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

by Lev Golinkin

  His name is Aaron. I nodded. “Lev.”

  Aaron nodded. Good.

  “Um, English English,” the kid launched a jumble of words. “English English English, English English English.”

  “I. Fucking. Don’t. Understand,” I enunciated, and proudly grinned up at Lina, chatting with one of the journalists.

  After a half-hour of milling around and interviews, we drifted toward a van, which took us past clusters of large brick buildings with large parking lots (this was Purdue University, the heart of West Lafayette) that were soon replaced by little streets with rows of houses, lawns, and garages. I’d never seen a suburb, and the individual houses with separate walls and driveways astounded me. I kept a wary eye out for nagging babushki and skulking bullies, and to my relief, I saw neither. Just a few Americans walking with their dogs, or their kids, or by themselves. Please, please don’t be an apartment, I prayed, harder than I’d prayed before, harder than I thought myself capable of. Please be one of those houses. Please, please, please. Apartments were beatings. Apartments were communal yards full of danger, watchful eyes, ready to report you, drunk men in dark places, “Crush the Jews, Save Russia” scribbled on foyer doors. Please God, let it be a house.

  To my great relief the van rounded a few corners, then pulled up to a gray ranch house whose lawn was bustling with people from the airport. The tall man with the thick glasses slid open the van’s door, grabbed a suitcase in one hand and Grandma in the other, and headed up the driveway. Grandma marched beside the man, hand looped around his arm, like a queen inspecting her new castle. One by one, our fat red-violet suitcases wrapped with white cords disappeared inside, as I fought off the impulse to protect them from strangers. Mom and Lina were swept inside by the crowd, Dad was pointing around while jabbering to the camera, and I almost didn’t want to enter. It required several long, deep breaths to convince my legs to step forward.

  For once I was thankful for being small. I ran, half-crouched, around the photographers, Mom, Dad, Lina, and Americans swarming in every carpeted room. Carpets! No cold, blue linoleum floors, no stupid rugs covering up grime, just soft, warm carpeting. A couch and a short glass table with metal legs I can play with my soldiers on. The kitchen and a huge refrigerator in the corner, full of everything … Why is that American woman staring at me? A tiny porcelain house with a removable roof, cookies, chocolate cookies, and forks, knives, and tools in a drawer (examine tools later). Grandma’s gaping at a weird device, looks like an oven but it’s not an oven, it must be something else, like a super-oven. Back into the living room, and another room, a bedroom with a bed, then another room, two beds, and then one more small room with a bed and a door—an open door that’s a closet, and it has toys, toys, toys, toys, toys!!!

  My thoughts spun too fast for talking or thinking, rooms, kitchen, yard, toys all pulsed through my body, and I drank them in until I thought I couldn’t fit any more, and then I lapped up some more. How could this happen? rang in my ears until it came to me that the strangers did it. This was all because of the strangers.

  One of the photographers caught Lina and a middle-aged woman in a floral print blouse standing next to the weird super-oven appliance, which turned out to be the dishwasher. Our host gestures as she explains the contraption, while a googly-eyed Lina clasps her cheeks in classic Home Alone fashion. The picture wound up on the front page of the next day’s paper (West Lafayette is a small college town, and with Purdue off for the summer, our arrival was lead story material). Lina Golinkin is “overwhelmed as Linda Forman describes the furnishings in Golinkin’s new home in West Lafayette,” was how the caption summarized it. I’d argue that “Lina Golinkin is rocked out of her fucking world like a Neanderthal transported to Times Square” would’ve been a more accurate description.

  Lina was horrified when she saw the photo, and to this day she insists it was staged.

  She’s lying.

  REFUGEE SPONSORSHIP FOR DUMMIES

  West Lafayette, Ind., Summer 1990

  The first few months were a blur. Everything was new, old things were useless, and lessons numerous. You didn’t walk to a bazaar; you drove to a supermarket. Prices were prices and there was no haggling, doctors made no house calls and required office visits, insurance cards, and copays. You were expected to ask everyone, even strangers, how they were doing, but the answer always had to be “Good!” I’ll never forget going to our first Fourth of July cookout and watching the Americans throw away knives, forks, plates, and tablecloths, disposable versions of items that weren’t supposed to be disposable. It was like traveling to a land where people toss out their cars after they run out of gas.

