Copyright © 2014 by Lev Golinkin All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Www.doubleday.com DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Music for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” words and music by Pete Townshend, copyright © 1971, copyright renewed by Fabulous Music Ltd.

Administered in the United States and Canada by Spirit One Music (BMI) o/b/o Spirit Services Holdings, S.a.r.l., Suolubaf Music and ABKCO Music, Inc., 85 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music. Cover design and illustrations by Michael J. Windsor Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Golinkin, Lev, author. A backpack, a bear, and eight crates of vodka: a memoir / Lev Golinkin.

Pages; cm ISBN 978-0-385-53777-3 (hardcover)— ISBN 978-0-385-53778-0 (eBook) 1. Golinkin, Lev.

Jews, Russian—Ukraine—Kharkov—Biography. Jewish refugees—United States—Biography.

Jews, Russian—United States—Biography. E184.37.G655A3 2014 947′.004924092—dc23 [B] v3.1_r2. AUTHOR ’ S NOTE This book was born from a need to understand my past, and as such, everything recounted here is as accurate as memory, research, and reflection can allow.

But this is not only my story: the narrative takes place in the context of a massive refugee movement and includes accounts of numerous individuals, some of whom weren’t eager to publicly embrace a turbulent past. In light of this, and in the spirit of not being a jackass, I have changed the names of those who asked to remain anonymous or weren’t available to provide consent. PROLOGUE Chestnut Hill, Mass., May 2003 It was a hot day and the metal bleachers of Alumni Stadium channeled the sunshine directly into the center, where the graduates and I melted in our black gowns.

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The commencement speaker, a blind man who had climbed Mt. Everest, spoke about the journey of life, and ways to overcome obstacles, and the many lessons of college.

He said other stuff, too, but I don’t remember what it was. I couldn’t listen. I needed to move. I needed a cigarette. I needed a pack of cigarettes, I needed coffee, extra-large coffee with cream and no sugar, and most of all, I needed to walk. People and places I hadn’t thought about for years—that I’d refused to think about—flashed through my head, drowning out the mountain climber. I had to find Linda, and Peter, and Eva, and the bald hotel owner, and the Bosnians.

I had to find the pudgy man who pulled us off the Vienna train station and the blond girl from the house with the red door who gave me a jacket on a cold February evening when the wind howled down the Danube. There were others I had to find. Unfortunately, I didn’t know their names, or where they were, or what they looked like, which was going to make looking for them a bit problematic. The speech ended, everyone clapped, and we broke up by schools and shuffled off to various parts of the campus for the second half of commencement. On the way, friends swapped congratulations and contact info, and I made a mental note to clear my phone book and disable my e-mail account.

Boston College was kind enough to let me participate in the graduation ceremony, so I crossed the stage and was handed a giant envelope with a little printout explaining why there was no diploma inside and I would therefore not be going to med school. I smiled and shook the dean’s hand, Dad took a picture, and I scampered back to my seat without further thought on the matter. The only thing preventing me from graduating was a one-credit physics lab. I could earn my diploma in a month, and then apply to med school or not apply to med school. At this point it wasn’t important.

Commencement ended and the countdown began: we had to empty our dorms by 5:00 p.m. I hadn’t packed and by the time Dad and two family friends scraped me out of my room and into a van, we were right at the deadline. Dad, a meticulous packer, was rechecking straps and calculating optimal suitcase alignment when I excused myself, ran back to the dorm, shut the bathroom door, and turned on the faucet. The water helped, for some odd reason. Even though there was no one else in the dorm, the rushing sound made me feel more alone. I’ve always needed that moment before the plunge, to stand and gather, and I’ve always preferred being alone by myself to being alone in a crowd.

The Soviet Union was waiting. The largest country in the world, a country the size of North America. The land that worshipped the embalmed body of a bald monster, the land that banned God, the land of black cars, illegal radios, crooked mirrors, and underground bakeries, where missiles and tanks rolled under the red flag.

The guards were waiting, and the gas masks and the refugee camps. From the moment I stepped on American soil I had dedicated myself to forgetting, ignoring, and burying them, and still they waited. I felt my hands clenching the porcelain sides of the sink, felt the familiar panic radiate from my chest, crawl up my neck, choking me, urging me to run, get a new address, new goals, new friends, move, disappear, be somewhere else, but for the first time in my life, being terrified didn’t matter. I had to go back, to Indiana, to the refugee camps in Austria, to talk to people, walk around, and reconstruct something resembling a past. College has many lessons; I stood with the blind man on that one. Some I’d forget, some I’d already forgotten, but the one thing that finally sank into my head is that you can’t have a future if you don’t have a past.

A thin film of vapor coated the mirror by the time I turned off the water and walked back to the van, where Dad was pacing. It was past 5:00 and the campus was nearly abandoned. The faculty had driven off to embrace the summer, and the grounds crew was stacking chairs and folding pavilions in a rush to move on. Maroon pennants with the BC logo flapped from lampposts making me think of other red banners flapping in other winds, in a country that no longer existed.

Lanky shadows of campus towers chased the van down Commonwealth Avenue, like giant Gothic windshield wipers clearing away the school year, and then I passed out, and when I woke up we were getting gas at a rest stop in Jersey. I spent the next two years walking. THE BEST PARADES IN THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD Kharkov, Ukraine, USSR, September 1987 Parades were the gold standard of the Soviet Union. Workers’ parades, women’s parades, Revolution parades, the Great Patriotic War parades, we had them all. We had perfected parades; we had the best parades in the whole damn world.

Patrick’s Day? Macy’s has balloons.

We had intercontinental ballistic missiles rolling through Red Square. Parades were of paramount importance and attendance was mandatory, rain or otherwise. On April 26, 1986, the year before I entered first grade, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (located less than three hundred miles from Kharkov) exploded, spewing a radioactive cloud over the Ukraine. Other, weaker countries would’ve had their citizens hunkering indoors and popping iodine tablets. But May 1 was International Workers’ Day, canceling the parade was unthinkable, and so on we marched, blissfully unaware, soaking in the sunshine and the radiation.

The reviewing stand was mostly vacant, of course, since local Party leaders had been alerted beforehand and had long evacuated the area, but the parade went off without a hitch. That’s commitment. The year after the radioisotope-enriched May Day festivities, Mom grabbed my hand and we walked to the September parade for the start of first grade. Aside from the occasional tram rattling by, Moskovskyi Prospekt was quiet: there were no lines outside the Kharkov Department Store, which hadn’t received shipments in two weeks; the morning shift was already in the factories; and the babushki were staying indoors, cooking supper and complaining about the weather. Even the discarded newspapers that usually spun and danced in the wake of traffic clung to the pavement and slowly dissolved in the puddles. Mom and I passed by the Plaza of the Uprising, lined with maple and chestnut trees, turned left after the Hammer and Sickle stadium, and arrived at Kharkov School Number Three, where the parade was already under way. This procession didn’t have placards announcing how many tons of wheat had been harvested by the city’s collective farms, or proclamations of the Malyshev Factory’s churning out thirty tanks ahead of schedule for the millionth year in a row, or lists of proud citizens nominated for the Order of Labor Glory, Second Class, award.

It was a quieter, smaller affair held outside the brick school building where Mom and I watched the teachers, followed by the fifth-graders through second-graders. Encouraging production statistics and Orders of Labor Glory aside, everything was immaculate: the sky was pure, dark steel; frigid rain poured down, but no one felt a drop. It was as if they were marching hundreds of miles away, in a sunny Cuba full of warmth and light. Unfazed, undazed, and firm strode the students, girls smiling with shy optimism, boys practicing to be the soldiers they would become. I clung to Mom’s leg, covered partly by the umbrella, partly by her long white shawl. The last soggy red pennant streamed by, and I straightened my uniform and went to check in with Anna Konstantinovna, my first-grade teacher, a tall woman with gray hair and a gray face that matched her gray blouse. First she taught us how to sit, because without proper posture, learning was impossible.

We sat at our desks, backs stiff, eyes on the chalkboard, arms folded, right over left, fingers straight. (In the event of a question, the right arm was to pivot ninety degrees until perpendicular to the desk, but at no point were the fingers to separate.) Anna Konstantinovna paced down the aisles. She didn’t so much teach as remind, as if I, the two brothers in front of me, and the rest of my classmates already knew everything we needed to know, and her job was merely to jog our memories. A photographer trailed her. His duty was to document and report that the new generation of Communists was ready to enter society. Anna Konstantinovna paced, the photographer clicked, and I sat, issuing silent orders to my squirming fingers. The lesson on posture was followed by a two-hour briefing, which reaffirmed that as the children, we were indeed the future and would soon shoulder the burden of improving our glorious society and fighting the belligerent Capitalists.

Our perfect Union wasn’t always perfect, after all. It had been achieved only through the relentless work and genius of Lenin, but Lenin was dead now and it was up to us to pick up the torch. Everything from Pushkin to multiplication made up the arsenal we would utilize to spread happiness to workers and peasants around the globe.

The responsibility dangled over our desks like the sword of Damocles. To aid us in the upcoming struggle, we were taken to the cafeteria and fed milk and sandwiches. Hating milk is probably the first lasting decision I made, but, Anna Konstantinovna was quick to remind me, without its life-giving power, how was I going to stand up to the Capitalists? “Milk is strength.

Milk is strength, Lev,” she said, and I quickly gulped down the curdled mass in my cup. Everyone had to sacrifice for the common good. Following lunch we were returned to the classroom, where Anna Konstantinovna sat at her desk, back straight, eyes fixed ahead, and making it look easy. I watched her arm drop down to her desk drawer, then reemerge with a small metal box. She tilted her wrist, scattering the box’s contents, and I squinted. Our teacher’s desk was covered with stars.

