The Prague Post Online: Tempo: 'Jewish luck' for former Russians

November 22nd, 2008

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'Jewish luck' for former Russians

Magid family fought anti-Russian discrimination when they first moved; 17 years later, Czech Republic is their 'European' home

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
September 19th, 2007 issue

Jan Přerovský/THE PRAGUE POST

Former Soviet soldier Sergei Magid emigrated with his family to escape anti-Semitism at home.

Jan Přerovský/THE PRAGUE POST

Now a library researcher, Magid in 1968 made a pact with his comrades to join a Czech resistance that never materialized when the Soviets invaded the Czech Republic. Magid moved his wife and two children to Prague following the Velvet Revolution. He has h

Sergei Magid remembers the day in 1968 when he and his Red Army comrades flew from the Soviet Union, ready for battle. But they had no idea where the plane was going or who their enemy was.

When they landed, the soldiers climbed into tanks and drove for hours.

“We got out of the tank at 5 a.m. and saw an apple orchard. Some of the guys thought we were in Poland. We saw a town sign and we figured we were in some Slavic country,” Magid says.

Later they learned that the airport that received them was Prague-Ruzyně, and the town their troops occupied was near a place called Olomouc.

Although the Soviet soldiers had been told that they were liberating their Czech brothers from the German troops that had recently invaded, Magid says he and a few of his buddies knew better: He knew the communists routinely lied.

“They told us that German tanks were in Plzeň,” he says. “I knew it was a lie.”

Magid and his friends made a pact to abandon the Army and join the Czech resistance they expected would rise up. But it never did. “The Czechs weren’t defending themselves,” Magid says.

Had the Czechs resisted, “I’m sure they would have succeeded. Western countries would’ve helped in some way,” he says.

Besides this, Finland had already thwarted the Soviets even though it only boasts 3 million people, while Czechoslovakia had 15 million people.

“Even if [the Czechs] had lost, the moral climate, the spirit and self-esteem would’ve been different than it is now,” Magid says. “[The occupation] only strengthened or reinforced feelings of being a victim of larger, more powerful countries. I think this attitude goes back to 1620, when they lost White Mountain.”

Ironically, the 60-year-old Magid also knows something about being a victim of the Soviet state.

Although he was born and raised in Leningrad, he was never completely accepted as a Russian by his countrymen because he is Jewish.

His parents had been lawyers, but by the time Magid wanted to pursue his own career, living under Leonid Brezhnev’s regime, the anti-Semitic climate had heightened and he couldn’t get into graduate school to study English poetic drama, his passion.

“They said to my face that this post-graduate program doesn’t prepare experts for Israel,” Magid, a short, soft-spoken man with a placid demeanor, recalled over a cup of cappuccino in a Prague 1 restaurant.

Since he couldn’t get a job in his field, he worked as a freelancer teaching English in technical institutes and translating texts from English, German and Lithuanian into Russian.

“I decided that I was going to emigrate from Russia at all costs: I was going to go to Israel,” he says. At the time, the Soviet Union had a program that allowed Jews to immigrate, but only to Israel. But his wife, who is not Jewish, had no desire to go to Israel.

“I did not want to immigrate anywhere,” Marie Magidová says. “I had had my own experiences with ‘immigration:’ since I was 8 years old I had grown up in Lithuania and not in Moscow, where I was born. So I knew how hard it was to adapt. … One can hardly get rid of the position of an observer, a guest.”

Magid says he understood his wife’s qualms about leaving their home, but anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union was creating big problems for his family. So they set about looking for other ways to leave the country. They looked at New Zealand — a country Magid says was and is “a dream” — Australia and Canada. But these countries had immigration quotas and were only looking for very young immigrants with technical backgrounds. A 35-year-old poet was not considered a prime candidate, Magid says.

So, he and his wife turned instead to Czechoslovakia, where she had family.

“We knew Marie’s father was in Czechoslovakia, and, according to Soviet law, this would mean reuniting family,” he says.

His wife, who is half-Czech, also had her own reasons for wanting to move.

“For me, it was, at the same time, a question of my own roots. That is why we decided to go to Bohemia, where my father was and where there was no anti-Semitism,” she says.

Magid says he also liked the idea of living in what he considered to be a “civilized, very cultural European country” and where he had spent six months of his life in 1968. However, their solution was not such a quick fix. Throughout the 1980s Soviet authorities refused his emigration application 11 times, he notes. In 1989 they finally relented, but that was only half the battle.

Getting permission from the Soviets to leave Russia was one thing; getting the Czechs to allow Russians to move in was another.

“I was discriminated against as a Jew in Russia and I was discriminated against as a Russian in Czechoslovakia. This is called Jewish luck,” he says with a chuckle.

After a year, the Czechoslovak government agreed to let Magid immigrate with his wife and their two children, who were then 11 and 7.

It was a tough time to be a Russian in a newly freed former satellite.

“It was terrible because it was a time of strong Russian phobia,” he says. The anti-Russian feeling was stronger in 1990 than it was in 1968 because in the ’60s “many [Czechs] believed the Soviet Union was protecting them from capitalism.” This idea had evaporated by the end of the ’80s and the Russians had come to be seen as the latest oppressor. “Nobody wanted to speak Russian, nobody wanted to understand Russian,” he noted. And, for a while, he and his wife couldn’t even get jobs because they were Russian.

Still, he says, it was worth it to immigrate. Now, his children speak Czech, as do he and his wife, and they feel European.

“That was my mission,” Magid says.

Today, the couple both work at the Klementium, where Magid has been working in the Slavonic Library for 15 years. He has had a book of poems and one of stories published in the United States, Israel, the Czech Republic and Russia.

He sees the anti-Russian attitude starting to thaw but says it’s going to be a long process that won’t be resolved until Russia is able to institute more functional democratic institutions.

After 17 years in Prague, Magid has Czech citizenship. But, when asked if he still feels Russian he says, “I feel European.”

— Naďa Černá contributed to this report.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com

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