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

by Lev Golinkin

  Linda and Michael lived a five-minute walk from the gray ranch at 213 East Sunset Lane, and since Linda spent more of her time with us than at home, Michael would often drop by to say hello and bring his wife a sandwich. He was a relaxed, good-natured man, with a sizable belly and a bushy beard that had turned gray long before his hair. When not in the lab or the classroom, he putzed around in his garden and played clarinet for the Lafayette Klezmorim, a traditional Eastern European Jewish band. The first time he strolled down to our house, clad in his Hawaiian shirt and sandals, he made me think of Santa (I should say “Grandfather Frost”) in the off-season, long after all the toys had been delivered and with the upcoming holiday bustle far, far away.

  The night before Lina’s hearing, however, the man’s avuncular attitude had evaporated, because by that point Michael had tacked on another, even tougher, goal to his agenda. Lina couldn’t afford the out-of-state tuition. Michael quietly checked with the local banks and was told she wouldn’t qualify for a loan: ten suitcases were not enough for collateral. The community’s resources were tapped (they had already shelled out eighty thousand dollars to sponsor Soviet Jews), and federal aid was out of the question. In other words, the panel would have to not only accept Lina, but accept her, a non-citizen and non-resident, as an in-state student.

  When Michael first met Lina, he decided to help her with a Wouldn’t it be neat if I could pull this off sentiment. But after witnessing Dad toil as a clerk and Mom as a barista, Michael realized that unless Lina was enrolled in a graduate program by September, she would be forced to take a low-wage job, and the odds of her returning to school would taper with each passing year. Dignity, family, social status, or blood, one way or another, every immigrant pays the admission price to America, and the older they are, the steeper the fare. In order to complete her education, Lina would have to be admitted as in-state, and now. Michael knew it, Linda knew it, and so they prepped, Michael debating, Linda playing devil’s advocate, revising and tweaking long into the night.

  Waiving the prerequisite proof of college education ate up an hour. Michael’s star witness was Victor Raskin, a Purdue linguistics professor who had himself escaped from the Soviet Union during the seventies. In truth, Raskin’s testimony was conjectural at best. The man was a linguist, not an engineer. All he did was confirm the existence of Kharkov Polytechnic Institute and that, based on his conversations with Lina, she had indeed attended it. But his voice supplied Michael with the gravitas of a faculty member, as well as giving those in attendance a clear example of what an immigrant can become. As expected, the sticklers demanded stipulations, and Michael conceded to having Lina demonstrate her proficiency by spending the fall semester maintaining a B-plus average in upper-level undergraduate engineering courses. Overall, things were progressing smoothly when Michael dropped the bomb. “Just so everyone’s on the same page, I want to clarify that Ms. Golinkin is going to be joining us as an in-state candidate for a master’s in Materials Engineering,” he casually summed up, as if ready to bang down the gavel and get back to enjoying the last few days of summer.

  Rumbles of a slippery slope erupted right on cue. Purdue University, like all universities, was a business, tuition money was its bloodline, and the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition was considerable. Even Michael’s friends looked perturbed. “Where is this going to stop? What about the kids from Illinois and Ohio—are we going to take all of them as in-state?” one chemist objected. “Absolutely not!”

  Michael stuck to the script, jotting down notes and nodding with the utmost empathy. “I understand your concerns; I hear you.” He spread his hands. “I, too, have grants, and facilities, and a salary to worry about. Believe me, I’ve got two kids in college—I know. But I just want to ask one question of this committee. Ms. Golinkin, as you are well aware, is a refugee from the Soviet Union. She fled a tyrannical dictatorship with nothing but two suitcases and the clothes she was wearing. She cannot go back. She was granted asylum by the United States government and taken into West Lafayette under the auspices of this community. So I ask you, if Ms. Golinkin does not belong here, if she is not in-state, then what is she? Where else does she belong? What state are you going to send her back to?”

