A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir

by Lev Golinkin

  There was no bully I’d brought with me from Russia, no drunk anti-Semite or sadistic teacher. But after five thousand miles and permanent asylum in the most protected and protective country in the world, the sick caricature of the Jew still dwelt in me. A careless glance into a shiny car or a freshly washed window was enough to show me the zhid, ugly, diseased, and ultimately worthless. Mirrors aren’t complicated: whether in Cleveland or in Kabul, a mirror reflects what the mind sees, no more, no less.

  For Mom and Dad, the hardest part of leaving Russia was me. Abandoning your life and possessions and putting yourself at the mercy of strangers is hard; it is terrifying to do so with a child. For years, my parents marveled at how well I had handled it. No, I’m not scared. No, I’m not tired. I’m a little chilly, but I’m fine. Partly, I viewed it as my job. From the night we snuck out of Kharkov, it seemed that everyone in the family had assumed a certain role. Dad was the decision maker, Lina the translator, Mom and Grandma the base camp crew, tending to cooking, sewing, and other necessities. I dragged suitcases and ran errands, but my most valuable contribution was simply not to panic. Through cold, hunger, instability, or terror, I was the first thing Mom and Dad checked on, and as soon as they saw I was fine, it had a calming effect on the whole family. I took my job seriously, but to be honest I didn’t need to pretend much, because I loved emigration. I thrived in emigration.

  The best part of emigration was hope. Everything was temporary, nothing was certain, and there was always that blessed chance that tomorrow something would happen and I would come across a place, a situation, a fairy godmother, a genie, something capable of generating a poof! that would cure me. But a couple of years after we moved to East Windsor, sometime around middle school, I realized that emigration was over and the poof! never came. I woke up and was still a zhid, and this time there was no new place to disappear to. We were no longer trapped in Russia; we were no longer refugees in Austria. For the first time in a long time we didn’t have to run, and all I wanted to do was keep running.

  I lay awake in my safe New Jersey house. The Soviet Union had collapsed, its carcass lay sprawled across Eurasia, and still it shook me at nights. I’m never going back. That promise soothed me, for years I chewed on it, it was the last thing I thought before falling asleep. But it wasn’t enough. I started purging my life of everything Russian, hollowing myself out until I was no longer a Jew, religiously or ethnically. If America couldn’t cure me, I’d do it myself. The religious part was simple—I never prayed or thought of customs and holidays. Here, seven decades of Soviet persecution played to my advantage. I wasn’t brought up with Jewish traditions and it wasn’t hard to root out what was never there in the first place. The ethnic part required some effort.

  I became no one. I was from the Ukraine, once, I’d lived in the Alps, in Vienna, in Indiana, but none of those places had any meaning; I didn’t speak of them, and I carried no photographs. It wouldn’t do to have friends and neighbors poking into my past, so I carefully isolated myself. Russian was spoken strictly at home and out of earshot. Dad was too proud of being a refugee and Mom had her awful broken English, so my friends couldn’t come over or carpool. On the few occasions Mom and Dad showed up at a concert or a swim meet I would feel naked and exposed and panic until they left. A part of me ached for them to be there but the relief of their absence was greater than the ache of their absence, and it won every time. My parents had to go. I was no longer a Jew or a Russian, so I became 32 Winchester Drive, East Windsor, New Jersey, secure in the knowledge that I was ready to ditch that life at a moment’s notice and get a new address, and then be from that place. I chased numbers, piled up achievements, became 1510 on the SATs, volunteer #763 at Princeton Hospital, cadet captain with sixty calls a year on East Windsor Rescue Squad 142. My numbers would suffice for my identity.

  The world is full of shiny surfaces, but avoiding my reflection wasn’t impossible. I knew my surroundings, trained my mind to go blank when glancing over a mirror, learned to shave with my eyes closed. I wasn’t about to take a vow of silence, but I found a solution for my accent as well. “New Jersey,” I’d tell curious folks who’d hear me speak and ask where I was from. “East Windsor, New Jersey,” I’d clarify, and most got the point. “Originally,” some would persist; “I meant where are you from originally?” as if I didn’t understand the fucking question. Silence worked wonders at that point. I’d hurl the full force of my ice-blue stare at the nosy prick, and they’d back off.

