Ukraine II: Notes from the Synagogue Underground

My second most interesting conversation in Ukraine came in the basement of the Kiev Central Synagogue with a certain Leonid.

I went to shul on Saturday morning in Kiev because I wanted to add my number –even my completely Americanized, married-to-a-shikse number — to the Jews gathering in worship here at one of the epicenters of the great darkness that fell 67 years ago in full confidence that it could exterminate our (oh, now all of the sudden it is our!) civilization. Fate had even provided me with a custom-made party-favor yarmulke stashed in one of my suit pockets from a suburban New Jersey bar mitzvah some months back. So I was meant to go.

Also I was lonely with a day to fill up in a strange city, and I thought some fellow Jews might clasp me to their bosom and invite me home to one of these million-dollar fresh-built apartments I kept hearing about in my banker travels. Things turned out a little differently.

The service was moving, the spectacle of one hundred or more men (women stashed in the balcony, orthodox style) swarming to kiss the Torah here in the shadow of Babi Yar — a microcosm of the desperately stubborn rebirth, repopulation, re-enrichment of my peculiar tribe, determined apparently for one more century and millennium to rally around these frequently indecipherable and hectoring Five Books, the portion from which this particular sabbath was not one of the greatest hits: We were stuck deep in the interminable Leviticus/Deuteronomy stretches commanding us how many ephods to build our tent poles, and the specifics of how to dress our goat sacrifices.

I drifted over nonetheless to apply my tallis to the sacred scroll and bestow a reverent kiss, when the holiness of the moment was interrupted, alas, by human ugliness and arrogance. The rabbi carrying the Torah, one of the barrel-chested, dense-bearded, radiating- self-righteousness types whom the world Jewish hierarchy, whoever they may be, always sends out to restore the faith in the scorched spiritual earht of Eastern Europe, took a turn away from me and mounted an altar in the middle of the shul to commence the reading.

I was chill with not kissing the Torah, but an older man behind me with a hearing aid, who looked either too frail or too polite to die into the scrum of general Torah-kissing, was disappointed and called to the rabbi: “Wait. Can you come over here?” The good clergyman gave his best Jerusalem glower and shot back: “You should come to the book. It doesn’t come to you.”

I flashed back to 14 or so years ago when my son Daniel had just been born in Moscow, and I trekked to the central synagogue there to humbly ask if he might be circumcised even though he had the grave misfortune of a Christian mother. A black-bearded holy man from the same Jewish Central Casting poked his head momentarily out of a well-guarded office, shook it at me with righteous outrage, and disappeared with a great bustling air. So Daniel has not grown up much of a Jew. (That’s a long story).

I was tempted to throw in the tallis after this fresh rabbinical outrage. But I wasn’t quite upset enough to walk out in the middle of the Torah reading, and I was still lonely for society after the service. So when it finally ended I happily followed the rabbi’s invitation to go downstairs for a post worship snack, sat down at the men’s table and bid my neighbor gut shabbes. This turned out to be Leonid.

“Boy, a lot of people come out for the services,” I addressed him heartily.

“To be honest,” he answered. “A lot of them just come for the food.”

Then I had a look around. Indeed, most of the prosperous, self-confident looking parishioners, the ones I was counting on for invitations to the million-dollar apartments, seemed to have skipped the banquet. Instead I was surrounded by the people you seldom notice until you are surrounded by them — Leonid, frail and indistinct with a handshake like a patch of moisture on one side, and a just-plain snot-leaking beggar whose name wasn’t volunteered on the other. Opposite was a roster of middle-aged men who looked simply threadbare, having put together a shabbes suit and tie perhaps of Soviet vintage and enough wherewithal that they could pass their leftovers — cabbage, potatoes, chicken, served generously by a cheerful young waitress in two courses, to the beggar, who shoveled them into a plastic bag to last through part of the week.

Leonid described himself as a “lonely man” — no wife or children, most unusual for post-Soviet society. He had worked for many years running a post office. But pressures of the job in recent years, the move to computerization and other newfangled ways, had an unspecified bad effect on his heart. He couldn’t work now, but had to wait one more year until he was 60 and could collect a pension, if the government doesn’t raise the pension age by then. (I didn’t think of it just then, but with my financial journalist’s hat I am getting set to decry Ukraine’s uncontrolled upward spiral of social payments for things like … pensions, which are indeed pushing inflation to dangerous rates.)

Leonid drew the brief picture of his life uncomplainingly and for the most part unapologetically. We talked as equal to equal, just that when the waitress brought me my second course, for I was first in the path she as following, Leonid grabbed for it with hands that shook a bit. And he carefully tucked next to his napkin an extra piece of black bread that one of his merely-threadbare companions discreetly passed to him, for use later on.

