The Next and Last Stop: The Land of Opportunity
If I were asked to name the origin of my family in a single word, I would, certainly, say Azerbaijan. I have to admit that I consider myself to be a culturally poor person, due to the fact that the deepest level of my family tree that I really know about is my grandparents from my mother’s side. Very often I would talk to my parents and four brothers at the Shabbath dinner, discussing all different things in the world, but the topic of life and migration of my grandparents and their ancestors appeared to be something silently forbidden. It was the point of weakness in what seemed to be a limitless joy from communication with my family members – from the conversations that could easily take any direction.
“Great-grandparents” is the word that evokes a single, simple image in my mind – a black-and-white photograph that my maternal grandfather Binyamin keeps on the wooden nightstand in his room. It is a photograph of my great-grandfather Talhun, and I am almost certain that my grandfather keeps it there out of pride, since he looks just like his father. The only difference is that Talhun had long mustache and burning black eyes that catch my attention every time I look at the framed picture when visiting Binyamin. Even though my great-grandparents were never the subject of our conversations, I managed to infer from the photograph that Talhun worked in the stockyard in Qusar, Azerbaijan, since that is what he is standing in front of on the photograph. Furthermore, I once overheard my parents saying that all of my great-grandparents were from the same city – from Qusar, where population density was so low that they all knew each other from childhood. Talhun’s ripped and stained shirt has set my mind to associate life in Azerbaijan with pain, poverty, despair, and even discrimination, but the energy from the sparks in his eyes transmits the satisfaction with the sense of community, the feeling of being needed that sat in his heart and set the direction for him in his life. One of the other things that I happened to overhear is that my paternal great-grandmother died when giving birth to my grandmother in Qusar. I never asked questions about great-grandparents since then. It was, indeed, a forbidden mystery.
Even though all of my grandparents were born in Qusar, paternal side spent most of their lives in Haifa, Israel. The decision to move was unexpected, since my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer and needed immediate treatment. I remember visiting them at least once in two years. My mentally ill grandfather Natan would go outside and walk near the house he lived in with a cane, showing different signs and gestures to his home attendant. I never heard him talk. He would often try to communicate with me by gently pushing me with his thin arms to catch my attention and pointing up to the sky with his fingers. I always thought that his goal was to teach me religion and to tell me about God, since I could trace the elements of pride and hunger for understanding in the look he gave me. My father told me that Natan was beaten up badly by hooligans on the street when he was young, and that is how he ended up being speechless and mentally ill. However, I never believed that explanation: the simplicity of the explanation was inversely proportional to the complexity that I found in Natan’s character and state of mind. Unfortunately, both of my paternal grandparents died in Israel in 2011, and I did not go back to Israel ever since. I still regret not spending more time with them, since the stories told by my parents did not have the capacity to really make me understand my grandparents’ lives. In my mind, Israel is a little synagogue surrounded by a desert. It is a place that I immediately associate with religion, especially because my older brother was named in Natan’s honor, and his Bar Mitzvah took place in Tel Aviv in 2010.
My mother’s parents were always around until we moved to Beijing, China. I was born in Moscow, Russia, when my parents and maternal grandparents have already been living in Russia for four years. Anti-semitism and financial hardships formed a strong force that pushed them out of Azerbaijan. Since childhood, I was trying to avoid displaying my religious beliefs and affiliations to the public. Whenever I wore a kippah – a brimless cap made of cloth, a tallit – a fringed garment, black non-leather shoes, and a fancy-looking rounded hat on top of the kippah, people would burn me with the laser lights coming off their eyes. Sometimes they would even spit trying to explicitly express their disgust towards my religion. Often, they would shout “chernomazie ponaehali”, which translates from Russian as “these black bastards keep coming to this country.” This discriminative phrase was used to show both treatment of Jews as colored people and the message that the Russian land is meant for Russians, not for immigrants who steal jobs and territory. To my own surprise, after having heard it so many times, I would often find myself thinking about complexity of the Russian language, knowing that just two words can combine to carry so much meaning. I knew that Jews have suffered a lot due to their religious beliefs in the world dominated by Christians, and I would often ask my parents if preservation of some ideas was worth sacrificing tranquility for the whole Jewish population. In response I would get silence and a feeling of guilt for asking the question that kept bothering me.
