Uncle Mitya 251

This rare photograph shows my beloved Uncle Mitya (Mattityahu) Abramov. Sadly, in the picture you can see only Uncle Mitya's hand, feeding an unidentified kitten, and behind him a smiling man whom I no longer recognize. It is the only photograph of Uncle Mitya cleared for publication.

In 1983, armed KGB forces raided our old neighborhood, where Jewish, Muslim, Armenian, and Russian families lived, all of them barely scraping by. During the search of Uncle Mitya's basement apartment, four kilograms of pure gold were found. The Soviet regime had absolutely forbidden private commerce of any kind, especially trade in foreign currency and gold.

In those harsh times, many Mountain Jews ran clandestine black-market operations to support families with many children. My own father, as a boy, fed his family by running for an underground shoe factory in the neighborhood. He knew every policeman, knew how to hide the shoes on his body, how to slip past a patrol and reach the customers.

But that night the whole neighborhood was struck dumb. Four kilos isn't a gold chain — four kilos is a death sentence: a bullet in the head, no appeal, for anyone deemed an immediate threat to the Soviet Communist regime.

That night Uncle Mitya was not in the apartment. Apparently he had been tipped off by a detective he kept on a generous bribe. From that day on Uncle Mitya vanished, and was declared the regime's most wanted man.

Uncle Mitya sold gold only to feed his family, but in truth he was no merchant — he was a poet. In secret he wrote strange poetry that almost no one understood, work that only many years later scholars would classify as prophetic Kabbalistic poetry: an ecstatic practice of permuting letters and numbers, in the tradition of Rabbi Abraham Abulafia.

Eventually strange rumors began to circulate: that Uncle Mitya had joined the underground punk scene, that he was practicing the esoteric tradition, that he had founded a secret circle for messianic, revolutionary, anti-Soviet poetry.

His poems weren't about love or depression. They were mystical poems, dense with Kabbalistic codes and transmissions from the world of tohu. He and his friends distributed them as street notices, on public transport, in unlikely places. The poems were extraordinary in their beauty, but they were wrapped in a cloud of disrupted consciousness, in an unusual chaotic density. Anyone who read them began to ask questions that had no answers, and felt himself undergoing a shift in consciousness.

One such case: a senior officer in the Red Army happened by chance upon one of their poems.

From a notice pasted on the window of Tram No. 4, Lenin Street, Baku, February 1986:

אַבְרָמוֹב (Abramov) = 251. בְּרָמוֹבָא (Bramova) = 251. רָמוֹבָאַב (Ramovav) = 251. The name does not move. The border moves. Whoever rearranges the letters rearranges the blood, the plague, the darkness. The Five-Year Plan did not number them among its objectives. Tovarish, count again from one.

Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Stepanovich Loginov came home that evening and called his wife by his mother's maiden name. He did not notice. She noticed and said nothing. At midnight the hallway bulb flickered twice and went out and did not come back until morning; his wife said avariya — malfunction — and fell silent. The next morning he tried to write a routine report and discovered that he knew where every letter was supposed to sit in the Russian alphabet — but he could not get them to line up. They were not refusing. They had simply forgotten one another. After three days it passed. He did not report it. Only at night, before turning out the lamp, he would whisper to himself the three words he had seen in the window and their number — two hundred and fifty-one, two hundred and fifty-one, two hundred and fifty-one — and laugh, low in his throat, and count again from one.

Very quickly the Soviet authorities began to sense that something abnormal was happening in reality itself, and they could not tell whether this was mystical madness or whether they were under a strange and dangerous mental attack. The Communists had been certain that they alone could control consciousness, and suddenly they fell into panic and systems-collapse, and the consciousness-disruption kept spreading like fire through a field of thorns.

In the end — everyone knows this by now — Uncle Mitya and his friends brought down the Soviet regime, with no violence and no demonstrations in the streets.

When the whole thing exploded and collapsed, he made aliyah to Israel. There are rumors that even today he lives under a false identity (because a death sentence still hangs over him in Russian counterintelligence to this day) in the Old City of Tzfat, continuing his secret, mystical, messianic, avant-garde work — and that occasionally he is called in to help the Mossad disrupt the consciousness of the enemy. There are also rumors that he is hiding in Mea Shearim, or with the hilltop youth in the caves of the Judean Desert, or with the junkies and prostitutes at the Old Station.

A curious and brave man who defeated the kingdom of evil — and when he came up to the Land of Israel, the root of his soul shifted from the world of tohu to the world of bohu. More than that I cannot say, except that I miss him terribly whenever I look at this single photograph.

Uncle Mitya — if you are reading these lines — I'm waiting to see you, or at least some trace of you, tomorrow evening, at Aunt Shoshana Agarunov's, 18 Rothschild Street, Or Akiva. Aunt Shoshana said she'll make the stuffed grape leaves you love so much.