  Michael crossed his hands atop his belly and gazed out the window. It was long past twelve on a muggy August afternoon. Off in the distance, the football team jogged out to the practice field, the season opener against Washington just days away. Prefrosh orientation groups dallied by the quad, a pair of groundskeepers rooted around the chrysanthemum beds by the sidewalk, somewhere across the world the Cold War was petering out, and for a few brief moments the air of a small Indiana classroom hung heavy with the seventy-year struggle of totalitarianism and democracy. Michael leaned back, enjoying the silence, and glanced over at the opposing chemist. Rebut that, you bastard.

  Five minutes later, Purdue’s First [and only] Panel for the Status of Ex-Soviet Graduate School Applicants had adjourned. Lina was in and in-state—they even waived her first-year tuition on their own initiative.

  It was the American thing to do.

  * * *

  In March 1991, after hundreds of rejections and eight months of ramming his résumé down the throat of the U.S. military-industrial complex, Dad got a bite from a company called Delaval in New Jersey. His persistence was aided by a bit of luck, because the woman who reviewed his application spoke German and took the time to research the Austrian firm that had supplied Dad with recommendation letters. Dad flew out to Trenton and immediately accepted an entry-level position typically reserved for graduates fresh out of college (Delaval was willing to take a chance on an old immigrant, but they had their limits). Dad was fine with it: the only thing he asked was to have company business cards printed before he flew back to Indiana. His first task upon returning to Lafayette was to distribute the cards across the community. The few believers who had encouraged the job search were given a card; the skeptics got two, lest they misplace one. Linda received a small stack.

  Dad started work on April 1 and, a month later, after scouting out the area, he returned to Indiana to pick up me, Mom, and Grandma. Our departure, like our arrival ten months earlier, was a community-wide event replete with media coverage and touching gestures. Happy Hollow Elementary School rushed to have the yearbooks printed ahead of schedule so I could leave with a signed copy from my classmates. Dad gave an oration during a farewell dinner at the local temple, where the community had gathered a year earlier to hear the young man from HIAS speak of the refugee crisis in Europe. After Dad’s address, Rabbi Engel, the temple’s advisor, came up to us.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll look out for Lina,” he promised, protectively draping his arm around my sister, who was staying behind to complete her education. “And listen,” the rabbi reminded Dad, “all of you haven’t had much time to explore Judaism during the past ten months. There was too much secular work, of course, of course. But now you’re on your way, you got your feet wet, as they say, and it’ll be up to you to connect with the faith and culture robbed from you by the Soviets.” Engel smiled, and his light blue eyes, so full of pain when talking of the Communists, twinkled with joy. The rabbi had spent decades fighting to free the Soviet Jews, even forging an alliance with a Pentecostal pastor to pressure Congress to confront the Kremlin. Our crossing the Soviet border was a victory for him as well. “Don’t forget, this is America, and you have freedom of religion on your side, here, in New Jersey, wherever you go. The choice is yours.”

  “Thank you.” Dad smiled as everyone received a hug from the old rabbi. “This freedom is what makes this country wonderful, and we will be sure to take advantage of it.” And take advantage of it we would, but not in the way Rabbi Engel had intended.

  UNFINISHED BUSINESS, PART I: GETTING TO AMERICA

  East Windsor, N.J., 2006

  Part of my father’s collection of mementos from our journey is a copy of the June 21, 1990, Journal and Courier, a local Indiana newspap
er that covered our arrival to the States. On the front page is a photo of me shaking hands with Neil Zimmerman, the mustached man in the checkered beige sports jacket who greeted us when we stepped off the plane. The accompanying story informs the reader that “the Golinkins opted to settle in West Lafayette because their son, Leo [sic], does not like hot weather.” “Opted” is a curious choice of word in that sentence. While it’s true that I function best in environments below sixty degrees, neither I nor anyone else in my family had opted for anything—we had little control over the process. And all else aside, as sentimental as it would be to think that of all the places in America we would’ve elected to live at 213 East Sunset Lane, the disappointing reality is that we weren’t even aware of the existence of West Lafayette … or Lafayette proper … or the midwestern region of the continental United States, for that matter.

