The day after Rivka and I met, I was summoned to meet her mama. I was promised cookies and I thought, I can’t be bought with cookies. My family didn’t even know I could speak Russian. But this tall, beautiful Russian woman with Rivka’s eyes, extracted my story. Four-year-old boy, waking from a coma, only able to speak Russian. I left out the violin story and the Jew thing.

That day was the beginning of my insomnia. I would hang out with my friends in the G5 after school, then hang out with Rivka for as long as I could . . .  telling myself it was because I could speak Russian freely there, at her house, with Rivka and also her parents. But really, I knew I wanted to be near her. Her parents were brilliant and initially I felt they just liked having me around because I was like the talking dog. You know, “Oh look, there’s an eight-year-old American boy who speaks Russian. Aw, how cute!” Eventually I came to feel that they genuinely liked me . . . but I was cute.

Being there in the Koen home, feeling that intense curiosity about everything that ran through all of them, feeling the heat from their combined brain power energized and steadied me, lined up all the electrons, protons, neutrons and quarks of my core, my soul. When I first met Rivka’s papa, Itzak Koen, quarks hadn’t been described in any publication, but he talked to me about them, not referring to them as quarks, but as chastitsy peelie, dust particles. I remember that feeling of elation, this brilliant physicist telling me something new, crazy, elemental. Everything made sense. It felt like I was in the right place in the universe.

Waking up from the coma I could only speak Russian so I kept my mouth shut. That did nothing to allay the fears of my parents that I’d had brain damage. And I had this itch, like it was in my brain. I needed a violin in my hands and only after my parents, poor-as-dirt Okies out of the dust bowl, bought for me a distressed violin with only three strings, could I begin to speak English again.

And the Jew thing; Our neighbors across the street, the Augers, were devout Christians. Very sweet people. I think they would have made awesome Jews. They had a beautiful, illustrated Bible. You know, Christian Bible. My family was not religious. By all reckoning, we should have been Catholic. Irish. Great Grandparents on the O’Taney side, out of Gaelic-speaking Ireland. Had to be either Druid or Catholic. So, maybe fleeing religion? At any rate, by the time I came along there was no religion to be found in my family. So, I borrowed the Augers’s Bible. Read it cover to cover. Couple times. Old Testament stuck. It’s what Jews call the “Tanakh.” And the first five books, the books of Moses, are the “Torah.”

Torah spoke to me. Few years later, secretly studying with Rabbi Roi, he said there was a teaching. Talk to a Rabbi? There’s always a teaching. He said, “Maybe, Mickey, Adonai placed some of those souls lost in the Shoah, the Holocaust . . . maybe he placed those in some new, maybe unusual places. Maybe what we have here, he said, is you have a Jewish soul.” Like I said. Talk to a Rabbi? There’s always a teaching. I don’t know about all that soul-switching stuff, but I was an Old Testament guy, a Tanakh guy. It was one of the books I routinely read when I couldn’t sleep.

                                                                                           ***

“What are you doing today, squirt?” Sean Patrick was always checking up on me. We were on the covered front porch which extended the entire front of the house. Sean Patrick more closely resembled Mama than he did Papa, and his hair color was closer to Mama’s hair color, auburn red. He was two inches shorter than Al, a fact that galled him.

“The G5 is going to a matinee.”

“G5? I thought it was G4.”

“We have a new friend.”

“Who is he?”

“SHE is Rivka Koen. She moved here this last summer from the Soviet Union.”

“Soviet Union? She’s Russian?”

“Russian as day is long, Sean P,” I said with a Russian accent.

“Whoa . . . how come I didn’t know about this?”

“Big brother, you have . . . big brother stuff you’re doing. I’m doing little brother stuff and I guess sometimes the two of those don’t intersect. It’s understandable. I have to let you have your freedom.” The “let you have your freedom” thing is what did me in.

Sean Patrick looked at me, his face blank, then grabbed me, put me in a headlock and gave me head noogies. I thought, Very mature response from a sixteen-year-old big brother.

“Stop, you big bully.” I struggled and pushed myself free, laughing. “Someday I’m gonna be bigger than you. And we’ll see what happens when you try and do that then.”

He initially looked surprised, a little regretful, but then he smiled evilly, his eyes narrowed and he grabbed me again and was about to repeat the head noogies when Rivka approached on the sidewalk. I pushed him away and shook my finger at him. “Don’t!” Sean P saw Rivka and stopped his bullying.

“Hi, Rivka,” I said somewhat breathlessly.

“Hi, Misha. Is this your big brother, Al? The one who is always doing horrible big brother things to you?”

“No. This is my other horrible big brother, Sean Patrick.”