I could not walk comfortably beside my family during the holidays when we had to wear complete religious attire. Often, I would walk far behind them pretending to enjoy the beauty of the parks and their surroundings. I always tried to hide my religion and pretended not to be a Jew.
Our family’s migration decisions were never discussed with me or my brother, and we just accepted them as necessary steps that had to be taken on our way to success. We moved to Beijing when I was eleven and spent five years there. At the same time my maternal grandparents and two of their sons moved to the United States in hope for a better future. I never experienced the true cultural shock, since the school I went to was at the Russian Embassy, and it was just like living and studying in Russia with a different climate. My father used his savings to open up a shoe store quickly after we moved, so we all felt at ease in the new environment. The Chinese New Year became my most anticipated holiday, since I loved fireworks, and the people in Beijing launch the fireworks for at least two weeks after the New Year’s Eve in February. New Year in Beijing is the time when you can lie in bed and feel like there is a war taking place outside the four walls your room is bounded by. I once heard a loud explosion at two o’clock in the morning that seemed to occur in the next room. I felt the sound waves shooting my ears, some of them dancing on the walls of my room to irritate me, and then flying into my ears after partying, tired, with less intensity. I had to get off from the bed to check my parents’ room. They were sleeping like tired babies while green, yellow, and red lights were racing through the window onto the ceiling of the room.
One of the crucial decisions ever made by my family was moving to the United States. The reason was simple – they saw no future in any other country. The success that Ruvin, my uncle, came to after graduating from a law school in New York reinforced our desire to come to this country. My parents did not want me and my brothers to live a wandering life, so their decision was firm. We took a plane to New York, and throughout the whole flight I was so emotionally tired from moving around all the time that I did not have any feelings to express. I just wanted to reach the destination and fall asleep forever.
Staying at Brighton Beach feels like living in another type of Russia, for the community is mostly Russian. However, it was easy to assimilate to a new location, since the language barrier was not one of the obstacles we had to face. An obstacle I did have to face was the subway system. I never used subway before, and on my first day of school in New York I could not figure out how to use a metrocard, so I jumped the turnstile. I was nervous about going to a new school and meeting new people, so I was speedily walking up the stairs, when two police officers surrounded me and told me to go back downstairs. They asked for me for ID, but I did not have any documents on me, so they handcuffed me and kept me there until I told them my name, address, and age for them to identify me.
I must admit that I do not consider myself an immigrant. My grandparents and uncles have been living in New York for four years at the moment when we moved. Ruvin was constantly helping me with schoolwork, and my father got employed as a truck driver. My mother’s job was the same – she was taking care of five sons and a husband. Being busy kept us alive, and my parents constantly encouraged me and my brother to work harder to get into a good college. The goal was to gain that financial stability and independence – qualities that life in the United States is known for.
Lack of consistent discipline was something that I noticed in my first American high school. I would rise from my seat every time a teacher entered the classroom only to find out that it is not considered a norm here. I would alienate myself from other students, feeling irritated by the inappropriate language used by the teenagers. Thoughts about never being able to get used to the mentality of these people kept bothering me. I would see violent student fights so often that I just ignored them, even if my acquaintances were involved. I knew that my character was formed and under my control, but I was afraid that my younger brothers will follow the momentum and adopt some of the undesired traits, especially because my two youngest brothers were born here in New York. They are still very young, and my family has a lot of faith in them.
Now that I think about all that, I understand that the journey of Agaronov family paid off. Even though some hardships, such as alienation, unsociability, and my heavy Russian accent endured, the benefits outweigh all the stress. I am in college now, and I got into a very promising Macaulay Honors Program. My brother is studying finance in a different honors program. My parents are happy and proud of us, and I am happy that we are eventually realizing their hopes. United States is the country that gave me a feeling of achievement. United States is the country I want to stay in.
