THE PEOPLE’S MUSIC

On a sunny spring day, Alik and I walked down one of Kiev’s grandest streets, with its billowing fin de siècle facades, through an archway, past a shoe repair stand, and into a yard, a classic Kiev dvor, covered in bright graffiti.

Zakhar was in his late twenties, athletic but gaunt, with high cheekbones, sunken blue eyes, a Roman nose that had been broken more than once, and a large collection of scars. He wore neon-green plastic sunglasses, a shiny thrift shop blazer with shoulder pads, swim trunks, and the cheap slip-on plastic sandals favored by middle-aged Ukrainian women. A few other languid art-hipster types were lounging around in similar attire.

Alik introduced us in Russian. As he looked me over, Zakhar reminded Alik in Ukrainian that he didn’t much like the Russian language. Alik told him that I, “Sopha,” only spoke Russian; Zakhar found this explanation acceptable, and showed us around.

The central piece in the garage was a new work of Zakhar’s, of which he was very proud. He had stolen a dumpster, spray-painted it gold, and lined the inside with blue bathroom tiles. The result was strangely beautiful. We took turns having our pictures taken inside the dumpster, sitting on a little tiled stool. We looked at some of the other art, in which the male member played a prominent role. One work was a video of someone watching porn on a cell phone while standing in an art gallery.

Zakhar took us back outside, to a rusted blue car. “What do you think of my car?” he asked. “I like to sit in it and think things over. Everything works but the engine.”

He sat down in it and demonstrated. “Onward!” he shouted, pointing into the future like Lenin.

I found Zakhar fascinating, but hard to talk to. I tried to make a joke about garage rock, but he had never heard of it; I tried to explain about New York artist lofts but couldn’t make an impression. I wasn’t sure whether the problem was the language barrier or the cultural distance. Still, we got along. He and his friends fed me homemade jam and gave me knowing looks, then invited me and Alik to a psychiatric hospital to look at a room where they’d been asked to paint a mural. But Alik had another engagement, and I wasn’t ready to go to the mental hospital unaccompanied.

A few days later Zakhar took me to the Botanical Garden, where he explained that he was deeply depressed because someone had broken into his garage and stolen his dumpster and his bicycle. (They didn’t bother with his car.) He suspected that his enemies were to blame, but he wasn’t sure which ones.

“Do you like plavlenyi cheese?” he asked, cheering up.

“What is that?”

“It’s the cheapest and worst kind of cheese. We always used to eat it in the Soviet Union. It’s delicious! I’ll give you some as a gift.” He took a damp, foil-wrapped square from his backpack, along with a liter of Ukrainian beer. I took the beer but declined the cheese.

Zakhar told me that he’d grown up partly in an internat, a Soviet boarding school, because his mom wanted to “party,” as he put it. She took him home on Sundays. When I met him, he was living sometimes with his girlfriend, Alla, a Russian who had inherited an apartment in Moscow and lived on its rent in Kiev, and sometimes with his mother. Zakhar bragged that he’d never read a book. I think this was an exaggeration, but he certainly wasn’t one for book learning. His specialty was a knowledge of social categories and types, a watchfulness obscured by his expert performance of the role of the post-Soviet madman who can’t be held responsible for his actions.

Several years after we met, I discovered Zakhar’s prototype: Pyotr Mamonov, front man of the 1980s experimental Russian rock band Zvuki Mu. Maybe Zakhar knew his fate as soon as he looked in the mirror: Mamonov, too, has a Roman nose, high cheekbones, fair hair, deep-set eyes, and a slender, broad-shouldered build. In videos from the 1980s, he stands rigidly onstage, staring into the distance, twitching like he’s been possessed, or at least electrocuted. Like Zakhar, Mamonov was heavily scarred by attacks and accidents. During a fight in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Gardens in the 1960s, somebody stabbed him with a sharpened file and broke his ribcage, putting him in a coma and leaving a scar above his heart. On walks in the park, he’d run into walls at full speed just to see how people would react.

