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.
Three years later, in November of 1982 the bottom fell out of the USSR. The only Soviet leader I ever knew, Leonid Brezhnev, died in office, leaving the country in an economic crisis and with a public consciousness badly injured by the continued quagmire in Afghanistan. In the next three years, two more next-in-line geriatrics ascended to the Soviet throne to croak on it only a few months later, before Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet dictator, took the reins in March of 1985.
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.
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.
The history of Jewish emigration from the USSR, of which I was an supernumerary in its final act, would not have been the same, if it hadn’t been for the creation of the State of Israel in the wake of the Second World War, as a solution to the problem of two million displaced Eastern European Jews in the middle of Europe at its end.
I want to use mathematics to illustrate (to prove, as a mathematician would say), that apart from symbolic significance, disobedience actually has an inherent pragmatic value: it is the means to advancing knowledge.
Most people don’t know how to speak about ideas, they only know how to recount events by telling stories. If you’re lucky, people will take turns in telling their stories, so that everyone has a chance, but, more likely, everyone will be held captive by a few. The experience of listening to other people’s stories ranges from agreeable to onerous.
The last time Al saw her kindergarten classroom at Jefferson Elementary and her teacher, Ms Wong, was on March 13, 2020. The next time she set foot inside the school was almost to the day a year later, on March 5, 2021, when her first grade teacher, Ms. Barb, whom Al had only seen on the computer screen, and whom we slyly called Barb Wire, invited Al for a brief visit. By then, all the teachers had been vaccinated and the school had changed its name to Ruth Acty.