  And that’s how it went, through middle school and high school, shedding and running, running and shedding, flitting and darting and hissing New Jersey, dreaming of those wonderful days of emigration when I was nothing and no one, didn’t need to worry about people and mirrors, just drifted and drifted with no attachment, nothing to remind me of what I was.

  * * *

  * The younger generation, those born in America or brought over at a very young age, is different. Brooklyn has plenty of young Russian Jews who converse with shopkeepers in English, their parents in Russian, and one another in Runglish. They keep kosher, chain smoke their cigarettes before sundown on Shabbat, go to pray at the temple, go party on Saturday nights, and go to college during the week. They’re Jewish; most are also too young to remember the Soviet Union.

  THERE ARE NO CATS IN AMERICA

  Kharkov, Ukraine, USSR, 1988

  “Look at the quality—that’s cotton. Nothing else, just cotton.”

  The clock chimed ten as Uncle Fedya’s face swam into the cone of light cast by the anemic lightbulb hanging above the living room table. His thick, meaty fingers gingerly grasped the sleeves of a T-shirt, and the low drone of his voice, which usually bothered me, seemed somehow apt for this occasion. It was the winter of 1988, and Uncle Fedya had recently received a package from a distant someone who had immigrated to the States in the seventies. Earlier in the evening, my family took the tram to his apartment across Kharkov to be entertained with tea, and jam, and news from America. But now it was late and the time had come to unveil the parcel. Uncle Fedya’s granddaughter Yulya, whom I was expected to play with, had been mercifully sent to bed, and I nudged my way over to the main table, where I belonged (I was already eight!). Our host shoved aside the cups, stacked the saucers, and displayed the box’s contents one by one, his face assuming the same somber expression I would later see on Boston priests presiding over the transfiguration of bread and wine into Body and Blood.

  “A real American shirt from Brooklyn,” he rasped. “Look at the tag, you can see the English letters. Here, feel it, feel it.”

  It was a very nice shirt, pale blue, soft and colorful, much better than the ones we had in Russia. But truth be told, it could’ve been an average shirt or a greasy rag. It had come in a box covered with small square stamps, much different from our gaudy ones smattered with red stars and Lenins. Beneath the circular cancellation marks with queer letters were little engravings of mountains, temples, statues, and mansions, and flowing over each image was that unmistakable striped flag that evokes reverence and hatred all over the globe. The box gave the shirt power.

  A potent rumor mill churned through the Soviet-Jewish community of Kharkov, feeding our imagination with tales of America. The stories came from Russian-Jewish expats who had squeaked through the border during détente in the seventies, before the USSR had invaded Afghanistan and emigration ceased. The information filtering in wasn’t plentiful: not many had left in the first place, and not all who had left had kept up correspondence. But the rumor mill made up for the scarcity, for any whisper of life in America was repeated endlessly, tirelessly, by friends, by relatives, by friends of relatives and relatives of friends.

  The stories were always ones of success: unprecedented, unparalleled, and unimaginable. News from America would not, could not be from America unless it centered on a raise, a promotion, a wedding, or a house. After all, Communists and Capitalists alike agreed that America and the USSR were polar opposites. Soviet propaganda averr
ed this with pride, but to those disenchanted and persecuted by the Soviet Union, the notion carried an entirely different connotation. Not the USSR meant a place where good things transpired and one succeeded not in spite of the odds but simply because success was in the air. The warm glow of the Promised Land entrenched itself in our minds, molded our communal viewpoint until it reached the point at which it no longer transcended reality—it was reality.

  This vision placed incredible pressure on both the expats who penned the letters from the United States and their relatives who read them to others in Russia. An unspoken censorship held sway over the letters: if little Misha had moved to Brooklyn, become a lawyer, gone through a nasty divorce, and was currently drinking himself into oblivion, the only item mentioned in the dispatch back to the Motherland would be “Little Misha graduated from law school,” period. The end. The suppression was even more pervasive than its Communist propaganda counterpart, because unlike the blackouts and radio jammers of the Kremlin, this censorship was self-imposed. People didn’t fail in America; how could they? Even if someone had failed, how could he muster the courage to tell others? Honestly, what can you say: if your cousin fucked up in America, well, your cousin must be an incurable grade-A schmuck, because only an incurable grade-A schmuck could ever find a way to elude the pursuit of happiness.

