by Joshua Cohen
It was amazing to me that this structure had another dimension—it was amazing that I was able to step inside. Though only for a moment.
A man strode up and, in response to my asking in Hebrew, said he spoke Hebrew. He was tall, skinny like he had a parasite, and wore a flatcap and trenchcoat indoors. He was between thirty and forty, I’d guess, but had a sparse scraggly beard—like he’d five-fingered it off the face of a surly teenager. He wouldn’t give his name—or any name—or he couldn’t. It turned out that he couldn’t speak Hebrew, or what he spoke of it wasn’t just jumbled, but jumbled with rigor: morning (boker) was evening (erev) and vice versa, six (sheysh) was seven (sheva) and vice versa, the ark (aron) was a prayerbook (siddur). After showing me around the synagogue proper, he took me into the facility’s community-center portion and showed me a wall of portraits of Mountain Jewish heroes of Azerbaijan’s wars, and another wall of portraits of Mountain Jewish leaders posing alongside Putin, Netanyahu, both the Aliyevs, George W. Bush, Sheldon Adelson, and assorted Azerbaijani mullahs from the government’s Committee for Religious Organizations. Then he hit me up for a donation—he didn’t confuse the word for charity, tzedakah. I gave him 5 manats, and asked if he knew any Mountain Jews who’d be willing to take me to Quba. He shook his head—meaning he didn’t know? or didn’t understand?—shook my hand, and ushered me out the door.
From the six or so years I lived and worked as a journalist throughout Eastern Europe, I was used to this stripe of wariness. No one who grew up in an authoritarian regime likes to or, honestly, can answer a question directly. Everyone hesitates, dissembles, feels each other out. Feels out, that is, the type and degree of trouble that truthfulness, if they’re even capable of truthfulness, might get them into. In most post-Soviet countries this Cold War ice can usually be broken or, at a minimum, thawed, by a bribe, or through the vigorous application of alcohol. But here, in this Muslim country whose signature intoxicant was tea, alcohol wasn’t an option.
So I headed back to Brooklyn.
By which I mean: I went to find the Azerbaijan Chabad House.
Chabad Lubavitch is a Hasidic religious movement based in Brooklyn, which—like a yarmulke-wearing, spiritually focused version of a UN taskforce or NGO—dispatches its rabbis all over the world, to provide essential religious services in places where there aren’t many Jews: in Asia, Africa, even Antarctica, though they’re especially active in places where there haven’t been many Jews for a while, thanks to the Soviets and/or Nazis. They’re basically a missionary organization, except they don’t convert so much as reclaim: They bring the unaffiliated back into the fold. Now, that’s a laudable brief for an organization to have, but there’s also a dark side, in that Chabad, at one extreme, is something of a messianic cult (some of the rabbis proclaim an uncomfortable fealty to their deceased leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe), and insists on imposing its parochial brand of Ashkenazi Judaism—Eastern European Hasidic Judaism—no matter the local tradition or preference.*
There’s also this pesky issue that a few of their rabbinic emissaries have had with, OK, money-laundering.
