I'll Never Change My Name

by Valentin Chmerkovskiy

  My parents faced a tidal wave of doubt from others: “No, you can’t do it!” and “You won’t survive!” With the overwhelming odds against them, the chances appeared slim to none that they would be able to accomplish what they set out to do.

  How does anyone even begin the process of leaving? Imagine picking up everything you know, your entire life, your children’s lives, the lives of your loved ones, and moving it all to the other side of the world, the most exclusive side, the place hardest to get into. And once you manage that impossible task, then what do you do? You don’t speak English, you don’t have any friends, you don’t have a job. What then?

  How proud, how determined, how desperate, how strong did my parents have to be in order to look at that forty-foot tidal wave of negativity coming straight at them and just buckle down and do it anyway? It took a lot of courage. They made a decision for which I’m still being paid dividends, the investment they made in us, allowing our incredible family to grow and prosper in a new land.

  So when you think about the person who is able to get up, drop everything that’s comfortable, everything that they know and are used to, you have to understand that they face overwhelming odds. Once they’re able to breathe out and settle in, the immigrant sure isn’t feeling a sense of entitlement, but rather of immense gratitude. The Thanksgiving holiday in our household has become like the Fourth of July, observed more enthusiastically every single year.

  I celebrate family and America. Those two things are what I’m most grateful for in my life. My name will never say that proudly for me, but if you’re willing to go beyond my impossible-to-pronounce last name and lend me your ear for a five-minute conversation, you’ll quickly realize that I’m as American as it comes. My pride for this country, which is ultimately reflected in my loyalty to it, is a prime example of what the flag stands for.

  IN THE CLASSIC “WHO ASKED YOU?” STYLE OF OUR FAMILY, I don’t recall being consulted about the decision to leave Odessa. I was seven years old and did have an opinion. The other family members could have asked me but they didn’t. I do remember a huge family dinner—it must have been in the spring of 1993—when the idea was first announced.

  Everything in our culture was a dinner thing, an hours-long combination feast, debate, and performance, with plenty of food and alcohol. The time spent around the dinner table was our Sunday church, our temple, synagogue, and mosque. We shared everything, all our thoughts and emotions, for better and for worse, accompanied by noisy interruptions and intense back and forths, all allowing us to wind up feeling united once again. The dinner table was where you made the big announcements, where the head of the house had to be the wise one, and where we learned the most, where we connected the most.

  This particular dinner, there were a lot of raw sentiments and more than a few tears. My father found himself looking at the same people he had been preaching to years before about loyalty to Russia. Those teenage ideals had now caught up to him in the real world—not the imaginary world he had created for himself, influenced by Soviet propaganda. Now he was a grown man with a grown man’s responsibilities. We can’t stick it out after all.

  My mom was different. She hadn’t been preaching ideology in her teenage years. She had lifelong friendships, ones that she had always treasured and cared for.

  “Oh my God, we’re leaving Odessa,” my mother moaned. But even with all those deep feelings, still she signed on to the move.

  As an adult looking back, I stand in awe at my parents resolve. These two people essentially said, “We are all in on each other and our kids. This is it. I’m all in as a father and I’m all in as a husband. I’m all in as a mother and I’m all in as a wife.”

  I was sitting at the table, but I didn’t have any chips to play. I was excited, but I had just turned eight and was always in a state of perpetual excitement about something, anything, everything.

  Me: “Okay, wow, leaving—that sounds exciting. Where are we going? What’s happening? I think we should go right now!”

  The whole family, in unison: “Who? Asked? You?!?”

  Before we could leave Russia, the four of us had to trek up to the United States Embassy in Moscow to get our official exit documents. From Odessa, Ukraine, we traveled by train to the Russian capital. This was a 25-hour trip, and let me tell you, Russian railroads never prioritize the comfort of their customers. The bottom line was getting from point A to point B in the most stripped-down way possible. The conditions were cramped and the trip seemed endless.

