Though my parents always tried to shield us from anti-Semitism, I was often made aware that there was something wrong with my being Jewish. Even as a little child, I often encountered a second-class-citizen attitude toward me.
“Nationality” was a mandatory line in Soviet passports and was a required disclosure on every application. When I was seven, my parents, hoping that I had a hidden music talent (I didn’t), signed me up for singing lessons. While filling out a standard application, the teacher asked me the usual questions: parents’ names, address, phone – and nationality. I vividly remember being filled with shame and staring at the ground as I said, “Jewish.”
Russia was not South Africa under apartheid; there was no formal discrimination against Jews or segregation. Though Stalin was going to send all Jews to the Far East, his timely death interrupted that endeavor. I’d be lying if I said that we constantly felt anti-Semitism in Russia; we did not. It sporadically touched parts of our lives, and some people were impacted more than others. Other than the anti-Semitism my father encountered in the 1950s when he applied to universities in Moscow, we were impacted even less by discrimination than most Jews were. Murmansk was a city of immigrants, a melting pot that somewhat came to life in the 1960s and 1970s.
But I always thought of being Jewish as a nationality. Until my late teens, I never related being Jewish with a religious identity. My parents and grandparents were not religious. The premise behind all organized religions was “debunked” by teachers in Soviet Russia from the first grade forward. I don’t think the “God doesn’t exist; it’s all a mass delusion” lecture was in the curriculum, but the message was consistently the same from all our teachers. My father said my teachers were just a product of their environment, and he was probably right.
Come to think of it, I did not know a single religious person of any religion. My parents had a lot of Jewish friends who for the most part were either teachers, scientists or doctors; and none of them were religious.
Coming to America
After the glasnost (“transparency,” “openness”) reform of 1985, the decades of brainwashing were slowly supplanted by the truth. In the late 1980s few people could afford VCRs, but little VCR movie theaters were popping up in basements of apartment buildings everywhere, consisting of several TV sets hooked up to a VCR. Unlike state-owned theaters, they were not censored and had the freedom to choose their repertoire.
Picture and sound quality were terrible, as VHS tapes were copied dozens of times before they made it into a VCR. Movies were dubbed by one monotone voice that translated all characters. But none of that mattered; we were hungry for variety, and American cinema was it. After watching hundreds of these flicks, it became painfully obvious that America and capitalism were not so rotten after all. And despite what my camp teacher told me, Americans did not really have any intention of poisoning little kids.
But we were shocked to discover that Americans ate dogs. Okay, this needs an explanation.
As the relationship between Russia and the Western world started to thaw, Americans and Europeans started to send food to help Russians. I remember one day we got a box full of canned and packaged food. All this food looked new and exciting to us. It was so different from the food we were used to that it might as well have come from Mars.
There was a can that said, “Hot Dogs.” My English was good enough to know the words hot and dogs. What you need to understand is that the term hot dog doesn’t (or at least didn’t) exist in Russian. There were sausages and there were links (thin sausages). We were shocked that Americans would kill dogs and then eat them hot.
In 1990, my “Siberian” aunt invited us to join her in the US. Just a few years earlier the possibility would have sounded absurd to us but, despite America’s cruel eating habits, we decided to emigrate.
My father saw no future for us in Russia. So, on December 4, 1991, we found ourselves in New York City. We stayed there overnight and a day later we were in Denver. A new and in many ways harder (at least at first) life started, but we never regretted leaving Russia.
Our coming-to-America experience lacks the color and drama you might expect. Pan Am had oversold its coach class, so we got a free upgrade and flew first class from Moscow to New York. In 1991, the road for new immigrants from Russia had already been paved by the hundreds of thousands that came before us a few years earlier. At the airport we were greeted by my aunt and half a dozen friendly strangers (people from her synagogue), who brought us to a fully furnished apartment that my aunt and these strangers had prepared. The selflessness of these supposedly self-obsessed capitalists was shocking to all of us. With the help of my aunt, these strangers, and Jewish Family Service (a terrific organization that helped a lot of Russian immigrants), we were able to get on our feet relatively quickly.
