Beginning with its title, Yevgeniy Fiks’ small book Soviet Moscow’s Yiddish-Gay Dictionary (Cicada Press, 2016) poses many provocative questions: How does one translate between “Yiddish” and “Gay”? Is there really a transnational queer dialect, parallel to the idea of Yiddish as a global workers’ language? Why write a travel guide to Soviet Moscow in 2016? In an unbearable present, why still search for a “usable past”? And if we use Fiks’ dictionary as a map, what (or who) would we encounter in this utopian Moskve? Following the general format of Weinreich’s famous Yiddish mini-handbook, Fiks’ project self-consciously examines the ambivalences of their genre: the linguistic travel guide to an imagined community. But rather that conflating multiple identities into an imagined Yiddish-Russian-gay convivencia, Fiks uses trilingual translation to explore both their tensions and affinities. Born in Moscow in 1972, Fiks has lived and worked in New York since 1994. His artwork explores Post-Soviet dialogue in the West through a variety of media: “Lenin for Your Library?” involved mailing V.I. Lenin’s text “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” to one hundred global corporations as a donation for their corporate libraries. “Communist Party USA,” a series of portraits of current members of Communist Party USA, were painted from life in the Party’s national headquarters in New York City. Fiks’ series of photographs, “Communist Guide to New York City,” documented the buildings and public places significant to the history of the American Communist movement. Each of these works examines the relationship between place and memory. Here, I talk with Fiks about the dictionary as map, micro-utopias, the history of anarchist language projects, and Yiddish cosmonauts. I was delighted to find so many unexpected resonances between Fiks’ art practice and my own research in anarchist history, queer studies, and translation theory. Anna Elena Torres: Tell us about the origins of Soviet Moscow’s Yiddish-Gay Dictionary. How is this connected to your other work across media? Yevgeniy Fiks: For the past ten or so years I’ve been making work that addresses complexities of Soviet and Post-Soviet experience and histories, usually focusing on hidden micro narratives within the larger Soviet and post-Soviet history. For example, I’ve done projects about the history and present of the Communist Party USA, histories of Afro-American expats in the USSR, the interdependence of the Red and Lavender Scares during the McCarthy era, Soviet LGBTQ history. Usually, my projects involved research and they are the so-called “research-based projects” that later manifest visually as books, performance as guided tour, or art installation or exhibitions. This project “Soviet Moscow’s Yiddish-Gay Dictionary” came out of my continuing interest in Soviet LGBTQ histories and Soviet Jewish histories and my awareness of a certain discursive friction between the two groups—queers and Jews—in the Soviet and Russian context. So, via this imagined dictionary I thought of connecting the historical/cultural legacies of Moscow’s queers and Jews. And of course, it has a personal meaning for me too—as an object that would connect the two sides of my own identity, which is both Jewish and gay of a specific Moscow variety. AET: Your introduction takes care to discuss both queer anti-Semitism and Yiddish homophobia, which perhaps resonates with certain conversations in the US among queers of color around Black homophobia. You characterize “the conflation of Jewish and gay” as a “failed analogy.” Can you tell us about the relation between these identities and cultures? What are the historical processes that might lead them to be conflated? Is Russian masculinity what’s at stake, or is it about gay identity more broadly? YF: Both Soviet gays and Soviet Jews were marginal groups in the Soviet context, but marginal in different ways nevertheless. I think in the Russian context, the failure of analogy between queers and Jews is connected to the historical issue of visibility, both physically acknowledged and discursive. Jews have lived in Russia for centuries and have been always visible: because of their non-Slavic physical appearance among mostly Slavic peoples, the semantic markers of their German-sounding Ashkenazic surnames, Yiddish accents and mannerisms, etc. And although forces of assimilation have been at play for centuries in the Russian Empire and then USSR, the distinction, separation, and otherness of Russian Jews was persistent and overwhelming even after the disappearance of “Jewish accent” and changing of Ashkenazic last names to be more Russian-sounding. So the Jews have always been visible, self-consciously present, and their presence was widely acknowledged both by the state and the people. There were synagogues built and Jewish cemeteries established, and the heads of Soviet state routinely met with the Chief Rabbi of Moscow in the Kremlin. Judaism was acknowledged by the government as one of the three historical religions of Russia (along with Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Islam). It was inconvenient but never illegal to be Jewish in Russia. This situation doesn’t compare with realities of gays in Russia, where homosexuality existed underground and was punishable by a prison sentence. There was a zero-level of establishment or institutionalization in the Soviet LGBTQ community. There was no community. At the same time, there was plenty of opportunity for Russian LGBTQs to pass for a straight. In that, the Jewish experience in Russia was closer perhaps, with many differences also, of course, to the African-American experience in the United States — since for both groups “the closet” was simply not a possibility one could fall back on.

