After 27 years of opening packages of blue jeans and listening to The Beach Boys, my father applied for immigration in 1980. He’d spent his whole life in The Republic of Moldova. As a child, lived on a humble farm in the village of Tsaul’. When he started attending school, he noticed that he was part of the only Jewish family in a village of 2,000.
He faced persecution for his religious background in a vast number of ways. For example, to proceed to higher education he had to take a subjective exam. When the examiner found out that he was Jewish, he discounted my father’s answers. Subsequently, he was forced to go to the Army until he would finally be able to pass the examination. The only thing that got him through the time was American pop-culture that he had learned about through his relatives. He envisioned a place where it would be okay to be Jewish. He envisioned a place where it would be okay for him to pray without fear of the Pogroms. Despite living in a Post-Holocaust Eastern Europe, he had been subject to the anti-Semitic sentiment of the time and felt as if he wasn’t free to enjoy anything. In fact, in the army, he was forced to adopt a completely new culture. Even though he grew up learning Romanian, and was immersed in solely Romanian culture, the army imposed the Russian language upon him as well as Russian ideals that were so contrary to everything that he’d ever been exposed to before. Even before coming to America, he had to completely assimilate into a different culture that was still technically within his country.
The stories that he had heard about America sparked a sense of wonder within him and with that he embarked on the immigration process. Unfortunately, because of the Soviet Union’s strict immigration policies, he was stuck within the USSR for eight years. After eight long years of impatiently waiting for a chance at a life of freedom from persecution, he finally got lucky.
Depending on whom you may ask, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan may not be considered successful politicians for their respective countries. After all, the former was responsible for the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the latter is criticized as having some of the most flawed economic policies of his era. To my dad though, these two people saved his life. The politicians came to an agreement about immigration policies and finally opened up the borders of the country. My dad finally had a chance.
His journey took months and was incredibly difficult at times, but he knew that there was a light at the end of this unfortunately bleak and long tunnel. He went to the capital of Moldova, Kishinev, and came to Moscow. After two days there, he flew to Vienna. It was his first time in a different country. He stayed there for 7 weeks with his mother. She was too old to work but both of them wanted to escape their homelands as soon as they could have. A Jewish organization funded their food and clothing money, as well as provided a hotel room for them to live in. He then boarded a train to Rome where he spent one week. He walked the grounds of the Coliseum and admired the postal system. From there, he traveled to Ladispoli, a small city about half an hour away from Rome. He spent four weeks there and traversed the volcanic beaches. Then he finally came to the embassy and pled his case for freedom of religion and achieved refugee status.
My mother had a very similar story except that she didn’t come with a parent. Instead, she was a parent. She came with my sister who was seven years old. She had just recently divorced a man and had only lived in Kiev, Ukraine up to that point. Her family disapproved but she dreamed of what it would be like in a city that wouldn’t run out of bread and necessities constantly. She dreamed of the ability to be free from the perpetual discrimination that she had known.
They had a couple of other options. They could have gone to Israel. My mother briefly considered Lithuania. In the end though, they decided upon America. No other country offered the same promise of economic success, stable government, and appreciation of immigrants.
My father came in 1988 and my mother in 1989. They met each other a few years later and decided to start a family after only knowing each other for six weeks.
Sure the country fell short in some ways. It took my mother years to get her medical license back. In Ukraine she was a surgical nurse who had stitched up hearts. She barely got to be a registered nurse here. My father, who had B.S. in computer science, was working as a waiter and a clerk in a department store for years. However, after years of effort, he got to be a computer programmer. But they don’t care.
I literally don’t know how to emphasize that enough. They would do it over again a hundred times if they had to. My mom saw a Banana for the first time when she was 30. She cried because the food tasted so good. She cried because she could have it whenever she wanted to. My father could go to a Synagogue and not be ashamed. It’s no comparison for them. They listened to Led Zeppelin, wore denim jackets, and finally enjoyed the simple pleasures in life. Life wasn’t bleak anymore. They had the ability to leave a place if they didn’t want to be there anymore. They were in control of their own lives for the first time.
Every time I ask my parents about their stories, they cry. They cry because they love it so much here. They aren’t rich tycoons or anything. They’re a regular group of people. But what they have now are rights. They know what it was like to live in an oppressive state, and they appreciate life here so much more.
Sometimes I’m a little bit jealous of them. I was born in New York, and sometimes I feel like that’s so boring. I mean they have such a rich cultural and political history. But I’m romanticizing it. It sucked where they lived. I can sit down and say that I would like to have had an adventure like that growing up all I want, but until I actually experience a life so oppressed and bleak, I will never be able to fathom what it must have been like. I guess I’m really lucky that they met and my life manifested itself here in New York City. Every time I complain about anything to them, they laugh and say stuff like “Cheer up! You’re an American!” and I can’t help but smile.
