Yankel came to Odessa in the early 1900s from a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement—the zone where since 1772 the Russian Empire’s Jews had been confined. Though within the Pale, the port of Odessa was a thriving melting pot of Greeks, Italians, Ukrainians, and Russians as well as Jews. Here Yankel married Maria, began to flourish. And then in 1905, he returned from the disastrous Russo-Japanese War to something unspeakable. Over four October days, street mobs killed and mutilated hundreds in an orgy of anti-Jewish atrocities. Yankel and Maria’s firstborn, a baby boy, was murdered in front of them.

The civil war revived the pogrom of 1905 with anti-Semitic marauding by counterrevolutionary Whites. The Red Army—commanded by one Lev Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky—vehemently denounced the violence. Jews flocked to the Reds. Too old for combat now, Yankel cheered from the sidelines.

At first the revolution was good to the Jews. The official birth of the USSR in 1922 brought them rights and opportunities unprecedented in Russia’s history. Anti-Semitism became a state crime; the Pale was dismantled. Jews could rise through the bureaucratic and cultural ranks. At the start of the decade Jews made up one fifth of the Party’s Central Committee.

But there was a catch.

Like the Russian Empire before it, the Soviet Union was vast and dizzyingly multiethnic. For the Bolsheviks the ethnic or “nationalities” issue was fraught. In Marxist terms, nationalism was reactionary. Yet not only did ethnic minorities exist, but their oppression under the czar made them ripe for the socialist cause. So Lenin, along with the early Bolshevik nationalities commissar, Stalin, an ethnic Georgian, contrived a policy of linguistic, cultural, and territorial autonomy for ethnic minorities—in a Soviet format—until international socialism came about and nationalities became superfluous.

The USSR, in the words of the historian Terry Martin, became the world’s first affirmative-action empire.

The catch for Jews? Jewishness was now defined in strictly ethno-national terms. The Talmud had no place in building the Radiant Future. Reforming and modernizing the so-called “Jewish Street” fell to the Yevsektsii, the Jewish sections of the Communist Party. They worked savvily. Religious rituals were initially semitolerated—in Sovietized form. Passover? Well, if you must. Except the Soviet Haggadah substituted the words “October Revolution” for “God.”

In 1920s Odessa, the Soviet supporters Yankel and Maria Brokhvis continued to light candles on Shabbos at their one-room flat in Peresyp—but without mentioning God. Maria saw no wrong in gathering their three daughters around Friday table; she was a proud Jew. As the terrible times of the 1921 famine gave way to NEP’s relative bounty, she shopped every week at Odessa’s boisterous Privoz market for the pike for her famous gefilte fish. It was her second daughter Liza’s favorite. Maria made challah bread too, and forshmak (chopped herring), and bean tzimmes, and crumbly pastries filled with the black prune jam she cooked over a primus stove in the courtyard.

Then one Friday Liza returned from school and sat at the Shabbos table staring down at the floor, lips pursed, not touching a thing. She was fourteen years old and had just joined the Komsomol, the youth division of the Communist Party. After dinner she rose and declared: “Mother, your fish is vile religious food. I will never eat it again!”

And that was it for the Brokhvis family’s Friday gefilte fish. Deep in her heart, Maria understood that the New Soviet Generation knew better.

I had no idea about any of this. Not the baby dead in the pogrom, not Grandma Liza’s ban on Maria’s religious food. Only when Mom and I were in her kitchen making our gefilte tribute to Maria did I find out.

Suddenly I understood why Grandma Liza had looked pensive and hesitant whenever she mentioned the dish. She too had run from her Jewishness back in Odessa. To her credit, Liza, who was blond and not remotely Semitic-looking, became enraged, proclaiming herself Jewish, if ever anyone made an anti-Semitic remark. Granddad Naum… not so much. About his family past Mom knows almost nothing—only that his people were shtetl Zionists and that Naum ran away from home as a teen, lied about his age to join the Red Army, and never looked back.

In Jackson Heights, Mom and I are both ecumenical culturalists. We light menorahs next to our Christmas trees. We bake Russian Easter kulich cake and make ersatz gefilte fish balls for Passover. But our gefilte fish this time was different—real Jewish food. We skinned a whole pike, hand-minced the flesh, cried grating the onion, sewed the fish mince inside the skin, and cooked the whole reconstituted beast for three hours.

The labor was vast, but for me it was a small way of atoning for that August day in Odessa.

Returning to twenties Bolshevik policies, I reflected again on how kitchen labor, particularly the kind at Maria’s politically equivocal NEP home canteen, got so little respect in the New Soviet vision. Partly this was pragmatic. Freeing women from the household pot was a matter of lofty principle, but it was also meant to push them into the larger workforce, perhaps even into the army of political agitators.

I haven’t mentioned her yet, this New Soviet Woman. Admittedly a lesser star than the New Soviet Man, she was still decidedly not a housewife-cook. She was a liberated proletarka (female proletarian)—co-builder of the road to utopia, co-defender of the Communist International, avid reader of Rabotnitsa (Female Worker), an enthusiastic participant in public life.

Not for her the domestic toil that “crushes and degrades women” (Lenin’s words). Not for her nursery drudgery, so “barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying” (Lenin again). No, under socialism, society would assume all such burdens, eventually eradicating the nuclear family. “The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin,” predicted Lenin in 1919, “only where and when an all-out struggle begins… against… petty… housekeeping.”

In one of my favorite Soviet posters, a fierce New Soviet proletarka makes like a herald angel under the slogan DOWN WITH KITCHEN SLAVERY, rendered in striking avant-garde typography. She’s grinning down at an aproned female beleaguered by suds, dishes, laundry, and cobwebs. The red-clad proletarka opens wide a door to a light-flooded vision of New Soviet byt. Behold a multistoried Futurist edifice housing a public canteen, a kitchen-factory, and a nursery school, all crowned with a workers’ club.

The engine for turning such utopian Bolshevik feminist visions into reality was the Zhenotdel, literally “women’s department.” Founded in 1919 as an organ of the Party’s Central Committee, the Zhenotdel and its branches fought for—and helped win—crucial reforms in childcare, contraception, and marriage. They proselytized, recruited, and educated. The first head of Zhenotdel was the charismatic Inessa Armand—Paris-born, strikingly glamorous, and by many accounts more than simply a “comrade” to Lenin (Krupskaya being strikingly not glamorous). Ravaged by overwork, Armand died of cholera in 1920, desperately mourned by Vladimir Ilyich. The Zhenotdel mantle then passed to Alexandra Kollontai, who was perhaps too charismatic. Kollontai stands out as one of communism’s most dashing characters. A free-love apostle and scandalous practitioner of such (the likely model for Garbo’s Ninotchka), Kollontai essentially regarded the nuclear family as an inefficient use of labor, food, and fuel. Wife as homebody-cook outraged her.