Tiny metal stars. Like all good dictatorships, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union recognized the importance of early-childhood indoctrination. The moment a child entered first grade he was fed into a finely oiled propaganda machine, the first tier of which was the Little Octobrist group. October was the month of the Revolution, and it held special significance for the Party (October saw parades galore; October parades made the other parades look weak, like St. Patrick’s Day). It made sense to have first-graders begin at the beginning, at the origin of the Revolution. We became Little Octobrists by donning the official star pin.

Symbols are crucial to both elementary education and totalitarian propaganda (the two have much in common), and a tried-and-true emblem of the USSR was the five-pointed red star. Every star on Anna Konstantinovna’s desk had a cherubic Baby Lenin embossed in the center, and the golden, curly-haired child looked like a perverted version of the Baby Jesus pins that people in America put on their car visors to keep them safe. Anna Konstantinovna fastened our pins, and we walked to the Grand Assembly to watch the third-graders become Pioneers. Pioneer was the next level after Little Octobrist, and it was a big deal. Being a Little Octobrist didn’t entail much beyond wearing the pin: the Pioneers got to step forward and start serving the Motherland in earnest. Enrollment began in third grade, and it was optional. They didn’t want to pressure us.

They wanted it to come from the heart, and if the occasional child was too stupid or immature to join, they would eventually be forced to do so by the fifth grade. To reflect the sobriety of Pioneer enrollment, the day’s ceremony took place in a Grand Assembly, mini parade-like procession and all. Red kerchiefs, the symbol of the Pioneers, were everywhere, and banners emblazoned with slogans like ALWAYS BE READY TO FIGHT FOR THE WAY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE USSR! And A PIONEER IS EVER VIGILANT!

Swung from the rafters. One by one, the third-grade inductees rose and recited the Solemn Pledge of the Pioneers: “I, [last name, first name], joining the ranks of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization, in the presence of my comrades solemnly promise: to love and protect my Motherland passionately, to live as the great Lenin bade us, as the Communist Party teaches us, to always carry out the laws of the Pioneers of the Soviet Union.” After tying on a red kerchief, each newly knotted Pioneer was paired up with a first-grader. My Pioneer was a pretty girl with very tight ponytails who gave me a book about some jackass named Don’t Know Anything who found a flying car and decided to travel to the sun, where, after numerous misadventures (I vaguely recall an incident with an elephant at the Sun City Zoo), he finally learned that he really belonged back home, working hard with his fellow citizens to build a better society.

The girl told me how Pioneers had these organizations called Squads and Watchgroups, and you got to be part of Committees, and be Friends with other Pioneers, and learn important Communist Skills and Pioneer Songs, and other great stuff. She asked if I knew the alphabet, and I said yes. “That’s good,” she recited. “The alphabet is the beginning of all beginnings; even Lenin began with it.” (It sounds better in Russian; it’s a rhyming couplet.) I just stared at her ponytails and at the canary-yellow book jacket, which showed Don’t Know Anything revving up his flying car, ready to wreak havoc on Sun City. Then the older Pioneers embraced their new comrades and lined up in Squads and Watchgroups and marched away, and that was my first day of school.

* * * The olive-green gas mask over my face is a remnant from World War II—the Great Patriotic War, as people on the radio call it, or simply the War to everyone else. The mask is too big and is made of old, tough rubber, and Anna Konstantinovna had to really tug on the straps to make it stay on my head. The round eyepieces are also too big and encompass not just my eyes but also my cheeks and eyebrows. We’re all wearing the masks, and our left hands grasp long, flexible hoses that end in some sort of tin filters. I’m in uniform: a starched blue suit, the dark red Baby Lenin pin twinkling from my lapel. Everyone has their Lenin pin.

All the boys wear navy suits, and the girls wear brown French maid outfits and have large white bows in their hair, but today you can’t see the bows because they’re squashed under the gas masks. Everyone in first grade is lined up in a hallway with brown walls painted with murals of Pioneers, boys and girls helping the elderly and planting trees. There are posters of bald Adult Lenin, too, with slogans like “Be Ready! Always Be Ready!!” and other quotes centered on readiness and the importance of education. Suddenly the boy at the front of the line is told to run and he runs and we follow, up the stairs and down the stairs, outside to the pavement and inside to the hallways, and the gas mask lenses are fogged up and dirty and all I see are gray cement blurs when we run outside, and red-and-brown mural blurs when we run inside.

It’s October, so most of us have learned our way around the building, and the run goes smoothly. We loop through the school several times, corridor by corridor, classroom by classroom, and then we take off the masks and split up by class, and then I’m lying on the floor, my arms pinned by the tall brother, the older one, and someone’s at my legs, the fat kid with the big head, I think, and my forehead’s bleeding, and I’m trying to lift my head up, and it makes the blood flow into my eyes and down my nose. The blood obscures my vision but I can still make him out, the little kid, the younger brother, straddling my chest and shoving a shit-stained wad of toilet paper in front of my eyes. “This is what you are, this is what you all are,” he hisses, and the shit is brown, and his face is tan, almost dark brown, and his eyes are receded and black, and his uniform is dark blue, and the Lenin pin is dark red, and what stands out from the whole dull palette are his bright white teeth that spread over half his face. His face is frozen.

I can hear “ zhid” and “shit,” and feel the spit as it shoots out his mouth, but his face is trapped in that gargoyle smile. They’re all frozen—I see hands, pressing down on my arms and legs, I see faces in the periphery, still, immobile, bored—they’re doing this all in a perfunctory way, as if they have to, and they’re just frozen in the middle of their task. A Squad of Pioneers flutters by, or maybe it’s a Watchgroup, I can’t tell the difference, and their red kerchiefs look like a flock of colorful birds.

The younger brother’s grin is not happy, it’s more of a scowl, a baring that cuts through the smell of the shit and the blurry red fog of the blood, and I see the teeth, and the brown of the hallway, and blue blurs of uniforms and the gray-and-white blur of Anna Konstantinovna as she opens the door and calmly reminds us that it’s time for class. The late bell rings, a few more punches, another shit smear on my face, and my classmates and I head in to learn. I’m still not clear as to why we had to run in the gas masks. Anna Konstantinovna briefly alluded to the Capitalists and said that it was vital to be prepared in case they attacked, and it must’ve been a satisfactory explanation, because I didn’t push her for further clarification, and neither did any of my classmates. But that’s the only regular school day I can vividly recall. The rest of it, Soviet poetry and Ukrainian grammar, blood and shit, Revolutionary history and gym class, it all blends together and I remember little.

I probably wouldn’t have remembered that day, either, except for the masks—the masks were kind of neat, and they made the day stand out. * * * To my memory’s credit, I missed about half of my first two years of school.

Mom drew on her contacts among city doctors to get me extended-absence notes whenever I fell ill, which was frequent, and so I stayed home as much as possible. Overall, I didn’t mind being sick: there were always books to read, Grandma allowed me to hang out with her when she was cooking dinner, and at night my parents and sister came home and then I could tell Mom about what I’d read or hammer out plots to annoy my sister, Lina. If the weather was nice, I’d tag along with Dad for a walk in a little lilac park behind the apartment complex. He was an engineer who traveled all over the Union to fix turbines, and he never failed to return with trinkets and stories.

Dad told me of frost-shackled mining towns in the tundra, where temperatures plunged to minus forty and birds froze to the ground like little feathered ice lumps. Some of the workers would chip away the ice and tuck the birds under their armpits, and by the time they reached the refineries the birds would thaw out and fly away. My favorite were his stories from the ’stans in the south, where minarets stuck out into the skies and one madrassa built in the days of Timur the Lame had a niche inlaid with red stones, and when you stood just right the stones aligned to form an image of a Muslim saint. Dad, ever the engineer, spoke with delight of the Uzbeki and the Turkmeny, whose tribal ancestors had built huts in the deserts, drilling holes in the walls to create air currents that made the interiors feel cool and breezy. Often, Dad’s thoughts would wander back to his turbines and he’d start muttering about blades, rotors, and diaphragms.

Newspapers and other trash lined the paths, and homeless men bunked beneath the trees at night, and the park smelled like piss and lilacs. Long branches swollen with purple blossoms drooped overhead and I’d walk alongside Dad and dream of the day when I would be tall enough to have to bend under branches, too, and then I could help him with his turbine problems and maybe leave Kharkov and go see the minarets for myself. When Dad was on the road, I spent the afternoons with my best friend, Oleg, who lived in the apartment across the landing from us. Our usual game was playing the German invasion of Russia in our housing block’s common yard. Sometimes we’d be the Red Army, creeping back before the German advance, holding fortifications, making desperate stands, making sure the Nazi bastards paid a dear price for our city. Sometimes we did the opposite, trekking out to the far end of the yard, by the landfill and the army barracks, then turning around and taking the land bench by bench, foyer by foyer until we secured our apartment building by the bakery. Going that route meant being the Germans, of course, so Oleg and I just called it “starting at the far end” to make ourselves feel less unpatriotic.

Attacking was more fun than defending, though, and more often than not we started at the far end. Imagination wasn’t required for the game.

Kharkov had been destroyed by the Germans—four major Battles of Kharkov between 1941 and 1943 had made their way into the history books—and, forty years later, the scars remained. Our balcony wall was pockmarked with mortar holes. Memorial plaques and captured Panzer war trophies littered the city. Mom, Dad, and Grandma all remembered the frantic evacuation in the fall of 1941, when they were packed on trains and sent far to the east, Dad to the Urals, Mom and my grandparents to Central Asia. Back when Dad had returned to the city, there were more than just pockmarks. Dad and his school friends, many of them fatherless, would burrow into collapsed buildings and dig through the rubble for machine guns, grenades, and bones. They carried weapons to school, just because they were so readily available, and for a while Dad armed himself with a wicked SS dagger with German writing on the blade.