Another shock to us was that Denver looked nothing like New York or Los Angeles. It didn’t have many skyscrapers; nor did it have palm trees. My image of America had been wrongly colored by Hollywood movies, which were usually set on the coasts, not in flyover country. We were also shocked at how underdressed Americans were (at least in Denver). Russians, just like Europeans, paid attention to how they dressed. Americans (unless they lived in NYC), not so much.
I had studied British English in school, though studied is an overstatement. This was raw memorization, with zero practical speaking experience. I soon discovered that my Queen’s English was worthless. It was good enough to buy a pack of cigarettes, but beyond that I could barely understand anything. Americans spoke in full, run-together sentences, not in discrete words.
The lack of language did not stop me from looking for a job. My aunt taught me to say, “I’d like to fill out a job application.” Armed with this important sentence, a winning smile, and a lack of fear, I knocked on the door of every business in a two-mile radius. (I later discovered that a few of them were strip clubs.) After a few months of knocking, I got a job at a health club folding towels and cleaning locker rooms.
TV was a great educational tool. In fact, the show Married with Children is responsible for a good portion of my day-to-day vocabulary, and for a while Al Bundy was my role model (not for too long, though).
My new American life was exciting – new friends, new country; everything was new.
My father and stepmother initially had a very different experience. The first few years must have been excruciating for them – they had a family to feed. My father could not teach, so he turned to painting. My stepmother was a doctor in Russia; she got a job doing housekeeping at a hotel. As you can imagine, it was a difficult and painful transition for her. My father, wonderful human being that he is, would come to the hotel late in the day, let her rest, and do the beds for her. To this day, when we stay at a hotel, my father makes sure we leave a big tip.
After a few years in the US, my father started to make a living selling his art, and my stepmother quit working and became his “business manager.” She spoke English for both of them.
Additional thoughts:
The war in Ukraine and the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel made me think about Russia, and about my being Jewish.
I used to look at the Soviet Union as a collection of fifteen republics, states if you like. Today I realize that it was a Russian empire. Russia was the preeminent republic (state) and all the others were just its vassals.
One feature of empires is that their core residents wear a mask of superiority over their vassals. There was also an unspoken caste system in the Soviet Union: The Slavs – Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians – were the super caste, and everyone else was not as good.
The farther away from Russia they were, the darker and more different their facial features were, the more pronounced their Russian accent was, the lower caste they were. Georgians, Armenians, and Tajiks were the lowest of the low. The part that still confuses me about this system is that Jews, who looked not that much different from Russians and did not have an accent, were still an underclass. Hatred of Jews – antisemitism – was a special category in this system.
The antisemitism could have made me weaker, but I think it has made me stronger. Jews were persecuted for centuries, but somehow they found the strength not to adopt a victim mentality but to have adversity make them stronger. Not being a victim but being a fighter and seeing antisemitism as just another mountain to climb (an obstacle to overcome), made them stronger. This is what antisemitism did for me.
Don’t get me wrong; I think I am speaking for all Jews when I say this: We’d trade this character-building mountain to climb (the hatred towards us for holding different religious beliefs, for having longer noses, and for being of a “different race”) for the boredom of a normal life.
There is a Kosher hotdog brand, “Hebrew National,” which has a brilliant slogan: “We answer to a higher authority.” It implies that because the company is kosher and follows additional Jewish laws when making this hotdog – rules imposed by God – the product is of a higher quality. The irony is that Hasidic (superreligious) Jews, for whom this brand is theoretically created, don’t eat it as they don’t believe it is kosher enough.
Recently I realized that this slogan had been an important subconscious motivator for me throughout my life. Not for religious reasons – as I have mentioned, I am agnostic. The “higher authority” here is the super-high standard set by my parents and grandparents – my ancestors.
I tried to rise up to be as good as them, to be worthy of them and their memory. As I look at my parents and grandparents I see they were people worthy of admiration – not just for their professional and intellectual achievements (though they had plenty), but for their character, the way they elevated their family, the attention they gave to their kids and the personal sacrifices they made for them, their prioritization of education, their constant curiosity about life and the world around them and their valuing of culture (books, music, science).
When I became a father, in addition to the backward-looking “answering to a higher authority,” a forward-looking dimension was added. I realized I wanted to be worthy of my descendants, too. I want to be the example, the role model they follow. This elevated my “higher authority” accountability even further.
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