By Alex Gordon, Ph.D
HAIFA, Israel — My grandfather Yaakov, my mother’s father, had seven brothers and one sister. At that time Jews in Russia gave birth to many children, because it was God’s will. Then God was forbidden in the Soviet Union, and there were fewer and fewer children. In our family there was less obedience to God’s commandments and fewer children were born. My grandmother Rosa gave birth to only two daughters, the eldest Leah and the youngest Dora, my mother. As in other Jewish families, the mother’s role grew as the number of children decreased.
My grandmother Rosa, grandfather Yaakov’s widow, was an authoritarian woman. My father’s mother, my grandmother Anna (Hannah) was also an authoritarian woman. She had only two sons, the eldest Lev and the youngest Yaakov, my father. My father was very much attached to his mother. She was the main authority in his life, a friend, an advisor, an attorney in matters. All the other women in his life were secondary characters. One could study the phenomenon of the “Jewish mother,” Yiddishe mama, by him. He was a great storyteller of jokes in general, but was especially fond of the “Jewish mama” theme:
– If a man has a wife and a mistress, who does he love more? A German loves his wife more. The Frenchman loves his mistress. The Englishman loves both wife and mistress at the same time. And the Jew loves his mother the most.
With his jokes about Yiddish mama, my father laughed at himself. He once told such a story:
– A recently married young Jewish girl complains to her friend, “The horror!!! My husband talks about his mother all the time and compares her to me: Mom does everything better than me. And during sex he cannot focus on me, his thoughts are occupied by his mother, and nothing works in bed with us. A friend advises her young wife to see a sex therapist. After listening to a concerned girl, the doctor suggests she buy black fishnet lingerie, and when her husband returns from work, open her robe. And then everything will work out. The girl buys black fishnet lingerie and, meeting her husband, unzips the robe. The husband returns from work, frightened by his wife, recoils and says: “You’re all in black… did something happen to Mom?”
Although my father was aware of his morbid attachment to his mother and could joke about it, he was still “captive” to Anna’s grandmother. I, too, loved my mother, but was much more free of the Yiddishe mama complex. My father accepted his mother’s despotism much more readily than I did. He was a typical Jewish boy, whose love and dependence on his mother was much stronger than Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus complex demanded. Because there were fewer children in Jewish families during the Soviet era, mothers of the new generation were more attached to the few children than mothers of the old generation were to the many children. The fewer children became, the more restless the mothers’ love for them became.
The weakening of the Jewish tradition, which led to a decrease in the birth rate, the detachment from the Jewish people, turned the mother into the personification of the homeland and the Jewish people. I lived in the Soviet Union without a homeland, in exile, alienated from the society of the dominant nation. My mother, however, felt differently. She loved Kiev. Her family had experienced Jewish pogroms in her early childhood, but my mother had no memory of them. For her, Kiev was a city of childhood, youth, male and female friends, learning, and love. It was her city.
For me it was also the city of my childhood, youth, and friends, but my studies and life in Kiev were full of dislike for me and other Jews. Unlike me, my mother still remembered Kiev before World War II, when attitudes toward Jews were tolerant. I, on the other hand, had lived in Kiev, where state anti-Semitism was combined with anti-Semitism of the local population. In general, my mother and I had a different Kiev. I rebelled against this kind of Kiev.
My mother perceived my estrangement from Kiev as a bad attitude toward her, toward values that were dear and important to her. For my father, his mother was associated with the socialist motherland, the country he lived, worked, dreamed and hoped for. For me, my mother was part of a world that was foreign to me, one that did not accept my blood type. She and I argued a lot, and I could not find harmony in my relationship with my Jewish mother. A barrier of anti-Semitism arose between us, which prevented my mother from dictating to me what she thought was right, valuable, and precious about life in Kiev. The voice of blood, or rather the accusation of Jewish blood, sounded in me. I had a different worldview. Unlike my father, for whom his mother was a typical Yiddishe mama, a like-minded woman, a friend, an authority, an advisor, I, who sought to acquire a Jewish state, did not get a typical Yiddishe mama.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 8 books and about 500 articles in paper and online, was published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English and German.