One onlooker described Mamonov’s performance style as “Russian folk hallucination,” and it was clear that, regardless of any resemblance to Western punk or New Wave musicians, he was doing something distinctly Russian. Driving audiences insane in Moscow and Leningrad, Kharkiv, Vladivostok, and Tashkent, he was the violent, alcoholic patron saint of Russia’s musical “Red Wave.” Gorbachev’s dry laws almost killed him, as he resorted to drinking first cologne, then solvent. But in the 1990s, after he’d been picked up by Brian Eno, he converted to Orthodox Christianity and moved to a village. In Pavel Lungin’s 2006 film The Island, he plays a man who shot his friend in the Second World War and ends up living as a monk on a remote island in northern Russia, trying to expiate his sins.

In 2009 Zakhar hadn’t found God or attracted any pilgrims, but as a lifelong Kiev scenester, he knew pretty much everyone in town. One night he introduced me to another famous Kiev character. Topor, whose name means “ax” in Russian, was a self-described “charismatic Moldovan,” an accordionist, singer, and leader of a street band called Toporkestra. Tall and slender, with long, thick black hair, a black beard, large black eyes, and pale skin, Topor looked a lot like Jesus, or at least like an Orthodox priest; crazy people and drunks often approached him for help. He had a similar allure for old women and little children.

Topor told us that he had been hired to play at the birthday party of the grandson of a “gypsy baron” outside Kiev, and invited us to come along. We got in his car, along with a pair of college students we’d acquired while standing on the street.

“But Sophie, you have to say you’re Zakhar’s wife,” Topor warned as he drove, “or else the gypsies might try to steal you.”

We drove along the highway that led to the airport and pulled off onto a rutted dirt road. The gypsy baron’s village was full of cheap suburban palaces with ornate woodwork and bare concrete steps, more finished versions of the smuggler castles Igor had pointed out to me on the western Ukrainian border. We were greeted with great enthusiasm by our hosts, who brought us into a vestibule with a door on either side. On the left was a dining room, with the men of the family seated around a long wooden table. On the right was a living room, where the women of the family sat quietly. Topor introduced me and Zakhar as man and wife, and our hosts invited us all into the dining room to sit with the men.

Topor sang a few Balkan songs, accompanying himself on his battered red accordion, and then the men started to sing, in order of age. First was the birthday boy, who was only about nine years old but sang very beautifully, in Romani, the language of the Roma, who are usually called “gypsies” in Russian and Ukrainian. They worked their way up through the family, from the adolescents to young adults to the middle-aged, until the grandfather of the family sang most beautifully of all. The songs were interspersed with toasts; the women kept bringing in more food and drink, swift and silent.

“I don’t think you’re really married to that guy,” said the Roma man nearest to me, gesturing toward Zakhar.

Zakhar had become drunk and was beginning to yell. I defended our marriage only halfheartedly.

“If you’re married, then why don’t you have a ring?” my neighbor asked. I told him that in my country we didn’t wear wedding rings.

He laughed and pulled his chair closer to me.

“Let’s get married,” he said. Although he was very good looking, I explained that this was impossible.

“I think we should get married.” He smiled and leaned closer.

The baron was already paying Topor, who seemed to have noticed my plight and become aware that it was only a matter of time until Zakhar took off his clothes and got a beating. (At a Roma wedding in Moldova, he had once behaved so badly that he’d been locked in the cellar for the night.) We went outside, along with all the men. Topor played another song and then hustled us into the van. In my youth and ignorance, I felt that I’d had an encounter with the wild, soulful gypsies, just barely escaping a bridenapping. In retrospect, I realize that the man who asked to marry me had only been teasing; with my drinking and carousing and transparently unmarried state, I was presenting myself as a woman who could be acquired without commitment.

Topor had no Roma roots, but for Ukrainian purposes he was close enough. Apart from Balkan and Roma music, he played Ukrainian folk songs, ironic covers of Soviet pop, “chansons” of the Russian underworld, and Jewish wedding tunes.

Toporkestra’s musicians always had vyshyvanky, traditional embroidered Ukrainian blouses, in their kits, to be thrown on whenever there was a need to perform Ukrainian identity. This situational, almost cynical use of the vyshyvanka as a declaration of national pride was nothing new. In the nineteenth century the Russian Empire’s “Ukrainophile” intelligentsia was forbidden any kind of real organization, whether political or cultural. This meant that the only legal way for them to express their Ukrainian identity was through their choice of language, music, dance, food, hairstyle, and clothing. Fusing Ukrainian peasant and Cossack elements, the intelligentsia devised a private subculture, one that did not correspond to any single existing culture but rather constituted an imaginary space, reserved, for most people, for festive occasions—holiday Ukrainianness, you might call it.