When his father, Grandpa Lev, saw the knife, he brought Dad to the fields by the tractor factory. “Somewhere around here are the pits where five years ago, the man who owned this knife, and other men like him, shot thousands of Jews in a single day,” Grandpa Lev told Dad. * He didn’t order Dad to get rid of the dagger, but Dad carried a regular Soviet knife from then on. For Oleg and me this wasn’t like playing in a backyard; it was more like stepping onto an old movie set and reenacting the movie. We crept past the army barracks, hid behind the lilacs, crawled on recon missions over the hill by the apartments, dodged, seized, and raided until we reached our home building, grimy and victorious. Day after day, it was me and Oleg kicking ass against the yard: the older boys who congregated by the doorways and traded pins and coins, the girls, including Oleg’s sister, Tanya, who plucked flowers and squealed whenever we nicked their dolls (or, as Oleg and I thought of them, “enemy combatants”), Mitya the yard keeper who mostly paid attention to his pipe, the babushki parked on benches who never missed anything, and the ghosts of the German and Soviet dead.

* Much later, the details emerged: the Nazi killing field was a ravine called Drobytsky Yar, on the outskirts of Kharkov, where 15,000 Jews were killed on December 15, 1941. The city refused to create a memorial for the Jews on the site until 1991, after the USSR fell apart. THE BLACK WITCH COMES TO KHARKOV Kharkov, Ukraine, USSR, 1980s My mother was a psychiatrist who worked at one of the several large clinics in the city. The majority of her patients suffered from the standard psychiatric ailments: depression, mania, anxiety, an occasional psychosis. Mom and her coworkers made house calls or held office hours for the functional patients, and attended to the more serious, hospitalized cases in the clinic. It was a similar routine to that of her Capitalist counterparts, save for a little-known group of patients who were unique to the Soviet Union.

These patients were rarely spoken of, because prior to being institutionalized they had been mentally healthy. Political dissidents posed a tricky dilemma to the regime. These weren’t your run-of-the-mill murderers or petty thugs (most were highly educated intellectuals). No, these individuals knowingly, willingly, and conspicuously rejected the Soviet Union, the Soviet way of life.

They penned letters, attempted to organize rallies, spoke out against the system, and otherwise engaged in bizarre actions that had only one explanation. “No sane individual would oppose the USSR” was the official stance of the dictatorship. In other words, since: a) Communism was the ultimate form of human society; and b) it was natural for any normal person to aspire to the best; then c) anyone who shunned the best was clearly deranged. Deranged people belonged in asylums, which is exactly where the dissidents were incarcerated. But locking them away wasn’t enough; to erase all doubt, the protestors had to be officially classified as insane. To achieve that, the regime first required an appropriate illness, and in 1969 one was supplied by Dr.

Andrei Snezhnevsky, a leading Soviet academic. “Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia,” a disorder recognized nowhere outside of the Communist Bloc, was characterized by a sole key symptom: an irrational desire to fight perceived social injustice. Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia was considered an intractable disease that demanded the most aggressive treatment, and, once diagnosed, patients were subjected to electroshock, insulin-induced comas, sensory deprivation, tranquilizers, and potent psychotropics. Eventually, the diagnosis became reality. Mom’s workload always swelled around the holidays, when a KGB agent would present her boss with a list of names.

“Surely you realize how certain individuals tend to get overly agitated this time of year. They go out in the streets, shout nonsense, pass out leaflets, and disturb the working men and women of our city. Please sign these orders so we can institutionalize them for a while. That way the public won’t get harassed and everyone will have a safe and pleasant holiday.” It wasn’t a request; the head doctor would sign and the black Volga sedans used by the secret police would hit the streets, off to ensure that everyone had a safe and pleasant holiday. There was an area of Kharkov called Nemyshlya. It was a place rife with crime, a neighborhood the city had given up on; even ambulances stopped at the outskirts, and police entered strictly en masse. Mom was one of the few psychiatrists who made house calls to Nemyshlya.

The taxis would drop her off and wait on the periphery, and Mom would enter on foot, unescorted, and hardened criminals would smile and part way for her, because they knew she was the only doctor who would take care of their friends and families. Her care wasn’t limited to just the city. Kharkov, like other Ukrainian cities, was surrounded by villages and communal farms—many of which weren’t readily accessible—and Mom’s work took her on countryside excursions, via trucks, motorcycles, and, on one occasion, a horse and buggy. Mom refused constant attempts to bribe her, but at some point long before I was born, word spread that she loved flowers. Our apartment was a garden, with fresh bouquets arriving daily. Tables and stools held vases of lilies and peonies, and bluebells poked through the laundry lines on the little balcony.

One ex-patient, a farmer, would drive his truck into the city and fill our bathtub with tomatoes and cucumbers. Mom kept insisting that we couldn’t possibly go through a tub of the plump vegetables, but the farmer, like all farmers, was a man of routine and the deliveries continued, year after year, with the cyclical surety of the harvest. * * * My sister, Lina, was twelve years older than me, and I devoted much of my time in the apartment to cooking up novel ways to annoy her. Dhoom 2 Tamil Dubbed Full Movie Download Mp4 more. Lina’s studies left her with limited private time for boys—it was a fact I leveraged to my benefit. The first time a romantic interest stepped into the apartment, he was bombarded with an onslaught of unpleasantries.

Lina’s shutting her door wouldn’t help, since I’d make sure to disable the latch beforehand. Some of the more intrepid boyfriends managed to extricate me from the room, which was fine; I had backup plans. There were hidden alarm clocks set to buzz every few minutes, booby traps rigged above the bed, and, failing that, I could sing, loudly and badly. I never went to school and spent entire days in the apartment: this was my home court, and one had to do a little better than locking the door. Soon, usually by the second date, the boyfriend would quit worrying about impressing our parents and grandmother and focus on me.

“There you are, Lev!” He would find me, waiting in the foyer. “I brought you candy!” “Thank you.” “Now that we’re friends, would you mind not gluing my shoelaces together? Deal?” “I read about it in a book, you know. *1 There was this man, and he was in South America, in the pampas, and they were hunting these big ostriches, except in South America they’re called rheas, and they would throw this rope around their legs when they hunted, and that’s where I got the shoelace idea.” “How about this: I’ll bring you more chocolate and you stop doing that.” “How about pirates: they’re these sailors who attack other sailors, and they have bandanas, and peg legs, and parrots, and they bury treasure. Do you have any pirates?” “I’ll find you some pirate toys, promise.” “And chocolate.

And be careful when you walk into Lina’s room—I stretched some fishing line across the door. I read about that in a book, too.” *2 The boyfriend would tear the city apart, but by the next date I’d have my pirates. Lina got back at me by telling stories. I’ll never forget the evening she flew into my room to ask if I’d heard about the Black Witch, who made toys come alive and strangle kids at night. No one could determine which toys were possessed.

The Black Witch was patient: some toys remained perfectly harmless for years, then pounced without warning. Lina’s bulletin was timely; she wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but she had it from a reliable source deep in the Witch’s retinue that the Witch was heading to Kharkov. I hollered for Mom, but Lina shrugged it off. “He asked me for a story, so I told him one.” “Is that true?” Mom asked. “Yes, Mom,” I said, frantically compiling an inventory of which of my soldiers were likely sleeper cell candidates.

“Stop asking her. You always ask and you always get scared.” “I know, but—” “See!” Lina jumped in, beaming. “I told you he likes my stories.” She was right. I spent a week barricading myself in the bedroom, then lowered the threat level and came back for more. I couldn’t resist. Sometimes she sketched pictures of her monsters to help me visualize the horrors that waited for the lights to go out.

Sometimes she didn’t even have to make anything up. “Before you were born, when I was your age, the KGB detained Dad and started asking him about what books he owned [true].

They sat him down and detained him, and then, they raided our apartment and searched it! Went the door, and in they burst! Thank God, one of Dad’s coworkers warned Mom and Grandma beforehand, as soon as Dad was taken, so they burned all the illegal books we had [true]. By the time the KGB agents came in their black cars, dressed in their big black coats [the KGB and the Black Witch shared a penchant for the color], everything bad was already gone. So they let Dad go and didn’t put him in prison. But who knows?

The KGB’s unpredictable. Maybe tomorrow they’re not going to like the books you read—you know, like your fairy tales [poetic license: all children’s lit had long been scrubbed free of undesirable religious and Western allusions]—and they’re going to come for you, and you don’t have any coworkers to warn you, do you?

They’ll come in their black cars and take you away.” She paused, waiting for the desired effect to set in. “Go ahead and read your books while you still can Watch out for the black cars.” She grabbed her schoolbag and rushed out, a trail of satisfied giggles lingering in the hallway.

Lina was good. When Lina was in high school, she was working hard to go to med school.

She was on track to earn her gold medal, an award given to high school seniors with straight A’s that qualified them to pursue certain professions, such as medicine. Lina had the grades, and then in the fall of her senior year her high school director called Dad in for a conference. The director, an accomplished educator, looked concerned.

“Comrade Golinkin, your daughter is a fine student and a very nice girl. I asked you here because I admire her, and I don’t want this to take her by surprise. She will get a B, only one B, which will preclude her from getting the medal; it’s the best I can do for her.

I have my orders, just like everyone else.” Dad was confused. Un-affirmative action policies of the Soviet Union shifted and varied depending on the year, the republic, and the whim of the dictatorship. Some years, certain ethnicities would be tolerated in certain professions and institutions; then, a nameless bastard in the nameless echelons of the bureaucracy would decide that too many zhidi were getting straight A’s, and a memo would be generated and sent out. Dad knew all that; what confused him was why the director bothered to bring him in to discuss it. “Of course, we do live in an open society, and you do have the option of filing a complaint with the administration. I know that Lina can be tenacious, and may urge you to follow this course of action. But I must strongly advise you against it.” The director leaned forward.

“The teachers will then have to justify your daughter’s not qualifying for the medal, and instead of a single B she will have to start receiving Cs and Ds. I don’t want that to happen; I don’t want her to be any more upset than necessary.

