I landed in San Francisco on January 10th 1989 on a TWA flight from the Leonardo da Vinci airport, after first stopping at JFK. There had been a few of us, Soviet Jews on that flight, but I was the only one left for the second leg to San Francisco, the place of eternal spring and unbound professional opportunity for the Soviet tech intelligentsia. Its Jewish community organizations, unlike those in New York, did not have the budget to house everyone who wished to be resettled there and required a prospective immigrant to have a sponsor able to house him, — the person known in the immigrant parlance as гарант. I was among the lucky ones who had one.
I spotted uncle David by the small sign “Игорь У.” he was holding, outside the customs control. We shook hands, like we knew each other, covering up the awkwardness of the moment, and headed to his Pontiac Sunbird. Twenty minutes later we arrived at his house on 19th Avenue, a few doors down from the corner of Ulloa. It was a stereotypical San Francisco row house, two stories high and so close to its neighbors on either side that only a rat could squeeze between. After introducing me to his wife and daughter, David led me to the guest bedroom in the back of the first story with a futon, a closet, a desk, and a small bathroom. I would live there for the next 6 months.
David had emigrated from Kyiv with the previous wave of Soviet Jewry a decade earlier, in the late 1970’s. They first settled in Detroit where he got a job at a GM factory, and then moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a computer technician at Unisys, a job from which he’d retired just a few months before my arrival. His wife Yelena worked for Bank of America processing ATM deposits. Her job was about to end because Bank of America moved her department out of the landmark downtown BofA Center to a cheap suburban office space on the other side of the bay, and she refused to follow.
I never quite understood what moved David to agree to put me up. He was as distant a family as could be; the connection was via my maternal grandfather’s second wife Leah, but even my mother couldn’t remember how she was related to David and his younger brother Leonid, other than that they called her their aunt. David had never met me or my mother and had never heard of me until Leonid asked him to help me out in the summer of 1988, just a few months before I left the USSR. At first, I naively assumed mere altruism, but that explanation fell apart when David asked me to hand over most of the modest monthly stipend I was to be paid by the Jewish Family and Children’s Services, leaving me with $25 of pocket money a month. Apparently, the house on 19th Avenue had been rented especially to accommodate me, and the rent was more than what they’d paid in rent before. It’s hard to accuse anyone struggling to make the ends meet of mercantilism, but the altruism explanation had to be dropped.
I would never know the real explanation, if I didn’t ask my mother just recently as we sat in the backyard over the Mother’s Day 2021 dinner. This is the story she told me. Leah suffered her first stroke in the early 1980s, a few years after David moved to the U.S. The stroke was mild and she almost completely recovered. I remembered that episode, but what I didn’t know is that my grandfather decided to get out of the impending onus of spending the rest of his life as a caregiver by getting a divorce. He was a medical doctor and probably knew even back then that Leah’s recovery was temporary. If Leah were to be abandoned, it would be Leonid, her next in kin, who’d have the obligation of caring for her. Leonid enlisted the help of my mother and together they traveled to the town of Dneprodzerzhinsk (now Kamianske) where my grandfather and Liah lived, with the goal of what now would be called an intervention. This was the first time my mother and Leonid met.
As most shameless people, my grandfather was rather susceptible to shaming. Аnd my mother knew exactly how to deliver it, because shaming had been my grandfather’s principal pedagogical tool and the shaming dynamic between them had been well established. The intervention panned out; my mother talked my grandfather out of leaving Leah (the decision that he must have damned in 1985 when Leah suffered another stroke which left her speechless and bedridden and him her caregiver until his death in 1998), and Leonid incurred a debt of gratitude to my mother, which he repaid three years later, when my mother asked him to put in a good word for me with his brother.