  Although every refugee story has its unique quirks, certain patterns can be teased out of any given refugee movement. There are two such commonalities relevant to the massive Jewish exodus during the waning years of the Soviet Union. First, Austria was nothing more than a triage center for incoming refugees: migrants came to Vienna, were processed over a period of one to two weeks (a month at peak overflow times, such as the end of 1989, when my family and others were stationed at Binder’s), then transferred to Italy. Joint’s refugee infrastructure—the camps, teaching centers, food kitchens, clinics—was in Naples and Rome. The only migrants retained in Austria were the gravely ill, people so infirm that relocation to the crammed, filthy apartments of Rome was deemed a medical risk. Everyone else was shipped to Italy.

  Second, migrants with no relatives in America were likely to be placed by HIAS into an urban Jewish community, such as Brighton Beach in Brooklyn or its counterparts in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Cities have dense concentrations of low-level, immigrant-ready jobs coupled with public transportation, Laundromats, pharmacies, grocery stores, and other conveniences of Western life squeezed into a few blocks. What’s most crucial is that all those jobs and institutions are staffed by and cater to Russian speakers, which eliminated the crippling effect of the language barrier. The whole idea was to ease the lonely transition to America by plugging isolated refugees into long-established linguistic, ethnic, and immigrant networks.

  Problem is, the story of my family flies in the face of both. Every one of the fifty families stationed in Binder’s hotel had been transferred to Rome, save us. We were moved to Vienna, to a private upstairs room in a house so packed with invalids that Joint was forced to create space by dicing up the first floor into minuscule curtained-off sectors we generously referred to as rooms. And then there’s West Lafayette—even with the entire student body of Purdue University thrown in, the town still comes up a few million short of a metropolis. The Russian enclave of Tippecanoe County had consisted of us and one other family adopted by the community.

  Why were we kept in Austria for six months? How did we wind up in Indiana? Time rolled by, my family met other refugees, heard other stories, and the more we shared, the more our story stood out, and still the answers lay hidden, obscured by years and by a transformed world. For many years, I didn’t think about any of this—in fact, I did everything I could to ignore, omit, and otherwise bury memories of our journey and of the Soviet Union—but in 2006, as an adult seeking to understand my past, I set out to discover what had happened.

  I headed for New York to interview directors of HIAS and Joint, as well as to Vienna, where I tracked down Oswald Prager, who had been responsible for stationing refugees in Austria. I asked all three men if they could think of a reason why five healthy individuals would’ve been retained in an Austrian purgatory house instead of being forwarded to Rome. Their responses were: “I don’t know,” “Hmm, that’s strange,” and “I have no idea.” On my way out of HIAS headquarters I picked up a copy of my family’s refugee file, and after scouring the blurry, typewritten bundle I discovered that any pertinent information was either omitted or simply not there. One page, dated February 6, 1990, tersely states, “Originally family was supposed to be processed in Rome—now Vienna case.” The file continues with numerous correspondences between HIAS and potential sponsor communities in Chicago and Baltimore, when suddenly there appears a sticky note, scribbled on which is “Accepted. Lafayette, Ind. Free case.” That’s it.

  I tried flinging the whole thing on the shoulders of fate, but the longer the story percolated in my mind the more I was certain of a missing factor swirling around me. I’d logged in enough hours with community service organizations to recognize that these groups, especially ones that operate in chaotic environments, are very good at adhering to protocol. There are reasons for established patterns, and explanations for deviations. It didn’t require the imagination of a conspiracy theorist to discern a conscious will at work during critical junctures of my family’s story, a higher power bending our path to its purpose.

  * * *

  Oberösterreich (Upper Austria), June 2007

  Peter still loved his weapons: on the way to the priory he had pulled off at a small village to pick up some rifles he was getting repaired. “The gunsmith was late in repair, so I have convinced him to contribute free bullets!” he happily announced upon returning to the jeep. Peter still loved his haggling. I sat wedged between my friends Steve and Kyle in the back of the Mercedes, listening to the baron and Jeff (the fourth member of Team Lev) discuss Austrian politics as we rolled along the E55 Autobahn on a warm June day. Seventeen years ago Peter had taken my family on the very road we were now on and offered us a choice between the Sankt Florian priory and the Mauthausen concentration camp. Back then we went to the latter; now we were headed for the former.