  And then there were words. Words words words words words. I absorbed them rapidly. When fourth grade began, my teachers realized that if they left me alone, I would take in lessons to the best of my ability and show progress at the end of the day. It was a game, and I would make up little mnemonics to help me with the rules. When do you use “a” versus “an”? Well, “a” doesn’t like other vowels, so you have to stick an “n” in between: an alligator but a crocodile. What’s the difference between “embarrassed” and “humiliated”? If you fart in public, you’re embarrassed; if you shit your pants in public, you’re humiliated. But kids are already wired to soak up languages, plus they’re not expected to have jobs or full conversations. Lina and Grandma fared best of the adults: Lina’s language was very good, and Grandma announced that she was old and didn’t have to learn anything, and America gave her a pass. Dad found out he didn’t know as much as he thought he knew, and Mom had to start at the beginning. Thousands and thousands of words: it was like being born, except you didn’t have years to build a vocabulary—you had months.

  People flocked from all over town to introduce themselves or to assist with particular issues, but Linda Forman (the other woman in Lina’s unforgettable Home Alone photo) was our American mother. There’s no other way to describe the woman who arranged discount school lunches, obtained Social Security numbers, taught Dad and Lina to drive, managed doctor visits, filled out food stamp applications, balanced checkbooks, introduced customs, took us to our first Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Passover, and Rosh Hashanah celebrations, all while coordinating the other volunteers in our support network. Before we arrived, she met with my teachers to make sure my classmates knew they were getting a new student who might be scared and wouldn’t speak English; shortly afterward, she was already visiting local businesses to inquire about jobs for my parents. For a good part of a year she spent more time with my family than with her own.

  The culture shock ran both ways. One evening Linda stopped by to find everyone frozen with fear because the police had just called our house. Linda investigated with the local police chief, who had no idea what Dad was talking about, and after a while she discovered that the “policeman” was actually a Police Benefit Fund telemarketer. “You have nothing to worry about,” she assured the family, but her assurances meant nothing. What do the police want? Why are they calling? What do the police want? “You have nothing to worry about,” Linda repeated a hundred times over, but it required a three-hour explanation of telemarketing, and law enforcement, and civil rights, to make her feel comfortable enough to leave us for the night. She wouldn’t forget walking home astounded at how grossly she had underestimated our deep-rooted fear of the police. It was a fear that wouldn’t abate for years.

  And then there were challenges of a thornier nature. Linda quickly learned that while Lina would readily acknowledge not comprehending something, Dad was reluctant to admit his ignorance. Linda would convey information, important information, on upcoming events, U.S. culture, laws, and protocols, Dad would respond with a blank “Okay,” and later on she’d find out he had not understood at all. This drove Linda insane, since Dad’s misconceptions were multiplied fivefold the moment he relayed the incorrect information to us. But every time Linda confronted him, Dad would assert his understanding. Finally Linda began making Dad r
ecite what she had told him, but using different words, and this tell-and-repeat method became a problem in its own right. Our sponsor believed it was the only way to ensure the message was transmitted. Mom and Dad felt they were being treated with condescension, a callous and arrogant disregard for decades of holding down demanding professional careers while raising a family in harrowing circumstances Linda couldn’t fathom.

  Linda had hit on a sore spot: the helplessness that smothers many newcomers, especially those who don’t settle down in an ethnic enclave (like Brighton Beach in Brooklyn for Soviet Jews or Westwood in Los Angeles for Iranians) and are instead plunged into mainstream America. Tensions between our host and my parents escalated when it was time to nail down jobs. Dad began work as a filing clerk for a medical supply company, a private environment with a small number of employees, but Mom became a barista. Binder’s hotel in Austria taught us that not everyone in the West appreciated migrants, and the same was true of Lafayette. Several obnoxious individuals (who weren’t known for being coffee connoisseurs prior to our arrival) began to frequent Mom’s café, blurting out detailed orders, refusing to speak slower, and ridiculing her whenever she got something wrong. For thirty years Mom had shepherded patients during some of the worst periods of their lives, and now she couldn’t brew an espresso. She felt worthless.

