, our three beaten up suitcases are the only ones in the luggage window of a deserted airport. A group of people with a “Dobro Pozhalovat”, Welcome, sign waits for us in the airport hallway. They are members of the Nashua Jewish Community and they are there to meet us and introduce us to our new life in America.

The first few weeks pass in a blur. The Refugee Resettlement Committee of the community furnishes our new apartment, mentors my father on his first resume, and secures a generous grant from a local liberal arts college so I can continue my education. While we earn money to buy our first car, members of the committee take turns driving us to the synagogue where, plunged into the midst of a Conservative congregation, we try—and fail—to follow the liturgy. Religious faith is as foreign to us as the American breakfast cereal that comes in a box and requires no cooking. Raised with the ‘religion is the opium of the people’ adage and with the piatii punkt stamp we are Jewish because we’ve been born into a Jewish family, not because we believe in God.

At first I feel like a bad Jew. The anxiety is back and the familiar sense of inhabiting a separate, shameful place overtakes me. Why did I drag my family into exile if here too we won’t be able to belong? But then I remember that I didn’t move to the United States in search of the divine. I moved to find myself, to allow the Jew in me to exist and grow—unencumbered by rules or expectations regardless of whether they came from the Politburo or God. I moved to stop hiding, to not be afraid, to claim my space.

For the next several years I work to squelch the terror that swallows me every time a Jewish topic comes up in a non-Jewish crowd. I invite non-Jews to join me in celebrating Hannukah and I fry latkes for them. My Passover Seders include Catholics, Muslims, and agnostics and we take turns reading from a Haggadah as unfamiliar to them as it is to me. With time my breath stops turning shallow and my stomach no longer clamps when I mention my piatii punkt to gentiles. The zhidovka space so long the symbol of isolation and shame is gone — and the fear is gone with it.

***

Or so I’d thought.

Back in my studio I look at the painting of the alarm clock and think about how closely my family’s story mirrors stories of other Jews. Stories of never being sure, of always wondering—and wandering—of forever being afraid. By leaving the Soviet Union I sought to change that story, to shift that narrative, to finally settle in a place where nailing a mezuzah to the exterior doorframe didn’t generate angst. Yet today, three decades since I left, my fear and apprehension are at all times high. My mezuzah is indoors and the old thinking is back. I scold myself for relaxing, for assuming with too much confidence that we, Jews, could be like everyone else, for becoming too comfortable.

And then I remember why I’m in the studio going through my paintings.

The piece I plan to donate to the Artists Against Antisemitism auction is named Shekhinah. I painted it over ten years ago, inspired by the concept of the divine feminine and by the kabbalistic interpretation of shekhinah as a protective maternal presence during the Israelites’ exile. Hyperbole be damned, but the year after October 7^th has been marked by a sort of exile: in both disguised and direct manner Jews have been ejected from many spaces. Those of us who are Zionists and believe in Israel’s right to exist have been put on lists, disinvited from events, and chastised in public, not unlike during the famous prorabotkas, or rituals of public shaming, in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. Calls for boycotts of Israeli institutions are common and often headlined by famous people and existing as a Jew has once again become a danger. How appropriate then that my Shekhinah will have the honor of being part of an initiative spearheaded to counteract the current antisemitic fad?

And so, as I wrap the canvas in bubble wrap for its eventual journey, I decide that to be unafraid is not to tempt fate.

To be unafraid is to never have to hide again.

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Margarita Gokun Silver is a writer and an artist living in Madrid, Spain. She’s the author of an award-winning essay collection, I Named My Dog Pushkin, and her other work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, BBC, and the Atlantic, among others. Please sign up for her Substack Mastery and Margarita to follow her and her writing.

Five tiny delights

• Cup of tea in the afternoon

• Pancakes on a Saturday morning

• People watching in a Madrid cafe

• Greeting a dog on the street

• A glass of wine and a tapa with a friend

Five tiny Jewish delights

• Latkes (regular and sweet potato ones) on Hannukah

• People singing together during Friday night services

• Challah when it's just out of the oven

• Jewish comedy

• Making a Russian Napoleon cake from matzah during Passover