For as long as I can remember, my parents argued. That their marriage survived is a miracle that can only partially be explained by the cultural propensity for a good disagreement or the logistical nightmare that a divorce in the Soviet Union would have been. The other explanation, I must assume, is love. Now both in their 80s, they still find an occasion for a lymphatic spat, but forty years ago hardly anything worth talking about wasn’t argued over. Emigration was a point of disagreement from the first time I heard them talk about it and has never been completely settled even now, after they’ve lived in the U.S. for thirty years.
My father seems to have never doubted it. He first planted the thought in my head in his characteristically circuitous way by asking me to copy some hand-written notes he brought from work one day. The notes painstakingly documented some recent lucky emigrant’s exploits while en route from the USSR to America, which he took with the goal of helping those who’d follow. This was the only way this information could be disseminated — hand-copied, like Bibles in the Middle Ages. Copying the notes on an office copy machine or typing on a typewriter with five carbon copies would have constituted publishing unapproved material, a criminal offense,— but hand copying was okay, at least so we thought, to the chagrin of my mother.
According to the notes, the first step was to arrange for a family invitation, because the only official basis for emigration was family reunification. Presumably, this rule was designed to curb the number of prospective applications, while shamming compliance with Jackson-Vanik. If it had been followed, only a small percentage of Soviet Jewry would have been eligible, but Israel quickly figured out a way around it by organising the production of fictitious official invitations on an industrial scale. All we had to do was pass our name and address with a departing emigrant, and a month later the mailman brought a frightfully alien looking long envelope with Latin lettering and a Hebrew postage stamp,— the first time I saw Hebrew outside the Jewish cemetery.
The invitation came in the summer of 1979, when my father, my brother Anatoly, and I, were in the countryside for a summer vacation. The coniferous air had already felt faintly exuberant, doped with the summer daydreams of a fifteen-year-old. In the evenings, we sat on the porch and listened to the BBC and Voice of America on our Riga-104 portable short-wave radio. Far from the city’s jamming station, their signal came in as clear as if from the other bank of the river. My mother stayed at home and took public buses every weekend to join us. On one of these visits, she brought the letter. The invitation was signed by a woman named Rivka — our putative Israeli kin. My mother’s anxiety was easily transmissible: now we were exposed to the authorities.
We did not apply for exit visas in 1979. If my mother’s general apprehension about the whole affair could have been outweighed, but her unwillingness to abandon her ageing father and his wife was an insurmountable objection. The letter of invitation went into my father’s desk to wait for a better day, which took nine years to arrive. Rivka, real or imaginary, sent us another package, this time with a light women’s overcoat, which we interpreted as a scheme to make the family ties seem more credible. The coat was sized for a statistically average Jewish woman, two sizes larger than my mother. Still, she loved it and wore it for twelve winters.
It’s tempting to speculate now, forty years on, what was gained and what was lost by delaying our departure by nine years. By 1979, the authorities had all but shutdown emigration, frustrated with the American Administration’s failure to pass the favorable trade status for the USSR, and retaliated by invading Afghanistan under the convenient pretext of helping a new Marxist government, while Americans were distracted by the fallout from the Islamic revolution in the neighboring Iran. Most likely, our visa application would have been denied and we would have joined the growing company of otkazniki. My parents would have been out of their jobs and looking for income in the growing gray economy of home remodellers, car mechanics, and hairdressers. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to enter the University and, instead, would have served in the military, a terrifying prospect at the time of the Afghan war.
Coming to America in their 50s, instead of their 40s, my parents had to abandon any hope for acculturation. Even now, after thirty years in the U.S., their English is right where it was when they got off the plane in 1992, rendering them basically unable to communicate with your mother. Luckily, they have you two, thanks to your speaking Russian.
As for me, the delay may have been an unlikely boon. Those extra nine years turned out to be the most formative years of my life. It is then, in high school and at the university, that I learned some really important things. We skipped lectures to see the latest Romy Schneider (Une histoire simple, perplexingly translated in the Soviet release as У каждого свой шанс), fearful that the authorities would end the release before the classes ended that day, we wrote and produced unsanctioned plays, lent each other books, sang Okudzhava by the campfire, — did all those things that elude enumeration but add up to an examined life.
In the aughts, well into my 30s, I was introduced to the group of young and mostly single San Francisco professionals known as the Seventy-Niners. The bonding agent was their shared experience of having come to the U.S. from the USSR as children in the 1970s. On average, they were younger than me by five years, a nice age difference for a single man, — making them around ten in 1979. They held regular quaint parties at each other’s houses and volunteered at nursing homes during High Holidays. They clung to each other, as I would have clung to my childhood friends, if they had been around. My presence always felt as an act of charity on their part, for we seemed to have nothing to offer each other, other than our anatomies. Most of their conversations were career related, something I’d been raised to despise. Their frame of cultural references was strictly bounded by popular culture, which I could only draw a blank on. They knew neither Mandelstam nor Auden. They floated in the intergalactic cultural dust, equidistant from the old world of their forebears and the new world they’d never quite made. They knew movies by their stars, not their directors, and the only movies they knew were the most getatable contemporary Hollywood hackjobs, whose directors weren’t worth knowing anyway. They knew no music that wasn’t on MTV and no literature that wasn’t required by their public schools curricula. I have no reason to doubt that if I hadn’t had those extra nine years, I would have been just like them: outwardly nice and inwardly impoverished. Instead, I am lucky to be what I am: a sanguine misanthrope who hopes to ignite in you a spark of personal exceptionalism and a sense that you’re among the very few through whom the current of humanity flows from the past into the future.