“Going to the people” in their vyshyvanky, looking to discover the pure folk culture of the Ukrainian village, young nineteenth-century “Ukrainophiles” expected to blend in, but they didn’t fool anyone. Some older peasants believed that the tsar had punished former landlords for their oppression of the peasants by forcing them to wear “ordinary clothes”; others believed that the gentlemen in peasant costume were spies. They didn’t appreciate the playacting, especially when gentlemen in peasant garb came into the fields to imagine how it felt to be oppressed by a landlord—who might very well be the gentleman’s father, the one who had paid for his vyshyvanka. Celebrating one’s Ukrainian identity was, for the most part, the luxury of those who had money and education.

AT THE END of the summer, Topor invited me to come with his band to the “mushroom festival” in Vorokhta, a small Hutsul town in the Carpathians.

“Is it a hippie thing?” I asked, thinking of the wrong kind of mushroom.

“No,” he laughed, “it’s mushroom-picking season. People will listen to the music, get drunk, and then pick mushrooms.”

This seemed, if anything, stranger to me than a magic mushroom festival, but I was aware of the Slavic passion for mushroom picking. I met Topor and the rest of the band, along with a number of other musician friends, at the train station the next evening. There were accordions and clarinets and trumpets and violins and a trombone and a tuba and a group of female a cappella folksingers who called themselves the Daughters of Sound. We drank and sang for most of the overnight trip, despite the frequent protests of the lady conductor. In the tambur, the space at the end of the train car where you were allowed to smoke, I fell in love with a golden-haired guitar player, Kotik.

The mushroom festival, which was held in a field at the foot of a smallish mountain, had many features that I would soon recognize as typical for Ukrainian folk festivals. It had been organized in honor of the 850th anniversary of the founding of Vorokhta and was advertised as a “festival of contemporary culture of daily life.” In fact, it was an open-air display of ethno-nationalist kitsch, with a strange dose of hippie contemporaneity. Women in western Ukrainian folk costume—colorful fur-lined embroidered vests, embroidered blouses, and headscarves—served traditional Ukrainian dishes, Crimean wine, and medovukha, a potent honey liqueur. Beaded jewelry, embroidered shirts and dresses, woven belts and headbands, woolen socks and shawls, and woodwork were also for sale. People sat on the grass and played the trembita, a very long Hutsul horn, or formed the inevitable hippie drum circles. There was traditional music, or something like it, and Ukrainian rock, and folk dancing, and a fire dance to Ukrainian bagpipes. (This was more like the sort of mushroom festival I had imagined.)

Just as Soviet policy anointed a poet for each “nationality,” with Taras Shevchenko serving as Ukraine’s national bard, the USSR promoted standardized, sanitized versions of the folk culture of every Soviet national group. Each had a codified folklore, folk costume, folk dance, traditional cuisine, and folk music, displayed in national museums and trotted out for national events. According to the original logic of Soviet policy, the display of respect for national identities would enable the eventual disappearance of these identities, as they were replaced by an all-embracing socialist one. This helped explain why the Soviet versions of national folk culture felt so lifeless and artificial. National movements among stateless peoples of Eastern Europe often started with elite interest in folklore; institutionalizing folklore was a way of defanging it. Soviet official folklore was brittle kitsch—dead culture, but not the heroic kind of dead, like Shevchenko’s Cossack ghosts and burial mounds. Instead, it was a culture of cheap synthetic peasant blouses, tacky ethnic souvenirs, and mediocre renditions of played-out folk songs. Many Soviet people rejected it, preferring popular, or underground, or foreign cultural products.

So it was ironic that Ukraine employed this kind of Soviet-approved folklore as a signifier of its post-Soviet identity. In the early 1990s Ukraine hosted music festivals that rejected the Russian language and promoted folkloric and nationalist music. Such festivals were (and are) supposedly intended to dissociate Ukrainian culture from the Soviet and Russian experience and to develop a sense of a unique Ukrainian cultural heritage. And yet post-Soviet Ukrainian folklore wasn’t so different from the Soviet version, just as Ukraine’s government consisted largely of Soviet institutions repackaged with the iconography of Ukrainian nationalism.