  And so, when my family gazed out of the windows of the Boeing 747 that carried us across the Atlantic in the summer of 1990, what we—like those before us who sailed on steamships and barges—were searching for wasn’t the physical landmarks of the United States but the lambent glow of the land of opportunity, the shining city on the hill, the beacon of liberty, the solace of refugees.

  * * *

  Fifteen years after my family landed at JFK, I shared this rosy vision of the States with my friend Kyle, who immediately asked if I’d seen An American Tail. He bolted upstairs and fished out a dusty videotape from his attic.

  Eighty minutes later I rose from Kyle’s couch a broken man. An American Tail turned out to be a cartoon saga about the Mousekewitzes, a family of five raggedy mice [read: Russian Jews], including Fievel, the plucky young protagonist, who are persecuted by ferocious cats [anti-Semitic Cossacks]. The mice brave the perilous transatlantic journey and just can’t wait to get to America, where there are no cats and more cheese than an honest rodent could nibble. Upon their arrival, they discover that, much to their dismay, cats are plentiful and the cheese supply limited. Several misadventures, musical numbers, and one wacky ploy to scare the crap out of New York’s cats later, the Mousekewitzes learn that with a little teamwork and a can-do attitude, they can enjoy a better life in the New World. The movie ends with a close-up of the Statue of Liberty winking at the camera as the credits roll on.

  “H—h—how?” I croaked out.

  “Oh there are no cats in Ame-ree-ca, and the streets are paved with cheese”—Kyle launched into the refrain—“there are no cats in Ame-ree-ca, so set your mind at—”

  “Stop it! Please! Yes, you like it—that’s absolutely wonderful. Unfortunately, I can’t join in on your nostalgic childhood memories because I just learned that my childhood perfectly parallels a movie about mice … wide-eyed, idiotically optimistic, musical mice. I am Fievel Mousekewitz. I am a fucking cartoon mouse! I’m having a crisis here. How could this happen? Even a ten-year-old kid doesn’t expect to go on safari and see singing warthogs and ‘Hakuna Matata’ bullshit! But me, Mom, most of us, it was just like that mouse movie. Mom’s a smart woman, not some naïve idealist, but she didn’t study English or prepare a résumé: she acted like those mice! How?”

  “I don’t know,” said Kyle. “Have you tried asking her?”

  “I’ve interviewed her dozens of times.”

  “Don’t interview her. Ask her.”

  The opportunity presented itself several days later, when I went out to eat with Mom and Dad. I sat across from Mom. Over the past six months she had grown used to fielding random emigration questions and spontaneous requests for clarification, so I brought up America smack in the middle of the entrées. “Didn’t you consider, before you got here, that people may have been exaggerating, that the stories weren’t real? Didn’t you plan ahead for getting a job, learning the language, banking, paying rent? Didn’t you foresee any of these challenges?”

  “No, we didn’t discuss too much of those details,” Mom shook her head. “It was just a feeling, America, not specific details, and—”

  I cut her off. “And that is why doctors become security guards here.” Mom winced. It was a shitty thing to say, but that moronic mouse had me furious. “You wanted to live here, right? So shouldn’t you have prepared more realistically? I hate to say it, but the refugee vision of this country was naïve and ridiculous!” I jabbed my fingers in the air to accentuate the point. “America’s not heaven: there’s bills, and rents, and fine print, and a language barrier, and people get fired, get mistreated, humiliated … I mean, Mom, what is it you wanted from America?”

  Mom rested her elbows on the table and for a while I watched her gaze off at the wooden divider next to us, and I could tell she was far away. When she spoke again, her voice was both calm and quiet. “I didn’t want to be afraid of the government anymore, to live in fear of them going to my home. I didn’t want to watch my daughter suffer and be denied from school because she was Jewish. I didn’t want to stand on the schoolhouse steps and worry to death about explaining to my nine-year-old son why being a Jew was bad, and why he should prepare for a long and painful life.”

