by Lev Golinkin
By the time I interviewed Shaviv, I had already been involved with several fund-raising efforts for student organizations at Boston College, as well as a community revitalization group in New Jersey. Admittedly, none of those budgets ranged anywhere near eight digits, and it was hard for me to absorb the multimillion-dollar figure Shaviv threw out. Put simply, I couldn’t comprehend taking an operation, spending all of its funds, and then spending $19 million more.
“I may be thinking on a provincial level, but that seems like an awful lot of money,” I said.
“It was,” Shaviv replied. “It certainly was.”
“Didn’t that decimate you? You’re a nonprofit, you rely on donations, you have to answer to board members and stakeholders. How did you inform the trustees and convince the donors?”
The tall, beefy man leaned back in his chair, eyes scanning the room. Shaviv’s office displayed an austere functionality, which matched its occupant’s demeanor. It was clean and uncluttered, without all the extraneous coffee mugs and paperweights, the only exception being a smattering of unframed photographs tucked about the room. I noticed Shaviv’s eyes lingering over the photos, and it was here that my pre-interview Wikipedia-ing paid off. Next to the printer I recognized an off-centered shot of enormous camps in Sarajevo; Joint was there before the camera crews had arrived. Peeking out from behind a stack of forms was Operation Solomon, a massive airlift of fourteen thousand Jews from Ethiopia to Israel in the wake of a civil war. Moses brought his people through the Red Sea; Joint flew them over it. There were other scenes: the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, tanks and camps, black-and-white and color, natural disasters and disasters man-made. Post-Soviet deployments were there, too, and I gazed upon volunteers triaging survivors in Darfur, and the devastation of the 2004 South Asian tsunami, and more locales I couldn’t pinpoint.
Shaviv crossed one leg over the other, European style. His face assumed the expression of a college professor feeding a rather obvious answer to an obtuse freshman. “The role of Joint is to help overseas Jews in need. That is our mission, the reason for our existence. What was the point of having money sit in the bank when it was needed immediately? There were Jews in need, massive amounts of them, so the pressing question was, ‘Let’s help them now, and we’ll worry about the budget afterward.’ And that is what we did, Lev. That is what we did.”
I’m not a fan of cities—in fact, I hate them—but I had an hour to kill before the next bus to Jersey and decided to walk for a bit. I wandered around Times Square and Rockefeller Center, glancing at landmarks and constantly pausing to wait for tourists snapping photos. An odd feeling gripped my chest, swelling and ebbing as I walked. It wasn’t an anxious or bad sensation, just new and uncomfortable, something that shouldn’t be there, and walking had always helped me deal with strangeness. I swung by the Empire State Building, edged around Central Park, reviewing Shaviv’s remarks, thinking of follow-up questions to e-mail him, transcribing the interview in my head. Eventually the courtesy wore off, and I started walking through tourist photos like the New Yorkers do. I missed the afternoon bus and the evening ones as well, and it wasn’t until I was on the late bus on the New Jersey Turnpike that it hit me that for the first time in my life I was proud of being a Jew.
THE BOSNIANS DON’T COME OUT AT NIGHT
Vienna, Austria, May 1990
One sweaty May evening, a strange new family appeared at the villa. They were accompanied by the blue-blazered Mr. Prager, the human rights worker we knew from the train station when my family first came to Austria. It was a large family, with a father, a mother, and four or five children. The father wore a long robe, and all of the women had their heads wrapped in scarves. It was hard to catch their tongue, since they spoke little and in whispers, but the snippets we overheard sounded like nothing Slavic. Consensus was that they were Muslims who fled Yugoslavia because their lives had been threatened by Serbian Orthodox militias. Dad guessed they were Bosnian, but they could have been from Croatia, or Serbia, or somewhere else in the Balkans—there was plenty of carnage to go around. One thing was clear, though: wherever they had come from, they must’ve left in a hell of a hurry, because not one of the people huddled together in the downstairs atrium carried a suitcase, or a sack, or a bag, or anything.
