Я хочу научиться говорить по русски

A few days ago a friend sent me the newsletter of the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives/ NYU Special Collections. The mailing was about an event next week to commemorate the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Curious, I checked out the special collections and felt the shock of recognition. The archives contain the records of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship.

The Council was a communist front group that believed that the USSR and the United States should join together in their common fight against fascism in the 1940s. We all know how that worked out. In 1946, the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated it and in 1947 the Council was indicted. It finally closed in 1991 just as the USSR itself was sliding into the dustbin of history. Of course, the Stalinist mindset is now the required worldview on U.S. college campuses and elsewhere. Perhaps that’s what Nikita Khrushchev had in mind when he said “We will bury you,” Мы вас похороним! These days, he might say, "We will give you the ideological tools and strategies so you can bury yourselves." So the flavor of the worst of the USSR is digging in to the current frenzy to unmask spies and wreckers who deviate from the ever-shifting Twitter/media party line. But that's another discussion. 

Anyway, the council helped me realize a long-term dream—to study Russian. I had always been curious about the USSR. I almost took Russian at Princeton, which had a great program, but I got cold feet and took Spanish. My curiosity intensified after I read all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago in 1983. I finally got a Barnes & Noble book on Russian and I earnestly read it for years on the subways. But I always noticed the council’s classified ads on the back page of the Village Voice offering Russian classes. This tempted me, but the name of the group told me it was a front for the Reds. I didn’t want to get on any FBI watch list because of language study. My daring act was buying The English-language Moscow News at a newsstand on West 42nd Street.

My subway reading companion

But starting in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev brought more openness to the USSR, with glasnost and perestroika. The USSR was changing, so I threw caution to the wind and signed up for a beginners class, given at the Ukrainskaya Dom, or Ukrainian House, in the East Village. The teacher was the wife of a Soviet official at the UN.

The challenges were immediate. Russian written in the Cyrillic alphabet, akin to Greek, so I had to learn a lot of new letters. While Russian has some cognates with English, it’s nothing like German or Spanish. And the case structure! I still remember the declensions in this order: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental and prepositional. Perfective verbs, imperfective verbs, soft sounds, hard sounds, words with 30 letters. Pronunciation could be tough. Once I mispronounced the phrase for “crime and punishment," преступление и наказание. The teacher laughed merrily and revealed I had actually said, “Crime and execution!” That must be s a real knee-slapper in Russian.

But I learned something. I wanted to, because I went on a tour of the USSR in September 1987, the high tide of glasnost. I could at least read the street signs. I came back with lots of constructivist-style posters, an art form I greatly admire.

I went on to study Russian at NYU’s school of continuing education. Since then I’ve moved on to other languages. But Russian studies paid dividends. I still have my language books, including this dictionary I got before my 1987 trip—I can pick up on words in Ukrainian, Polish, Czech and Serbo-Croatian based on their connection to Russian. I buy CDs in Russian at Goodwill when I see something that interests me, like the greatest hits of Anna Pugacheva. And when I get bored, I doodle in my loopy cyrillic script. Often I’ll write “ya nhe znayu,” я не знаю, which means I don’t know, or ”ya govaryu na-russkom,” я говорю на русском I speak Russian. If you're a James Bond fan, you'll recognize my scribbling of the phrase and organization called SMERSH from Смерть шпионам (SMERt' SHpionam, "Death to Spies.)" I’ve used simple phrases to banter with Russian barbers in New York and Katonah. They get a kick out of this.

I've also seen how learning some Russian, or any other language, can very quickly connect me with other people. It may be for only a few minutes, but acknowledging somebody in their native language can dent the isolation felt by people outside the dominant language culture. This happened when I visited Israel in 2017; many Russian-speaking immigrants work in jobs such as running the checkrooms of museums. At the Bauhaus Foundation in Tel Aviv, the woman who took my backpack appeared to be Russian, so I simply thanked her and said one or two other things I could manage. She was a human with her own language, perhaps she rarely felt recognized as such. She responded positively. I felt like we connected and that felt good. 

