by Lev Golinkin
“Yes,” Peter shrugged. “He is my father.”
“He wants to know if we want to see where he lives.” A confused Dad polled the backseat, and we agreed. Well, we would’ve agreed if we had time to, but scarcely had the offer been translated than Peter threw the shift into first, the engine’s idle grew to a deep, satisfied purr, and the pines and fields, so clear to discern as we’d shuffled past, became a blur. We zoomed past Nondorf, into another town, and veered off the road and over a bridge spanning a small moat with a thin coat of ice floating on the bottom. Peter heaved the jeep up a sharp incline, through a portal in a massive stone curtain wall, and slammed on the brakes, scattering frozen white pebbles from under the tires.
We stood atop a hill in the middle of the town, with a commanding view of the surroundings. Two lean hunting dogs trotted up to the jeep, received pats and affirmations of being gute hunde, and returned to patrolling the premises. To our right was a low stone barrier. Little statues of grimy cherubs were scattered beside it like displaced garden gnomes, curly heads and manicured wings poking through the snow. “Late Romanesque, manufactured shortly before the Renaissance,” Peter muttered to Dad. Beyond the barrier, a twenty-foot drop-off led to a field, which in turn sloped away to a distant forest. To our left and behind us squatted several ancient buildings hewn out of thick stone. The nearest one appeared to be the medieval version of a multi-car garage, since it had only three walls and an interior separated by massive dividers carved right out of the stone supports. “That’s a stable, that’s a stable, Dad!” I yelled, illustrations from our old Ivanhoe book flashing before me. “Stable, yes,” agreed Peter. “Cows no, horse no, but stable yes.”
But we caught only a glimpse of the landscape before our gaze was snared by something else. Next to the stable and obscuring the town below rose “the house,” a four-story castle complete with a belfry, balconies, and twin ten-foot gateways with flanking towers, all made out of crumbling gray stone.
“How—how old is this place?” Dad stuttered.
“It was originally constructed in the twelfth century, but”—Peter nodded toward a gray satellite dish peeking out from a corner parapet—“we have made certain modifications to the original design.”
I’ll never forget watching Peter fumble through his key chain in front of the giant oaken gate, just as ordinary people fumble through ordinary key chains in front of normal doors. “Let us go,” he waved. “Let us go inside.”
A murky passage led to an inner bailey that cut through all four stories up to the icy gray sky. Grim stone walls were interspersed with three rows of balconies. More statues watched from the terraces, and other unknown objects lurked in the shadows. The bailey was silent; nothing disturbed the chilly gloom. Once again, we barely had time to orient ourselves before we were ushered up a winding staircase. “This way, please.” Peter unlatched another door and showed us in, carefully locking it behind him. “These are my apartments,” he said, visibly relieved.
On the other side of the door lay the answer to the fate of the rugs—Peter’s floors were covered by an exhibition of the history and craft of carpet weaving that stretched into the distance. We halted, unsure of how to maneuver through the expensive and colorful patchwork, but Peter marched right across in his boots.
Dusty paintings and antique vases were strewn on floors and chairs. Cabinets and curios stuffed with everything from ancient Greek pottery to cheap Soviet perfume crouched in the corners. A long glass case running the length of one wall housed an extensive collection of firearms, beginning with medieval muskets and culminating with a high-power sniper rifle.
“Don’t touch, Lev,” Dad warned when he saw me eyeing the guns.
“Touch is not a problem,” interrupted Peter. “But do not depress the trigger.”
“They’re loaded?” Dad asked.
“Why would they not be?” Peter raised an eyebrow, and Dad’s frown banished all thoughts of hands-on contact from my head. Peter’s apartments bristled with enough weapons to stock a Hollywood studio. Ceremonial officers’ daggers from armies Western and Oriental, ancient and modern, were mounted along the hallways. Racks of pikes, poleaxes, halberds, morning stars, and other cruel and unusual implements of battle hung from the walls. The man took the defense of his castle seriously. I was impressed.
