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

by Lev Golinkin

  “Career, Appalachia, parents, all of that doesn’t matter right now. Your parents will get over it. Or they won’t get over it,” he waved. “But it’s not about them; it’s about you. I’ve watched you closely over the past four years, I’ve seen you grow and you have grown, but not nearly enough. I’ve sat with you in my office and you talked about medieval history, and Appalachia, and girls, and parties, but today was the first time you have ever divulged anything about your past. Do you realize that I can quote your views on Plato and Kierkegaard, I can recite your attempts at getting a girlfriend, but aside from the little scraps you mentioned just now, I know nothing about you beyond New Jersey? You act as if your life began at Boston College, and it—did—not. You have no foundation, Lev; you must go back.”

  A legion of “if”s and “what about”s was itching to jump out of my mouth, but the words wouldn’t form. The jumble of conflicting thoughts in my head had been unceremoniously thrust aside, leaving me and the voice, rhythmic, deep, hushed, hypnotic, sinking itself into my mind and forcing me to listen.

  “If you keep running up to life, and tasting it, and scurrying away, if you only go by the ideal world, the real world will consume you, and instead of an idealist you will become a cynic”—he spat out the word like it was venomous—“a person so fed up with futility that you will come to despise the very dreams you once espoused. The line between the idealist and the cynic is a thin one, and too often people—especially people of your age and situation—cross over that line.

  “You are not ready. If you want a meaningful future, if you want to become part of something larger than yourself, then you must root yourself, reach out, and understand. You have to go back.”

  The cafeteria was so dead that the distant chiming of the campus bell tower startled me. Kilcoyne rose. There was no small talk, no goodbyes; he simply shook my hand and headed for the main exit, toward the heart of the campus. He had a class in five minutes. I, too, had class, but I took a different exit, through the door leading away from the college. I walked across the street and past the little pathway meandering up to the freshman dorms. I went by the ring of houses owned by the BC administration, and the old mansion on a hill where every year a few imprudent freshmen might get busted for smoking pot, and huddled by an oak at the edge of campus, Kilcoyne’s warning pounding in my head.

  Kilcoyne was … well, he wasn’t a friend, he wasn’t family, but friends and family didn’t mean much at that point. Talking to my parents was out of the question. Lina and I had been growing apart for years. She wanted nothing to do with Russia, and neither did I, which left us with meaningless progress reports on her PhD and my studies, and in every conversation there was less to say. The last time we talked was when I called her, excited that I had been chosen for the Tijuana service trip, and she asked why I was wasting time on Mexicans instead of concentrating on med schools. I knew exactly where she was coming from, but I didn’t know what to say to make her understand, so I just hung up the phone. Kilcoyne was what I had. When he talked, I listened.

  I passed houses with unshoveled sidewalks, wandered past a shopping mall, and into the tiny hamlet of Newton, where I bought a coffee and kept going. I had no destination; as long as I had coffee and cigarettes, I continued to walk. I smoked the cigarettes, and my hand would freeze, then held the coffee, and my hand would warm up again. I slunk past Boston College, past the dull years of high school, past New Jersey, Indiana, the cobblestone boulevards of Vienna and the hoary valleys of the Alps, back through the endless steppe and the gloomy, industrial streets of Kharkov. I walked past Linda and the swearing cabbie from New York, Madame Eva and the blond girl with the jacket, the manic grins of the tamozhniki at the Soviet border, the frozen shape of Kolya the coin dealer as the druzhinniki walked through our apartment yard. Even thinking of their names was painful. Ten years of rigorously excising the shreds of my childhood had left me raw and exposed: Russia, Vienna, Indiana, the Alps, any of it was enough to transport me back to a dark brown hallway, a dirty mirror, and the specter that dwelled inside. It was an image I’d never challenged. It was an image that triggered the most visceral reaction I knew.

  “Hate” is a strong word. I heard that over and over from well-meaning adults in America, but it’s not true. Hate’s neither strong nor weak. Given the proper environment, hate can settle down into an annoyance, or a baseline, or a norm. I knew strong things, things beyond hate, things that made hate seem pretty fucking trivial. I didn’t have clever aphorisms for them, but I knew them well. I knew blinding and paralyzing anger. I knew isolation, so crushing that my tiny shreds of self-esteem would wither to nothing, and I knew sadness and I knew that I was helpless against them, and compared with those, hate wasn’t so bad.

  Hate is what came through after I chanced to glance at a mirror and felt so alone, so scared, unwanted and unwanting, naked and trembling. Hate’s what drew me out when my whole existence shrunk to an insignificant pinpoint of ugliness; hate is what took over, shook me, ground my teeth, utterly exhausted me until I reached the point where I could collapse and not feel sad and unwanted anymore. Hate’s what protected me, and as I walked it awoke, rejoiced, swelled until I was so flooded with it that by the time I limped back to my dorm room I no longer wanted to be well, or have a girlfriend, or be able to hug people, or have a good evening—I just wanted to be numb.