Doodles in Russian, meaning something like "The Party is our eternal work!"

So many thanks, National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. Am I on a list in your archives at NYU? I really should check that out. In the meantime,большое спасибо товарищ wherever you are.

The Day Everything Changed (Musically Speaking)

I’m thinking back to the moment I realized the world had changed irrevocably. No, I’m not referring to the pandemic, which roared into our lives a year ago this month. I’m going further back, to the moment that shifted my musical tastes in a way that continues to this day.

That instant came in 2005 when I somehow landed on a Latin radio station and heard the 2002 song “Soy Mujer” (I am a Woman) by the Puerto Rico-born salsa singer La India (a/k/a Linda  Bell Viera Caballero). The pulsating music and La India’s blazing, passionate voice grabbed my attention. It also helped that my meager knowledge of Spanish enabled me to understand the title.

Her vocal performance was so dramatic and captivating that I had to go get the CD, probably at Tower Records or the Virgin Megastore. Her videos show a bold physical presence that fills the screen and demands attention. She knows how to belt ‘em out, sort of like a salsa version of French singer Edith Piaf. I loved the rest of her music and began checking out every Latin CD I could find at the Westport and Greenwich libraries in Connecticut.

I had already started moving toward being a big fan Latin music. I grew up on the Texas-Mexico border so I knew about that Tex-Mex genre, even if I didn’t pay attention to it at the time. It pulsed in the background, on the other side of the tracks of Mission, Texas. I had albums by El Chicano, Malo and Santana and liked them all (the Tijuana Brass probably doesn't count). A 2004 trip to São Paulo, Brazil supercharged my interest in all the music from there, so much that I started studying Brazilian Portuguese.

I still like other genres, of course: the Great American Songbook, classic jazz, blues, opera, Israeli and most recently a yen for the bewitching and sinuous sounds of Afro-pop. But Latin music now pulses in the background and foreground of my musical devotions.

So what happens when the world changes? We all know too well the impact of the pandemic. What about when La India rocked my music world in four minutes?

This turned my CD collection in a completely different direction. I had never been much for CDs, favoring vinyl. But given the chance to get Latin CDs, I did, starting in Brazil and never stopping. The Goodwill stores in the area provide me some great buys. I even took a Jewish humanitarian trip to Cuba in 2008, where I was excited about scooping up as many CD sets as possible (and I did). I find them always listenable and a great way to improve my Spanish listening skills.

Then, in the years BC—before COVID—was always looking for concerts. Gal Costa at Carnegie Hall to the Texas Tornadoes and also Lila Downs at Celebrate Brooklyn to Los Texmaniacs at Ridgefield’s Ballard Park, I’ve gone far and wide to hear Latin music. Lila Downs, from Mexico, has the big voice and commanding presence of La India, and a very political message. 

Lila Downs in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, 2017

For my walks around Katonah, a favorite podcast is the Latin Alternative, just the right length at an hour for a lunch ramble.

Latin music often has a political and social edge. A documentary series on Netflix, Break It All: The History of Rock in Latin America, covered the musical aspect of political convulsions in Mexico, Chile and Argentina in the 60s to the 80s. A documentary I watched this week showed a concert by Los Tigres del Norte at Folsom Prison, 50 years after Johnny Cash’s epic performance there. I keep looking and learning. 

Los Texmaniacs, 2014

And finally, the music has a retrospective aspect. It connects me with where I grew up. I didn’t pay attention to the border music that surrounded me growing up, but now I do now. I enjoy the accordion-driven sounds of Tex-Mex music and I look forward to heading back to the Rio Grande Valley for a high school reunion and hearing some with old compadres (I call them Landsmen, they call me Carnal, a mashup of Yiddish and Spanish affections). 

Latin music even intersected with that other, more world-historic first moment, when the pandemic began. I had tickets for my partner Naomi and me to see Mariachi Los Camperos at the State University of New York at Purchase—on March 20, 2020. As you can guess, that concert never happened.

Maybe in 2022. If so, we'll be there.