Vicki Boykis
By Vicki Boykis
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Opinion Can My Kid Be an American Jew Without Losing Her Russian Culture?
In my family, we do Judaism like jazz does covers of popular songs — it only sometimes resembles the original. We celebrate Passover, but we always have fluffy Russian cakes because you can’t have a meal without a good dessert. We rarely light Shabbat candles, but when we do, we usually have a movie going…
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Life Earning My Hebrew Accent
I spent the summer before college holed up in my room in front of my laptop watching strange cartoon letters take shape and trying to replicate them on my own. I was teaching myself Hebrew. I’d just been to Israel twice and had become deeply embarrassed that I could not understand a language that was…
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Life The Guest Bedroom is the Best Bedroom
I live in Philadelphia. My parents live two hours away. So, when my husband and I were looking for a house last year, one of the most important features was the second/third bedroom. Because that’s where my parents would stay. So every house we looked at carried the specter of my parents. Would they be…
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Life The Problem with Dry-Cleaning
I was at my local grocery store this weekend, standing in line at the checkout. I saw that the line next to mine was moving faster. With stealthy Soviet queue analysis skills acquired only by years of living with Russian parents, I scanned the lines, assessed the length of time, and made a beeline into…
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Life Scotland Is for Lovers (of Slavo-Soviet Culture)
On my blog and here in the Forward, I’ve dissected every single issue of Russian-Jewish life in America, from Russian Dolls, to raising Russian kids. But there’s only so much introspection you can do before you reach a meta-loop and break the universe. That’s the point I reached last December. I was tired of writing…
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Life Bringing Up Boris
I read an article last month in Philadelphia magazine about how American men aren’t growing up. These kinds of trend pieces aren’t new. Neither are pieces examining why Americans are raising their kids the wrong way. Just look at Amy Chua and the “bringing up the French bébé” phenomenon. But seeing this last one in…
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Life My Passover Wish for Russian Jews
There is nothing more Jewish than Passover, the holiday of hope. There is nothing more Russian than trying to get a little something extra from the U.S. government. So I thought I’d take this time leading up to Pesach to talk about my hope that the Russians who keep defrauding the government cut that out….
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Life A Game of Borscht-22
The expectations Russian mothers have of their daughters are tough to live up to. The biggest one is that Russian women should know how to cook. And since we have the double privilege of being Jewish, we are expected to know how to make both borscht and latkes, often at the same time as having…
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