Celebrating opposites

By Liba Vaynberg

There’s another Megillah story—one in which Haman is not minister to King Ahasuerus, and we don’t make cookies in the shape of his ears (or hat). Instead, he’s a Georgian (as in the country, not the state) revolutionary born to a poor family who goes on to secretly edit a newspaper whose name translates to “Truth.” He is dogged in his pursuit of what he deems to be a politically perfect nation. He publishes his thoughts on “national-cultural autonomy” in a pamphlet under a self-anointed pseudonym that stuck: “K. Stalin.”

In a way, my sisters and I grew up with Joseph Stalin. I don’t mean that either my mother or my father were Stalin-esque (though I’m sure, as a teenager, that I complained loudly that they were). I mean that my mother and father, immigrants from Azerbaijan and Belarus, respectively, were the products of both Russianization and Sovietization. My father can quote stanzas of Pushkin’s poetry full of yellow pillboxes and dilettantes who should know better; my mother still remembers the epitaph by Gorky that inspired her medical school statement: “Love the book, the fountain of knowledge.”

My first language was Russian and not Hebrew even though I was Jewish—something most of my classmates couldn’t understand. And, honestly, for a while, it confused me, too. The first stories I heard were dense with softly coded language: fairytales with grim endings where magical fish punish you for wishing for too much and witches live in huts on chicken legs and warn painfully dumb princes. I have learned that identity is a tightrope.

As Jews, my parents were simultaneously bound to and expelled from the Soviet Union. Always in hiding, always in plain sight. When they arrived in America, they were met with new questions; the Americans that had clinked tzedaka boxes to save Masha & Misha from Soviet antisemitism were unimpressed with these ritual-ignorant refugees with whom they seemed to have so little in common. These new Jews didn’t read Hebrew or speak English, for that matter. They had been strangers in the motherland; now, they were strangers in a strange land.

My mother and father searched for a Jewish school in Los Angeles for their daughters—they hadn’t grown up with the luxury of labels we find familiar here… Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist, etc. They thought all Jews were simply that: Jews. It wasn’t a denomination—it was a liability, and they gambled everything for a chance to live in a new world where they could raise their children safely. One synagogue asked for a big check first, and the other asked for nothing. That’s how we ended up at the Chabad of South Bay.

A year ago, my husband Zev and I called my father to wish him a happy Purim—it’s one of the few holidays he knows well.

“You know, in the days leading up to Purim, Stalin executed Jewish doctors and planned to wipe out all the Jews,” my father began.

I chimed in, “Oh, I know.”

“But,” my father continued, “did you know he died on Purim?”

Zev pulled out his phone right away, eager to confirm—“Really? What year did he die?”

“1953. March 5,” my father answered immediately.

Zev reported his results: “Hmmm, that wasn’t quite Purim. Purim was a few days earlier—March 1?”

“Ah well—that’s the day he had the hemorrhage,” my father answered.

Zev turned to me, laughing: “Now that’s a Talmudic response.”

Stalin aimed to rip the tree out by the roots—in the name of Marxism, he demanded a “cultural revolution.” Internally belligerent but apparently soft-spoken otherwise, Stalin suppressed humanity in the traditional ways despots do—not only inducing famines and enacting mass executions but also demolishing cathedrals and censoring artists. In other words, he not only ended lives, he made lives unlivable. He insisted on atheism, but the atheists this Haman created were constantly dancing with the devil.

My mother is a doctor, and my father is an engineer: these are the two professions that were easily available to Jews. I’m an artist now who firmly believes that sometimes disguises are the best reminders of what can’t be hidden. I never set out consciously to write Jewish plays, but my faith and my questions guide me. Judaism is a kind of ubiquitous bedrock for me. Dig deep enough, and it’s there. A renewable resource.

Before the pandemic, I co-wrote a play with characters who unintentionally resembled my parents so clearly that my therapist told me I was playing my mother. Oy. I squirmed at the suggestion: This isn’t about my family! It’s an adaptation of a Tolstoy story that’s set in the Soviet Union! That’s all! But in costume, I found her. Every night, I would listen to the man who played my husband talk about finally escaping the Soviet Union and learning in America:

“I stood at the window of the train, holding a book and a boy, and I finally saw the forest.

The trees waved.

They said ‘goodbye’ and ‘hello’ at the same time.

They tell me now that’s a Hebrew word for peace.”

Perhaps that’s what peace is: “goodbye” and “hello” at once. And that’s what we celebrate as Jews when we explore opposites on Purim when our expectations are upset and our world is overturned for the better in ways we could never have imagined. V’nahafoch hu—“the opposite happened”—and so it did: my parents left the Soviet Union, and now they are far from the pillars of grey socialism. My mother dreamed of a country where you could wear a silk dress and buy oranges year-round, and my father never thought he’d hear a shofar. And, now, I doubt they can wrap their minds around the fact that their daughter is an artist… writing about them. They still carry those memories, still tell those stories of the “opposite,” still remind us of their Haman, lest we forget how lucky we are.

—Liba Vaynberg is a playwright and actor who has performed in television and theater and was described by the New York Times as “wonderfully real and raw.” She studied Biology at Yale before getting her MFA at Columbia. Her plays have been performed off-Broadway, and she is currently working on The Gett: A Young Wife’s Tale for Rattlestick Theater. A regular contributor to Lilith Magazine, she lives in Tucson, AZ, and Bronx, NY with her husband Zev and their dog Vera

Liba Vaynberg (left) and Emily Perkins perform The Russian & The Jew at The Tank Off-Broadway 2019 * Photo: Moti Margolin

William Vaynberg and Marina Raikhel and their children Lena (second from left) and Liba, before their third daughter Ida was born

Liba Vaynberg and the late actor Ed Asner in The Soap Myth at B’nai Jeshurun Synagogue in New York City

Liba Vaynberg photographed in Tucson by Jacqueline Soffer