The primary or most salient fact about Arkady Gendler, the 91-year-old icon and paragon of the Yiddish revival movement, is that he is adorable. Wizened, handsome, humane, wise, mirthful, radiating warmth and understanding like the archetypical Yiddish-speaking Jewish grandfather, he is cherished by the specialists and oddballs who inhabit the musty, cultic, and tightly knit world of academic Yiddishkeit and Klezmer revival festivals and beloved by everyone around him.
Traveling to Zaporozhye, situated deep within the industrial heartland of Ukraine, is by no means simple. Setting out by plane from Paris, my fiancée and I arrived in her hometown of Odessa where, fortified by a night of sleep and some of her mother’s cooking, we then embarked on one of those spectacularly adventurous and uncomfortable night-long train journeys by a sleeper car full of Cameroonian medical students. (“There is no work in France now,” they told us to justify their choice to study medicine in Odessa.) Arriving in the industrial behemoth of Dnepropetrovsk in the morning, we missed the day’s last electrichka—one of the slow-moving regional trains that make all the local stops, that would have taken us a full five hours to traverse the last hundred miles to Zaporozhye.