I’m trying to help you. Do you understand?” “I understand,” Dad said. “Thank you for your time and for looking out for Lina.” On the walk home, Dad thought how lucky Lina was to have a school director who cared. Lina was tenacious. She dedicated the next two years to mastering the medical academy entrance exam in the hope of overcoming the taint on her transcript.

Her passion won Dad over, and he hired some of the best tutors in the city to prepare her. Lina took the exam twice.

After the second attempt, an administrator from the academy phoned Dad and told him to stop torturing his daughter and send her somewhere she could get accepted. Lina became an engineering student.

From that moment on, medicine was no longer discussed. “Tomorrow afternoon you’re getting your books, Sunday you’re off, and Monday we’re registering you at Kharkov Polytechnic—get to work,” said Dad, and went out for a walk, ending the deliberations for good. I was three at the time, but even afterward and all through my teenage years I can’t remember having or hearing a single conversation about this event in my sister’s life; the same went for my beatings in school and in the yard. Adapt and endure was how generations of Russian Jews had managed to hang around under the Bolsheviks, and the tsars, and whatever the hell was there before the tsars. My grandfather Lev (my father’s father and my namesake, who died shortly before I was born) was an orphan raised by a yeshiva, a Jewish religious school in a Byelorussian shtetl. Grandpa Lev showed promise in Torah studies, but when the Torah was outlawed and the rabbis killed, he became a factory worker, eventually rising to foreman. Years later, when Dad was sixteen and wanted to become a history professor, Grandpa Lev reminded him that a Jew would never be permitted to join a history faculty, so Dad took a walk and became an engineer.

Dad excelled in his field: back when Lina was a toddler, he had spearheaded a paper on turbines that was selected for presentation at an international Communist expo in Bulgaria. A week before the trip, a low-ranking KGB sergeant showed up at Dad’s work with a letter from Dad to the expo committee. The letter explained that due to a recently broken leg, Dad would be unable to attend the exhibit and requested that the following [non-Jewish] coworkers represent the project instead of him. The only thing missing was Dad’s signature.

“But my leg isn’t broken!” Dad blurted out in a moment of idiocy (my father hated lying). “Would it help if it were?” Dad hastily scribbled his name, went for a walk, and returned the next day, ready to work. Adapt and endure, and those who had allowed themselves to be paralyzed by lamenting over pogroms, anti-Semitism in school, anti-Semitism at work, beatings in the yard, complacent teachers, friction, tides, gravity, and other unalterable factors were ground underfoot. Lina was about to enter Kharkov Polytechnic, where nobody cared about her distressed state, where she would need her brain to function in order to have a career and have children. Dad was trying to help her, as were the school director and the administrator from the medical academy.

Any way you look at it, Be yourself wasn’t an option—being yourself was the problem. *1 The Drunken Forest by Gerald Durrell, which covers the author’s wildlife collection expedition to Paraguay and Argentina. Many of Durrell’s techniques for trapping large game can be easily modified for snaring sisters and their boyfriends. *2 Karlsson-on-the-Roof by Astrid Lindgren. This tale of a boy and his magical friend is replete with ideas for using common household objects to inflict misery on loved ones. OLEG AND THE MIRROR Kharkov, Ukraine, USSR, November 1987 In November of the year I entered first grade, about a month after the gas mask drill, a period of unseasonable warmth settled over the city.

Early American colonists called this late-fall phenomenon “Indian summer,” because it gave the Indians time for one final raid before suspending their war campaigns until spring. The Russian name is “ babye leto” (“old women’s summer”), for it’s the babushki’s last chance to warm their bones in the sun before winter descends for good.

Oleg and I didn’t step out of our apartment building: the abnormal weather carried with it an element of risk, and not just for American settlers. An entire platoon of babushki was camped in the yard, any one of whom might start wondering why a pair of first-graders was slinking around outside when there was plenty of homework to be done. Telling the babushki to take a hike was ill-advised (I had attempted it once, with disastrous consequences), which meant that Oleg and I were best off indoors. Everyone in my family had gone out to work, to school, or on errands, leaving just us and the empty apartment. We were bored, and amused ourselves by browsing through the various trinkets that Dad had brought home from his trips throughout the USSR. For a while we stayed in the master bedroom, then made our way into the hallway. Nothing special was there, just a couple of bookshelves, a coat rack, and a mirror, placed in the hallway as a courtesy for disheveled guests walking in from the elements.

As we passed by the mirror, Oleg looked at me. “Are you a zhid?” “ Zhid” was an ugly word with an ugly meaning. In English the best translation is “kike,” but that doesn’t do it justice, for “kike” is rarely used nowadays in America, whereas “ zhid” was heard all around Russia.

It meant more than a nasty Jew; it was the term of an epidemic, a sinister cancer many Russians felt was ravaging their country. “ Bei Zhidov, Spassay Rossiyu” (“Crush the Jews, Save Russia”) was a common slogan scribbled in the alleyways of Kharkov. I didn’t know what that meant. “I don’t know,” I said, after a while.

Oleg was thinking. “Let me look at you.” I said nothing. Somehow I found myself facing the mirror, straining to see the image through the dirty surface. Behind me, I saw Oleg circling, scanning, searching, trying to pinpoint something. “You are a zhid. I know you are. You have the ass of a zhid, the face of a zhid We learned how to look for them in school.” Despite the fact that we lived next door to each other, Oleg and I went to different schools.

My parents had lobbied hard to get me enrolled in School Number Three, which was known for being tolerant toward Jews. Of course, I still received my share of beatings, but I suppose it was the school with the gentlest, most understanding beatings that a Jew could get.

I thought the other kids didn’t like me. But Oleg was different.

He was my friend, my best friend, the veteran of a thousand Battles of Kharkov. Until I stood there with him, I did not make the connection between the beatings and being a zhid. Oleg finished his inspection and stood to my left, looking at me in the mirror, his face showing a curious mixture of sympathy and disgust. I wanted to get out of there and away from the mirror, but I couldn’t. I saw a protruding nose attached to a skinny face with thin lips above a long neck. Below was a stooping body with small hips and a flat ass.

My familiar image was still there, but overshadowed now by those grotesque features. I wanted the thing in the mirror to be gone. “I’ll have to ask my mom about this.” Finally I turned to Oleg. “I’m going to read a bit. I’ll see you later?” “Yeah, sure.” I let him out and watched as he walked across the stairwell to his apartment, just a few feet from mine.

I wasn’t angry at him: How can you get angry at someone for speaking the truth? I just turned the lock and leaned against the black leather upholstery stapled to the door. A few months earlier, I’d snuck out to the bakery around the corner for some cheese-stuffed vatrushki, and a man with a long mustache started following me.

“We’re sick of you,” he hissed, and he grabbed my arm. “Why don’t you all just leave?” I yanked my arm free and spun away, and I felt him chasing me as I sprinted home.

I managed to hold on to the vatrushki but I didn’t want them anymore, and the whole time I couldn’t understand why he was holding me if he wanted me to leave, and who “you all” were, and why he was sick. Anna Konstantinovna’s face floated up to replace the man’s.

She was a tall woman to start with, but the times I stared up at her from the floor, she appeared gigantic. I saw my gym teacher, whose name I wasn’t sure of, winking at the fat kid and the brothers and shutting the locker room door for a long ten minutes. Then I was back in the apartment, overhearing Mom and Dad late in the evenings, when friends came over and they whispered of synagogues and “us” and other bad things. What had been disparate moments of fear and pain swirled around my mind until the answer came to me, resolved itself in the mirror. I peeled myself off the leather door and went to bed. It wasn’t even dinnertime, but I felt tired.

The last two things I said to Oleg were lies. Other than passing encounters on the stairwell, I never talked to him again. And I didn’t even consider asking Mom anything. I remembered her dragging me along to meet with Anna Konstantinovna after the first few beatings, and the way her hand crushed mine on the walk home afterward, and her anger made me feel worse. In a country where parents didn’t trust their kids and people got arrested for “holding subversive Jewish gatherings” in their houses, what could she have told me?

What did she know about being a Jew besides the persecution? I don’t know if I understood all of that at the time. What I did know was, this was something Mom couldn’t help me with. I tried hard to forget about the whole thing. I didn’t want to be pitied. I hated myself and I wanted others to hate me. I wanted to surround myself with an aura of hatred.

Mirrors became enemies, and anything good in them was transparent, like a vampire’s reflection. I stayed in the apartment and read fairy tales and stories from faraway lands.

The reminders of being a zhid still came, at school and in the yard, but over time something else began to creep up on me, in addition to the fear. I considered the bullies lucky: they only had to see me once in a while; I had to live with myself every day.

I envied them. DISARMING THE ADVERSARIES Kharkov, Ukraine, USSR, Spring of 1988 Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns; why should we let them have ideas? —Joseph Stalin Tat-tat-tat-tat rattled the rotary dial, Dad’s fist clenched and pale as he gripped the black receiver. “I’ll take two bags that’s fine. Same as last year? Good, I’m leaving now.” He replaced the receiver, grabbed a bag stuffed with rubles and flour, and hurried out into the rain.

Purchasing matzah in Kharkov required money, flour, and discretion. The money went to the underground bakers who operated out of apartments throughout the city.

But even with the reforms that had begun to creep into Soviet society, it was still dangerous for the bakers to purchase large quantities of flour in the springtime. To avoid drawing attention, the suppliers asked customers to contribute flour along with rubles; that way, today’s buyer provided ingredients for tomorrow’s client. Discretion was necessary, because possession got you anything from a heavy fine to the loss of your job, depending on the political climate. For Dad, discovery likely meant being unable to work as an engineer. The bakers could face imprisonment. Dad hopped on the trolley, mixing in with the rush-hour bustle, then ducked down a predetermined alleyway and exchanged bags. He returned, visibly relieved to lock the door, and instructed me to follow him into the kitchen.