Rivka offered her hand to Sean P who looked mortified to have been confused with Al. “I’m Rivka . . . Koen . . . um, M-Mickey’s friend.”

Sean P took her hand and said, “I’m usually better behaved.” He shrugged at me. I rolled my eyes. “You’re Russian,” he said.

“Guilty,” she said with a smile. 

And Jewish . . . Double threat girl, I thought, smiling and silently chortling.

Sean Patrick glanced at me quizzically, then proceeded with the interrogation . “What are you guys doing today?”

“Well, Sean Patrick, Mi . . . mm . . .” She shrugged, then apparently, decided to just call me what she’d been calling me. “Misha and our friends and I are going to movies.”

“Right,” said Sean P, just seamlessly accepting my new nickname, then remembering, “Matinee, huh? What are you seeing?”

“It’s between Ben Hur and Darby O’Gill . . . we will vote when we have assembled at, uh, Misha is it ‘theatre or movie theatre or cinema?’ I don’t quite have it straight.”

“All of those are equally correct, my friend. Your English is really very impressive.” Then I realized that, without thinking, I’d spoken in Russian.

Rivka smiled warmly at me and I felt funny. “Thank you, Misha.”

Sean P was looking at me, puzzled. “That was Russian, right, little brother?”

“Misha? Y-your brother . . .?”

“Um, he . . . let’s go!” I was looking at my watch and hurrying off.

“See ya, Sean P,” I called out.

“Nice to meet you, Sean Patrick.”

Sean Patrick waved absent mindedly and stared at us as we disappeared down the sidewalk.

“Misha, doesn’t Sean Patrick know you speak Russian?”

“Well . . . no. I . . .  haven’t spoken it around my family . . . ever. They don’t know. The extended family is kind of conservative about some things, like vehemently anti-Communist, which they conflate with anti-Russian. Their . . . negative feelings aren’t nuanced, so I just never spoke Russian. I mean, the way things are in this country right now, there’s just so much suspicion about Russians, communists, I just thought it better to avoid doing anything to set the members of my extended family off.”

“Hmm. Is it big problem for you?”

“At first, in the hospital, after my coma, Mama thought I was maybe brain damaged when I spoke it, so I didn’t want to stress her any more than she was already.” I decided not to tell Rivka about the fannings and the possibility of brain probes; things I’d seen the first time the fannings appeared right after I’d awakened from the coma and spoken Russian for the first time. “Plus I didn’t really have anyone with whom to speak it, until I met you. It’s really weird, you know, to suddenly wake up from a coma and be able to speak Russian and not your . . . native language, English . . . and,” 

“And?”

“Rivka, I was only four years old and I knew how weird it was that I was thinking and speaking a language no one around me was speaking, not even knowing it was Russian. And I reasoned that I should hide that. Instead of doing what any other normal four year old boy would do and just keep speaking Russian, trying to make people understand me, I chose to hide it. Don’t you think that’s . . . I don’t know . . . strange?”

“Well . . . yes,” she said, nodding, but smiling at me at the same time.  “but . . . I understand. I mean, I understand about keeping secrets.” She was looking down at her feet like something there on the sidewalk could help her express herself. Finally, “Misha, there are some things I want to tell you but I’m not sure I can. I’m just so accustomed to hiding myself, my real self, from everyone. In the Soviet Union we felt we were always being watched . . . I just . . .” She was looking at me, searching my face. “When we were living in Israel last year, Mama said it was going to be hard for me to trust people outside of the family because I was so used to . . . being a different person, you know, in public. I mean, even inside our home I was always concerned someone was listening.”

“Wow, Ri . . . that had to be hard . . . and confusing. I can see why you would have trouble with trust.”

“Only . . . Misha . . . I feel I can, I don’t know, tell you anything without fear. I wonder why that is?”

“I’ve been told I have a very trustworthy face. I mean, people seem to feel they can”

“Misha, I’m only eight years old,” She blurted out and froze, her eyes wide, looking at me with complete trust but obviously fearing divine retribution.

I thought, You poor thing. Your family’s afraid to get in trouble for just lying about your age. God, Russia must have been Hell. But all I said was, “I had a feeling.”

“My parents lied about my age to get me into a higher grade . . . I can’t believe I just told you that. They could get in a lot of trouble . . . what do you mean, you had a feeling?”

“Well, losing your front teeth, the primary teeth, is kind of a seven or eight-year-old thing.” 

“How do you know this, Misha?”

“I read a lot.” I thought, I don’t know how much I can tell her, but I want to tell her everything about me, the violin, the dreams, the fannings, the Jew thing.

“I have always known, even as one-year-old, when I was communicating in complete sentences, always known I was different. My parents were conducting this elaborate charade, hoping, planning someday to escape. Everything was always big secret. We acted like we were always being listened to.”