  I remembered the last day of second grade, standing on the steps of Kharkov’s School Number Three, the cold rag damping the bruise spreading over my left eye and cheekbone. Mom dashed in from work and I asked her if it was possible to stop being a Jew. I had been so ashamed of that moment, not because of the beating, but because I was weak enough to ask Mom for help. I hadn’t meant to upset her; I just figured she was a doctor, she knew how to cure all sorts of illnesses, and it was worth a shot. It was the only time I ever brought up Jews to my parents. I didn’t realize Mom even remembered that moment, and now, as an adult, I shuddered at seeing it from her perspective.

  She didn’t need a job, I realized as the waitress refilled our drinks, snapping me back to the present. She had a job. She had a career. She didn’t need English to read books, and have friends, and watch the news, and carry on meaningful conversations. She’d done that for decades before I was even born. She sacrificed it all for peace and dignity, not a paycheck.

  The laughable thing, it hit me, was not that intelligent, sane people bought into an unrealistic vision, but the fact that I was fussing over logistics when deeper factors were at play. We needed America. Shit, I needed America. When I was a kid huddling inside the apartment, scared of the world beyond our black-leather-upholstered door, scared of my neighbors, my teachers, of drunken men by the bakery, when I lost my best friend to the grotesque thing in the mirror, when I had no dreams other than to escape the Ukraine, I needed America, Fievel Mousekewitz’s America, shiny and golden, without the warts and fine print. How could any immigrant write home anything but good news? People are suffering: tread softly, comrade, you’re walking on their salvation. The stereotype of America had anchored itself to dreams and fears, drew its power from hope, operated on a level beyond logic. It didn’t bother to contend with rational thinking for the simplest of reasons—it didn’t have to.

  The waitress cleared away the plates and left us the check, and for a few quiet minutes my mother nibbled at her cake while I sipped my coffee, a little subdued and immensely grateful.

  * * *

  America is the land of opportunity—that’s a true stereotype, and thank God for that. The seeds for meaningful change were there, in the States. They were there through middle school and high school, as I gnawed on disappointment and hate, but they would require a commitment beyond landing on safe shores and passively waiting to be healed. Fievel and the mice did it with musical numbers and half-baked sche
mes that were just crazy enough to work. In my case, it would necessitate another journey, one that began at an unlikely place.

  Senior year of high school came, and with it, the ritual choosing of colleges. I had only two requirements: the school had to be highly selective (a top education being the most important thing in the world), and could not have a Jewish studies program. I gravitated toward nice Catholic schools, figuring they’d provide me with a good diploma while minimizing my contact with the sick race. Boston College grabbed my attention: it was ranked in the top forty national universities by U.S. News & World Report and boasted of being not just Catholic, but “Catholic Jesuit.” I had no idea what that meant, but it sounded delightfully not-Jewish, and that’s what I went with. Little did I suspect that from Boston College I, who had enrolled as an anti-Semite, would emerge a Jew.

  WHERE AM I AND WHY DO I SMELL LIKE BANANAS?

  Chestnut Hill, Mass., March 2001

  The campus is desolate; spring break has begun. I’m in my dorm waiting for tomorrow, when I will join my Appalachia Volunteers group to begin the long trek down to Georgia, where we will spend a week building houses with Habitat for Humanity. Tonight is my birthday, and in a few hours I will turn twenty-one. I do not plan on going out: I want to be fresh for the trip, all of my friends have already left the campus, plus I hate birthdays to begin with and I thank the BC administration for being prudent enough to schedule the first day of spring break right on my birthday.

  Enter Pete, the only friend who’s staying in town for the week. Earlier this year I made the mistake of telling Pete the date of my birthday, and now he’s calling to make plans. When I tell him there are no plans, Pete grows incensed. He fumes that there are disadvantaged children who would give anything for a chance to binge drink once in their grimy little lives. He reminds me that getting blitzed the night you turn twenty-one is an American tradition, and the Founding Fathers didn’t shed their blood for my right to party just so I could “pussy out” on them. But what hurts Pete the most, as an American, is that I have just gotten my citizenship, made a commitment to this country, and the moment I have to do something that “inconveniences” me I go ahead and trample the proud American spirit without any regard for my actions.