Synopsis: The Light of Seven Days by River Adams
DINASH ASH is born in 1968 in Leningrad, USSR. After her Jewish parents are killed in an accident when she is three, she is raised by her grandmother, BABBY. Her childhood is both happy and difficult: while she plays and makes friends, she begins to experience antisemitism in first grade and learns that she doesn’t belong the way other children do.
When she is ten, Dinah is accepted at the Vaganova School of Ballet, and her life centers around the dream of dancing on the Kirov Theater stage. At the Vaganova, too, she must fight the antisemites, and Babby teaches her how to navigate a hostile world with dignity. Another person who helps her is MATTHEW, an older schoolmate, and soon Dinah and Matthew fall in love and get engaged. However, while Dinah is the star of her class, sure to be hired by the Kirov, Matthew turns out not to have been made for ballet. After graduating from the Vaganova, he gets into the Pedagogical Institute.
Since Soviet students are not exempt from military service at that time, after his first year Matthew gets drafted. Only through hints in his letters does Dinah realize that he was sent to fight in Afghanistan. After a long silence and many futile efforts to find him, she learns that Matthew was killed in action when a friend Matthew had made in Afghanistan, LESHA, comes to tell her personally; he was severely wounded in the same firefight.
In the meantime, Dinah has started dancing at the Kirov, though she is told plainly that becoming a prima ballerina is not an option for her, since she is Jewish and so the KGB won’t clear her to go abroad with the company. She is bitter, but more profound and accumulating traumas are taking a toll: the loss of both Matthew and then Babby of cancer. Post-Chernobyl, cancer is everywhere, and perestroika has destabilized the economy. Food has become scarce, the country is on rations, and its desperation is breeding white supremacy and nationalism.
Dinah’s solace and support is in her two childhood best friends and in a loose community of Afghan veterans who come and go at Lesha’s place. There’s darkness about them, but they are the only people who understand her widowhood. Lesha himself is not well but is most dear to her, and for his sake she endures the company of the two vets her bigotry radar nags her to avoid, until they catch her alone in a room. They disclose there will be a pogrom in Leningrad, then pull out a knife and carve a cross into her abdomen. Lesha and a neighbor come to Dinah’s rescue, but, in horror and shock, she runs and never comes back.
Though the pogrom never does happen, Dinah goes to the US embassy in Moscow and receives a refugee status. After an excruciating process of packing and saying good bye, in 1991 Dinah lands in Northeast Philadelphia, in the embrace of her sponsoring synagogue. While her synagogue is kind and nice, it is rather traditional and not particularly culturally savvy. Dinah is scarred and atheist and feminist and from a massive center of high culture, but she doesn’t know English. She is helpless, grateful, and resentful at the same time.
Dinah spends her first several months trying to learn English and find any sort of job. Until now all she’s known of her Jewishness was persecution, but the Jews at her synagogue choose freely to practice. Dinah is both envious and resistant. She has encountered the legend of the Wandering Jew when she was a child, and now she realizes herself—and perhaps the rest of her nation—to be one.
Her first years in America are agonizing. Dinah barely finds a hateful job handling vegetables at a Russian supermarket; she’s out of practice and in bad shape, and both her work and her attempts to retrain herself for ballet are complicated by her refusal to condone racism among her Russian colleagues. Eventually the founder of a small New Jersey ballet troupe takes a chance and hires her, but Dinah must start from the bottom, in corps de ballet. She cannot adjust to being automatically labeled “white” after growing up a minority, and her relationship with Judaism is fluid and bothersome. Still, she works hard and is finally dancing again. Her English improves, and she begins to find belonging at the Southern New Jersey Ballet, especially with two Black dancers who help her understand her discomfort regarding racial labels and with an old Holocaust survivor, who deepens her sense of Jewishness. When she takes her citizenship oath, unexpectedly many people turn up for her ceremony.
After a few years, Dinah is comfortable and a soloist again, but she begins to feel so run-down that she has trouble finishing the season, and her contract is not renewed. Her boss finds her a teaching job with old friends (until she feels better, they agree), but doctors keep diagnosing her with a virus, then with depression, until finally Dinah is diagnosed with lung cancer, which she attributes to the effects of Chernobyl. By then the tumor has metastasized to her brain. She’s been hallucinating for months.
Stunned by the news, Dinah boards the wrong train and wanders into a synagogue in a small town outside of Philly. She is pulled in by hearing the rabbi, SIMON LEVI, practicing for next service, singing in Hebrew. She breaks down in his office, and he goes with her to the next medical appointment. Friendship becomes care, and care becomes love. Simon is much older, has lost his first wife to cancer, too, and has a teenage daughter. His and Dinah’s marriage is very different from her young, romantic relationship with Matthew. With him she can explore her most important questions: those of Jewish identity, of race, of loss and the meaning of life.
With a series of treatments, Dinah survives long beyond the average for her illness: four more years. Simon’s synagogue is Reconstructionist, very liberal, and slowly Dinah comes to think that their understanding of Judaism is so broad that it embraces her atheism. They find God in the world and in each other. She feels finally that she has a home and family.
It is October 2001, and Dinah knows what happened a month ago but loses dates and details, even the faces and names of her husband and daughter. In her last moments, her daughter comes to tell her that, in the aftermath of 9/11, she’s enlisted in the Army to go fight in Afghanistan. Dinah recognizes the expression on Simon’s face: she used to wear it. The wheel turns over, but it’ll have to run its course without her. Dinah is too tired. She is done.