What might’ve licensed that behavior is a quirk of history: European Jews, not just in the East but throughout the continent, had almost always been required by the governments of the countries they lived in to identify as Jewish. Even after forced registrations became census requests, Jews tended to continue the practice on their own: If they gave charity to or attended their synagogue, there was a fair chance their home city or province’s community had their name and address on file, and it was these files, these community rolls, that made the Nazi genocide that much more efficient. After the fall of Sovietism, amid the aforementioned rash of privatization, nascent independent countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia found themselves steeped in unclaimed property, a lot of which had belonged to Jews, a lot of whom were dead. Meanwhile, young ambitious Jews of the postwar generations, many with limited Jewish education and even limited Jewish identification, were busy reorganizing their official communities into nonprofit religious entities. Having varying levels of access to their prewar rolls, they applied to state, provincial, and city governments, not just for the restitution of their rightful infrastructure—their synagogues and cemeteries—but also for the restitution of the properties of their exterminated members who’d left no next of kin. Not many of these Jewish communities had rabbis; Chabad had rabbis—trained in America and Israel. Chabad sent its rabbis to open Chabad Houses—from which they directed prayers, classes, food-and-clothing drives, and life-cycle ceremonies (mostly funerals)—and while the preponderance of the sect’s emissaries stuck to mission principles and successfully renewed Jewish life, a few were tempted, or invited, to infiltrate the administrations of their governmentally sanctioned communities and took up posts as official chief or head rabbis—which gave them nominal power over the management of community real estate portfolios, some of which were extraordinarily lucrative. For instance: much of the downtown tourist districts of Krakow and Prague. Local influential Jews, inured to the inversions of Sovietism, in which the state was the criminal, and they were merely businessmen, would cut deals with the Chabad rabbis assigned to them, supporting the movement and smoothing its way in return for using this reclaimed infrastructure to clean their money—say, a Russian Jew from Odessa who in the 1990s amid the ludicrous inflation and loan defaults of independent Ukraine gets involved in the counterfeit luggage racket, and launders his profits through a storefront in a community-owned, because community-restituted, building that before it’d been nationalized by the Soviets and devastated by the Nazis had belonged to a Jewish family that’d been liquidated in the camp at Bogdanovka. I once, at a very tender, pious, and moronic age, tried to report on this phenomenon—a phenomenon that, in retrospect, I now find utterly rational and tolerable—and, in return for my sanctimony, in the course of a single day, one man threatened my life, and another man handed me an envelope crammed with cash that kept me housed and fed and working on a novel for nearly all of 2004. Suffice to say, I’m no Chabad booster. But still, if I could never completely bring myself to trust Hasidim, I could at least trust Hasidim to be Hasidim.
Chabad has its Azerbaijani House on Dilara Aliyeva Street, which used to be called Surakhanskaya, and under the Soviets was Pervomayskaya. I couldn’t figure out whether Dilara Aliyeva was related to the dictator president Aliyevs, or just shared their surname (two people said yes, online said no), but I do know that she founded an antidomestic abuse organization and was a member of the opposition People’s Front, who died in what Russian media described, not without bias, as a mysterious car accident on the Azerbaijani/Georgian border in 1991.
The head of Chabad in Baku, conforming to expectations, introduced himself as the Chief Rabbi of Azerbaijan; his business card read “Cheif Rabbi” [sic] of “The Jewish Community of European Jews.” Whatever. I addressed him in Hebrew, just to be a schmuck, but also because it felt like the only language to use in Baku for a conversation with another guy from New Jersey. Rabbi Shneor Segal—robustly obese, copiously bristled, the suit I’d bet from Shemtov’s on Empire Boulevard, the Borsalino I’d bet from Primo’s on Kingston Avenue—asked me to put on tefillin and tallis to pray, and after I did, because prayer is the price of admission with Chabad, he asked me to explain my presence. I was a tourist, I said. From where? Brooklyn. Ah, he said, Brooklyn. Born there? Born in Atlantic City. Ah, he said, New Jersey.
It was English after that. I told him we had mutual acquaintances, and named the rabbis in Prague and Krakow. He knew them. I named their wives, their children. He softened, reclined, released his belly over his belt. We talked about his difficulties getting a lease on a space to open up a kosher restaurant—there were so many people to “pay,” and so many people he might slight through a failure to “pay,” and all of them would be his only customers. We talked about my difficulties getting in with the Mountain Jews,
and I wondered if he was in touch with any—if he knew any who’d take me around.
His face lit, and then his phone lit, and he was scrolling through his contacts. He was giving me a number, but what he said was: “I’m giving you a mitzvah.”
There was this Mountain Jewish kid, he said, who was an orphan. His father had absconded, way back when. His mother had just died. He was having problems earning a living, but at least he had a car.