“We are going to eat matzah,” he said. “Why?” I asked. He wasn’t sure, but he thought Passover was sometime around now. For a man who risked losing his beloved career, Dad didn’t know much about Passover. There were no holiday traditions, no family gatherings, no Seder services (definitely illegal), and if you were crazy enough to try hosting one, good luck finding someone who spoke Hebrew or knew the prayers. Many lost track of when the holiday fell, since Passover, like Easter, is a day that shifts from year to year. Matzah was all that was left, that and rain.

“It’s Zhid Easter,” the ordinary Russians would grumble when the first nice day of spring was ruined by a downpour. “Weather always turns shitty on Zhid Easter.” It was as good a way as any to remember a forgotten holiday. Incidentally, Christmas didn’t fare much better.

Christmas was effectively destroyed by a series of anti-religious campaigns starting in 1928, shortly after the Revolution. But the people still needed a winter holiday to tide them through the dark nights, and that’s when one of Stalin’s propaganda geniuses suggested it would be much easier to co-opt an existing tradition rather than contrive a new one. Stalin agreed, and as a result, Christmas trees, presents, songs, and decorations were uprooted, cleansed of religion, and transplanted over to the New Year. Under this system, families were ordered to celebrate the New Year with New Year’s songs around a New Year’s tree adorned with New Year’s ornaments. Santa moved, too: every New Year’s Eve, jolly, white-bearded Grandfather Frost, who looked exactly like Santa, would drop by in his sleigh with goodies for the children.

This revamped holiday celebration debuted in 1935, seven years after the old, religious Christmas was outlawed. People are good at adapting, especially at gunpoint, and after a few winters the new tradition took hold nicely and no one but the old folks thought of or remembered what had been done before. How could thousands of years of tradition—Jewish, Christian, Muslim—vanish overnight? What had become of them, the believers, the martyrs, defenders of the faith? The answer is chillingly simple: the martyrs, they were martyred. They were martyred by the millions.

The first thing the Communists did upon attaining power was to exterminate the intelligentsia. They killed the priests, they killed the rabbis, they killed the teachers, they killed the judges, they killed anyone and everyone who was a source of knowledge and inspiration. Artists and writers were taken because they distracted the workers; engineers because there were power outages. Farming elders were killed because of food shortages, which led to more food shortages, which led to more dead farmers. They killed with diligence, they killed with pride, they killed and they killed until there wasn’t a man left who could recite so much as a damned nursery rhyme, and with the leaders dead, their memories banned, the books burned, the relics confiscated (and sold to the West to purchase more bullets), the sanctuaries torn down and refurbished into gyms and Pioneer youth centers, the souls of the people left bare and trembling, the Communists’ goal had been accomplished. The Bolsheviks knew: eradicate the culture, and the rest will wither accordingly. * * * My grandparents’ generation was the last to know what things had been like before 1917, before the Revolution.

By the time Grandpa Lev was a man, he spoke Yiddish, had become Bar Mitzvah, and was intimately connected to his history and customs. Many of his contemporaries lived in rural enclaves, governed by their own rules, their hours anchored by yarmulke and tallisim, prayers and feasts, daily reminders of who they were.

Everything, from birth to death, was suffused with ritual and meaning. And, as my mother and every rendition of Fiddler on the Roof point out, Jews in that time were a bit snobbish, and viewed themselves with a certain measure of underdog pride. “The goyim [non-Jews] hate us because they envy us,” the Jews of old averred, “because we have something—we are something—that they will never be.” It was far from an idyllic existence; anti-Semitism in my grandparents’ time manifested itself in pogroms, violent raids often sparked by times of strife and unrest. Pogroms shattered and burned, raped and looted; pogroms flared up and pogroms died down, spreading through vast regions or smoldering in local provinces, sometimes petering out for decades at a time. Long centuries taught Jews to view them as seasonal calamities, unavoidable evils like famine or drought. The Cossacks and peasants who participated in these medieval riots were goaded by their own, medieval beliefs: Jews were witches; Jews concocted outbreaks of plagues; Jews crucified Jesus; Jews plotted to assassinate the tsars.

The difference was, Jews before the Revolution knew what it was like to be Jewish. They possessed a language and rituals that were still connected to the meanings behind them. And as they rose, time and again, from burned villages and charred ghettos, they rose as a people.

They rose as Jews. “Mayn zun, mayn zun,” Grandpa Lev would say to my teenage father as he scrubbed the grease from his hands after returning home from the tank factory. Dad watched my grandfather illegally rinse the bitter herbs, bless the Passover wine, break the matzah, reestablish the covenant of long ago.

Dad soaked in the ancient words, grateful for a glimpse into an already-waning world. My father’s generation had an immediate link to the pre-Revolution era. Dad couldn’t learn Yiddish, or study the Torah, or become Bar Mitzvah, but what he did inherit was a yearning for something his father had once had. It was a blurry vision, but it was enough to draw him down the alleyway with a sack of money and flour, risking himself for an obscure holiday that he didn’t comprehend. But the afterglow was rapidly fading. The end of World War II was a watershed moment, for the war had destroyed personal records, and Jews began bribing clerks to falsify their passports, altering names and ethnicities to rid themselves of their Hebrew stigma.

The yeshivas were gone, the shtetls destroyed. Many Jews had been herded into urban environments where paranoia and the secret police thrived. City life offered plenty of opportunities for informants to root out unwelcome cultural practices. Being a Jew was no longer a seasonal concern. The anti-Semites also had changed, and the witch hunts of old were gone. With each year, both Jews and anti-Semites regressed into more basic survival mind-sets.

The everyday Russian was just as affected by the secret police as the zhidi, for in the land of no trials, no one was safe. Such was the case with my father’s boss who had spent ten years in the gulag. One afternoon, the supervisor, a Ukrainian without a drop of Jewish blood in him, was walking through the factory floor when he overhead a group of welders quietly snickering in the far corner. The supervisor paid them no mind until he was apprehended the next morning.

It turned out one of the workers had told an anti-Soviet, Jewish anecdote, and since the incident took place in a factory, the supervisor was charged with fomenting Zionist propaganda with intent to undermine Soviet industry. The man pled that he was across the shop floor when the joke was made, he didn’t even hear the quip, especially considering he was clinically deaf in one ear. Applying typical Soviet logic, the Party took the deafness into account, and instead of the standard twenty years in the labor camps, the man got ten.

“You nevertheless have one good ear to answer for, Comrade,” the KGB officer admonished the supervisor as he was hauled from the sentencing chamber. “Mayn zun, mayn zun,” Dad said as he dragged me over to the sink. “Why?” I asked when he thrust my fists under the faucet and told me to hold one fist on top of the other. Dad always knew everything. He’d traveled all over the USSR. He could put turbines together and he knew all about power plants, and history, and books.

But now he wasn’t sure. I craned my head to spy the sack of matzah squatting on an old chair in the parlor. I despised that pallid, tasteless substance, that ashen thing already crumbling into powder, as I despised this fists-washing thing. They were stupid, sad secrets, things to be beaten over. An idea crept into my mind, and I started laughing and slamming my fists against each other.

Water splashed on the floor and hissed against the rusty radiator. Anger flashed across Dad’s face, followed by disappointment. “Not yet,” he whispered, and I knew it was finished, and I felt the blessed relief that comes when you try to outsmart an adult and hope desperately that they’ll fall for it, and it works. “He’s immature,” Dad said to Mom, who appeared as thankful as I was that the sham was over. “He doesn’t understand.” * * * Dad was right. I had no idea what it meant to be a Jew.

I was repulsed by it, and was about as interested in Judaism as I was in cannibalism. But he didn’t know either—scurrying down alleys and mimicking his father didn’t yield meaning, and without meaning, symbols are useless and an ancient token of freedom and redemption crumbles into a bland, tasteless cracker. The anti-Semites didn’t know—they hated because they had been programmed to hate, and they obeyed because they had to obey in order to survive. No one knew, no one understood, and, as the old saying goes, one will always fear what one doesn’t understand.

A MARKED MIKHAIL WILL DESTROY RUSSIA Kharkov, Ukraine, USSR, Spring of 1988 It’s an early weekday afternoon and the yard is quiet. Mom’s at the clinic, Dad’s fixing a turbine, Lina’s in school, and Grandma’s at the stove working on borsch, which I’m excited about, and potato pancakes, which I will find a reason to avoid eating.

I’m supposed to be in school, but my last blood tests showed I was still low on iron and that was enough for Mom to score me another extended sick note. A couple of weeks ago I successfully wormed out of the Passover hand-washing, and now I won’t have to worry about the end of first grade for a while. I have a good streak going. Kolya rolls through the yard, lazily scanning benches packed with babushki greeting the spring, and lilac bushes where a few scrawny birds are trying to surprise the early crickets. The babushki position themselves three or four to a bench, where they discuss everything from Union politics to the far more interesting rumors of the apartment complex. Some of the more intrepid women have already exchanged their dark winter scarves for the brighter red and yellow spring varieties.

*1 Mitya, the yard keeper, is slowly stirring piles of runny snow, pausing here and again to relight his pipe. I wave my arms but Kolya ignores me. He saw me when I scrambled down to meet him from the balcony, but Kolya is never in a rush. Everything about the kid is angular, from his lanky wrists sticking out of the sleeves of his older brother’s coat to the bent spokes jutting from the wheels of his bike. The wheels are slightly flattened, which makes the bike lurch a little, but Kolya pedals standing up and that doesn’t slow him down. The most peculiar part of the bike is the oversized seat, shaped like an upside-down helmet, which originally belonged to an old moped. “You buying or gawking?” Kolya slings himself off the bike, hand hovering near the seat’s lock.