“Well, you were just a kid, a baby really. I mean of course they couldn’t tell you they were hoping to escape. I mean, they couldn’t trust a baby to keep a secret like that.”

“Oh, no. I knew all about dreams of escape.”

“Really? You knew all your life your family was trying to escape?”

“Well, yeah . . . I was partner in scheme. My God, I can’t believe I’m telling you about this! Are you . . .  witch? Cast your spell over me?” She looked at me, her hands up, pointing toward me, acting like she was casting a spell on me with this weird, serious face, but she couldn’t maintain it and we both burst out laughing. 

We’d been walking to the cinema all this time. Only two blocks away.

“So, you and your family were . . . leading this double life.  God, that must have been hard. Rivka, that’s amazing.”

“They made it like game, only it was played 24/7.”

“Hmm . . . I think that makes you very special, Ri.”

“I’m not sure I want to be special. It’s only been since we’ve been here, in America, with you . . . and our friends, our gang, that I feel,” she was looking up, searching the sky for the word, “normal . . . Isn’t that weird?”

“Oy . . . you’re . . . you’re not weird, Rivka, but you’re definitely special.”

“I had friend in Israel, Yael. I always thought that one day I could tell her everything. And I knew her for almost year. I know you for . . . maybe week . . . and I’m, shit, Misha, tell me American idiom for what I’m doing with you.”

“You’re spilling your guts.”

“Spilling my guts?”

“Yes, my friend (I thought, My sweet, sweet friend), that’s what you’re doing. You’re spilling your guts.”

“Wow. Spilling my guts. That felt so good.” She smiled big, front tooth gap and all. “How about we go to the movies now, da? Just something fun. Something . . . normal?”

“Da, da, my friend. Just some good clean American fun. Movie, popcorn, soda, making out . . .”

She looked at me with raised eyebrows and furrowed brow. And a tight smile.

“I’m joking . . . I’m joking, Rivka!”

We met our friends and voted, unanimously selecting Darby O’Gill and the Little People. After the movie, we were all walking to the Shake Shoppe and Rivka was trying to speak with an Irish accent, talking about the little people trying to steal her pot of gold. Only she sounded like the Swedish chef on Sesame Street and she kept talking like that. The rest of us were laughing so hard, Ava said she was going to pee her pants.

A few days later Rivka and I were sitting on her front porch swing, doing Social Studies homework. Why it was called “Social Studies” I never got a satistory answer for. It was always History. Fifth grade it was American and Oregon History. It was all new for Rivka. There was a lull and she looked up and asked me,“So, are you keeping any other secrets from your whole family?”

“Well . . . yeah . . . a couple of things. But I told them about the Russian. I kind of felt guilty after we talked and I came clean with them.”

“Really? What was their reaction?” She was surprised and almost whispering.

“They were . . .  shocked. I mean, Al wasn’t bothered by it. I don’t think much bothers him. My parents thought the Russian was probably from the coma. Sally Anne started laughing, thinking I was joking, but straightened right up when I said something to her in Russian. Then she thought it was cool. I feel like whatever I do now won’t shock them.”

“Nu, if you think about it, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I mean, your parents have seen all kinds of weird things in their lives. Maybe it gives you license to do some really weird shit.”

“Um . . . there’s a couple of things I haven’t told them about. I mean, I woke up from the coma with a few other, mm, compulsions.”

“Oh, boy . . . should I be concerned?”

“Well . . . no . . . I mean . . . i-it’s this Jew thing.”

“Jew thing? Oy vey!”

The fannings appeared and several possibilities fanned out. I could go on with the explanation of “the Jew thing” or I could just say “nevermind” As I was considering all these things it seemed strange that I could see only a very narrow path that didn’t lead to something bad. I snapped back and said, “I feel funny telling you this. I mean . . . it’s kind of hard to explain. You know about the violin thing, right?”

“Misha, what happened just then?”

I got an ice cold feeling in my stomach. There were a lot of things she didn’t know about me. I felt pretty certain the fannings would make me seem irredeemably strange. “What do you mean?”

Then she looked uncertain and said, “Misha, I just told you some very secret, very sensitive things . . . I don’t know if I can answer your question . . . you know, your question about what I meant.”

“What?”

“Wh-what?”

“Alright, look, Ri . . . I trust you. You’re my friend. We haven’t known each other a long time but . . . something happens to me when I’m talking to you and before I know it I’ve spilled my guts and told you things I didn’t intend to tell you.” We translated “spilled my guts” to “confessed everything.” Sometimes idiomatic phrases lose their color when translated.

“Oh, God, Misha, I feel the same way.” She took several deep breaths, kicked on the porch to get the swing swinging and said, “Okay . . . why don’t you just tell me about Jew thing and we’ll see what happens after that?”