Some SMS’ing, and emailing, later, everything was arranged. This Mountain Jew agreed to pick me up, next day, at the Intourist.
One thing about the Intourist, before I continue: The original Intourist—the hotel of choice, or of no-choice, for foreign visitors under Sovietism—had aged so shoddily that it had to be demolished. But after the demolition, some oil and gas execs, feeling so nostalgic for what’d surely been a heap of reeking plumbing and intermittent electricity, commissioned a replica built on a plot just a block away.
The Mountain Jew, who was late to pick me up, was a companionable slab of stymied maleness, aimless in his middle twenties, in too tight blue jeans, too tight black T-shirt, swart face with lots of scruff, lots of Asian: epicanthic folds.
If I’d had to guess his ethnic or racial affiliation from his appearance alone, I definitely wouldn’t have said Jew or Azerbaijani or any other of the undifferentiatable (to me) Caucasians, so much as Man Boy—a peaceful beaten international tribe whose members are usually unemployed and single.
No surprise, then, that he seemed happy to be of help to me. Though I didn’t understand straightaway what that meant—to be hanging outside of his clan like this—to have to depend on the whitebread Jews, the Chabad crowd….
I’m going to have to make up his name, of course, because some of the things he explained could get him in trouble with other Mountain Jews, and some could get him in trouble with his government. Also: He requested. I couldn’t deny that I was a writer; I couldn’t have been anything else: As he drove his dirt-colored but punctiliously tidy Hyundai, I was writing down everything he was saying.
He spoke Judeo-Tat, or Juhuri, which he called Gorsky, and also Azeri and Russian—and spoke to me in bits of broken Hebrew and English.
Kinda sorta.
I’m going to call him U. Because that’s as close as I can get to You—and that’s whom I’ve been trying to talk to.
* * *
—
WE’D AGREED ON TWO DAYS, 40 manats a day. He’d be driving me to Mountain Jewish sites. In Baku and in Quba—beyond. But after we’d stopped at a SOCAR station and I’d paid to fill up the tank, he took me to a Zoroastrian fire temple.
There’s so much gas—“natural gas,” as the English phrase goes, to distinguish it from what Americans call “gasoline” and the rest of the world calls “petrol”—seeping out from under the earth here that in certain areas you can light a match and the air will burn, and will keep burning, until the gas deposit runs out. Zoroastrians erected their temples around such natural fires—around “vents”—though now this temple, the Baku Ateshgah, is lit artificially, its ancient flame having been snuffed by the substrate damage done by adjacent oil drilling. Because of the subterranean deposits, you can’t really dig (for anything but oil or gas), and if you can’t really dig (for anything but oil or gas), you can’t really bury your dead. That explains Zoroastrian air burial. Zoroastrians will lay a corpse out on a rock. The vultures swarm. Put it all together: Flames springing up from the ether; a corpse up on a rock; vultures plucking out its liver: Prometheus.
U took me to mud volcanoes (which locals explain as “vents” from which only mud erupts, after the exhaustion of their flammable deposits); he took me to what he called the Olympic Stadium and the Olympic Village—driving me through the abandoned concourses, grinning at my incredulity. The issue here—though it only seemed to be an issue for me, not U—is that Baku never hosted an Olympics. Earlier in 2015, it hosted the European Games, which the government apparently insisted on referring to as the Olympics—the bona fide quadrennial gold-silver-bronze Olympics™—intellectual property laws be damned. In 2017, these facilities are slated to host the Islamic Solidarity Games, which U called the Islamic Olympics. I wondered, “Do women compete?” U said, “How can they compete?” Later I found out that not only were women excluded, but also that they didn’t even have a bogus Olympics of their own anymore—not since the Women’s Islamic Games was discontinued after Tehran 2005.
