Thread by @SlavaMalamud, OK, the results are in, so here it is, one of the [...]

OK, the results are in, so here it is, one of the stories of my Soviet life: how I got Karened by my art teacher in 7th grade.
A fair warning: this story is extremely mundane. If you are Soviet. https://twitter.com/SlavaMalamud/status/1291857734825107457

https://twitter.com/SlavaMalamud/status/1291857734825107457

This happened during a regular art class in my Railroad Workers' Secondary General Educational School No. 13 in the village of Borisovka, Moldavian SSR, one sunny spring day in 1989.
One thing you should know about my neck of the woods: it was the Soviet version of Alabama...

In that it was really, really rural, extremely backward, riddled with centuries-old ethnic strife between Russians in Romanians, who could agree on absolutely nothing except one thing: they both hated themselves some Jews.
One thing you should know about me: I hated art...

I always thought of myself as rather creative, but when it came to drawing things that looked like things, most of my things tended to look like either a hockey goalie in a fur hat or a motorcycle with a corpse on it.
One thing you should know about art: it hated me back...

... through the medium of my art teachers. Luckily, art teachers in god-forsaken cloacas of the Soviet provinces rarely expected their charges to be able to draw anything beyond the barest approximation of a chair. But they did take their "mandatory assignments" seriously...

Those ame down from the principal and they always involved something political, because in the Soviet Union, every subject was political. Even gym. Especially gym (at least in my school, where it was taught by a contused Afghanistan vet who told us tales about mujahideen torture)

The mandatory art assignments consisted of drawing posters for the state holidays: the Revolution Day (no Lenin! nobody was allowed to draw Lenin's visage! he was basically our Mohammad), May Day, International Women's Day, Glorious Soviet Coal Miners Day, Red Army Day, Lent (jk)

I forget what exact holiday we were commemorating then, but I remember the topic of the assignment: "Glorious Soviet People are Staunch Defenders of World Peace!" Not a type of project you are allowed to screw up. So, everyone reached for their backpacks to get their compasses...

WTF? Compasses? Why, Slava? This isn't geometry! Well, you see, any Soviet agitprop poster on the topic of world peace and its staunch defense had to have a globe on it. I am not sure whether it was per the Central Committee directive or just naturally happened that way, but...

... they all did. Globes. Globes with doves over them. Globes with a muscular proletarian over them, breaking an atomic bomb with letters "US" on it. Globes with multi-colored hands shaking each other. Globes with hammers and sickles being brandished, presumably peacefully...

So, every student in my class reached for their compass, to draw the ubiquitous globe. Except, of course, for the nearly six-foot-tall Semite with a history of poor relationship with art teachers.
"Malamud! Where is your compass?", asked Whatevera Whateverovna, the art teacher.

"In my backpack", said I.
"Why aren't you using it?", she insisted, obviously suspecting that something horrible was in store. The answer, however, found her quite lost for words.
"Because I don't want to do what everyone else is gonna do", was the literal heresy uttered by me...

At this point, I must make a Tolsotvian digression and explain you the full gravity of the situation.
The very fact that I was a Jew meant that I was in eternal debt to the Motherland, to be paid only be the utter subservience and every attempt possible to make myself invisible..

The fact that I was about 5'11" and the captain of the volleyball team meant I was already on the thinnest of ices. So, there was no conceivable way on Earth I could ever think of answering the art teacher's question with what amounted to actual prosecutable crime in the USSR...

The art teacher never said another word. She quietly exited the room for about 2 minutes. That's because our school was about the size of an NBA player's man cave, and the principal's office was never far away.
As you can imagine, this is where I was summoned after the bell...

Awaiting me there were the art teacher, the principal and the assistant principal (what in the USSR was known as The Administrator of the Educational Division, or "zavuch", just to make it sound more frightening). It was quite obvious the admins didn't really believe the teacher.

It was just too dire an accusation to take seriously. A child not wanting to be like everyone else?! A student exhibiting a rudimentary desire to have his uniqueness encouraged and nurtured? What's next? Hard narcotics in shop class? Homosexual sex? Immigration to Israel??? Bah!

