by Lev Golinkin
The defining moment in Jewish history was the Exodus, the flight from a hostile land ruled by a hostile people who “knew not Joseph.” Everything from that point on has been, for the most part, a series of exoduses, a series of escapes. Some, such as the waves of immigration to America, have been massive. Others, accounts of a few families moving here this year, running there the next, are smaller but no less painful. The Exodus was there in the beginning and the Exodus has remained, manifesting itself over and over to become a part of nearly every Jewish family.
One consequence of this collective pain has been the development of the idea that every Jew is responsible for the welfare of every other Jew, because you never know—tomorrow may be your turn to run. This undying vigilance is such a part of the Jewish psyche that it might as well be genetic. Nomads we are, and nomads we remain. Cars replaced caravans, tents calcified into houses, yet the wanderings of old course through us, simmering under the surface. The suburban network HIAS sought had been there all along, mowing the lawns, driving the kids to soccer practice, renting movies on the weekends. Seemingly wispy and disjointed, isolated and oblivious, it was nevertheless capable of extremely rapid mobilization. All it needed was a stimulus.
Nobody recognized this better than HIAS. As Valery Bazarov, the HIAS director of location and family history services, and himself an erstwhile Soviet refugee, told me, “We were always good at keeping records, and we are not shy about reminding people of their roots. Say someone needs to come to the U.S. but has no sponsor. So we go to someone who we assisted years ago, or whose father we assisted years ago, and we say, ‘Look, you came here and people helped you and you’re successful, and now it’s time to help someone else. This person needs a sponsor. Let’s bring them in.’ And it works; it worked in the past and it works now, and it works very well. That’s part of what HIAS does: it unites people through generations. We were all strangers at some point, and it is important to remember that.”
In the early months of 1990, an urgent reminder went out to synagogues and Jewish centers across America. Phone calls, faxes, groups of young ambassadors fanned out from New York, visiting cities, then towns, then suburbs, all of them bearing the same message: We fought for the release of our people; now they are free. They are waiting in Vienna. They are waiting in Rome. They need our help. Let’s bring them in.
* * *
* Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 929.
PENNIES AND PEACH SLICES
Nondorf, Niederösterreich (Lower Austria), Late January 1990
I was playing with my soldiers in an upstairs stairwell when I heard that Lina and Mom had been arrested. “Watch him!” Dad barked to Grandma, who grabbed my arm, and he scrambled down the stairs, joining the throng of Russians spilling out into Binder’s parking lot.
The businessmen had gotten too greedy. By the end of January, the novelty of ex-Soviets living in the midst of Austria had worn off, the flow of gawkers to Binder’s bazaar had diminished, and the traders decided to gain wider exposure. Down the hill from the hotel, the road took a tight curve over a little bridge, where passing cars had to slow down. The peddlers armed themselves with matryoshki and cigarettes and started camping out on the bridge, setting up a hybrid roadblock/drive-thru boutique. They had some initial success attracting new customers, which only emboldened them to crowd in on motorists, almost forcing them to stop. These new tactics quickly attracted attention of a different kind.
In 1990, the Austrian countryside was not a land of immigrants; it was a land of Austrians. The influx of noisy strangers who didn’t speak German, tried to haggle over set store prices, and attempted to hitchhike where normal people drove must have been jarring. Some of the locals in Nondorf and Hoheneich were friendly to the migrants (my parents fondly remember a Hoheneich woman who invited them to warm up over tea during an especially frigid shopping trip), but many viewed our presence as undesirable. Every refugee at Binder’s had long grown used to the angry honks and stares during the daily slogs to buy groceries. The businessmen’s bridge activities ratcheted this tension to another level, until one late afternoon a squad of police cars screeched up to the overpass. Mom and Lina, who sometimes took a matryoshka or two to the bridge, were among those detained.