  Dad channeled his frustration into a more positive direction, spending nights and weekends researching the U.S. engineering sector and shooting out résumés to firms across the country. The rejections returned at an astonishing rate, but that didn’t deter my father. “Step by step” was an expression he picked up early on in America, and that’s what he’d grunt on the way from the mailbox, before heading to Kinko’s to crank out more résumés. Linda, whose prerogative was for Mom and Dad to secure an income and amass equity, viewed Dad’s job search as a waste of precious resources, like blowing money on scratch-off tickets. She was the voice of reality and had the statistics to back her up. Mom and Dad were thrashing about, grasping to regain their dignity. Their situation made them feel powerless and humiliated, and Linda’s insistence on their remaining there fostered their bitterness. Both my parents and Linda were trying to do the best for our family, but they often resented each other.

  Linda was neither a social worker, nor a Jewish Federation employee, nor a professional do-gooder. (Her education in sponsorship was limited to receiving a thick binder containing HIAS’s version of Refugee Sponsorship for Dummies.) She was an architect, with a husband and two kids in college, and up to a few months before my family’s arrival, she didn’t know or think much about Soviet Jews. To be sure, she belonged to the local synagogue, heard stories, signed a petition or two, but overall she was aware that Soviet Jews were being persecuted in the same vague sense most people know that somewhere in Africa, someone is hungry. But in February 1990, the West Lafayette rabbi put out a call for all community members to attend an urgent meeting with a young HIAS ambassador, and Linda showed up.

  The young man from HIAS spoke of Soviet Jews stuck in refugee camps, and the community decided to act. People took out checkbooks, drafted lists of furniture items, volunteered to be English tutors and driving instructors. Linda sat in the back, half paying attention. She was thinking of another young man, a young man swimming across a river, a long time ago. Linda knew little about her grandfather. She knew he was born in Romania, and an army was closing in, and he jumped in and swam for his life under gunfire. She couldn’t shake that image. The young man from HIAS kept organizing, and Linda kept thinking of her grandfather swimming across some river in some part of Romania, praying the bullets would miss, praying there was help on the other side. And then the young man from HIAS asked for a community member to take responsibility for the entire project, and Linda Forman stood up. She didn’t even remember deciding to say yes.

  On weekday mornings during our first two months in the States, Linda would scoop Dad up and start ticking off the countless items on her agenda. It was summer, I didn’t have school, and so I tagged along, bound to Dad by old habit. Linda was middle-aged, with olive skin and jet-black hair perpetually coiled in a bun with one or two pencils poking out. She preferred jeans and earth-toned shawls, tan, brown, and gray, which made me think of Indians from old Russian engravings of The Last of the Mohicans. If we finished the day’s errands early, our host would treat Dad and me to something enjoyable, swinging by a park, a local landmark, or a funky part of Purdue’s campus. Before kicking off the fun part of the day, Linda would fasten her seat belt and turn to Dad: “English English English. English English.”

  Even Linda’s slow-paced speech was incomprehensible, and I learned to rely on body language to interpret her mood, just as I did with my teachers and the other Americans in Lafayette. With Linda it was easy: one just had to follow the wrinkles. The corners of her mouth creased up when she was pleased, foreshadowing a smile. When angry, she squinted, emitting little spokes of wrinkles; when she was deliberating, a ripple snaked across her forehead.

  “Een-glish, Een-glish … Een-glish,” Dad would respond in his choppier, hesitant baritone as Linda looked at me in the rearview mirror.

  “English English English, what would Lev like to do?”

  I knew those words. They were some of the first ones I learned to recognize. Linda was serious: I could track the wrinkles gathering, thinking, asking.