So I did two things on Saturday morning that I think were important, without being able to explain just why: joining the Jews who still come to daven in Kiev, and taking a detour from my travels among the economic elite to meet Leonid and others feeling the pain. I didn’t make it to any of those million-dollar apartments, but I had a great day in Kiev after that, all by myself.

Ukraine: Some Mold Under the Breadbasket

Those of us who practice journalism know that most of the time people we interview say pretty much what we expect them to say. (“Profits will rebound.” “We will win this election.”). A good source will feed you a pungent quote or some telling statistics, maybe tweak the theme a bit. If they didn’t, you could hardly meet deadlines. But now and again you find someone who is determined to be off-message,and they make it all worthwhile again.

Top experience in that category this week (well, one of top two) was a guy I’ll call Bill the Agrobusinessman. Here in Kiev the investment bankers (yes, there are investment bankers in Kiev folks!) are talking up the story of agricultural investment and revival now that global farm prices are, contrary to the pattern of the last two centuries or so, rapidly rising. (Is there nothing Bushonomics can’t achieve?) The fabled Breadbasket of Europe, as pre-1917 Ukraine was known, will return, in tandem with a new Biofuels Basket, because those funky Europeans make their ethanol out of rape seed (look it up in your farm dictionary), which grows perfectly, like wheat and soy and so many other things, in Ukraine’s beautiful black earth.

As it happens, I like this story (though my financial editor in New York appears unsold), so I shook the tree to find some real live agroinvestors, and one of the bankers steered me to Bill. When he mentioned the name, I recalled with pleasure that I had already met Bill in the mid-1990s. His story was this: A middle-aged farmer and grain dealer from the U.S. plains, the most bluff, straight-shooting, American guy you could possibly imagine, appealingly overweight in the John Madden style, by chance of fate meets a Ukrainian woman on some sort of exchange program in Des Moines, takes her for his second wife and vows to start a new life in Ukraine circa 1993 or so.

Two years later maybe, when I meet him, he is angrily disillusioned. He has brought capital, know-how, initiative, can-do attitude to a field where they are desperately needed, Ukraine’s endlessly downtrodden farm and village, and nobody gives a shit. More precisely, the local tin-pot lords of each particular farm or village understand Bill is a threat to their local tin-pot dictatorships, and vow to be rid of him at all costs: fire inspections, silo inspections, financial audits, when all these fail to deter him some outright vandalism. I meet him at his home base in Kiev and he is boiling with outrage. “We’re going to turn around and leave them here in their Communist shithouse!” he declares.

So fast-forward to 2008, and a banker is steering me to this same Bill as a pioneer of the bankable Ukraine farm revival. I call him and he’s still bluff and friendly, still working out of the same apartment office on one of the outlying Kiev hills. And I’m thinking he must have slogged through all the crap and made it, that he’s going to sell me a happy story of determination and Ukraine making progress in spite of itself.

Instead what I find is Bill older, fatter, and … angrier still. He starts off telling me: “Ukraine is missing a once in a millennium opportunity because they all have their heads up their asses.” (Two successive governments, though allegedly bitter ideological rivals, have both limited agricultural exports in the name of keeping prices low for Ukrainians, which hasn’t worked.) Then he gets warmed up.

When I note that something good must be happening because he is still here, he tells me that if he could get back the $50 million he invested he would leave tomorrow. When I ask whether all that money was his, he rises, bangs his chair on the floor (we were having an excellent lunch prepared in-house by one of his suitably self-effacing Ukrainian helper women) and shouts what the hell do I mean by that question? Isn’t he obligated to protect his investors’ money as if it were his own?

He recounts how a certain official demanded a bribe from one of his deputies as the price of importing a certain variety of seed corn. “If I were at that meeting, I would have taken down my pants and taken a crap right on his carpet, and you can quote me on that!” Probably I can’t unfortunately outside of this blog entry. I’m not sure where such a quote would fit into any piece I would write for traditional publication.

Bill stormed off to his office and I followed, though he hadn’t exactly asked me to. I spent 15 or 20 minutes calming him down, which I found I was rather good at. Either that or, as he explained, he had been on the verge of a diabetic episode not having eaten until 2:00 pm., and the sugars from the nutritious home-cooked lunch were restoring his chemistry. I told him that he had chosen to enter post-Soviet society from the back end, the demoralized, socially broken, post-purge, post-famine, post-all horrors imaginable and many unimaginable Ukrainian village, where change could only come generationally, as it had to the Children of Israel lost for 40 years in Sinai. (A common metaphor in this part of the world.) I bade him remember all the good work he had done, the folks he employs at good wages (relatively: $140 a month for the farmers), the young managers he has trained who will create more progress on their own in time. And he settled down, went for the photo album of his kids, grandkids and cattle.