The peddlers had done more than create a dangerous road hazard: they had violated a key condition of their refugee status by engaging in work, and the Austrian police wasted no time lining everyone up and asking for identification. Binder flew outside the moment he heard the cops gathering names, and for a good hour the little bald man circled from officer to officer, arguing, pleading, throwing out one hand, then the other, all the while anxiously glancing up at the sky. And it’s a testament to Binder’s reputation with the local authorities that he managed to stall the cops long enough for the sun to set, until the distant mountains blurred into the twilight, bazaar time neared, and the dark green Mercedes pulled into the hotel’s parking lot.
It wasn’t easy to read Peter’s face as he crossed the police cordon toward the terrified crowd that included his favorite sellers, as well as Mom and Lina. Dad, Grandma, and I stood to the side, watching with the rest of the refugees. Peter shouldered past Binder, pulled out his wallet, and began lazily flipping through little rectangular cards, occasionally pausing to show one to the officer in charge. He could have been a street magician entertaining a tourist. Peter kept shuffling his papers and muttering to the cop in clipped, bored sentences, until the officer took a step back and let out a sharp whistle. Suddenly, his men began packing up. Peter remained in the lot, hands in the pockets of his mud-stained coat. Mom and Lina collapsed into the arms of Gera and Vicki Zhislin, and the baron shrugged and drove away without saying a word.
Binder immediately announced that business was finished, both inside and out. Everyone caught selling on the bridge was fined 100 schillings (which put a significant dent into the $650 my family had been allowed to bring out of Russia), but no names were taken and no one was reported to immigration.
“Let’s go,” said Grandma, and trudged to the cafeteria, where an anxious Agnes Binder and her workers were keeping dinner warm. Not much fazed my grandmother. Dad may have spent years planning for emigration, but Grandma had survived the evacuation of Kharkov, grabbing all she could carry and jumping on a train with my infant mother hours before the Nazis stormed the city and killed every Jew they could find. We’d eaten breakfast this morning, supper was waiting, tomorrow’s meal forecast looked promising, and Grandma was doing all right.
Grandma ate up, but I claimed I had a headache and snuck outside. The raid petrified everyone; not even the smokers were out that night, and I had the grounds to myself. I circled the snowy arbors by the hotel, the ones where the Leningradi girl kissed her love-stricken Austrian who was going to lobby the federal chancellor to get her citizenship. I started breaking off branches from Binder’s pines, snapping them into smaller branches, then twigs, then kindling. My stupid bunny coat picked this time to fall apart for good, but I barely noticed the cold. It was clear that the cops viewed the migrants on the bridge as not just reckless asses (which, to be fair, they were) but trash. I terrorized Lina to the best of my abilities, but she was still a good person, a student who giggled at silly things and read books and told scary stories. And Mom, only a month ago (in what already felt like another life), Mom was as respected as Binder, maybe more. Mom, who couldn’t eat at restaurants without some old patient stopping by the table to say thank you. Mom, who walked through bad neighborhoods because criminals didn’t touch her, and now she was a criminal. To the cops they were vermin. I did not feel the frost, or the pine splinters pricking my fingers; I felt nothing but unbelievable, blinding rage and in that cocoon I floated, neither thinking nor feeling for most of the evening.
Thankfully Mom was too exhausted and didn’t even ask when I threw away the now-useless coat in the hallway trashcan.
* * *
The loss of business had a prof
ound effect on Binder’s. We had too much time and not enough purpose. Every day was the same, and every day was long. There were few children staying at the hotel, for which I was grateful, and no school to cower from. It was a wonderful life for me, especially compared with nine years of being caged up in the sooty Kharkov apartment. Our daily diet consisted of chunks of wax-wrapped cheese, and every morning I’d carefully peel off the red casings to fashion soldiers with. I mounted sieges and went on raids with my wax platoon, read and reread my books, strolled around the hotel, walked to the store once in a while, and was at peace. The only eerie part was, I felt old. There’s no such thing as a young refugee; every migrant has a past they’ve fled from, and how can you be young when you already have one life behind you? I felt old when I passed by local Austrian children flinging snowballs and building snow forts, but it didn’t bother me. It was worse for the adults.