  I walked again the next day, and again the day after that. Every day I walked, several times a day. Where I went didn’t matter—graveyards, apartments, country clubs—as long as it had a path it suited me. About two weeks after my conversation with Kilcoyne, I asked Dad to mail me his scrapbook of our journey to America. We had no camera when we left the USSR, of course, but Dad had grabbed what he could, and despite the chaos of emigration he managed to hoard a surprising number of items. He saved a napkin from Binder’s, from when we waited in line to receive those precious rolls with butter when Joint moved us to the mountains after that terrible night at the Soviet border. He spent a bit of our meager refugee stipends on postcards of the palaces and gardens we strolled past when we were stationed in Vienna. He grabbed an extra copy of the customs form we filled out at JFK and the Indiana newspaper from our arrival to Lafayette. He stored away our coveted exit visas (except Lina’s, because my sister insisted on shredding hers the day she got her citizenship), and traced our route on maps he photocopied from the library. All that he stashed and more, and when he made enough money he bought an enormous magnetic-page scrapbook and arranged everything inside.

  For years, Dad’s album had terrified me. I could feel its filthy presence whenever I walked by his closet, mocking all the costly efforts I’d put into concealing my identity. I begged him to never show it to anyone, raved about how unfair it was that Lina was allowed to shred her exit visa and I couldn’t shred mine (“Lina is an adult, and she has the right to be an idiot,” was Dad’s unyielding answer). God, I hated that scrapbook, and suddenly it became the only item that mattered. I sat with the album and watched the past unfold before me, I walked as words and stories cautiously tiptoed into my mind. Here, my experience as an Appalachia coordinator proved invaluable: I knew how much work went into organizing even the dinkiest fund-raiser, and what I was staring at went way beyond a bake sale. In flickers and glimpses I saw them, thousands of individuals across the globe, praying, debating, marching, lighting candles, and holding vigils. People I’ve never met and will never meet, people who didn’t know me, people who died before I was born, grappling with the most powerful dictatorship in history because they believed in my cause. Because they believed I was worth it.

  Spring came and thawed out the sidewalks, and I ventured out farther. I circled around the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, among runners training for the upcoming Boston Marathon on Patriots’ Day weekend. I took the tram into the city and followed the banks of the Charles, past couples cuddling on benches and students reviewing for final exams. Amid the weirdness that descends on campus in the last month of college, I
called up a few students and some trusted professors who had asked me about Russia. People always inquired, in retreats, trips, classes, and I’d silence them, snapping, “I’m from Jersey.” Now I sought them out, showed them Dad’s album, recounted the little I could verbalize. As I talked, I paid attention, listened to their responses, heard them be amazed, or tearful, or grateful, and I bottled that, too.

  Facts became faces, details rushed in, fleshing out events, hints of emotions played in the periphery, and I clung to them, the stubborn shards of my past. Instinct flared up every time I touched on something new, and I fought to inure myself so that I could probe further. Back and forth I went, as two sets of images wrestled for control of a crazed kaleidoscope. Otto Binder, converting his hotel into a refugee camp, risking his business for migrants. Anna Konstantinovna, placidly staring at the cuts on my face. The drunk man by the bakery, hissing We’re sick of you, grabbing me, reeking of vodka, and an Austrian baron getting a stranger an illegal job. Panic set in when I’d poke out too far, and the images would quiver and scatter, and leave me again in front of the mirror, reminding me of what I was and why I ran. You did this to yourself, I’d think as a feeling would dissipate, so get up and undo it, and I’d launch into another walk, have another conversation, conjure another memory, grasp it for a bit longer. And as maddening as the process was, I really had no choice: chasing achievements didn’t work, and hissing “I’m from Jersey” and intimidating people into silence didn’t work either. I was trapped, and Kilcoyne gave me an exit. When you’re stuck at a dead end, any way out is a good way out.

  * * *

  Mount Laurel, N.J., August 2006

  One August morning three years later, I sequestered myself in the back room of my job, picked up the phone, and dialed the offices of the Journal and Courier in Indiana. In my hand was a copy of the paper from my family’s arrival to the States, which showed me shaking hands with our Jewish community greeters after we landed on the tarmac. But newspapers always have more photos than they print; the photographer goes on assignment, the editor picks one or two shots, and the rest are consigned to an eternity in the archives. I was calling the Journal and Courier because I wanted the other photos from that roll, the ones that didn’t make the cut. For the past three years, since Boston College, I’d been residing in my cozy zone of reading about Soviet Jews, speaking with my parents, and ruminating over coffee. It was time to step outside the cocoon, and obtaining a handful of photographs from a small-town newspaper seemed like a safe and easy objective.

  It wasn’t. In fact, by the time I hung up the phone I was seriously considering trying something more realistic, like breaking into Fort Knox. I was informed that the Journal and Courier had long-ago switched to digital media. The film processors had been shoved into an out-of-the way closet, everything past the mid-nineties had been relegated to the archives, and the archives were closed. The policy of the Journal and Courier was to release only those photos that had been originally printed in the paper. No exceptions.