AET: Your project struck me as being not only a dictionary, but also a map. It also reminded me of Michael Chabon’s remarks about Weinreich’s mini travel handbook, which inspired his novel Yiddish Policemen’s Union, set in a Yiddish-speaking Alaskan town. Please tell us more about the importance of place and sites in Moscow.

YF: Yes, this is a very Moscow book. A rather high percentage of words in this dictionary are names of Moscow’s cultural monuments, locations, places, which also functioned as gay cruising sites. I spent the first twenty-two years of my life in Moscow, practically never leaving the city. So my experience as a Jew and as a gay is a very Moscow experience. I cannot talk of Russia in general, but of Moscow I can. Although Moscow is a huge city, it’s also kind of “unstructured” and loose; it’s become a commonplace to say that Moscow is a “big village,” but it’s true. There’s warmth and provincialism to Moscow that one normally doesn’t associate with major international metropolises. And at the same time, Moscow being the capital of a huge empire had probably the largest Jewish population in postwar Europe; in its cruising sites, one could meet queers from every part of the USSR. AET: There are very few trilingual dictionaries of Jewish languages. The most famous one is by Alexander Harkavy, an anarchist writer and linguist. Harkavy’s multilingualism allowed him to move beyond the national language politics of other movements, such as Zionism’s privileging of Hebrew and Bundism’s predetermination of Yiddish as an “international workers’ language.” So why make your book trilingual? And why choose to foreground English? YF: I guess the decision to include English and to give definitions of the words in English was simply pragmatic—to give access to the book to readers who know neither Yiddish nor Russian. The main audience of my work remains mostly the art world, people who go to see contemporary art exhibitions so I simply wanted to remain open to and true to my usual audience. After all it’s an artist’s book. I’m not sure how much practical use this book can have for, of course, there are not much Yiddish-Gay exchanges going on these days in Moscow. Most Russian Jews don’t speak Yiddish anymore and most Russian queers don’t know or don’t use the Soviet-era gay slang anymore. So, this dictionary is kind of outdated. AET: You write: “If the goal of a dictionary is to facilitate understanding between speakers of different languages, then the goal of this particular dictionary is solidarity.” That passage immediately reminded me of Gayatri Spivak’s comments on solidarity and language in Politics of Translation: “Rather than imagining that women automatically have something identifiable in common, why not say, humbly and practically, my first obligation in understanding solidarity is to learn her mother tongue… [emphasis mine] I am talking about the importance of language acquisition for the woman from a hegemonic monolinguist culture who makes everybody’s life miserable by insisting on women’s solidarity at her price.” Can you say more about language and solidarity, particularly outside the academic context, as Spivak urges us? YF: The solidarity that I refer to in the introduction to the book—between Soviet gays and Soviet Jews—for the most part, I’m afraid, is an imagined solidarity. I don’t think this solidarity existed actually outside this book; at least, I never experienced it. And yet, even if the communities themselves—Soviet gays and Soviet Jews—didn’t see the necessity or possibility for such a solidarity, Moscow’s Yiddish and Moscow’s (Russian-based) gay slang had much in common. They were Moscow’s secretive languages of those “in the know.” For sure, the shameful languages of the oppressed. AET: A lot of the gay slang in this book seems to be about feminizing masculine words –Lenin’s statue is called “Grandma Lena,” for example. We see this in US gay slang, too—calling men “girl” and “she,” for example. Is there a distinct speech pattern in Russian Yiddish queer women’s speech? YF: One of the shortcomings of this book that I acknowledge is that it doesn’t contain enough of queer women’s speech. Unfortunately, historically queer women in general were much less visible in the Soviet Union—for example, there were virtually no lesbian cruising sites in Moscow during the Soviet era—which reflects a type of void of queer women’s speech in the dictionary.

Cruising Birobidzhan, Yevgeniy Fiks (2016). Courtesy the artist’s website.