People unearthed dignity wherever they could find it. Some of the older women took to waking up an hour early and shuffling down to the kitchen to help Agnes Binder and the cooks prepare breakfast. Agnes remembered the women being wary, and only approaching the kitchen if she was there herself. She didn’t need their help or ask for it, but she began assigning small duties like cutting bread and setting dishes on the tables. Agnes rewarded each babushka with a little cup of peach slices for her efforts, but old Russian women don’t eat much fruit as it is. They didn’t do it for the peaches.
Our travel companion Yura had once visited his brother in Nashville, an experience that qualified him to become Binder’s in-house economist. Every morning he would collect the newspapers abandoned in the lobby, check on the latest schilling-to-dollar exchange rate, and try to predict when it would favor the dollar. “Today, dear comrades,” he’d proclaim, “today is the day we triumph over the Capitalists!” and the heads of families, Zapodentsi and city folk, would start bundling up. Nondorf had no bank, of course, and neither did nearby Hoheneich, so the men made the ninety-minute trek to the town of Gmünd, which boasted two banks. (Yura, the inveterate jester, proposed that one of the banks relocate to charming Nondorf, even going so far as to hand out Binder’s hotel brochures, but the tellers didn’t bite.) Once in Gmünd, the men tinkered with minuscule transactions, using refugee stipends and matryoshki proceeds to ply the exchange rate and squeeze out a few pennies. They would make the return trip, triumphant, pant legs caked with ice, breath pouring out in puffs, bank slips tucked deep inside their coat pockets. Twice a week the men tackled the Gmünd circuit. It was a hell of a slog in the middle of winter for such a small payout, but then again, it was the work involved that gave the payoff meaning.
* * *
Learning English trumped every other concern. It took only a few days in a foreign land to hammer home the crucial role of language. No matter whether we were talking with Binder or with HIAS—English was the difference between impotence and empowerment, and the race for verbs and nouns had begun. Informal classes were held in the lobby day and night, where anyone with a new scrap of English to share was mobbed by anxious students. For expediency’s sake, lessons focused exclusively on basic conversational skills: phrases, questions, and answers. Grammar was considered irrelevant.
Dad was busy poring over Austrian power plant schematics from the job Peter had gotten him, but Lina and Vicki were among the teachers. Vicki patiently tutored an old pensioner who had left the USSR by himself. He was something of a pariah, prone to complaining and inciting arguments, but studying with Vicki transformed him. He would sit with her on a couch in a corner of the lobby, intensely mimicking her facial gestures, wrestling the new syllables into submission. Ha-u aRR yuuuu, aRRR yuuu, yuuu? Mai nay-eem eez Vadeem. Vat eeeez yoRR nay-eem? he’d growl. Vicki was fiercely protective of her pupil, and one look from her was enough to forestall any snickering. Besides, we were all in the same position—the cantankerous old-timer just made it more obvious.
My attitude toward English was conflicted. When I was in second grade, Mom and Dad, America on the forefront of their minds, enrolled me in an English class at school. It was a disaster. Tamara Alexandrovna, the teacher, was a graceful woman with long, dark hair. The good thing was, she didn’t tolerate beatings, although whether this policy stemmed from compassion or from simple expediency (it’s difficult to conjugate while prone on the ground), I don’t know. But the downside was that Tamara Alexandrovna considered herself the guardian of and ambassador for the English language, and as such, she demanded the utmost commitment from her pupils.*1
Our pre–first class homework assignment (Tamara Alexandrovna went balls-out from day one) was to memorize the English alphabet. I barely glanced at it. I hadn’t even bothered learning Ukrainian, a language so ridiculously similar to Russian that the two are mutually intelligible. No, I had enough trouble in regular classes to justify paying attention to a language I would never use.
