Verses About a Burned Passport
A Berlin-based artist, born in Bukhara to a family of former evacuees and raised in Brooklyn in the midst of Soviet émigrés, burned his Russian passport in front of a small crowd on Unter den Linden.
At the opening of an anti-war installation an inquisitive German journalist posed a question to the artist: “I thought you were Ukrainian, Where did the Russian passport come from? And why burn it?”
The author of the burned passport replied to the German: “I’m an American expat Jew of Ukrainian descent. My Russian passport is nothing but an error of history.
“My ancestors hail from outside Kharkiv. And only one grandmother is Russian, but actually a Chuvash, a Cheremissian, an old Soviet chameleon . . . enough already with your silly questions! It was an act of protest against atrocities, an act of self-purification.”
I read this account on Facebook and thought to myself: “They took away my Soviet passport at the time of emigration— in exchange for an exit visa to Israel, which was subsequently stolen in Pompeii at the Temple of Fortuna Augusta and later replaced with Italian refugee papers, I showed them when entering America.”
I have nothing to immolate except my memory but memory doesn’t burn at the Brandenburg Gate in the shadow of flowering lime trees on Unter den Linden on the banks of the Spree like a broken prayer memory wouldn’t leave a Jew alone.