A Graphic Account of a Soviet Daughter
Just after Trump signed the first “Muslim ban,” a document began circulating online. I paused at its title: “Soviet Jewish Refugee Solidarity Sign-on Letter.” I grew up in New York City, where I went to public school; since I was a teenager many of my closest friends have been Jewish émigrés from the Soviet Union. For 20 years, I’ve heard stories about selling off libraries accumulated over generations, saying goodbye to friends and relatives for what might well be the final time, spending months or years of purgatory waiting, in Western Europe or Israel, for an American visa, without a passport, without a nationality. I’ve heard about anti-Semitic slogans written on mailboxes or cried out in Soviet streets, or at jobs, or about university places deserved but denied. I struggled to imagine myself in these painful stories, out of my own comfortable, safe childhood on New York City’s Upper West Side, a place where even gentile children learn Jewish prayers by attending countless bar and bat mitzvahs. And yet I’d never quite thought of my Jewish friends from the Soviet Union as refugees. I’d met them after the hardest part was over, when their parents—many of them scientists and intellectuals stripped of their credentials by emigration—had already managed to fight their way back into the professional classes, and after their children, my friends, had already lost their accents. I had always associated the word refugee with people fleeing from bombings, famine, or outright genocide, people from impoverished, war-torn hells like contemporary Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, and Iraq, people trying to outrun death. But I was wrong, of course.
Many of my friends and some of their family members soon signed the letter, providing the years in which they’d immigrated: 1981, 1987, 1989, 1991. I kept checking the list, seeing an ever-growing number of familiar names. As protests against the refugee ban mounted, several of my Soviet Jewish refugee friends, as I had now learned to think of them, posted on Facebook about the great hope that their families had felt as they arrived in America, as well as the shame that they had experienced as refugees in hand-me-down clothes, with bad English and heavy accents, sometimes in communities where they were one of only a handful of Jewish families. My friend Anna Kats, a Soviet Jewish refugee from Tbilisi, wrote an especially moving note after the spontaneous protest at JFK:
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