Здесь отличают инородцев по оттенку ресниц.
The story of my arrival to the United States may well start in the summer of 1980, when I turned sixteen, the age when all Soviet youth applied for internal passport. Passports served as routine identification documents, so there wouldn’t be anything special about them, except for the “nationality” section. I could only choose one of my parents’, as it was recorded in their passports: “Jew” in my father’s and “Russian” in my mother’s.
This choice was common in my social milieu: many children of intelligentsia were “half-and-halfs” (половинки) — with one Jewish and one gentile (typically Russian or Ukrainian) parent, although the purity of either designation was obviously questionable. This was a reflection of the social trends in the preceding decades: Kharkiv had one of the largest Jewish populations of any city of the former Russian Empire, peaking in the 1920s at nearly 20 percent. Before 1917, Kharkiv had been far beyond the Pale of Settlement, only accessible to the assimilated, university educated or wealthy merchant Jews, many of whom were not opposed to inter-marriage. After the Revolution, in the early years of the USSR, the state encouraged mixed marriages, as a step toward a denationalized society of Soviet People, loyal not to their clan but to the Fatherland. My mother’s parents were a product of this policy: Moshe and Raisa met in medical college in the mid-1930s, and my half-and-half mother was born in 1939.
Like many times in history, this period of the state’s favorable treatment of Jews was short-lived. Salin’s personal antisemitism, which he’d harbored since the early days of his revolutionary activism, came to a head in 1939, when he saw an opportunity to appease Hitler into signing a sepraratist non-aggression pact with the USSR by launching an overt anti-semitic campain. The Jewish foreign minister Maxim Litvinov was replaced with Vyacheslav Molotov, who promptly dismissed many top foreign ministry officials of Jewish origin, and negotiated the non-aggression pact with Germany, which Germany violated two years later.
The next round of the state-sponsored antisemitism came in 1949, after Israel’s miraculous victory in the War of Independence, in which the USSR supported the Arab states, despite being the first country to recognize Israel only a year earlier. By the late 1950s, strict quotas, if outright bans, had been handed down, limiting the number of Jews in positions of influence, barring them from competitive college majors, like medicine, and relegating them to the mathematical and applied engineering fields, where their careers would still be limited, with management roles typically reserved for non-Jews.
To apply for passport, I had to fill out an application at the local state recorder office. To the chagrin of the administrator, I wrote “Jew” in the nationality section. I recall her solemn question if I was sure of my choice, which I took for standard protocol, and replied affirmatively without blinking. When my mother came home from work that evening, she told me that the administrator had phoned and implored her to make me reconsider by explaining to me the hardships I would face as Jew. This was not, of course, an act of confidential life-coaching, as the administrator made it out to seem. She simply had her quotas too and would be reprimanded for every Jew she let through, who could have been something else.
It is tempting to retell this story with some revisionary virtue, but I doubt there was any. The sacrifice was not because Jewish was how I felt in my heart, and no practical consideration was going to change that. Quite the opposite, it served the pragmatic end of leaving the country next time I had a chance, and the only chance I could hope to have was the fickle egress of Jewish emigration, that had opened briefly twice in the 70s, and might reopen again. But to be eligible, I had to be a Jew not just in my heart, but on paper.