  In Russia there’s an expression, Спать Валетом, “spat valetam,” which means “to sleep like jacks.” When you are faced with the task of fitting a body on a single bed, say, or another piece of furniture that’s obviously an impossible fit for two people, you “spat valetam.”

  Valetam was a reference to “валет,” the jack in a suit of cards, a figure which faces up or down depending which way the card was held. Valetam meant to imitate that, where one person would sleep one way and the other one would sleep opposite. I guess the English equivalent might be “69,” but I like spat valetam better, even though it has no sexual connotation.

  On that trip to Moscow Maks and I spat valetam, crammed onto a single bench seat, my face right next to his smelly feet. I found out that the process of emigrating wouldn’t be so damn easy, at least not for me and my brother.

  Meanwhile, the adults were left standing. For the whole day-long journey, one adult was always standing. My parents’ sacrifice seemed to exist on a higher, finer level than the world of us kids. It might have been true everywhere, but I felt as though in the old country, my parents were always sacrificing, one day after another. Every day was about the struggle to survive. They were always symbolically standing on their feet in a crowded train. Unless you were a masochist who was in love with pain and struggle, sooner or later you were going to decide that enough was enough.

  BY THE EARLY 1990S, OUR FAMILY HAD REACHED THAT SORT OF tipping point, and it put us on that train to Moscow, seeking official permission to leave for America. My grandmother, my father’s mother, had contacts with groups that gave aid to Jewish people leaving Russia, headed mostly to Israel, the States, or Canada, with some others going elsewhere in Europe or to Australia. Though we weren’t observant and were at best culturally Jewish, my father’s passport had the word “Jewish” stamped across it, just like a yellow Star of David would have identified him in the past. The same religious classification that had held my father in so many ways was now going to allow us to leave Russia.

  After that traumatic train journey, we arrived in Moscow to find the city locked in a civil war, not a full-scale one, but there was a level of unrest that definitely put troops in the streets. We had landed smack in the middle of a constitutional crisis, with President Boris Yeltsin facing off with hard-line Communists in Parliament. My parents couldn’t believe it. We could see the smoke rising from where tanks were shelling the Parliament building. Of course, as a seven-year-old, I found the whole business terribly exciting.

  We survived getting strangled by Russia’s horrible bureaucratic red tape, received our precious exit visas, and returned to Ukraine to pack up. The move to America felt permanent, as though we were leaving for another planet, as if the airlines flew only one direction and there was no possible way to return.

  We got rid of anything we could possibly sell, until our old apartment was bare to the walls. Everyone around me wept. Thank God I was too young to cry.

  “My whole life I’ve lived here,” my dad said. “My father’s buried here. All of our friends are here. And I’m saying goodbye to all of that.”

  At the end of May 1994, two months after I turned eight, we boarded an American Airlines flight to the U.S. with a single stopover in Shannon, Ireland. As I stumbled off the airplane at JFK airport in New York City, I recall my first impression was that the air smelled different. Not only that, but the colors seemed sharper, with a greater variation of shades than I was used to, and the
water from the water fountain tasted fresher than anything I had ever drank. It was a whole different level of life than what I’d experienced in Ukraine.

  I had heard one magic word whispered over and over. I thought, That must be what America smells and looks and tastes like.

  “Freedom.”

  FROM JFK WE WENT STRAIGHT TO BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, TO the home of relatives, the family of my grandmother’s cousin, Garik, and his wife, Sveta. They had a son named Dima, who had two boys: an older stepson, Damian, who was around Maks’s age, and a younger son, Brian, who was my age.

  A time-honored immigrant tradition required that those who came before host families who arrived later. But it stung a little, to come to America, hat in hand, and join Dima, a sort-of cousin who in Odessa my father had always considered something of an insignificant little punk. Dima had left Russia with his parents in 1977 and was now a grown man, living in a forty-story building in the Brooklyn neighborhood of West Brighton, and enjoying an established life in the States. It wasn’t like he was a gazillionaire—there were no one percenters walking around these streets—but Dima was solidly middle class.