“I’m buying, Kolyukha,” I assure him. “You better be,” he says, but I know he’s grumbling out of habit, and the seat snaps open. Coiled inside, wrapped in on itself, is an old stocking, several old stockings in fact, layered over one another and reinforced with electrical tape. Kolya unties the knot at the end and the coins spill out into his hand. Eastern European coins are the easiest to get and are always in Kolya’s vanguard. There are Hungarian forints with plain wheat sheaves (wheat being the prevalent symbol used to demonstrate your country’s commitment to Communism), boring East German pfennigs, each denomination bearing the same hammer, compass, and wheat mark, solid dinars from Yugoslavia with wheat wreaths and flames, intricate Czechoslovak korunas and Bulgarian stotinki (wheat wreaths and lions on both), bani and lei with cogwheels and factories surrounded by halos of wheat from Romania, and more.

Kolya’s long fingers pick through the wheatocracy with the surety of a seasoned dealer. He skips past the pfennigs—I already have those—and digs out a few stotinki, since I wanted to buy some the last time but didn’t have the money. The coiled stocking gives birth to several little socks containing more exotic coins from Cuba, Angola, Vietnam, North Korea, South Yemen: our fellow wheat enthusiasts from around the globe.

I buy some Cuban pesos, think about the Vietnamese coins with five-pointed stars on the back, haggle with Kolya over a few beat-up rubles from early Soviet Russia, but my eyes can’t help being drawn to the far end of the stocking. “I want to see the others,” I say, carefully storing my purchases inside my jacket. “I showed you the others, remember?” Kolya replies, but I’m not letting him play dumb today. I don’t know how he managed to get out of school early—I’m sure he has an explanation, otherwise the babushki wouldn’t have allowed him into the yard—but there’s no other buyer around and I’m not letting the chance pass.

The ones you showed Deniska and Fedya. I saw the eagles, over their shoulders.” Kolya squints, trying to make up his mind, then slowly reaches deep into the mouth of the stocking until the layers of nylon swallow his forearm. He positions himself so his back is between us and the nearest bench of babushki and works out the knot on the sock in his hand, glancing down at me from time to time. I see them and I want them, the tsarist coins, illegal ones, dark, rusty kopeks and dull silver rubles. The two-headed eagles scream from the metal, wings spread out, talons clutching orbs and scepters, the ancient symbol of the House of Romanov proclaiming the might of a dead empire. Kopiyki, it says in the archaic spelling of the word, and something about it fascinates me, because no one spells “kopeks” like that anymore. “There he is,” Kolya whispers, “Nikolai the Bloody, the one they shot with all his family.” A calm, bearded man appears in profile on the higher denominations, hair combed to one side.

“Ten rubles if you want two kopeks, but you better keep them hidden. I don’t need you bragging to anyone about it.” I was ready to wrangle a better price out of Kolya, but nothing irritates me more than being treated like a child—I’m already eight years old—and I angrily shove a pink ten-ruble Lenin note into his hand.

I’ll show Kolyukha who can keep secrets. I already have a secure location prepared for the coins, a little baggie I can hide behind my teddy bear that no one will see.

“I get to pick which ones I get,” I say as nonchalantly as possible, but Kolya doesn’t budge. He’s intently staring at a spot on a balcony directly across from the far entrance to the yard.

Nikolai and the eagles have vanished into the sock and the sock into the stocking. Suddenly I see them. Five men in dark coats with red armbands walk into the yard. Everything slows down. Kolya holds on to the ten rubles, but in exchange he’s sorting through common Hungarian forints, counting them out into my hand.

“This one, it’s in great shape,” he says, and I want to remind him that I already have them, I know I’m not getting the two-headed eagles but I want some Angolan coins or Vietnamese ones, but my mouth isn’t working well and I just nod my head instead. The yard is quiet. Laundry creaks on taut ropes, drying pins protesting the strain from the wind, the yard keeper’s shovel clinks brisk and regular, but otherwise I can hear everything. The five men in red armbands stroll through the apartment block. They have the businesslike gait of wolves near caribou, purposeful but not hurried; there’s always someone weak, injured, unlucky, and the pack will have its dinner. Wherever the men are headed, there’s no need for improper haste.

They’re not KGB; you don’t see those until they come for you in the middle of the night, and nobody hears about it until the next morning. They’re not even policemen, the KGB’s little brothers who handle official nuisances like filling out an arrest warrant long after the prisoner has vanished from the world. They’re druzhinniki, neighborhood watchmen assigned to patrol for drunks and loiterers, but on their arms is the plain red band, the crimson banner of the USSR, and with it comes all the malice and paranoia and fear that the color has ingrained into my head. Silence falls ahead of the druzhinniki. Kolya and I can hear them from all the way down the yard. They’re chatting about the upcoming Sokol Kiev–Dinamo Moskva match. This is Sokol’s year.

Communism’s goal is total equality, of course, brotherhood of workers and unity of nations—save for the hockey rink. In the arena, Sokol Kiev is going to feast on the marrow of their sorry Muscovite comrades and usher in a new era of Ukrainian dominance. I don’t know why I am afraid of the men. I don’t remember learning to be afraid of them, the police, anyone in the government. No one taught me that Nikolai coins are dangerous or that certain words like “synagogue” are not to be uttered except in the apartment, but I know it, as surely as I know a hot stove will burn my hand and scissors are not to be played with. Whisk whisk, whisk whisk, the armbands rustle against the men’s coats as their arms swing on the walk. Keep walking, don’t stop, not here, don’t stop pounds through my head.

Mitya the yard keeper has developed a keen interest in corralling every dirty snow patch onto the sidewalk around him, and he concentrates on the slush, his pipe forgotten. They’re just druzhinniki, assures the rational part of my brain, but my ears hear the whisk whisk of the armbands. Don’t stop here, keep walking, my head echoes back. Whisk whisk, don’t stop / whisk whisk, don’t stop, goes the cadence. Kolya stares at a balcony and I stare at the coins, but the babushki stare at the druzhinniki. No babushka—Russian or Jewish—ever looks away. Something happens to a woman once she gets old enough to be called a babushka.

Lina told me something about their surviving the evacuation and the war and the things before the war that no one talks about, times when people disappeared on a regular basis and the black cars were an everyday thing. “They stare because they’re alive,” said Lina, but I’m not quite sure what she meant. Whisk whisk, whisk whisk through the yard, and stolid scarf-wrapped heads swivel on benches to keep the men in sight.

Kolya presses the forints into my hand and tosses in some Polish groszy for good measure. We exchange meaningless words about not storing the coins near a radiator or anywhere else they can oxidize and develop a sickly blue-gray crust. Lina’s tales of the KGB detaining Dad at his work flash through my head. I know that they took Grandpa, too, in this very yard, in our own apartment, back when Mom was a little older than me and the cars came for him. This was after Stalin died, as I would learn much later, and they thought dentists were hoarding gold, so they imprisoned and tortured every dentist they could get their hands on for a supposed plot to drive up gold prices.

Not here, keep walking, the primordial prayer of survival screams inside my skull, and I hear its silent echo resonate through Kolya, and Mitya, even the babushki, through the birds, bricks, snow piles, and laundry lines of the yard. Kolyukha carefully returns the jingling socks back to the stocking, cinches the end, and clicks the seat shut. The red armbands whisk by us and out the front of the yard, leaving behind tracks in the mush and predictions of Dinamo Moskva’s upcoming demise. Gone are the eagles, as well, and I’ll have to wait for another chance. I can still make out their faded wings on the brown copper when I close my eyes, but for some reason when I see the coins in my mind they’re gigantic, like big copper tea saucers. Kolya was generous, because the fat bulge of Eastern European wheatage in my jacket is worth more than ten rubles, and I wave goodbye to his lanky silhouette as it half rolls, half lurches out of the yard.

* * * “A marked Mikhail will destroy Russia,” augured the old women sweeping the landing of my apartment complex. It was a few weeks after my unsuccessful attempt to get the tsarist kopiyki and I was running upstairs when I scurried past the two babushki in long coats and wool headscarves, their gnarled hands wrapped around old wooden broom handles. I paused outside my apartment, just out of sight. Mikhail Gorbachev, the new Soviet premier, had a conspicuous port-wine birthmark on his forehead. “That spot is an omen,” the hushed whispers carried up the landing, “and so is his name. He’s a marked Mikhail, and a marked Mikhail will destroy Russia.” That’s what the babushki foretold.

The old women knew their history, or at least the parts they considered important. The Roman Empire was founded by a Romulus and collapsed under a Romulus. Its descendant, the Byzantine Empire, was founded by Constantine the Great and collapsed under Constantine XI. And the “Third Rome,” the Russian Empire of the Romanovs, which styled itself as the successor to the Byzantines, was founded by Tsar Mikhail I.

These events didn’t just transpire by coincidence, and logic dictated that should Russia collapse, it would do so under a Mikhail. In 1988, change and reform convulsed the land. The Soviet Union was mired in what was rapidly transforming into a humiliating and bloody defeat: the invasion (or, as it was referred to by the state media, the “liberation”) of Afghanistan. And Mikhail Gorbachev, the man presiding over the chaos, was marked.

The babushki’s warnings were echoed by scarf-wrapped counterparts in apartments and farms throughout the land. Russia was rife with superstition, which permeated across class and ethnicity. Everyone took precautions against the evil eye, especially during weddings, births, and pregnancies. Peasants continued to eschew the word “bear,” referring to the animal as simply “the boss.” Using the boss’s true name was unwise, lest the wind carry it and the beast come running to see who called for it. *2 Words in general were dangerous, and certain ones were not to be uttered for fear their innate power be unleashed, as I was to learn during one unforgettable evening.

It started when someone placed hard, dried breadcrumbs under Lina’s bedsheets, which had resulted in her tossing in bed the entire previous night. *3 Upon discovering the crumbs, Lina called me an obnoxious, underdeveloped fool. “May you grow blisters on your tongue!” I fired back with an archaic curse normally reserved for witches and blasphemers (I read about it in a book). The impact was devastating. Lina ran for Grandma, who, after a protracted chase, cornered me by the china closet and demanded I take back the curse. I held out for a good five minutes, intoxicated by my newfound abilities, but then Mom arrived to reinforce Grandma and I could only stare at the dessert on the dinner table until I hollered, with utmost sincerity, that I no longer wished for any afflictions, lingual or otherwise, to befall my sister.

