The dusty record player, struggling through a faded song, was almost entirely drowned out by the sounds of the marketplace outside. Bins of pins, coins and assorted Soviet paraphernalia dotted the floor, and the shelves along the walls were crowded with ceramic figures: a village boy dancing with a girl, a stout bear, an old woman with a scarlet headscarf. In the center of the second room stood a metal stand — designed to rotate, but rusted stiff — stuffed with postcards.
Taking care not to collapse the entire contraption, I flipped through card by card, looking over yellowed images of Tallinn, St. Petersburg, Lviv; Soviet dogs dressed in costumes; Spanish art in Soviet museums; a collection of spring flowers. The entire Soviet Union, perhaps, arrayed before me in messy rows. An entire era of history printed out and preserved on cardstock, now available for tourists to purchase for only a dollar apiece.
A week later, I stood at the top of a mountain pass, beside an abandoned armored personnel carrier that had been left alone so long a sapling had begun to grow through the drive shaft. As I stood, awed by the snowcapped mountains and yellow forests stretching before me, I made an involuntary comment: “Looks like a postcard!”
In a way, it already was a postcard. I had captured the stunning view with a digital camera and then again with my phone. This specific view would leave my eyes as soon as I turned away, and probably fade from my memory within a few months, but it would live on in multiple forms. I had succeeded in extending the life of this mortal, passing moment a long, long time, bringing it to friends and family thousands of miles away from the actual mountains.
But in reminiscing, I had lost the present moment itself; the mountains had transformed from vast and majestic to an image instead, a separate product that I would now regard and remember. I had experienced ‘postcardification’ — the indescribable reality of the world condensed into an easily describable object. Yet, what was I to do to counteract the fallibility of my own mind? Risk losing the view forever? At least now there was a chance that someday, someone in a far-distant market could flip past dusty photographs that I had taken.
As the evening sun set behind the mountains, I found myself in perhaps one of the most unexpected places one can find in Almaty: a synagogue. I was there celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, with the only two other Jews in my program and a Kazakh student interested in converting to Judaism.
After being graciously welcomed by a young Russian émigré, I squeezed myself back against the wall and tried to follow the procession of prayers. Unable to read Hebrew or understand enough Russian to follow an Orthodox Rosh Hashanah service, I felt the congregation’s unfamiliar chanting fade into a soft murmur in the background. The yarmulke on my head felt alien — this being my first time wearing one since Yom Kippur the previous year — and even the Cyrillic letters in the prayer book before me began to swim before my eyes.
Ostensibly, I had found the only pocket of ‘my people’ within a vast and unfamiliar city. Although I felt welcomed, I did not feel at home. This was my culture, and I did not know it. How, I wondered, could I open myself to an entirely foreign culture?
But as the night unfurled and my stomach grew full at dinner, I began to sing along to the songs. A smile inevitably grew upon my face. As unfamiliar as my familiar had become, the lively conversation, the heaping plates of food and the sense of community were a language I still spoke fluently. And, as I should’ve known, apples and honey taste even sweeter in Almaty.
