A MIXED BLESSING FOR ISRAEL

Anne Applebaum believes that the

final wave of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe is bad news for the Middle East

Lvov `SOVDEP,' said Ilyusha. 'Or you can also say, Bardak.'

It was evening, and the sun was setting with the purplish, greenish, pinkish bril- liance which it only attains in the vicinity of large chemical plants. Ilyusha, skinny and street-wise, was teaching me Russian slang for 'Soviet Union'. The first word, he explained, implies a shabby institution, an endless bureaucracy, greyness and ugli- ness. The latter translates more simply. It means 'whorehouse'.

We were walking beneath the light of gas-lamps, down a street of shabby houses and stinking gutters. Lvov, down-at-heel and dirty in the daytime, becomes empty and dangerous in the evening. 'Of course I will miss Europe, I know I will. But this isn't really Europe any more, you see, and it's becoming less like Europe all the time. After a year or two, there will be nothing to come back to anyway.'

His boxes were in the post, his plane ticket was waiting in Warsaw, his bus ticket to Poland was purchased. The idea was to go via Krakow, to trade a few things on the way. Ilyusha didn't want to arrive in the Promised Land without cash.

`The Promised Land!' He rolled his eyes as if it were an off-colour joke, and broke into Ha-Tikva, the Israeli national anthem, which he knew by heart. 'I am studying, you see, I am going to be a good Israeli, better than the Israelis themselves. We Soviets have been taught how to fit right in. Yes, sir,' and he raised his hand in a salute. 'Yes, sir, if they want me to fight, I will fight, if they want me to convert, I will convert. Anything to get out of this filthy Bardak.' Odd how the world grows smaller all the time, how quickly the tragedy of one nation influences the tragic fate of another. As the Soviet Union crumbles, Israel becomes the beneficiary of what will be the very last wave of Jews who will ever leave eastern Europe; as 70 years of a northern tyranny collapse into hunger, hatred, and anarchy, a clutch of new citi- zens arrive in a tiny corner of the Middle East, where they become bargaining chips in the competition for control over one of the most coveted patches of land on earth. The Israeli Prime Minister travels the world looking for money to feed and house them; Palestinians protest that they are being moved into occupied territory. So far, the Soviet Jews themselves have just kept quiet, while others decide things for them.

Much has been written about the more sentimental aspects of this great emigra- tion, and rightly so. It is undoubtedly the death rattle of an ancient civilisation, whose customs will hereafter survive only in peculiar pockets of New York and Jerusalem, and whose language, Yiddish, will for evermore be confined to the realm of obscure scholarship. People with all manner of odd and archaic lives are join- ing the stream of émigrés: Bukovina Jews who survived the Nazis by hiding in barns, Weathcliff?' Byelorussian Jews who still follow the great Hassidic rabbis, Ukrainian Jews with tat- toos on their arms, Russian Jews who changed their surnames and joined the Party, Ruthenian Jews who never left their tiny mountain villages until now. With such personal histories, many among them will surely be poets, philosophers, and states- men. An undue proportion are already musicians — Israelis now joke about the special cranes needed to haul all the pianos off the boats from Odessa. The number of doctors, engineers and scientists now flood- ing into Israel is also vast, comparable only to the great migrations to America in the 1930s.

But the facts, as they say, remain the facts. Whatever loyalties drew earlier immi- grants to the deserts of Palestine, the main motives for emigration now are intense hatred of the Soviet Union and economic desperation, which amount to the same thing. With a few exceptions, this is not a generation which grew up regarding Israel as its homeland, nor is it a generation which ever felt itself culturally or spiritually Jewish. The majority of those who felt strongly about Judaism found ways out ear- lier, either during the emigration of the 1970s or at the beginning of the current wave. Among those leaving now, there are no starry-eyed idealists and few who con- sider Israel to be the special morally excep- tional state that it once believed itself to be.

In practice, this means that when those preparing to leave sit around kitchen tables discussing their homeland-to-be, they speak not of a return 'home' to the Jewish state, but rather comfort themselves with the belief that they won't be expected to assimilate too much. You don't really have to learn Hebrew, they say, everyone speaks Russian. You can get Soviet television, you can buy Soviet newspapers. There are restaurants that serve Russian food. You can buy sausage, it's not forbidden. After a while, the heat doesn't seem so bad.

It also means that Israel is rarely any- one's first choice. As it always has been, America is the destination of preference. But America, faced with a flood of applica- tions, continues to accept only those desig- nated as 'political refugees'. To obtain political refugee status, the embassy requires applicants to answer a series of written questions, describing the forms of oppression to which they have been sub- jected. Nine out of ten say the same thing, sometimes using, word for word, the same language: someone called me a name at school, someone called my child a name at school, and so on. While it is true that some Soviet Jews suffered for years, forbid- den to practise their religion and fired from their jobs, the majority of those have left already.