“Okay. So, there was the violin thing, right? It was like this itch in my brain and I had this image of a violin, and it was all I could think about. Papa brought home that violin and that itch . . . it got scratched in just the right place. You know what that feels like.”

“Well, I can imagine. That must have been torture before you got the violin.”

“It was not fun. But after a few weeks, playing that violin for hours everyday, I started to get that feeling again, only I couldn’t visualize it like I could with the violin. It was just this random jumble of images that felt familiar but that I couldn’t name, not even in Russian. And I started to think maybe there really was something wrong with me, like from the illness causing my coma.”

“That sounds really scary, Misha . . . like infection, or . . . like brain tumor?”

“Yeah, those possibilities crossed my mind. And I didn’t want to tell anyone, like my parents. Mama was keeping me close and watching me like a hawk. They’d been through Hell with me. So, I kept it to myself and the feeling, the itch, got stronger.

“I was across the street at my friend, Stella’s, playing violin as she was playing piano and I saw this really beautiful, ornately decorated book and I was drawn to it. It was a Bible. The Augers let me borrow it. It was illustrated. I read it . . . cover to cover . . . and the itch was scratched.”

“So, your compulsion was to read the Bible?” She looked somewhat unimpressed.

“I think it was more to read the Jewish Bible, Old Testament, you know, the Tanakh. I read it through and through several times, just to be sure the fucking itch didn’t come back. And so far, it hasn’t.”

“So, you just had a compulsion to read the Tanakh? I don’t know, that doesn’t seem like that big a deal to cause a brain itch.”

“Well, when you say it like that, yeah, but . . . I wasn’t just reading it. I started really studying it and . . . this is really a secret. You can’t tell your parents. Rabbi Roi could get in a lot of trouble. I’ve been studying with him for a little over a year. I mean, it’s a real no-no. You know how Jews are really sensitive about the whole conversion thing . . . to the point where it’s forbidden to convert a Gentile to Judaism before he’s an adult. And, in truth, it’s like I’m being instructed in preparation for conversion.”

“Wow . . . Okay. So, you basically woke up from your coma with a compulsion to play violin and to be a Jew, right?”

“That about sums it up.”

“Okay, I take it back. It is a big deal. I mean, my family is not religious. We don’t have a synagogue, but I know Torah and I know Jewish history. I understand what you’re saying . . . about Jews being forced to convert and why Jews are reluctant to convert Gentiles to Judaism. I mean, Jews have been murdered for this. Some synagogues, especially Orthodox, make it really difficult to convert.”

We sat in silence for a long moment. I was almost afraid to look at my friend. I wasn’t sure what a Jewish person who’d experienced subtle and not so subtle anti-semitism would think about someone who would presume to want to convert, presume to already, maybe think of himself as a Jew, someone like me.  “Rivka . . . what do you think about this? I mean . . .”

“Misha, we’re still friends . . . I’m glad you told me. It kind of explains why you know so much about Torah.” She smiled her crooked smile at me and I knew we were ok.

“Thanks, Ri. There’s really no one else I can talk to about this. My parents don’t know anything about Jews. I mean, I don’t think they’re malicious, just ignorant. They just casually say things like ‘this guy jewed some guy down’ using it like a verb synonymous with ‘cheating.’ In truth, I don’t think they’ve ever really known any Jews.”

“Misha, I heard things like that all the time in Russia. ‘Oh, Jews were such successful money lenders before the Revolution because they know how to cheat you.’”

“Yes, I’ve heard that particular slander also . . . And I’ve been having these dreams.”

“My goodness, Misha. You are full of surprises today . . . Tell me about your dreams.”

Her face looked completely neutral but I couldn’t help feeling like she was trying to be funny and acting like a psychoanalyst. “Well, Doctor,” I began. She acted like she was taking notes and responded periodically with “Hmm” and “I see” until my recounting of the dream got a little weird. “The most frequent one, I’m in a synagogue, full of people, people not from around here. It feels very . . . European . . . Eastern European. I’m walking up and down aisles, carrying a Torah scroll. Everyone is chanting and singing this song, ‘Torah orah, Torah, orah, Alleluia.’ And I’m weeping . . . with joy . . . and awe and the people are touching the scroll with their tallits, their prayer shawls,”

“Misha, I know what a tallit is.”

“Of course. Jew, duh, sorry . . . and I come to the end of an aisle and turn and almost run into . . . my mama.”

“Mama Sharon?”

“Da, and then I wake up . . . with tears on my face.”

“Woh . . . it’s like you’re dreaming about your Bar Mitzvah . . . in Eastern Europe. That’s weird fucking dream.”

“Boy, howdy!”