Ukrainian-language musicians such as Oleh Skrypka, frontman of the popular rock band V.V., and Haidamaky, a rock group with a singer who wore a Cossack costume, performed on Maidan during 2004’s Orange Revolution. (Haidamaky took their name from the Cossacks who rebelled against the Polish nobility in the eighteenth century, stars of Shevchenko’s bloody epic poem “Haidamaky.”) Skrypka started the annual music festival Kraina Mriy, “Country of Dreams,” where Toporkestra performed. Though it encouraged the mixing of old and new, Kraina Mriy was a festival where Ukrainian was favored over Russian; almost everyone there was in Ukrainian folk costume. It was a holiday when people participated in a group performance of pastoral, pre-Soviet Ukrainian identity, much as Ukrainophile intellectuals had done in the nineteenth century.

Once, at Kraina Mriy, I commented on the legions of people in standard-issue vyshyvanky, comparing them to an army.

“No,” a musician friend said laconically, “it’s like a children’s home.”

“DO YOU WANT to come to the brynza festival in Rakhiv with me?” Kotik the dreamy blond guitar player asked when it came time to leave the Vorokhta mushroom festival and go back to Kiev. Brynza is a type of sheep cheese, similar to feta. I wondered if I would spend the rest of my life celebrating food products. It didn’t seem like a bad way to live.

We waited by the side of the road for someone called Seryozha the Gypsy, who pulled up in a car that was filled to the roof with shoeboxes. Seryozha was small and strong, with a shaved head, a round, open face, and eyes like sparkling brown marbles; the gold fronts on his teeth served as his gypsy bona fides. He was a Moldovan Roma singer, piano player, and accordionist who made a living by buying cheap Chinese shoes in Odessa and selling them in western Ukrainian markets. This was safe work by the standards of his Moldovan musician friends, some of whom had resorted to selling their organs.

Kotik and I squeezed in beside Seryozha’s shoes. He gave us a lift to the bus station, where we met Kotik’s DJ friend, who’d arranged the gig at the brynza festival.

After a long bus trip through the mountains we arrived in Rakhiv, which I’d first visited a few months earlier. The geographical center of Europe was swarming with tourists sampling Hutsul delicacies, buying Hutsul textiles, and, of course, eating brynza.

Kotik and his friend were performing at Rakhiv’s lone nightclub, which I’d visited with Igor and Alina. Tonight, it was packed with young people who kept breaking into circle dances and lifting each other up on chairs, as if we were at a Jewish wedding rather than a small-town discotheque.

Five hours of frantic joy peaked with “Hava Nagila,” a song that I had heard only at bar mitzvahs. I’d never imagined that it could provoke such frenzy; I’d always associated it with shuffling horas, middle-aged parents, and cheap canapes. The way the people danced to it in Rakhiv made it seem alive again, evoking the mystical Judaism that once flourished in Ukraine, and the klezmer musicians who’d been stars of the Eastern European wedding circuit.

This unfamiliar liveliness was a testament to the intimacy of Jewish and Ukrainian culture. It was also painfully ironic: Ukraine was once full of Jews, and many Ukrainians didn’t like them much. As the historian Amir Weiner puts it, over the centuries “the Ukrainian countryside gained an almost mythical reputation for anti-Jewish violence.” Only the music remained.

ONE OF THE CLOSEST FRIENDS I made through Toporkestra was Mitya Gerasimov, a conservatory-trained clarinetist from Kazan, Russia. Mitya was Jewish, and he wanted to play klezmer music. There wasn’t any klezmer scene in Kazan, so he went first to St. Petersburg and Moscow and then to Ukraine, where he started playing with Topor.

If he’d been born a century earlier, Mitya could have been a great silent film actor; he could keep up his end of a conversation with facial expressions alone. Woeful and well read, he had sad eyes and a dry sense of humor. He stuttered when he spoke but never when he sang; he was absent-minded and a little awkward, prone to doing things like losing an envelope full of money on the street, but his clarinet playing was nimble and tender, with an absolutely pure tone, like a ray of sunlight dancing through forest cover.

Mitya’s grandmother was from Kiev. On the anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre, he wrote:

On the 29th of September 1941, a Monday, they started shooting the Jews in Kiev. My grandmother wasn’t yet 17 when her whole family was killed at Babi Yar. She and her sister were saved—by a miracle, they were able to leave the city before the Germans came.