Monday morning, Tamara Alexandrovna glided into the room and leafed through the roster. Her dark brown eyes brightened upon reaching my name. “Lev Golinkin. Lina Golinkin’s brother, correct? Jolly good. Kindly go up front, Lev, and show us how to recite the English alphabet.” Lina was once Tamara Alexandrovna’s star pupil. The teacher mistakenly assumed that diligence and a strong work ethic ran in the family, and wanted me to go first to set the tone. Her disillusionment would be swift and brutal.
What do I know about the English alphabet? I thought during the slow march to the chalkboard. I vaguely recalled that the beginning was similar to the Russian one, except that the third letter was C and not V, and I even felt comfortable enough with the first few letters to rattle them off together.
“A. B. C.”
Tamara Alexandrovna shone with an encouraging smile. Life was good.
“D.”
I paused, trying to remember whether the next letter was also the same as in Russian. I didn’t have many alternatives, so I kept going.
“E.”
And that was it. I knew that after E the two alphabets split. Russian moved on with Ë, a letter not to be found in diacritic-free English; English had something else, K perhaps, or that weird snake-shaped letter, I wasn’t sure. Two alphabets diverged in my mind, and I, I knew not which to travel by, so I just gave Mrs. Tamara a satisfied nod and returned to my seat.
The guardian of the English language stared, appalled, into the void by the blackboard. I had just taken the beautiful English alphabet, the building block of Shakespeare and Joyce, Tennyson and Yeats, and I had truncated it from twenty-six unique and essential characters to five. This assault on one thousand years of linguistic development would not go unanswered on Tamara Alexandrovna’s watch.
“F, Lev. F is the next letter. Do you know what F indicates in English? It means ‘fail,’ a concept you will become quite familiar with in the future. It means you don’t know anything. It means you don’t belong in this class.”
I cried and I cried, but I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I hated English and I hated Tamara Alexandrovna.
Now, at Binder’s, I was forced to concede that those lessons may have been useful after all. Over and over, I muttered the alphabet, chewing on the acrid feeling of being wrong. But after a little effort, the ABCs came easily, and I was just starting to think that maybe English and I had gotten off to a bad start when I ran into my nemesis. Th is the most frustrating sound in the world for a Russian. We can’t pronounce it. Most of us accept our fate (“it’s tree o’clock”), but even if we contrive to say th, it still feels unnatural. Now, I will acknowledge that I, as a native Russian speaker, should keep my mouth shut when it comes to judging other tongues. I understand that at some juncture in the development of my language my ancestors decided to save a little money and not buy any vowels. People attempting to learn Russian have compared the experience to trekking through a barren wasteland of consonants without the respite of any vowel in between.*2 Maybe the inability to say th is just well-earned payback, but an appreciation of karma doesn’t make pronouncing the awful sound
any easier.
I overheard the adults discuss that a good way to learn th was by practicing “one, two, three.” I dedicated a good week to that, playing with my red wax commandos while diligently reciting my threes:
“One, two, tree,
one, two, tree, one, two, shtree, one, two, thtree,
one, two, tree,
tree, three, thshtree, one, two, tree.”
“Are you going insane?” My head jerked up and I saw Lina leaning on the doorframe. “I didn’t think it’d happen so soon … bravo!” she smirked.
“I’m not going insane, stupid. I’m learning English. I’m practicing the th thingy.”
Lina perched on the corner of the bed, the laughter beginning to squeak out of her. “Learning English, huh? Practicing the th thingy? [Of course, Tamara Alexandrovna’s pet said it perfectly.] How’s that working out for you?”
“Not good. It sounds like I have a lisp. I’ve been working on it for a week, and I still can’t move my tongue right.”
“A week?” asked Lina. “One, two, three—that’s what you’ve been doing for a week?! At that rate … You know what?” She grabbed a napkin. “I’m going to teach you two sentences right now.”
Ai do-unt un-der-stand. Pleez speek slou-er, she scribbled phonetically.