"Malamud. What did you really say in art class?", asked the principal, playing the good cop. "It was something silly, right? Something you didn't mean?"
"I didn't want to do something everyone else was gonna do." I never bothered to master the Soviet Jew's Survival Techniques...

A confession, the holy grail of all NKVD officers, clearly wasn't what they were aiming for. It meant harsh measures had to be taken, immediately. One couldn't have a student going around the school bragging he verbally expressed a desire to be different AND GOT AWAY WITH IT!..

I was immediately informed that, effective immediately, I am suspended. My mother was to report to school at her earliest convenience. In order to compel my compliance, my backpack, with all supplies and personal effects, was confiscated.
"Damn morons", I blurted out as I exited.

As I closed the door, I heard the Zavuch gasp. This is the only emotional sound, other than growling, I ever remember hearing her make in my entire educational career. I didn't understand it then, but I know now that in her lifetime she saw people shot for much less...

I went straight back home, casually informed my mother she is wanted in school, changed into my goalkeeper's gear and went to the stadium, because the soccer team had a match that day. We were desperately clinging to a 2-2 tie when my mom entered the stadium stage left...

... singing the Eternal Aria of Jewish Motherhood, with the usual notes of disappointment accentuated by the underlying theme of near-suicidal hysteria.
"DO YOU KNOW THAT YOU HAVE A CRIMINAL RECORD?" - she screamed, completely obliterating the sound of the referee's whistle.

"YOU ARE GOING TO PRISON! YOU WILL BE A CRIMINAL LIKE YOUR NO-GOOD FATHER!", she continued as I was desperately trying to direct my wall for the upcoming free kick.
"HERE YOU ARE RUNNING AROUND DOING SOME SPORT LIKE ALL THE STUPID GOYIM! YOU WILL BE IN JAIL WITH ALL OF THEM!"

This, by the way, marked the first and only occasion my mother ever paid a visit to any of my sporting contests.
The free kick was a horrible miss, but the striker was only the second most embarrassed person in the stadium at the moment.
My mother was partially right...

I did not go to jail, though some of my teammates most definitely wound up doing just that at some points in their lives. But I did beat all of them to a criminal record, that much was true.
The school admins reported me to the authorities immediately upon my leaving the building

In the USSR, this was called "vzyat na uchet", meaning "put on notice", which meant the police had you on record as a potential "client" at some point. This was the standard first step in the career of a juvenile delinquent...

Since all of this was done in absentia, I still don't know what I was charged with. Criminal disregard for socialist realism in art? Misdemeanor nonconformity? Insulting comrade school administrators on duty? Goalkeeping while Jewish? All are good guesses.

Whatever it was, from that point on I was an Official Troublemaker, which came with unexpected benefits. Like, say, being able to come to school with slightly longer hair than was allowed in the Glorious Soviet Schoolchild Personal Appearance Field Manual. The bar was raised...

Also, I was never forced to draw another stupid Communist poster ever again. I was a child headed straight to the GULAGs, apparently, so nobody really cared anymore.
Only Yefim Semyonovich, a hard-drinking shop teacher, said: "Listen, wasn't it enough to be a Jew?"

My mother remarried, and I suddenly became a step-son of an Army colonel. This meant that GULAG might not be inevitable after all.
Yefim Semyonovich emigrated to Israel two years later. The USSR collapsed immediately after. Nobody draws fucking globes anymore. A lost art.
Fin.

I will tell the other promised story (The Gruesome Soccer Injury and The Expulsion From Soviet Boy Scouts) later. Promise.

As a side note: I tell this story a lot to my own students, both to lighten the classroom mood and to teach them to appreciate some good things about the American educational system. In particular, how it aims to promote and encourage uniqueness.

They always tell me I should write a book. "Like, Mr. Malamud, just call it "Weird Shit That Happened in My Life" or something."
I say that it's a pretty unambiguous way to get fired from the job I love. Because my life wasn't quite an American-school-parents-firendly narrative.

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