  I looked around and thought the whole arrangement was incredible—the towering apartment complex, the playground that was right on the grounds, the clean sidewalks, the green patches of lawn. And not a single broken-down Zaporozhets in sight.

  But my life was about to get a whole lot better. In a little sort of ceremony over dinner on the evening of our arrival, my grandmother’s cousin came forward.

  “Sveta has now a gift for you boys,” my father announced to us in Russian. I could hear a slight sense of embarassment in his tone, that a relative was about to give his sons something he was not able to afford. No one else would have detected that, but I knew my father better than most.

  It didn’t matter. Maks and I had entered into an American fairyland, where the surroundings seemed nicer, plusher, and richer than what we had back home. And here came Sveta with a wide smile on her face, holding out two large cardboard boxes. We couldn’t believe it. A safe place to land was enough of a prize, and now we were going to get presents?

  I eagerly opened my package with no expectation of what was inside. If the box had been empty I would have still used it proudly, and likewise if I had discovered gold bars I wouldn’t have been surprised. Instead, there was something better than gold bars—a pair of beautiful inline skates, black Rollerblade Lightnings with dark purple laces and chrome fasteners.

  The model had been introduced just a few years before and had effectively revolutionized the sport. Its invention was the greatest single engineering feat ever in the history of mankind. Or so I thought. My eight-year-old head exploded. This was America, right here, fresh off the boat and right out of the box. The molded plastic off the boot cuffs appeared to come directly from the future (or, as it turned out, from a factory in China). I was too stunned to speak.

  “Do you have something to say to Sveta?” my father whispered, giving me a gentle cuff on the head.

  “Spasibo! Spasibo!” I cried out to our hosts, thanking them in Russian. Maks got a pair, too.

  Forget about the little booklets of cardboard with government stamps all over them. Those Rollerblade Lightnings were our true passports to the United States of America. In Ukraine we had had old-style roller skates, with four wooden wheels—well, we didn’t have them in our family, of course, but a few well-off people did. These Rollerblades meant that Maks and I had somehow blown right past the clunky, old-fashioned roller skate and proceeded directly to the Rolls-Royce of inline locomotion.

  The next morning we strapped on our blades and rumbled down the sidewalk to West Playground, a block-long recreational area that featured handball courts, exercise equipment, and swings. In other words, the place was typical local urban park, nothing big, nothing fancy, just a place for kids and adults to gather. I remember being excited to be abroad in Brooklyn without grown-up supervision. We were discovering new terrain.

  Wobbling along like a pair of drunks, Maks and I entered the park. He mastered the skates a little more quickly than I did, and left me behind. We first passed an area where older people played chess, mostly Russian immigrants. We were going at a snail’s pace but it felt like we were flying. Talk about a pair of rookies!

  Beyond the chess players were the swings, hanging unused in the springtime sun, then up a bit further on the right were the handball courts. (I’ve since lived in several other cities in America, but Brooklyn is the only place where handball is a major, deadly serious street game.) After handball came the basketball courts.

  Through the green chain-link fences of the courts, we could see a sidewalk and another, smaller set of swings, all neglected and broken, making for a place where no kids would ever venture unless they happened to be well-armed. It was as if the area had a sign posted in front of it: Shady Shit Happens Here. I could already catch a whiff of dark, violent street energy.

  Maks was twenty yards ahead of me. Before I knew what was happening I saw five dudes surround him. They were shouting and although I didn’t understand English I knew they were roughing him up for the Rollerblades. I remember seeing a pair of identical twins, heavyweight, Italian-American thugs, leading the assault.

  I practically crapped myself, I was so terrified. I couldn’t believe what was happening.

  Back in Odessa I had been a devoted fan of an American television program called Rescue 911. Hosted by Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, William Shatner, the reality show portrayed police, fire, and paramedic units responding to real 911 emergency calls. The concept appeared magical to my young eyes. I had never witnessed anything remotely like it in Ukraine. Find yourself in trouble, dial 911, and instantly—instantly!—hordes of helpful, life-saving emergency personnel would descend upon the scene.

