“And I also heard they brainwash everyone into becoming Zionists.”
My mother gasps at this. “Where are you hearing things like that? In school?”
I shrug. “No, just… friends.”
“It sounds like you’re friends with anti-Semites! That’s what anti-Semites would say,” my mother exclaims, so aghast she’s reverted to her native tongue without realizing. Which I find a bit dramatic, if you ask me. I don’t really spend much time considering Israel or anti-Semitism, though, at least not in the present tense. It’s not like anyone has ever criticized my cultural origins to my face or anything. “Pavel, did you hear this?” she asks him, but my dad stays weirdly silent. So she turns back to me, her naturally pale face even paler. “They made this trip so kids like you can understand.”
“Understand what?” I say. “Religion? Religion is silly. No guy is sitting up in the clouds watching all of us and judging us. The Bible is a bunch of stories with a lot of plot holes.”
“Huh. So you know better than thousands of people who came before you, that’s what you’re saying?” my dad asks, chiming in.
“No…” Boy do I wish I had a rewind button. I would go back to that balcony and never open my mouth. Maybe I would go back to my apartment and never leave in the first place. I can’t help but wonder why they are speaking Russian again if they hate it there so much. How can you hate a thing and be mad at someone for wanting it, but also use it constantly? It’s so… hypocritical.
“Jewish people here for thousands of years,” my dad says, returning to his choppy English. “Other cultures—the Romans, the Babylonians—they larger and more successful, they vanished,” he says. “Why you think Jews still around? It’s not easy… 2,000 years of exile. The Spanish Inquisition, pogroms, Holocaust. Being kicked of every place in the world.”
“In the years after the Berlin Wall fell, eighty percent of the Jewish community left Ukraine,” my mom chimes in, also in English; hers is ten times better than my dad’s because she worked so long in customer service. “They lost a million in the Holocaust, then another half million because of Gorbachev. At last count, it was something like 80,000 Jews left. In less than a hundred years, Jews were forced out of Ukraine almost entirely, either by gas chamber or anti-Semitic policies.”
“And we still here,” my dad continues. “Just think about. Without stories, we have nothing. We a chapter in history book. You don’t think you have something to learn from that?”
“Sure. People can believe in very crazy ideas no matter what the century.”
“Judaism not just an idea. It self-corrects. Rabbis adapt rules,” my dad continues. “That’s what makes it great.”
“If it’s so great why have I never seen you go to a synagogue?” I ask, rolling my eyes. I stretch my legs out over the now-vacant backseat, where it still somehow smells like my grandpa.
“We almost moved to Israel, you know,” my mom says. She turns around to face me again, but I keep my glance on the road, which is getting closer and closer to my house. We pass a brick apartment building, followed by an endless array of vast duplexes with matching balconies.
“We were a week away from moving when we got our visas from America. Everything was packed and ready to go,” my mom is saying now.
“I know.”
“If you really knew—if you understood why—you wouldn’t want to go back to Ukraine. Ever.”
Before you go thinking I’m a total ignoramus, let’s get one thing clear: I understand that the USSR was no picnic. But it was not all prison either. There were upsides, too: camaraderie among the oppressed, tight-knit family units, off-the-grid survival skills. The fact that you knew where you were, where you belonged. I’ve never had that. In emigrating from the Soviet Union, whatever we all gained in safety, we lost in an assortment of smaller, equally important things. Cultural heritage, community, a high-stakes life.
And then there’s this: struggle isn’t all bad. Struggle makes your lungs remember air, makes your eyes remember there are stars.
What makes us remember anything now?
“It’s been sixteen years. It’s not the same anymore. We went to St. Petersburg on that cruise. And Estonia,” I try. “And it was fine!”
“That’s different,” my mom says. “It was only for a day, and we were there.”
“I don’t understand why you would even want to go to Russia again. You were miserable on that cruise,” my dad says.
“I was miserable because I was fourteen, not because we were in Russia.”
“It’s not how you imagine it,” my dad adds. “I promise. Everyone who could leave it left. You think that many people leave a place because it’s so wonderful?”
“I know it’s not wonderful,” I say. “Cuba isn’t exactly heaven, and people still go there.”
“Bozhe moy,” my mom says, placing two fingers on her temple. And if I’m not mistaken, she looks a little teary-eyed. This makes me feel bad—my mom is not a crier—but it doesn’t make me stop. It’s too late now to stop.
“Cuba?” my dad asks, his voice now an octave higher. “What are they teaching you at that school…”
With a dramatic sigh, my dad turns the car left with one hand, and allows the other to clasp my mom’s, as if to remind me they’re a team, and I’m the interloper. For a moment, I feel some empathy for Masha, who had to bear the brunt of their disagreements growing up. The three of them were always fighting. They fought so much that by the time I became a teenager, I decided that I would keep my opinions to myself, even if it meant making a few sacrifices. I didn’t think I could take it. If this car ride is any indication, I was absolutely right.
“Anastasia,” my mom says. “They didn’t want us there, don’t you understand?”
“I don’t really need your permission. I’m nineteen. If I want to go, I can go.”
“Maybe. But you do need our money,” she says. “Or have you found a way to fly to Eastern Europe on your own?”
She has me there. It’s the only reason I even bother arguing with them about going or not. I spent all my savings from summer jobs on coffee and cigarettes, and I’m still not done with a four-foot painting commission of Le Père Jacques’s “The Woodgatherer” I was slowly working on for my former high school guidance counselor last year and no longer even bother trying to finish. There is also, of course, the daily distraction of drugs and parties and schoolwork. How I get anything done at all is nothing short of remarkable.
“No. But I could get a job.” It makes sense they can’t relate to my incessant pull toward all things Ukraine. They went through hell to get here. This displacement is something they will never understand. They did have a home, once. Now they have a new home. To them, it is simple: they were there, and now they are here. People they knew then are dead or in jail. The worst thing that could happen now to the people they know is that they become lazy, or Democrats.
It probably goes without saying I avoid talking to them about politics, too.
“You and this Ukraine obsession…” my mom sighs, still rubbing the sides of her head with two fingers. “I thought you were done with it years ago.”
I, too, put my fingers to the sides of my forehead and rub them. When I look up again, I see we have finally stopped in front of my house. Feeling brave for one final moment, I say: “I wasn’t done, I was just done telling you about it.”
“Anastasia, there is a lot you don’t know about life. And about people,” my mom says. “We left that horrible place so you wouldn’t have to.”
“But don’t you ever wonder…?” I start, but I don’t finish the sentence.
“What,” my mom says, flatly.