Pagan custom had survived, and the deities of old still clung to the soil, thinly veiled as Eastern Orthodox saints. The Slavic thunder god, Perun, continued to be revered in the countryside, only now he was worshipped as Elijah, the ominous prophet who rolled through the skies in his fiery chariot. In Russian Orthodoxy, as in other syncretic religions, old deities don’t die; they just get makeovers. Many people consulted baby, witch doctors, sort of like super -babushki who read fortunes and offered herbs, tinctures, and amulets, mysterious remedies for various diseases.

These coexisted with modern pharmaceuticals: if a doctor didn’t help, people went to a baba, or vice versa. Lives were beyond our control, affected by the stars, by goodwill and malice, names and spells, saints and talismans. The question was not whether Gorbachev was marked; he was. The birthmark was an omen; it meant something, required interpretation. The old women’s warnings were issued in all seriousness and accepted as such. Uncertainty surrounded the premier.

He had risen rapidly and undetected. He spoke of change, glasnost and perestroika (openness and restructuring). The rhetoric alone was alarming. It naturally vexed the ruling class, who had no need for reform—they had nowhere to go but down.

But it was also distressing to the population at large. “Change” is a tricky word for Russians. Russians fear change, and for good reason. “Life has improved, comrades; life became more enjoyable,” quipped Joseph Stalin as he unleashed his Five-Year Plans, cheerfully massacring millions of his own people in the name of progress. Often, when restrictions were loosened, paranoia increased, because everyone realized that sooner or later some fool was going to poke his head out a little too far. Change was the harbinger of the black cars.

Gorbachev came to office with dangerous ideas, such as private enterprise (limited, of course) and freedom of the press (extremely limited, of course), but his initial forays into reform were rather innocuous. To be honest, they were rather idiotic. The marked Mikhail kicked off his premiership by venturing to Siberia to assess the working conditions of coal miners and lumberjacks. Raisa, his wife, accompanied him, which was a first, since previous administrations had a decidedly stag-party flavor, to the point where people wondered if their leaders even had spouses.

In 1985, his first year in office, Gorbachev rolled out his anti-alcoholism crusade. “Fight the Green Serpent!” posters sprang up all over the Soviet Union. I remember seeing them at bus stops and on magazine covers, cartoons of sad men and women trapped in the coils of a sinister boa constrictor with puffy red eyes, as unpaid bills and unattended children huddled in the background. To the dictatorship—the Politburo, the KGB, the Red Army—Gorbachev was benign, a silly man who wasted his time on silly causes, and the hardliners were relieved. “Let him shit in the woods with his lumberjacks,” they smirked. “Let him fight the Green Serpent.” The population also relaxed, and all across the Union, from the halls of the Kremlin to smoky kolkhoz bars, Gorbachev’s reforms were met with quiet derision as people raised glasses to toast to his health.

The regime felt secure, the jokes circulated in droves, but the dull purple spot still remained on Gorbachev’s forehead, and the old women muttered their warnings. *1 In Russian, babushka refers to the woman and not to the actual scarf, as it does in English. The difference is negligible, however, for one is seldom seen without the other. *2 Even the actual word for bear, “medved,” is a euphemism meaning “honey eater,” which adds another layer of protection. *3 This was directly inspired by Kipling’s Just So Stories, in which a mischievous islander terrorizes a rhinoceros by putting crumbs under the rhino’s coat. I didn’t have a rhino but I did have Lina. INTO THE STEPPE Kharkov, Ukraine, USSR, December 21, 1989, 10 Days to the December 31 Deadline The books vanished in droves.

Eighteen bookshelves had lined our small apartment, filled to the brim with fat collectors’ editions, rows upon rows of hardbound tomes, square little poetry anthologies, colorful travel guides, drab engineering manuals, and scraggly samizdat copies of forbidden works. Dad had waited in line for hours for some of those books.

He hunted down volumes on the black market, paid through the nose for them, and once (as Lina told me in one of her scary stories) was detained by the KGB and almost wound up in prison for having banned material. My memory of the books stretched beyond consciousness.

They were there when I first opened my eyes and began to identify things like “warm,” and “house,” and “bed,” and while I didn’t know about or understand the byzantine game of passports, imaginary relatives, summonses, and exit visas, it was the breakup of Dad’s library that made leaving a reality. The books were the background of my little world, and seeing them carted away by friends and relatives was like watching someone dismantle the sky.

All the adults—Mom, Dad, Lina, and Grandma—were constantly hustling, saying goodbye to good friends, reconciling with old friends they hadn’t kept up with, eating at their favorite places for the last time, and agonizing over what to pack. We were only allowed one piece of jewelry per person. Not that we had much treasure—a gold watch from one grandfather and a fat Austro-Hungarian coin from the other—but neither heirloom would be permitted to cross the border, so Mom brought them to a jeweler, the husband of one of her old patients. “Make something meaningful out of them,” she asked the man. Two days later, she came home with a pair of necklaces, thin gold bands bearing intricately wrought Mogen Dovidi (Stars of David), a large pendant for me and a smaller one for Lina. A Mogen Dovid was not desirable in the Soviet Union and thus less likely to catch a greedy guard’s eye; the symbol was also an apt reminder of the reason for our journey.

The jewelry had to be worn by the emigrant who claimed it, and since Mom, Dad, and Grandma would be wearing their wedding bands, the Mogen Dovidi would have to be conveyed by Lina and me. I winced at the thought of having to wear a zhid nametag, if only for one night. “Did they have to be those stars?” sniffed my sister. Locating suitcases was a nightmare. We were permitted two suitcases per person, which made for a total of ten, but rumors of the U.S. Border closing sparked a shopping frenzy, and not even a duffel bag was to be found in the stores. One of our neighbors, a surly mechanic who reeked of vodka and glared at me whenever I ventured into the yard, had a knack for ferreting things out on the black market and made a small fortune reselling large red-violet cases with metal frames, hideous but sturdy.

The last four came the night of the move, when the neighbor dragged them upstairs. He counted the cash Mom paid him, twice, before carefully tucking the wad into his coat pocket. After some hesitation, the man turned back to Mom and handed her a worn pocket knife with the five-pointed Soviet star etched on the handle.

“What’s this for?” asked Mom. “Consider it a parting gift, doctor.” He managed a grin, which still resembled a scowl. “It’s always good to have a good knife.

Use it to slash up the customs officers if they get out of hand.” The gloomy mechanic wasn’t the only neighbor we saw that evening. All around the apartment complex, windows were lit long into the night. Mom and Dad tried to keep our date of departure concealed.

There were many reports of refugees being hijacked in the lawless plains of western Ukraine, where bands of robbers, given advance notice by their urban scouts, lurked in the wilderness, ready to attack the buses. (Part of the reason the drivers charged so much was because they had to hire their own scouts to monitor the roads for bandits.) It was best to disappear without notice, at night, but moving was a rare occurrence in the USSR. People grew up, lived, and died in the same town, often at the same address. There was no such thing as a new family on the block or a new kid in school, and despite my parents’ attempts at secrecy, the increased last-minute activity alerted anyone with eyes that departure was imminent. The neighbors kept a vigil to see what would be left behind. Every half-hour a thin woman with a black kerchief around her gray hair darted into the foyer to check whether we were done with the kitchen table.

She had been promised that table, and she wanted to make sure she got it. Something about her quick movements, gaunt frame, and black dress made her resemble the scrawny birds that hopped around the apartment block’s courtyard scavenging for food. Mom kept telling her to come back, and as the night wore on and the eager neighbor returned, an uneasy feeling washed over Mom—it was as if the bird-woman was waiting for us to die. Friends and relatives rotated in and out in a mishmash cycle of legs from my perspective. I tried my best to stay out of the way, but my packing had long been completed. The most important thing was books: a collection of four stories by Gerald Durrell, Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K.

Jerome, a new book of Moldavian fairy tales one of my relatives gave me, and a pocket world atlas I appropriated from the book boxes, so I would know where we were going. The rest of the backpack was taken up by ten elite knights and pirates (I tried to be fair but wound up recruiting heavily from the knights), a couple of shirts, a pair of pants, a sweater, socks, and underwear. Lastly, I went to my grandfather’s old toolbox and fished out a little hammer and a couple of screwdrivers. After all, you never know when you’ll have to take something apart. Backpack on my shoulders, my teddy bear (Comrade Bear) in one arm, my pillow in the other, and I was set.

The supplies were all that mattered. Everything else, including our destination, was irrelevant: anywhere other than Moskovskyi Prospekt 90, Apt. 5, Kharkov, USSR, was fine with me. Dad shook me awake around 4:00 a.m., and I trudged to the sink and lazily brushed my teeth, spitting out the rust-brown liquid that squirted from the faucet. Our itinerary may have been uncertain, but I had a feeling brushing was not going to be at the top of the agenda for the foreseeable future, and I liked that. I got dressed, jogged downstairs, and stepped out into the Russian night.

Silence hung over the courtyard. A foot of wet snow blanketed the earth and the flickering streetlights cast a yellow glow on the mounds. Idling next to the apartment block was a bus surrounded with people examining suitcases, loading suitcases, and discussing the status of suitcases yet to be loaded. Eight crates of vodka were stacked on a nearby curb. These were going to be handed out along the way at inspection points and gas stations, to police officers and anyone else we might encounter. When it came to bribery, vodka was the surest form of currency in the volatile Soviet economy.

Times were uncertain, exchange rates fluctuated, the ruble went up and the ruble went down, but the value of a good bottle of vodka never depreciated. I climbed on the bus, took in the drone of the heater, the voices of the people, the smell of diesel liberally emanating from the tailpipe, and a peaceful feeling settled over me.