Our host disappeared into the eclectic labyrinth, returning with a set of teacups. By the time he fetched the kettle, the adults had regained the ability to speak and were eager to learn about Peter’s noble lineage, but the baron was quick to dismiss their romantic notions. “It is silly, the whole ‘nobility’ thing. In 1919, when Austria became a republic, the government abolished most aristocratic privileges, and I fully support that decision,” he said. “Who you are should have nothing to do with who your father was. Who you are should be determined by what you do and nothing else. Please sit down.”
I hovered near an array of fanned-out swords above a mantel. Mom and Lina browsed through a small chest bulging with photographs of dignitaries at galas, receptions, foxhunts, and other dignitary affairs, and while they noticed several men who resembled Peter, none of the photographs were actually of him. Peter led Dad through his vast antiques collection. No object existed in a vacuum: each one had its own tantalizing historical context, as well as a record of how and where Peter had purchased it. Viennese auction houses, Dutch bazaars, Bulgarian flea markets—he fondly recalled all the locales where the hunt had taken him. And it was the hunt, more than the actual trophies, that appeared to hold true meaning for Peter.
Mom spied a large bed draped in black sheets with three black pillows resting on top. “Why three?” she asked.
“My two children attend school right now, but sometimes they get afraid at night and they come to me,” Peter explained. Mom smiled. She’d dealt with nightmares aplenty, with Lina and me both, and the notion of little barons and baronesses scampering to their father for comfort made the suddenly giant-sized Peter more human.
At the end of the visit we were hustled out of the castle and dropped off at Binder’s. Peter asked Dad if we would be interested in taking a tour of the Austrian countryside the next day. Dad hesitated. “The rules say we can’t go farther than fifteen kilometers from the hotel.”
“Idiot rules made by idiots,” Peter snorted, but, noticing that his assessment didn’t allay Dad’s concern, he turned to address us all. “I can go anywhere I want. Tomorrow, when with me, you are my guests; that is so. Be ready at seven.”
* * *
For more than sixteen hours, the dark green Mercedes roared across Niederösterreich, the northernmost Austrian province. Peter was truly a man of the land, intricately familiar with the region and its people. He drove us around forests and past peat bogs, up mountains or through them via giant tunnels. There were castles—a castle on every hill, it seemed—some renovated, others just piles of stones left to brood over the past. We stopped at gorgeous abbeys with musty libraries and saintly relics, lone towers jutting out by the roadside, factories of Bohemian glassblowers who crafted some of the world’s finest crystal, lush vineyards whose keepers stirred aromas and spices into secret recipes passed down for generations. Our host knew them all, vintners and craftsmen and monks, but even more intriguing was his ability to retrace his own history far down the corridors of time.
“Dagger makers; my ancestors were dagger makers. They had traveled down into this area around the fifteenth century, and made a living fashioning weapons for local townspeople. Later, they became sailors and fishermen, transporting goods in central Europe. When they became barons in the 1800s, they got the right to create a coat-of-arms, and they applied an anchor on one side and a smith on the other. Anchor and smith, fishermen and dagger makers, yes, that is so.” Of his immediate family, Peter said little. He touched on his grandfather, who’d served as the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s ambassador to the United States, mentioned he had three sisters and that his father was once in the Austrian army, and nothing more.
“Mom, want to know a secret?” I asked during a stopover late in the day. We were west of Binder’s, where the mountains grew taller, at a roadside restaurant clinging to the side of a peak. Peter, Dad, and Lina were finishing dessert; Mom, who loved people-watching, cradled her coffee at an outside table. My secret wasn’t much of a secret, but I wanted to check out the mountains, and with the cold winds rising I felt like I had to open with a hook before Mom shooed me indoors.