  “Let’s go,” Dad would reply, but the wrinkles remained.

  “Ask him. Please.”

  Dad would tilt back and translate, and I’d say yes. I always said yes. I didn’t care what we did—it was the question that mattered. The wrinkles would migrate down and rearrange into a smile, and Linda would shift into gear.

  WHERE ELSE DOES SHE BELONG?

  West Lafayette, Ind., August 1990

  After taking a few weeks to brush up on her English and adapt to our new surroundings, Lina applied to grad school. Both Mom and Dad made it clear that Lina and I were the main reason they had decided to risk it all and flee the USSR. Their children were going to have a better future, and there was only one sure way to make it happen. Twin doctorates—an MD for me and a PhD for Lina—would propel the first generation into financial security and allow our children to enjoy a normal American life. “Your mom and I will work and get money: that is our task, and you and Lina will study and get A’s: that is your task,” commanded Dad time and again, adding his voice to the old immigrant battle cry that’s been uttered in every corner of America. “You will get a top education and you will succeed; it’s the most important thing in the world.”

  Conveniently facilitating Lina’s achievement of the most important thing in the world was a top-notch engineering program located ten minutes from our doorstep. But when Lina walked down to Purdue’s graduate school admissions department, she hit a dead end. My sister had no proof of college education, since her transcript had been confiscated and burned at the Soviet border. The best Lina could hope for, admissions said, was to apply to college and work for her bachelor’s all over again.

  Lina was devastated; engineering wasn’t even her career choice (her dream, after all, had been to become a doctor), and she had struggled for a decade against a biased anti-Semitic school system, then wasted two years taking the medical academy exam only to learn that merit played no part in her future. The burning barrel at the tamozhnya, our little parting gift from the Soviet Union, had achieved its intended purpose. The impotence she first tasted in Russia had trailed her to America, and as much as Mom and Dad attempted to console her, they, too, had been plunged into a strange life with no friends and no money, and were as powerless as she was.

  What neither my sister nor my parents realized was that a plan to get Lina into Purdue was already in place; in fact, it had been incubating even prior to our little puddle jumper’s touching down on the tarmac. As soon as West Lafayette signed HIAS’s sponsorship agreement, the organization faxed Linda a list of our names, ages, and occupations. Linda’s husband, Michael, was a Purdu
e biology professor who had recently been appointed as dean. And in July 1990, Michael Forman decided that he was going to get a girl with no college transcript and no standardized test scores admitted into an elite graduate engineering program ranked in the top ten in the nation. And he was going to get it done in the span of two months.

  The novelty of Lina’s case required Michael to convene a special university hearing. He began with influential professors in the Materials Engineering Department, pulling them aside in the labs, seeking them out between vacations, persuading, cajoling, and strong-arming. “It’s only a panel,” Michael reassured the hesitant ones, “the First Panel for the Status of Ex-Soviet Graduate School Applicants. That’s all.” (The ludicrous title was Linda’s suggestion; she didn’t want the meeting to smack of any global policy initiatives that would spook the more timid professors.) By that point my family had already landed in West Lafayette and local papers and TV stations were aflutter with stories about us and our sponsors. The faculty understood that this wasn’t some distant, ideological cause for Michael; it was personal. By denying him the hearing they would be stepping on the toes of a rising star in the university.

  After he had collected a sufficient number of professors to meet quorum, Michael moved on to the administration, and here his pitch changed. Fortunately, it was the early nineties, and ivory towers around the country—including Purdue’s nearly all-male graduate engineering program—were buzzing about the concept of diversity. “We must get our act together,” urged the new dean. “Diversity’s becoming a damn prerequisite. And here’s this refugee poster girl who landed right on our doorstep—we couldn’t ask for a better opportunity!” Rabbi Gedalyah Engel, another one of Lina’s champions, enjoyed a good rapport with the town and county press, and while Michael was plying the diversity angle, several well-timed phone calls informed Purdue’s public relations office that the local media was very interested in running a spotlight on Lina. By late August Michael got his hearing.