I rather admired myself for my skill as a therapist. (You don’t want to die here, I told him. Use this hype about Ukrainian agricultural to sell out.) But I also realized one more of the many reasons why I will never be an entrepreneur myself: I lack Bill’s passion about anything bricks and mortar that could effect change in the world of karma. I’m always seeing things with perspective and on the other hand. Or maybe this is just an excuse for being lazy and risk-averse. Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t leave him before he calmed down.

Bear Stearns from Abroad, or America Sells Cheap

I heard the news of Bear Stearns’ ignominious end from two Ukrainian investment bankers, having missed the denouement of the express financial drama while in flight from New York. The scene was one familiar to any financial journalist or other big-money hanger-on: a private booth in a marble-appointed sushi restaurant, two financiers looking conspicuously too young for the cash they have to throw around, looking faintly board at having to waste time and words on a mere hack who can’t directly help them make any more. Exactly the kind of scene played over a million lunches and dinners during better times on …. Wall Street.

But here’s the twist: These elite scions of a country most Americans (with some reason) think of as third-tier all-but mud-hut benighted, if they are aware it exists at all. taking the chance to send some well-deserved scorn back across the Atlantic. Bear Stearns sold for $250 million!” they chortled over the laughable sum. “Maybe a Ukrainian bank should have bought it!’ And indeed Ukrainian banks have been hot properties over the past two years or so, selling out to continental European cousins at $1 billion and up for the bigger ones.

My mind jumped back a few days to last Friday, when I first heard about Bear Stearns going into meltdown via Fox Business News, while eating some tuna fish (Bumble Bee from the can on this occasion) at home on Staten Island. Some American financial talking head in a $3,000 suit and $1,000 glasses was cogently arguing that governments could not allow banks to fail even though they had acted like idiots and wasted their capital on bad investments, how the central banks of the world needed to raise a $1 trillion rescue fund as the only means of staving off a rerun of 1929.

Now my first observation was commonplace: how when these clowns are riding high they sneer at government and revile the necessity of paying taxes in blithe assurance that the “self-correcting” market is all that’s necessary for the further progress of mankind. How we don’t hear any of the kings or pawns who created this mess volunteering to give back any of the hundreds of millions they raked off the top as the first contribution toward a rescue fund. How in Korea at least disgraced executives make ritual public apologies and crinkle their faces on TV.

The audacity of the money class in changing from universe master to humble petitioner is an old story. What was new, buried in the interior of the talking head’s remarks, was an additional address of the petition, foreign investors. Having emptied its collective pockets like a drunken sailor on a six-year or so binge, America now seeks to replenish them from the folks who have cash: China, Dubai, etc. “The foreigners will be coming in soon,” my friend on Fox assured us. Ukraine was not yet on the list of potential white knights. But you can feel certain that no one would turn away a chunk of Russian money that wanted to buy into  Citibank or Morgan Stanley at this point.

Here’s what’s interesting: The financial class, being by its nature pragmatic and mercurial (See Mitt Romney for a glaring example) has easily switched gears to the reality of America as a capital supplicant, the necessity of name-brand American institutions dancing to Chinese or Dubaian tuunes if they want to support their managers in the style to which they have, since Ronald Reagan opened the floodgates of righteously self-justifying greed, become so firmly accustomed.

The general population, on the other hand, is set in its ways and emotional, like general populations anywhere, and clings to the pleasant idea of  America as boss of the world, able if not obligated to intervene in the remotest corner of the globe to protect freedom and civilization, the unquestioned leader among nations. Neither Vietnam nor Iraq has shaken the broad conviction that we are morally obligated to maintain our benign  (as we see it) empire, that the White Man’s Burden passed to us after World War II and we must carry it (preferably with soldiers hired from minorities and the lower economic classes). The presidential candidates will fiercely debate how and whether we should soldier on in Iraq, but no one will mess with the shibboleth that the USA needs to be “strong.” (Except good old Ron Paul, who was laughed congenially out of the race.)

Now it only stands to reason that the rest of the world is not going to pay for us to boss them around. The American public will have to take a long, painful journey to reach the conclusion that Wall Street grasped instantly: We are one nation among others. We’ll have our better and worse moments. Sometimes we can help and sometimes we’ll need help.  The sun set on the British Empire at last. For America it’s looking well into the afternoon.

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