Those leaving now may have suffered the occasional insult, but there are others in this part of the world who have suffered more — say, Armenians who live in Azer-

baijan. As everyone knows, it doesn't mat- ter so much what you say to the American embassy, anyway. What matters is whether or not you have a relative in America — and the more relatives the better — who will sign your refugee application and promise to look after you upon arrival, thereby relieving the burden placed on overworked immigration officials in New York.

America's strict rules mean that more than one million Soviet Jews will make the journey to Israel, a country of less than five million people. The proportions are staggering. Already it is clear that the character of these new emigrants, their habits and their attitudes, will change Israel forever.

To begin with — and this is already beginning to bother the Jerusalem rabbis — many of the immigrants, perhaps the majority, are technically not Jewish at all. Ilyusha, my Lvov acquaintance, has one Polish grandmother, one Russian grand- mother, one Tartar grandfather and one Jewish grandfather. The Jewish grandfa- ther shaved his beard, ate pork, and became a communist in 1921, and Ilyusha grew up going to Catholic church on Sun- days. He was granted a visa nevertheless because, although the Jewish religion requires that the maternal grandmother be Jewish, the state of Israel takes anyone who can prove the existence of one Jewish grandparent, male or female, assimilated or faithful. That was Hitler's definition of `Jew', so that is Israel's.

I'll fit right in,' Ilyusha told me. 'Root- less cosmopolitan, that's me.'

At least Ilyusha is legitimate according to Israeli law. For others, lack of the requi- site Jewish forebear is simply another obstacle to be overcome. Jewish girls now find themselves surrounded by suitors, and Jewish men are widely sought after as hus- bands. Even without love a wedding can always be arranged, or a document pur-

chased. In most major Soviet cities, driving licences are for sale, university degrees are for sale, even medical degrees are for sale, so why not a grandfather's birth certificate, too? The ironies are lost on no one. To have the word 'Jewish' stamped in your passport was once a great liability. Now it is a ticket out. Jewish or not, the emigrants do have something in common: they undoubtedly figure among the Soviet Union's most energetic and entrepreneuri- al citizens. So long out of favour, the theo- ries of Social Darwinism should get a boost from the current emigration wave. Lvov, for example, has running water only a few hours every day, streets unpaved for 60 years, a housing waiting-list of 350,000, and a city government which can't make up its mind as to whether private property is a good thing or not. It doesn't take that much intelligence to realise that the place won't be fixed in one man's lifetime, but it takes quite a lot of stupidity to want to stay there.

But Soviet-style entrepreneurial spirit and its Western counterpart are not at all the same thing. Forging documents is only the beginning, and Israel may well be under-prepared for the morals and busi- ness practices which its wave of new citi- zens will bring. People who work hard, people who have nine-to-five jobs in offices — people, in other words, who con- stitute the middle class — are also people who are mocked in the Soviet Union. Lying, cheating the state, a reliance on thugs to ensure that the 'rules' are kept, extortion and the game of 'protection money' — these are the ways of getting ahead here. Any Sicilian would recognise them.

Already, the Soviet-Jewish underground reaches from Moscow through Odessa to Jerusalem and back. New émigrés are used to sending information to old ones, Jews `inside' trade goods with Israelis 'outside', whether based in the Middle East or Europe. For the moment, it is all fairly small-scale — smuggled antiques, money- changing, and so on — but as the numbers multiply, so will the number of scams.

Even if the invasion of former black-mar- ket dealers doesn't change the nature of the Israeli state, the far-right politics of the newcomers will. There is no more fertile ground for the growth of racism than a totalitarian state: if respect for the individ- ual is zero in the Soviet Union, then respect for the individual whose nationality is different from one's own is minus zero. Over the last 70 years, many unwelcome nations in this part of the world have been murdered, deported or forbidden to speak their native language. After a few genera- tions of such treatment, the nation in ques- tion generally disappears — the way, say, the Crimean Tartars disapeared from the Crimea, after Stalin sent them to Siberia. It takes very little imagination for the average Soviet to point out that the Israelis might consider applying the same methods to the Arabs.

Ilyusha himself wondered exactly that, but came to the conclusion that the Israelis had chosen a far cleverer route: the impor- tation of Soviet Jews. 'Everyone knows that when we arrive we are desperate, we will work for less money than the Arabs. A few shekels are a fortune for us, so no job is too dirty. The more Soviet Jews, the less jobs for Arabs, the faster the Arabs disap- pear, the faster the Arabs migrate some- where else. Simple.'

If the earlier generations of East. Euro- pean Israelis were children of a soft, ideal- istic socialism, the current wave are the by-product of the vengeful, unhappy nationalism that reigns in the Soviet Union in the place where communism used to be. While they will certainly help Israel with its demographic problems, their arrival may prove to be a mixed blessing. Rather than hope, they bring more cynicism to the Mid- dle East.