My grandmother served in the war, she wanted to have revenge for her relatives, or to be killed. After the war she ended up in Kazan. She was never able to return to Kiev. After many years she went to Odessa to visit relatives. The train stood for a couple of hours in Kiev, but she didn’t even get out.

Grandma sometimes asks me about Kiev: where I hung out, what I saw. She asked about Babi Yar, what’s there now. I first went there five years ago. I thought I’d see some kind of memorial. I searched the park for a long time, looking for some kind of marker, asking passersby. On a clear autumn day mothers were walking with strollers, with little dogs, teenagers were sitting on benches drinking beer. In the end I found a menorah monument and put flowers on it. I also stumbled on a plaque in memory of the Roma who were shot there. For some reason they removed it later....

Since childhood, I’ve heard from my grandmother about Kiev, about what a beautiful city it was, how she loved it. Even now she remembers Vladimir Hill, and the Lavra, where she went to listen to the choir, and Khreshchatyk. And how she and her brother caught fish in the Dnieper and cooked fish soup with sorrel. When I was little, she sang me Ukrainian songs. Her first language was Yiddish, then Ukrainian—she learned Russian during the war. In childhood I laughed at her accent, and then it turned out that everyone in Ukraine talks that way. When I suddenly, unexpectedly, moved to Kiev, my aunt in Israel, my grandmother’s niece, said, “Well, Mitya has closed the circle!”

I also love Kiev. When I think about Babi Yar, I understand that it wasn’t so long ago. In my grandmother’s youth.

After the war, Soviet Jews were prevented from commemorating their particular losses: where they wanted to put Jewish stars, only Soviet stars were allowed. Jewish mourning was considered a kind of Jewish separatism, especially after the state of Israel was established in 1948. Soviet authorities dissolved the suffering of the Jews into the suffering of the Soviet Union. At one point the Soviets made plans to build a marketplace on the site of the Babi Yar massacre; when a monument was finished, in 1976, it made no reference to Jews, mentioning only that 140,000 citizens of Kiev had been killed by the fascists. The small menorah Mitya searched for was a post-Soviet innovation. Even today many mass graves of Jews are marked only as places where “Soviet citizens” lost their lives. Jewish cemeteries and other landmarks lie in disrepair.

AFTER A COUPLE OF YEARS playing with Toporkestra, Mitya left to start his own group. As he imagined it, the music that had evaporated into the atmosphere after the destruction of Ukraine’s Jewish community would condense into sound again, as he and his bandmates gave new life to the klezmer tradition. He called his group Pushkin Klezmer Band because, he said, echoing an old Russian truism, “Pushkin is our everything.” The name was a clever choice. On one hand, it evoked the long struggle of the Russian Empire’s Jews to establish their homes on the metaphorical Pushkin Street, as historian Yuri Slezkine calls it—to establish themselves as Russians rather than mere Jews, as inheritors of the great current of Russian culture rather than as interlopers and intermediaries. At the same time, the juxtaposition of Pushkin and klezmer was a joke; the klezmer revival could have happened only after the end of the Soviet Union, where Judaism was a nearly taboo topic and Pushkin was a secular saint. In the Soviet Union Mitya could never, for example, have brought his band to the huge Rosh Hashanah celebration in Uman, burial place of Rabbi Nachman, dancing through the night on an actual Pushkin Street, with Hasidic men from all over the world.

One of the great moments of Pushkin Klezmer Band was when, with Seryozha the Gypsy, they performed the song “Tutti Frutti” at a Jewish-Muslim friendship conference in Kiev. (Don’t ask me why they were having a Jewish-Muslim friendship conference in Kiev.) “Tutti Frutti” is a contemporary Balkan Roma song about having a dance party, drinking Tutti Frutti–flavored Fanta and then smashing the bottles. It was one of Seryozha’s top hits, and his voice was perfectly suited to it: plaintive, a bit hoarse, slanting easily up and down the notes. Like many Roma songs, “Tutti Frutti” made you dance almost against your will. It had been agreed in advance that there would be no dancing at the event, for religious reasons. But when the conference attendees heard “Tutti Frutti,” they couldn’t resist. The most hard-core Orthodox Jews went back to their rooms, and everyone else had a dance party.