  At that moment at West Playground, I didn’t have a phone handy. I gotta get our pops, I told myself. I was too small and too far away to help my brother. The only thing I could think of to do was to turn around, wobble back up the street to the apartment building of my grandmother’s cousin’s son, and burst into the place bellowing out the familiar call I had seen on Rescue 911.

  “Call 911! Maks is getting beat up! Call 911!”

  My dad chose not to call 911, deciding instead on an immediate, more personal response, more Russian than American. He rushed outside wearing only his boxers and black socks, on a mission to save his fourteen-year-old son from getting mugged for a pair of brand-new Rollerblade Lightnings.

  We met my brother at the gate of West Playground, walking back with his head in his hands, his T-shirt ripped, and no skates. After I left to get help, the situation in the shady area beyond the basketball courts turned serious. One of the twins busted a bottle and sliced Maks’s shirt open. But by now the culprits were long gone.

  Welcome to America, in the most real way possible. Welcome to Brooklyn.

  Years later my brother and I would go back to the old neighborhood every once in a while. Our grandmother, who had also immigrated to America, still lived in East New York, we had friends in the area, and we’d go out to Russian restaurants in Brighton Beach. Sometimes we’d make a detour to Avenue X and West Street, to the apartment building that was our first stop after arriving in America. Taking a trip down memory lane was inspiring and humbling at the same time.

  Growing up I always felt the nabe was Italian and the Chmerkovskiys were just visitors. For that reason, I felt more comfortable around black and Hispanic kids than I did around Italians and native Brooklynites. They were the ones who were always calling out, “Go back to fucking Russia!” They were the ones who had a sense of entitlement to any outdoor space they wanted to claim. The minority kids I knew were like me, a bit like strangers in a strange land.

  On one of those nostalgia trips back to the hood, Maks and I could see how the place had changed from a mostly Italian enclave to a Russian one. The Russian immigrants were the alpha dogs now, the dominant ones. It was the old story of Americ
an transformation.

  Visiting brought up a lot of emotions. I remembered that on our first Halloween, after we moved into our own apartment, we had our windows egged. It wasn’t directed at us personally, but it was intimidating at first, until a couple years later we stepped out and started throwing eggs ourselves. When we came back from the mission, our mom was furious.

  “You wasted all our eggs!” she wailed.

  Nostalgia was a blade that cut both ways. Going back, remembering was always bittersweet.

  We were living in New Jersey by the time of this particular visit back to Brooklyn, and on our way home Maks wanted a bottle of water. We pulled up at a Key Food supermarket on Avenue Z, a few blocks away from West Playground. I guess not all of the “fuhgeddaboudit” guys had moved out of the neighborhood, because there was one of the Italian twins, the former skate-thief, grown older and heavier.

  He was bagging groceries in the checkout line.

  I don’t think the twin recognized us. If revenge is a dish best served cold, this one was frozen solid. But I have to wish for you the same kind of sweet payback, and hope that you encounter one of your childhood bullies later on in life, bagging groceries as a supermarket checkout boy.

  Every family has its own library of stories, accounts of this or that incident, a funny response to what someone said, a shared memory to treasure. Maks and I bonded over our “welcome to America” stolen Rollerblades saga. You may have run across it before, because we’ve told it often enough on talk shows and in media interviews. At the time, what happened was traumatizing, but it’s a very comfortable story by now. We grew up and carried it with us, a shared lesson learned from a childhood experience.

  School

  Odessa to Brooklyn represented a huge, head-twisting transition for all of us in the family. Due to the Rollerblades incident, Maks and I had been put on notice that we had to watch our shit, step up our game a bit, figure out how to negotiate around the obstacles and pitfalls of the brave new world we had been dropped into. But my mom and pops had steep learning curves, too.