“Peter doesn’t like standing still,” I said. What I meant was tough to describe. Peter wasn’t uncomfortable, quite the opposite: the stout, red-haired man moved, talked, walked, and drove with an arrogant surety that comes with nobility. I wanted to explain that he grew pensive when we were still, and no matter whether we were exploring a ruin in a forgotten valley or dining at a restaurant up in the clouds, Peter always seemed happier to be in motion.
Mom tugged on my coat, coaxing the torn rabbit pelts into some semblance of a unified garment. “Maybe you noticed it because you don’t like standing still either.” She smiled, and she was right. My favorite thing about going to Estonia was going to Estonia, curling up on the top bunk of the train cabin and staring out the window, getting lost in the bliss of being in neither one place nor the other, just dissolving into a particle in transit. When you’re standing you have time to think, worry, contemplate; when you’re a blur, you can relax.
We would go on several more trips with Peter, and while I enjoyed the places we visited, driving was always my favorite. I still tailed Dad during sightseeing, but when it was time to leave I’d be in the vanguard with Peter, ready to get back into fifth gear.
* * *
The refugees at Binder’s were suspended in diplomatic limbo in the mountains, but Dad’s mind was already on the other side of the Atlantic. He thought about work, which was nothing new: he was always thinking about work. Work defined him, shaped his life, gave him purpose, and no matter when we’d get to the United States, no matter where we’d wind up, Dad was determined to be an engineer once more.
That was a problem: he was already past fifty, he knew no one, and his school transcripts and records of professional achievements had been confiscated and burned at the border. Even if he had them, they would’ve been worthless: decades of Cold War secrecy had left the USSR and the United States with mutual contempt. Employers in the West knew nothing about Soviet professionals, not to mention Kharkov’s good ol’ Central Design Bureau. After destroying the microfilms, Dad realized that American companies would have to hire him on faith alone. But Dad was not a man of faith—he was a man of statistics, and statistics dictated that old immigrants who came to America ended up delivering pizzas and driving taxis. And that’s what consumed Dad; that’s what he turned over in his mind, parsing, speculating, analyzing, attacking. How to beat the statistics. How to get a job.
One day Peter asked Dad what was troubling him, and Dad told him, and Peter got Dad a job interview. Well, technically it wasn’t an interview, since Austrian law barred us from seeking employment. Technically, all Peter did was draw on his contacts to arrange a scheduled, one-on-one conversation between Dad and the director of an engineering firm in Vienna. “There is no harm in discussion,” Peter reasoned. “You are two grown men, you can talk about whatever you want. If you decide to talk about the beautiful Austrian mountains, that is up to you. If you decide to talk about turbine engineering, that is also up to you … Austria, too, is a free country.”
Dad and the director passed on the mountains and cut straight to the turbines. They made a whole day of it, the director probing Dad about turbomachinery on the other side of the Iron Curtain. By the end of the session the man was cautiously showing Dad some of his company’s designs, inquiring about ideas for innovation. The sun had long set by the time Peter’s Mercedes pulled into Binder’s parking lot and the baron faced Dad. “I go to Vienna two times a week for business. You shall come with me, you shall spend your time with them, and you shall return with me. They cannot pay you money because it is too risky: you will work for free, that is so, but if you do a good job, they will write recommendation letters to use in America.” Peter gave Dad a thumbs-up. “I thought you would fail, but you did not. You impressed them.”
The money didn’t matter to Dad; reputation was everything. “Work hard for your reputation, and then your reputation will work hard for you” was a favorite saying of his, one I’d heard time and again during walks in the lilac park behind our apartment complex back in Kharkov. I didn’t know what Dad meant by it, but I knew he loved his profession, and I was thrilled when he strutted into our room and proudly announced that he was going to work again.