I don’t know how Joint found them or how they found Joint, because Mr. Prager wouldn’t address questions from the agitated old folks until one adamant man shouted, “Why are you dealing with these Muslims?!”
“Joint aids refugees, and not just Jewish ones,” Mr. Prager snapped back. “This family will be living upstairs, and they will be left alone. May I remind everyone that you’re living in Austria under a refugee status, which would be seriously jeopardized by any cross-cultural incidents.” With that, he ushered the Bosnians to an upstairs room down the hall from us, gave Dad a nod, and left the villa.
The children and their father disappeared inside. The mother, together with her eldest daughter, sat on the hallway floor, leaning against the hard white plaster, and there the two of them remained for the evening. After some deliberation, Mom and Dad inventoried our sleeping supplies, and Dad pulled me aside. “I want you to give these to the women.” He pointed to a pillow and three wool blankets.
“Why don’t you do it?” I was habitually shy around strangers; emigration didn’t change that.
“Please stop complaining,” Dad said. “Your mom and I already had to deal with Lina over giving these up. You’re the least threatening one of us.” Dad forestalled any further protests by piling the blankets and pillow into my arms, and in short order I was hauling the bundle down the hallway. “Go.”
The women didn’t move at all. I peered at them from around the bundle until my arms grew tired, then set down the bedclothes, crouching in front of the mother. These—you—to sleep, these—you—to sleep, I explained with lots of pointing. She didn’t glance at me. She just kept staring at the floor, as if that one patch of old linoleum contained something so mesmerizing, so incredibly beautiful that she couldn’t look away. I knew I should leave, but nosiness got the better of me and I got down on my knees and craned my head to intercept her gaze. The scarf wound around her face set off her features in an ivory oval. Her eyes were big and dark brown, slightly elongated, pretty, and dead. Whatever she saw when she last used them must’ve been awful. Her vacant stare chased away my curiosity, and I slowly backed down the hallway, leaving her with a few apologetic gestures to cement that the bedding was hers to keep.
“Everything all right?” Dad asked.
“It was fine,” I lied.
“Did they take the blankets?”
“I think so. They didn’t say anything about giving them back.”
“Good,” Dad summed up. “You did good.”
Several more Bosnians arrived the next morning. The young men were visibly less shaken and more defensive, and shot challenging looks about them, ready to fight. They also found shelter in the upstairs corridor, and our two groups, ex–Soviet Jews and ex–Yugoslav Muslims, wound up being housemates for a few weeks. I’m not sure who first took to posting men in the hallway while the women and children were using the communal shower, but as soon as one group began the practice, the other followed suit. In time, an unspoken routine was established in which we and the two other upstairs Jewish families cooked in the evening, while the Bosnians cooked in the morning (all the Bosnians, including the young men, were reluctant to leave their rooms after nightfall). Otherwise we barely interacted, but as the Joint worker pointed out, cross-cultural incidents were greatly undesirable, and so no cross-cultural incidents took place. We didn’t hold hands and dance around in a circle; we didn’t negotiate a solution to the Middle East crisis. We walked in separately and we walked out separately and we only caught each other in glimpses in the hallways, but we felt safe.
Around mid-June, HIAS informed us they were close to finalizing negotiations with a U.S. community that had offered to sponsor us. The worker said that we wer
e to be relocated to one more place before flying out to the States, and once again we woke in the pre-dawn hours to meet HIAS’s van. By this point packing and moving suitcases was so efficient that we were loaded in a flash, and since we were running a few minutes ahead of schedule, Dad asked the driver to wait and hustled upstairs to make sure nothing had been forgotten.
As he scanned the empty attic room in the dim morning light, Dad felt a hesitant touch on his shoulder. He spun around and saw the Bosnian woman we gave the blankets to standing in the hallway. In her hand was a tiny cloth bag.
The woman signed, alternatively pointing at Dad and the bag, which Dad cautiously opened. Inside was a handful of hard, glossy seeds.