  The maypoles were everywhere, taller than telephone poles, tall like strange ship masts marooned in landlocked Austria, red-and-white pennants fluttering in the breeze. The poles weren’t always so tall, according to Peter. They started out as little decorated saplings in town greens, until local children took to stealing the trees from neighboring villages in an Old World precursor to capture-the-flag. Townsfolk responded by affixing the saplings to poles, which made them harder to reach, which only encouraged the thieves to get good at climbing. Over the centuries, the maypoles got taller and taller until they evolved into giant wooden pillars with rings of protective prickly evergreens, inaccessible to anyone, with the possible exception of the Navy SEALs.

  Rows of vineyards streaked by the banks of the Danube as I reviewed the interviews I had with my parents concerning the baron. In 1990, when we were still refugees, Peter conversed with Mom, Dad, and Lina about the future during our numerous excursions to the Austrian countryside. The baron never made his own opinion a focus of the discussion, but rather veiled it in hypothetical conjectures full of “if”s and “nice”s.

  “It would be very nice if your family did not have to go to Italy,” he’d muse. “The living conditions there are much worse. Besides, if you stay in Austria, then Samuel [Dad] can continue working for the engineering company, and get good recommendation letters for employers in America, that is so.” My parents replied that they would rather take their chances in Rome, because they didn’t want to be separated from our refugee-friends the Zhislins. Their wishes did not pan out.

  Once we were inexplicably secured in Vienna, Peter’s speculations shifted to the United States. “If you had a choice, where would you like to go in America?” he inquired.

  Mom and Lina wanted to move only to Brighton Beach, the Russian enclave in Brooklyn. “It’ll be so much easier to be in a neighborhood with Russian speakers all around us,” they reasoned.

  “Ah, so, that is true, but Brooklyn is so impersonal,” lamented the baron. “They place you in an apartment in a big building full of little apartments, with a little money, and they leave you alone to get a job and many people get stuck living in there. Mobility is low, so low. It would be nice if your family would go to a small town so you would get attention, somewhere toward
the middle of the country, with no Russians so you would have to learn English, and yes with a large public university because we require a strong engineering program for Lina …”

  West Lafayette fits Peter’s criteria to a T. In fact, I’m hard pressed to find a town that would’ve made a better match.

  Peter never gave a definitive answer on how big a role, if any, he played in our little refugee inconsistencies. Dad asked him once during a phone conversation in the mid-nineties, but got neither a “yes” nor a “no.” Peter muttered something about the past being the past, and shifted the conversation to another topic (in that casually insistent manner of his), and not even Dad had the stubbornness to press on for more. And here I was, almost two decades later, sitting in Peter’s car and debating how to tease the truth out of him.

  It was easy to see why Sankt Florian was Peter’s favorite monastery. The complex devoted to the patron saint of firefighters was a proud Baroque shrine that emanated power and beauty. Aside from a few errant monks, the grounds were empty, and we took our time exploring the courtyard, relics, and a library brimming with enough yellowing scrolls and leather-bound manuscripts to rival Hogwarts. But all those things were appetizers; the best, Peter promised, was the main basilica. The giant front doors were shut, as was a side entrance, but our undeterred guide marshaled us back into the monastery and soon discovered a tucked-away clergy passage. We crossed through the sacristy, spilled out into the front, and immediately discovered why all the doors were locked: inside the basilica was a group of people about to celebrate a private wedding. The guests were already in the pews and the wedding party was assembled at the main aisle in the back. The only thing missing was the bride, and the initial gasps of excitement prompted by our arrival quickly faded as the guests realized that not one out of the five noisy strangers who burst into the basilica was the woman in white. A perplexed murmur rose from the pews. Children began asking questions.