WAKING THE NOMADS
Nondorf, Niederösterreich (Lower Austria), Mid-January 1990
By mid-January, the mood at Binder’s had soured. Every family in the hotel knew people who had crossed the border before us. And every one of those forerunners had spent no more than one week in Austria before being sent on to Italy and then to the States. We had been stuck in the back mountains of Niederösterreich for a month with no explanation and no end in sight. What’s happening? Is there trouble with going to America? Questions grew in the hallways, took root in the lobby, spread to breakfast and the late hours, but Mr. Prager continued to provide no information and Binder claimed he knew as much as we did. The one group who would have the answer was HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which was overseeing Jewish resettlement into the United States. And by January 1990, HIAS had a problem.
In 1987, a total of 8,155 Jews had been permitted to leave the USSR. The following year that number grew to 18,965. In 1989, the year my family left, 71,000 had been granted permits. And in 1990, this spiked to a staggering 200,000 people.* These numbers meant various things to different parties. For the U.S. government, this was another small triumph in its struggle with Moscow. For the American Jews, the ones who paid attention, it was cause for rejoicing, the payoff from three decades of lobbying, rallying, and fund-raising. But human rights workers, the people on the ground, are always the last to celebrate. HIAS’s joy was tempered by the fact that every digit represented an individual in need of housing, and food, and political asylum. Running refugee camps in Europe wasn’t the immediate issue, since these were funded by Joint, which had just thrown open its coffers. The problem was getting people into America.
Every refugee had to have a sponsor, a person or organization to vouchsafe housing, medical care, education, and employment. The U.S. Congress made it clear that if it was going to pressure the Kremlin to release its Jews, if America was going to raise its annual refugee admission quota, then HIAS would have to provide its refugees with sponsors. In part, this sponsorship requirement was meant to ensure that the new arrivals wouldn’t be left to fend for themselves in a foreign country. But Washington also sought to protect itself as much as the refugees, and understandably so—laissez-faire immigration can take a heavy toll on health care, welfare, and all sorts of social services. In the interests of everyone, sponsorship was a must.
In years past, when the refugee flow out of Russia was merely a trickle, this had not been a serious obstacle. HIAS enjoyed longstanding relationship
s with urban immigrant communities, such as the ones in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Many refugees were going to reunite with family members already interwoven into the fabric of these hubs. Those who left Russia without any kin in America were taken in under the auspices of grassroots Jewish organizations coordinating with HIAS.
But with the immigrant numbers exploding from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, the seemingly infinite capacity of the cities had suddenly reached a limit. Individuals who were already supporting relatives were forced to refuse sponsorship for other family members who had counted on them. Organizations that had planned their budgets for several families were now bombarded with nonstop sponsorship requests. Neighborhood by neighborhood, New York, Chicago, and L.A. began telling HIAS to slow down, to give them time, to hold the refugees in Europe while they cleared space and resources. And yet every day more trains pulled up to Vienna, disgorging new families seeking shelter in the West. The camps, HIAS’s pipeline to America, were suddenly faced with a massive influx on one end and a bottleneck at the other. The system was strained to the maximum, and HIAS needed to address the crisis immediately.
HIAS had to free up the camps to make room for the incomers. The only way to accomplish that was to move those already in the camps into the States. And to do that HIAS required a fresh supply of sponsors, a suburban network that extended past the overtaxed enclaves of the cities. This went beyond asking someone to sign a petition or mail you a check. HIAS would have to convince random American Jews to take legal and moral responsibility for complete strangers, to accept entire families of refugees into their homes. First came recruitment, making local communities aware of the pressing need for sponsors. Then there was fund-raising. And training. And preparations. All for one family. There were thousands of families.
* * *
Two thousand years of roaming the world are enough to humble any nation, or what’s left of one. Two thousand years of fleeing an oppressive homeland, only to be oppressed in the next one, have etched into the Jewish mind-set a keen memory of traumas past and a nervous premonition of traumas to come. We are reminded of them when we dine on Passover, and build huts on Sukkoth, and hear family stories of persecutions of the past. To this day, the Jews will tell you where they’re from, and where their family escaped from to get there, and where they ran from before to get to that place, and so on. From the Exodus to the Holocaust, the Jews remember.