Many Bosnians displaced by the Yugoslav Wars had been subsistence farmers who lived off what they could grow on the land. This family, whose sudden flight precluded them from packing even basic supplies, must’ve grabbed their most portable, vital possession: seeds for future crops. The small, oval flecks were their version of a tea service, hope for someday replanting their lives in a newer, more fertile land.
Thank you, I can’t. Dad smiled and shook his head. My father explained that he didn’t know how to farm and didn’t want the seeds to go to waste. I don’t know how much he got across, since he used only gestures, and the van driver started honking. Dad cinched the bag shut, returned it to the woman, and trotted downstairs, and that was the last we saw of the Bosnians.
* * *
Our last stop before being shipped out to America was a tiny, one-room apartment somewhere in Vienna. We were there only a few days; I have no idea why they even bothered moving us in the first place, and I remember little of it, not even where it was. The suitcases remained packed in “battle readiness,” as Dad called it, and there was nothing to do but wait for the phone call and wonder where we would be going.
On the third or fourth night in the apartment, a young HIAS worker swung by to tell us that our destination in America was a town called Lafayette. Suddenly, an idea hit me, and while Mom, Dad, and Grandma were intoning the name of our mysterious new home, I asked Lina to see if the worker could lend me an atlas. The tiny Soviet version I brought out of Russia wasn’t very helpful. It had detailed maps of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Vietnam, but only one page dedicated to the entire New World. According to it, everything in America was colored pink, and the country had three cities called New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, a cluster of impressive lakes in the north, and a sad pink wasteland everywhere else. Lina translated, and much to my joy the worker retrieved a giant American atlas with two pages per each state from his van. (“Leave it in the room when you’re done … or whatever,” the man said. “There are so many refugees pouring in, I’m not going to be stateside anytime soon.”) I retired to the apartment’s closet, which I had claimed as my room, opened the atlas, and settled down on the blankets, only to jump up a minute later.
“I found it! Louisiana! Lafayette in Lou-i-si-ana!” I screamed, announcing our new home to the apartment building and nearby pedestrians.
Dad was so impressed he didn’t even yell when I slammed the book onto the table. Mom and Grandma began discussing the best ways to deal with the balmy southern weather. Dad tried to recall if any of the books he’d read had mentioned the state, and Lina was already scouring the surroundings for universities. It was my finest hour, better even than helping Dad haul suitcases at the tamozhnya. Everyone else had been putzing around wasting time while I, I delivered our latitude and longitude, in a minute flat! “Remember, I found it,” I told Lina for the tenth time.
Self-adoration kept me aloft for a good half-hour before doubt seeped in. A fat atlas with many pages, and I just happened to flip to the correct spot? It seemed too easy, and I reclaimed the book from Lina.
“I found Lafayette … again. There’s another one in Tennessee,” I announced, quietly this time.
The apartment was silenced. “Are you joking?” asked Lina. “How can there be two?”
There couldn’t be two … at least not in Russia. Each town had its own name, and if someone said he was from L’vov, or Dnepropetrovsk, or Sevastopol, then that’s where he was from and there was never a need to ask “Which one?” It was a ludicrous concept; it’d be like having the same word for a monkey and a giraffe. Yet there it was, right at the top of that stupid, long state, snatching away my triumph.
I took advantage of the confusion to grab the atlas and Comrade Bear and slink away to the fourth-floor landing, where I could concentrate and began with Alabama. The first ten or so states were combed through in expeditious fashion. By the time I reached Massachusetts the sun had set, leaving me to deal with the flickering yellow lightbulb over the landing. Pennsylvania was both big and dense, which necessitated a short break for tea, especially after big, dense Ohio. Everything post-Utah was a slow trudge, since the town names started jumping around the pages, but by that point I was committed. After a total of four hours, Comrade Bear and I staggered back into the room.
“What the hell were you doing?” barked Dad.
“Reading.” I held up the atlas.
“You read an atlas?” smirked Lina.
“Are we going to Louisiana or Tennessee?” asked Grandma, as if the book somehow showed a flashing GOLINKINS LAND HERE sign over one of the towns.
