The *truly* heimishe food
Food and Jews in the waning days of the Soviet Union
Heimishe: a word that means “homey” in Yiddish, but speaks to a greater sense of “coziness” or of home, hearth and family. I hear it used colloquially all the time; a small informal shabbat dinner with just immediate family might be described as such, etc. But perhaps that word has never better described the food culture of one group: Russian Jews in the waning days of the Former Soviet Union (FSU). I had the honour of speaking to Olga Zelzburg Alterman recently, a fellow Jewish educator, and book-obsessive, about growing up in the 1980s in the Soviet Union, and how her story of food, culture and family reflects broader trends of Jews in the FSU.
Judaism and Communism is a complicated subject matter; many early Bolsheviks were Jewish (by ancestry anyway) and there was a perception that Jews were disproportionately involved in revolutionary activity. It should be said that it kind of makes sense that many Jews in the Tsarist Empire were deeply discontented with the Russian policy of forcing them to live on the farthest reaches of the Empire, closest to the Western frontier through which the Russian Empire was usually invaded. They were less than enthusiastic about the Tsarist cantonist system, in which Jews as young as 10 were taken into compulsory 30-40 year terms of army service. They were especially displeased with the state-sponsored pogroms, like the one in Kishinev in 1903, in which Jews were slaughtered by people who were anxious to ensure Jews remembered their place, as if it was ever easy to forget. So, if Jews had been disproportionately involved in early Communist activity, that’s perhaps understandable. But once in power, the Communist notion that all were equal and no one could persecute another based on religion or race became yet another big tent statement that somehow excluded the Jews. Jews overwhelmingly became associated with being “wealthy merchants,” or “Kulaks,” and once the State of Israel was formed, Jews became targeted in whole other ways.
Izabella Tabarovsky’s excellent article in Tablet recently illuminates how the exact phrases, double-standards, and framing of the conflict is straight out of Soviet Russia in the 1960s. Because of course, Israel and therefore Jews were at play in Cold War dynamics, and became an extension of American “imperialism” in comparison to the USSR’s “love of peace”.1
One of the strange elements of Jewish life in the Soviet Union is that the identity of being Jewish and the actions of being Jewish were often divorced from religious or cultural practices. Olga describes how on the first night of Passover, they would go to someone’s house (a covert synagogue) and eat matzo; sometimes she would bring them to school and share with friends. They wouldn’t maintain being kosher for passover throughout the week, but there was this symbolic eating of a cracker. This, of course, was part and parcel of the Soviet insistence on there being no religious practice, and Jews who were raised in the generations after the war often seemed to have [what we would identify as Jewish religiously-based] traditions that they understood as specific to families and done at home.
But more importantly is how much the term heimishe came to describe food culture and practices in the last decades of the Soviet period. The Soviet Union had always had a shaky relationship with food security, with the many wars (WWI, Civil War, Great Patriotic War) both demanding greater food supplies while simultaneously taking out much of its farmland and workers. There were many famines, some an unavoidable catastrophe, some — like the Ukrainian one — that had a little “help" from Stalin. But by the 1980s, getting certain foods became nigh-on-impossible. With economic anxieties and supply chain issues caused by the shift into perestroika, grocery stores were often empty — like early days of COVID empty, except presumably without everyone hoarding the toilet paper.
Thus, food became particularly heimishe, as it was often grown, cooked and eaten at home. At their dachas, Olga’s mother and grandmother (as well as everyone else they knew) grew vegetables to supplement their diet among the massive food shortages. In 2001, a study estimated that as much as 50% of the food actually produced and eaten in the Soviet Union was grown in these small familial agriculture plots. These gardens produced beets, cabbages, beans, cucumbers, and of course the number one subsistence vegetable: potatoes. Apples, blueberries and other fruit grew on trees and bushes. Much of it was pickled or preserved for the winter. Food became something almost entirely exclusive to the home: it was grown at home, it was eaten at home. The notion that you would go out to eat? A fantasy. Olga says that she went out to eat once in her entire life (prior to leaving the FSU, of course). Perhaps a different meaning of heimishe, a less idealized and nostalgic version of home-cooking, where the cook also has painstakingly grown almost everything that they’re eating as well — something perhaps uncommon in other modern industrialized economies by the 1980s.
What was the most interesting is how many Jews came from the FSU to Israel when they were finally allowed to, and how much chaos that threw Israeli society into. What defined a “Jew” in the FSU was entirely by bloodline, which is very different from how one defined a “Jew” by halacha/ Jewish law. But most relevant to us in this blog was the way in which pork was a staple of the diet in the FSU, Jewish or not. Pork is particularly taboo in Israel, for so many reasons — both the religious prescriptions against it, but also how that dietary restriction was weaponized against Jews throughout Europe. Enemies from Spanish Inquisitors to Nazis forced the Jews to eat pork on pain of death, adding a salty splash of humiliation into an already gaping wound. For the first few years of the state, the concept of eating pork was considered a “national crime.” In Israel today, even secular Israelis who follow no other real laws often don’t eat pork. But in the 1990s when 1.6 million Jews emigrated from the FSU to Israel, and butchers from said communities wanted to import pork as they had never been raised with that proscription — well, all culinary hell broke loose. People raged. Others, who had emigrated decades before, covertly acknowledged that they weren’t 100% upset to have a taste of childhood back. Now, one can find pork in restaurants in Tel Aviv, although it’s still not widespread as many still consider it taboo. Well, at least there’s one thing that many Arabs and Jews could agree on.
Olga loves to eat matzo and could survive on it all week, and loves to make Russian recipes for her kids (provided you can find Russian buckwheat, of course — I’ve been reliably informed that the stuff sold in North America is comparatively garbage). Her tastes of home have become increasingly bittersweet in the last number of years. She grew up in a town on the border of Ukraine, and Putin’s territorial aggression from 2014 was significantly worsened when he invaded Ukraine in 2022. Her family was able to get out of the war zone and get to Israel, only for a few short months later, have that turned into another conflict. How interesting that Jews historically and contemporarily live in two of the biggest bloodlands in the world.
The food of Jews in Eastern Europe is overwhelmingly a food representative of poverty. Despite this idea that Jews are “wealthy” and “control the banks,” statistically Jews were as impoverished as their neighbours, particularly in Russia. What’s perhaps most poignant is that the lifestyle experienced by many Jews in the waning days of the Soviet Union, where food was involved, is not functionally dissimilar to the food traditions in pre-war shtetls, a life that is often seen with rose-tinted-nostalgic glasses now. But for those who experienced some elements of that through the post-war period, they view it with considerably less fondness — except perhaps the joy that always comes with being surrounded by family. I have a kitchen garden myself and pride myself on growing as much as I can to feed my family in the growing season, but — and here’s a crucial but — I don’t have to. If I wanted to, I could walk to a grocery store and buy eggplants there instead of pulling them from my garden. And maybe that makes all the difference.
In 1967, Communist leaders from around the world, came together at a conference, and the head of the American Communist Party argued for “framing the Arab-Israeli conflict in terms of colonialism versus national liberation and social progress,” equating Israel with Nazi Germany, casting the Jew as “occupier and tormentor,” reframing Palestinian violence as “resistance” that was “righteous and justified,” and comparing them to South Africa. Which is basically word-for-word how Jews are presented by the far-left today. Needless to say, Jews in the FSU were hardly doing “great.”