After the USSR was dissolved in the early 90s, many Jewish people left the Soviet Union and made Aliyah – hundreds of thousands of people. This immigration wave was so huge and concentrated over a (relatively) short period of time that it brought an immediate housing shortage, mainly in the center of Israel. As a result, an effort has been made by the state to transfer the immigrants to the periphery of Israel, such as Haifa and the Krayot in the north, and Beersheba, Ashdod, and Ashkelon in the south. Families with higher socioeconomic backgrounds managed to move to residential areas of their own choice, but most families remained in the same city that Israel had allocated to them.  

It’s important to know this historical background before diving into the new and relevant series Sovietska, created by Dana Abramovich, which aired on Kan11 in 2023. Abramovich wrote the script based on her own life experience growing up in Bet She’an (in northern Israel) to immigrant parents. In Sovietska, Anat is a bright student who studies Math at Tel Aviv University. Her mother (Evgenia Dodina) is an English teacher, her father (Gera Sandler) works at a factory, and her older brother is married and works in high-tech. Anat tries to help her parents navigate Israeli society, while also trying to shield them from it. The series opens with Anat’s father being laid off from his 20-year job at his factory, only to discover that due to a deliberate error on his employer’s part, he isn’t entitled to any compensation. A fight between Anat and a National Insurance official becomes viral and turns her, against her will, into a social media star and the voice of a generation.

The Generation In-Between

Abramovich’s generation is what is considered in Israel the 1.5 generation: those who came to Israel as babies or very young children at the beginning of the 90s or the early 2000s, and had to bridge Hebrew and the Israeli culture to their immigrant parents. They had to manage both their own difficulties of finding belonging and acceptance in the native kindergarten and classroom, and their parents’ hardships in finding a stable job and dealing with exhausting bureaucracy in a language they don’t speak. Adults who were doctors, scientists, and academics in the Soviet Union frequently had to work in lower-income jobs such as cleaning, security, and physical labor due to their language barrier. 

Due to these challenges, both mental and emotional, many adults who came to Israel from the former USSR found solace in their own tight-knit communities. These communities enjoyed the same traditions, cuisine, music, theater, and culture, and protected their members from harmful stereotypes that existed outside. The inhospitable attitude of some of the native Israelis, who had difficulty adjusting to the scale of this immigration wave, made it even more difficult to integrate. The 1.5 generation found itself stuck in between: speaking Russian or Ukrainian at home and Hebrew on the street, celebrating traditions and holidays with their families that weren’t even mentioned at school, and overall not feeling like they fully belonged, neither here nor there. 

Sovietska manages to shed light on this important conflict in a nuanced, funny, and touching way, balancing drama and comedy without losing touch with reality. With a cast of wonderful actors and actresses, all with similar autobiographical backgrounds (which heightens the impact), Sovietska will undoubtedly teach its viewers a lesson or two, without giving up the artistic value of a very clever and engaging television series.