“I don’t know. My head hurts. I’m going to bed. Good night.” I went to my room in the closet, wrapped myself in blankets, and tried to shut out the world. They were everywhere. I found them in the mountains, I found them on the plains, I found them tucked into little forgotten corners. Ohio had two—in the same state! How do these people function? My head was pounding, pounding, pounding, my eyes were watering and I hoped they wouldn’t fall out, and I silently cursed the Americans, who couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a new town name.
There were seventeen Lafayettes in the continental United States.
A SIMPLE REQUEST
Vienna, Austria, June 1990
We saved seeing Peter until the very end, when HIAS warned Dad that our departure was imminent. The baron came to the apartment the next evening. The goodbye was similar to the ones the adults had exchanged with friends and family back in Russia: a true goodbye, indefinite and lasting, where you say “farewell” because you don’t know when, if ever, you will see the person again. And after six months of floating through towns and villages, it felt wonderfully painful to say goodbye to someone. When first we became refugees it seemed that an exotic parade of human rights workers and clerks, border guards, Austrians, and policemen was marching by our lives. But after enough days of being stamped and processed, honked at and waved along, it began to feel like we were the ones trapped in some strange, wispy procession drifting by the lives of normal people. It was good to have Peter, to know that our path had intertwined with at least one person who would miss us, one person who was anchored in the world.
For several minutes the adults sat on crammed cots, sipping cheap Austrian tea Mom had brewed in a borrowed teapot. Dad was saying something to Peter, who replied with a series of quiet “no”s. “What’s going on?” I poked Lina.
“Mom and Dad really want to have a picture of Peter or with him. Dad keeps asking if we can go somewhere to take one before we leave.”
“And?”
“And he refuses.” Lina listened, then translated some more. “He says that we don’t need a picture of him … that he hates being in pictures, he doesn’t even have any of himself, and that if we want to remember him then we’ll do so in our minds, and we won’t need a photograph … and if we don’t remember in our minds, then … then a picture would be useless anyway. What a strange man, huh?”
Eventually Dad gave up and the conversation shifted to meaningless goodbye chatter.
We went downstairs and walked Peter out. Peter didn’t do hugs, so he just shook our hands. He gave Mom a forlorn smile and said something in English, and then, with a sharp pivot, strode across the street to the jeep. We barely caught a
glimpse of him, green jacket, red hair, and it seemed that by the time we heard him start the engine he was already gone. He had left us as he had met us, of his own volition and on his own terms, a baron and a forester, a man deeply in love with and deeply ashamed of his nation, a conflicted and inexplicable man whose complexity was as profound as his kindness.
“What did he say to me?” asked Mom.
“He said there are some good things about Austria, and he hopes you won’t forget them,” Dad said, after a pause. “I still don’t understand why he wouldn’t take a picture: he’s done so much for us, and it was such a simple request.”
The adults returned upstairs and I sat down on the outside steps. I realized that I was going to miss Vienna, which was passing strange because I’d never missed a place before. Estonia was lovely, with its unkempt dunes and queer twilight, but the Estonians were so protective of their little country that it was obvious that guests were welcome, but only as guests. Even I understood that. Nondorf, too, had its charms. I loved the castles and the gray-blue mountains, but we were reminded that we were different at every turn. Vienna, though, Vienna was so damn beautiful it didn’t matter what you were or what language you spoke. There were churches, old façades, public gardens, and fountains, none of which charged admission. Twice, Dad and I snuck into the city’s Kunsthistorisches art museum, when attendance was slow and the guards looked the other way. It was so easy to get lost in the beauty; no one pays attention to your clothes when you’re standing next to a van Eyck.
I was a little upset, too, upset with my family because I didn’t like photographs either and felt cornered along with Peter. I wished Dad hadn’t pressured him. Evening fell, the late buses rumbled by, and for a long time I sat on the steps, clenching my jaw, staring at the city and at the empty spot where the Mercedes had been parked. I desperately wanted to remember him; I wanted to prove to Dad that Peter was right, that you didn’t need a picture to trap someone’s image, that you only have to want to remember him and that would be enough.