  My initial August phone call turned out to be the opening kickoff of what would essentially become a six-week harassment campaign. For the first three weeks, I badgered the photographer, who finally crumbled and passed me off to the photo editor. Then came the photo editor’s turn, and then the general editor’s, until I convinced the editor in chief to grant me a minute of his time. “Can’t you just get some expendable intern to run the photos?” I suggested. All the expendable interns were already occupied with other duties, he replied. “I’ll make it worth their time,” I said, trying to sound like a man who regularly leaves financially satisfied people in his wake. It’s not a question of money, he assured me; it’s a matter of policy: if they do this for me, then little Timmy is going to want his Little League photos, and then little Susie is going to ask for her birthday party photos, and where would that leave the Journal and Courier then?

  “Why do you want these photographs, Mr. Golinkin?” the exhausted editor finally asked.

  Everything stopped. No more than a few seconds had elapsed, but those few seconds were like the moment right before an accident, or opening a college admissions letter, or asking a girl on a date. I had the world on pause. I could simultaneously track a thousand branching thoughts, follow each one to its logical conclusion, and still have time to spare. This was it. If I gave the editor anything but the truth, the conversation would be over and it’s goodbye, photos. And if I told him the real reason, I’d probably get the pics, but then I’d be committed. Yes, I could have them mail them to me, I could stash them on my hard drive and forget about it, but I wouldn’t. If I took this step, I would drive to Indiana and get them myself. And then I would track down Linda, and Michael, and the various families who had sponsored us. I would talk to them. I would talk to the refugee groups in New York and Vienna. I would accept myself, as an ex-refugee, and a Jew, and a Russian, and an immigrant, and while I was at it I’d try to do something for my future as well. I’d write it all down into a book. There’d be no more tiptoeing around. This was the plunge.

  “Listen, I understand what you’re worried about, sir. You have to deal with the public and you can’t set precedents you can’t follow; I get it. The reason I’m asking you to make an exception is because unlike little Timmy, I don’t have Little League photos. I don’t have any childhood photos. I don’t even have a birth certificate, because it was taken from my family when we crossed the Soviet border. The closest thing I have to a birth certificate is a copy of your newspaper from the day we stepped off the plane in West Lafayette and began our new life. I need those photos because I need to understand who I am and where I come from. They aren’t going to accomplish that all by themselves, but I think they’ll help. I hope they’ll help, in any case.”

  The next pause was not on my end.

  “Mr. Golinkin, would you be interested in cooperating with us on a follow-up story?” he finally said, in a tone that made it clear that the fate of the negatives trapped in the dark room hinged on my answer. Quid pro quo, Clarice.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

  “Wait, they tell me you currently reside in New Jersey: Is that correct?”

  “Yes it is, but I’ll see you tomorrow anyway … before you change your mind,” I blurted out.

  Five hours later, after calling Linda and Michael Forman and the other people in Indiana who had adopted my family, I bought a notebook and a voice recorder and was filling my car at a truck stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was a beautiful afternoon for a road trip. The summer vacation traffic was gone, fall had come early to Pennsylvania, and I took a moment to sip cheap roadhouse coffee while watching the sunlight play with the trees in the Poconos. I jumped in the car, tuned to the college football chatter for the upcoming weekend, and pulled out onto the highway, off to claim my future, off to reclaim my past.

  It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.

  The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

  We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is the Lord’s work.

  Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

  No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith.

  No confession brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.

  No program accomplishes the Church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

  This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

  We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

  We lay foundations that will need further development.

  We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

  We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

  This enables us to do something and to do it very well.

  It may be incomplete, but it is a b
eginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

  We may never see the end results,

  But that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

  We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

  We are prophets of a future not our own.

  —Prayer of Oscar Romero

  EPILOGUE

  East Windsor, N.J., 2011

  In the spring of 2007, after interviewing my parents, researching the struggle to free Soviet Jews, speaking with various individuals who’d been involved in the fight, and returning to Indiana to reconnect with the families who had adopted us, I assembled the trio of hooligans known as Team Lev and set my sights across the Atlantic. I wanted to return to Austria, journey along the shoulderless roads of Niederösterreich, tear down the autobahns past ruins and vineyards, and walk once again under the shadow of Vienna’s cathedrals. Most of all, I was ready to thank all the people who’d provided my family with love, sustenance, and support.

  This trip went beyond arranging an interview or shooting over to a quiet midwestern town. Seventeen years is a long time: things change, as I would discover after three hours of trudging around Vienna in pouring rain only to learn that the neighborhood around the old ex-villa where my family was stationed had been bulldozed and rebuilt as condos. Dad’s scrapbook proved invaluable once again: shortly after starting preparations, I was able to track down Otto Binder, Peter, and the Joint worker Oswald Prager, as well as map out all the places we had stayed. The one glaring omission was Madame Eva, the philanthropist who owned the house full of free clothes, where the blond girl had handed me a jacket a long time ago. Online searches as well as inquiries to my Austrian contacts yielded nothing, which wasn’t surprising. By the late 1990s, the refugee flow into Austria had largely subsided, thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Yugoslav Wars, and while this was good news in general, it also negated the reason for Eva’s charity. HIAS and Joint, at least, were established international entities with all the concomitant headquarters and websites. Madame Eva, on the other hand … I didn’t even know her last name.