I took U to a dinner of kebabs, and he reciprocated by taking me to meet his friend, another Mountain Jew, he said, though the friend denied this, and it was only after I admitted my confusion that he said, “If you’re not in the business, then it doesn’t count” (which meant: Being an ethnic Mountain Jew was not quite the same as being a professional Mountain Jew: a mafioso). U and I met him, let’s call him Asshole, in a video-game parlor above a carwash, and played video Monopoly—alas, not the Atlantic City but the London version. We hunkered around the console and drank tea—always black, never green or red, nothing herbal—compulsively, Asshole and U smoked compulsively, and I went bankrupt every game. U wouldn’t play anything else in the arcade, because Asshole wouldn’t—not Pac-Man, not Tetris, not the vintage-Soviet foosball table encased in a plastic bubble so pockmarked and cloudy that the guys who yanked at the bars could only guess at the ball—at its position—at its existence. Indeed, there were too many guys, doing too much bar-yanking. There weren’t any women in the place. But then, there weren’t any women in any place in the country—not without their husbands or brothers. I asked U how he went about meeting women, and Asshole replied—in a sense. He ashed his cigarette, right onto the console, and said that all women who smoked cigarettes were whores. All women who drove were also whores. He didn’t mean “women who had sex for fun and free,” but “women who had sex for money.” I asked, What about women who smoked while driving? According to Asshole, they were “double whores,” who’d cost me even more than landing my pixelated thimble on his Regent Street, which he’d outfitted to capacity with flashy red hotels. I went bankrupt again and put on my jacket, to signal that I was ready to head back to the Intourist. That’s when Asshole asked, “Didn’t [U] tell you not to wear red?” He hadn’t—no one had—“Why?” Only gay men wore red, Asshole told me, as a signal to other gay men.
The next morning, it was unavoidable. Rainy, drear, unavoidable. From the moment that U picked me up at the Intourist, he was suggesting itinerary alternatives. Still, I held firm: We were driving up to Quba.
Which should’ve been an ascent of an hour and a half, but U took two hours, three, like he was dreading it.
I tried to suss out why—trying to seem guileless—by asking him about himself, and then about Asshole, before moving onto Quba, and then to its more notorious natives, but U just hunched at the wheel and turned every question around on me: He wanted to know how much my apartment cost (including electricity? but what about WiFi?), how much my phone cost (included with the plan? but what was the plan?), how much his car would cost in America (where cars are cheaper), how much it would cost to fill up his tank in America (where, ridiculously, fuel is cheaper too), and I had to admit that I didn’t know anything about cars, and I didn’t want to waste my phone’s data, or its battery, on enlightening him.
“Women in America no care if you no have car?”
“No,” I said. “At least not in New York.”
“Why—because you must to have also plane, helicopter, yacht?”
We passed a roadside stand that sold sturgeon wraps—hunks of BBQ’d sturgeon squirted with pomegranate sauce, sprinkled with saffron, wrapped in lavash—and U insisted: lunch. As we ate, U pointed across the highway toward a mountain, and said that up in that mountain was a cave, and that in that cave was a bevy of stone growths that resembled penises, and that Muslim women, just after they were betrothed, would visit said stone penises and kneel down to kiss them, to en
sure the prima nocte potency of their husbands. Out of courtesy I finished all my slick greasy fish, which now wobbled perilously atop the summit of my stomach of yogurt and eggs and unwashed veg from the Intourist breakfast buffet. It was time to go, but U was unrelenting: tea.
But I was still meth-level caffeinated from the night before—between that and my jet lag, I hadn’t even gone to sleep yet….
We drove up toward the mountains, passing apple orchards. Apparently Quba is famous for its apples. I mentioned the apple-importer guy from Brooklyn who’d introduced my friend, and so me, to Quba, and realized, from U’s response, that the guy’s occupation had been a joke or a put-down. If you’re from Quba and a rube asks what you do for a living, you say, “I import apples.” It’s the gangster version of Ivy League pricks who when they’re asked where they went to school say, “In New Haven.” “In Boston.”