I liked the rumbling, for some reason I also liked the smell of gas, and I certainly enjoyed watching the adults solve the suitcase placement puzzle. But all that was incidental: I was two months shy of my tenth birthday, yet I understood, fully understood, that I was never coming back (the thought would warm my nights for years to come). I had no one to say goodbye to.

I hadn’t spoken with Oleg since that afternoon with the mirror, Kolya and I had a strictly business relationship, and I barely knew the names of my classmates. Everything I needed was already in the gray backpack on my lap. I realized that I would never again walk through the parks, see Mom and Dad’s friends and relatives, take the tram downtown, or quietly read in the bedroom. I also knew we were about to lose ourselves in the world, had no set destination, no friends, no rubles, and no plans beyond Vienna. I realized it all; that’s why I was happy.

However, after a few minutes of picturing the empty apartment I had explored for the past nine years, a strange itch crept over me, and I scrambled out of the bus, found Dad, and told him I needed to use the bathroom. He barked at me to hurry, and I scampered through the yard, up the stairs, past the padded black door, and stood, panting, in the apartment hallway. Fifteen minutes had elapsed and already the place was picked clean.

Gone was the furniture, carted away, gone were the little things like rugs and lamps, and all that remained were a few mangled boxes that could not be salvaged, bits of string, and a few trinkets on the windowsill. The trinkets, mainly tiny statuettes, were souvenirs from Dad’s business trips around the Union. They had cluttered his bookshelves, much to my mother’s annoyance, and as the shelves were emptied, the knickknacks had been tossed onto the sills. They were cheap, they could not be resold or reused as raw materials, and that’s why they had been ignored by the scavengers. I scanned the sad lineup. My eye fell on a small statue of a turtle.

Dad had brought it from Uzbekistan, or maybe Kazakhstan—definitely one of the ’stans. I never fancied it; it looked more like a brown lump of clay than like a turtle. In fact, I can still recall the three turbaned wise men from Kirgizia, the Crimean alabaster ashtray decorated with monkeys, and several other attractive items I could’ve rescued. But the clock was ticking and the pathetic crawling turtle looked like it was doing its darndest to catch up with us. Without much thought, I grabbed it and ran back to the bus, and five minutes later we were rumbling through the dead streets of Kharkov, me wedged between Dad’s brown jacket and my pillow, Comrade Bear on my lap, lumpy brown turtle clenched in my fist. * * * The ride lasted three days. Our drivers pushed the groaning engine as fast as the roads permitted, stopping only in trusted villages and only long enough for bathroom breaks and to check in with their scouts, who monitored the roads for bandits.

I sat next to Dad, alternating between sleeping and staring. I cracked open the Moldavian fairy tales, the only book I hadn’t read yet, and powered all the way through the first day of the trip.

The next two days were spent staring out the window at country roads with nothing but fields surrounding us. The landscape was shackled with frost and all I could see were dead leaves interlocked with the frozen grass. Patches of trees hunkered down on the horizon. Every once in a while a thin line of them stretched to the road, dividing one field from the next. A field, a flash of bare branches, then the next field was all there was to see.

The Ukraine ( u-kraina) isn’t much of a name. It’s just a word; it means “the land at the edge,” and this was that edge.

We had reached the outskirts of the Great Steppe, a vast sea of grass that stretches from Mongolia to Hungary. It was Eurasia’s no-man’s-land, a place called pustyr, or “emptiness,” in Russian. For centuries, the steppe was inhabited by nomads, wild horsemen, skilled and dreaded archers. For centuries they rode out of the plains, sacking towns and ambushing caravans before receding back into the grasses. No one could predict the cycles of calm and strife: the nomads spoke their own tongues and lived by their own codes, with no discernible pattern or motif. Scythians, Pechenegs, Huns, Bulgars, myriad clans and tribes came and went through the steppe, leaving behind them only kurgans, hill-shaped barrows that concealed the bones and gold of their chieftains.

To the Russian mind, the steppe was a symbol of the unknown, the primal, the wild. Thus it was in the beginning, and thus it had remained, even in 1989. By the second day the trees thinned, shrunk, thinned some more, and finally ceded the steppe to the earth. The sheer amount of land was astounding.

It unfolded steadily, relentlessly, ever expanding and never changing. At first I scanned the terrain as if it were a painting, looking for something distinct or hidden in a landscape composed solely of leaves and grass. After a few hours my eyes started hurting and I allowed them to lose focus and simply stare into the vastness. I thought of bylini, Russian folk tales I loved to read, stories of bogatyri, heroes who wandered into the steppe to test their mettle against the barbarians or the mythical monsters of old. For days the bogatyr would travel, sometimes for weeks. He’d ride and ride and ride and ride and suddenly it’d be a week later, and he’d be somewhere else. It used to frustrate me because the tales never divulged what took place during that time.

So what happened? I used to lie in bed and wonder, What did the bogatyr see on his journey? Sitting on the bus, swallowed by the unending blur before me, I realized that the tales got it right. They said nothing because there was nothing to say—there was only the steppe.

Next to the drivers sat the Kantlers, the family who had chartered the bus. Although we’d lived in the same apartment block, we rarely interacted and heard about each other via the rumor mill that bubbled through the Jewish population of Kharkov. They were a family of five: two parents, two grandparents, and a teenage daughter. Behind them were the Zhislins, the third family to share the bus. The father, Yura, was an engineer like Dad. He was short, with a wiry body and small, glistening eyes that gave him a perpetually curious appearance. At every stop, before the bus fully halted, he’d leap out and explore.

He also jumped at any occasion to make a joke, laugh, lighten the mood, and his relentless humor spread through the bus, easing the tension. Yura’s wife, Gera, was a tall woman whose quiet demeanor and graceful motions were a perfect foil for her husband. Their children, Igor and Vicki, both in their twenties, were leaving with them. Our family sat in the back, behind the Zhislins but in front of the last two rows of seats, which were occupied by the vodka. All three families were accompanied by trusted friends and relatives who were coming with us as far as the border.

Additionally, each family had one or two young men to help haul suitcases and bulk up our numbers, in case we got boarded along the way. There were about thirty passengers in all, but the bus was hushed. People vanished beyond the border. It was forbidden to return, but many didn’t even call or write. Long before my family left, the adults would gather for tea and muse about how if they left, they would never sever contacts, and how they would always stay in touch. But when our turn came, my parents and sister were so caught up they didn’t say goodbye to many friends. The adults were pondering leaving entire lifetimes behind them.

The chaperones were preparing for an indefinite farewell to their friends and relatives. And everyone thought of the tamozhnya. With each westward mile the bus carried us farther from the Soviet government, but it also brought us closer to the border and the customs officers who waited there. Some families were rumored to breeze through the border, barely losing a necklace or a ring. Others got shaken down, left to stumble across with almost nothing. Still darker stories swirled around the border, stories of violence and detention and strip searches.

Doubtless many were false. Doubtless many were true, and which were which, no one could tell, and that was the point. The reality didn’t matter, because—as with the wild horsemen of the steppe, as with the refuseniks, as with most everything in the Soviet Union—uncertainty made the system work. Fear gnawed at the mind, fear permeated the bus, and the farther west we drove, the stronger it grew. * * * Uzhgorod, Soviet–Czechoslovak Border, December 23, 1989, 8 Days to the December 31 Deadline An ominous haze covered the land as we filed out onto the plain.

Nothing broke the frozen emptiness except the barbed-wire fence and the two-story rectangle of the Chop Border Post, which loomed at the end of the road. Our friends and relatives would not be allowed to enter the tamozhnya, so they did what they could, helping us unload suitcases before saying farewell. The adults were getting emotional and I didn’t want to stick out. Thankfully, the goodbyes lasted as long as there were suitcases to haul, which didn’t take long. Everyone was on edge—quick hugs and quick good-lucks, that was all.

The cases crunched on the dry gravel path, our relatives dwindled to silhouettes in the fog, and we were in the building. The inside of the customs was as austere as the landscape: a large, bare waiting hall without so much as a bench or a trashcan. A small bathroom was at one end and a door leading to a separate examination chamber at the other. Several black-clad tamozhniki patrolled the hall.

They said very little, and when they did talk, they kept their voices low. Mostly, they watched.

They watched, and paced, and waited. “First group,” barked a female tamozhnitsa, and the Kantlers, who insisted on going first, disappeared inside the door to the examination room.

The Zhislins sat with us on suitcases and no one moved—no one, that is, except Yura, who, driven by his insatiable curiosity, peeked into the bathroom. An older tamozhnik with yellow makhorka tobacco stains on his mustache lazily paced the hall. Lina and Vicki Zhislin nervously chatted about the toiletries and makeup they’d packed for the journey. What will it be?

What will we lose? The adults wondered as they counted the minutes. The signs were good: after a mere half-hour, a new crew of tamozhniki took over, and their young shift captain called in the Zhislins. One hour passed, then another. Then we heard the muffled sounds of things being flung against walls.

I shared a suitcase with Dad, who was straining to hear as much as possible, and every few minutes I’d glance up to see his cheeks quiver, as if an electric current had passed through them. I didn’t know it at the time, and I wouldn’t find out for quite a while, but Dad had a very good reason to sweat.

Under his long brown coat, beneath the layers of sweaters and the undershirt, nestled deep within his underwear, were eleven tiny metal disks, microfilms containing engineering patents, designs, and sketches of future ideas—three decades of Dad’s work. Many years, and much of Dad’s savings, had gone into cultivating the contacts to create the films.

Dad was no fool: he realized that the odds of an ex-Soviet engineer working in the States were tiny. He had full confidence in his acumen and in the value of his designs, but he would need to offer something tangible to American employers. He had no qualms about stealing the patents—they were his patents, and they’d been appropriated by the very dictatorship he was fleeing. The only issue was whether he could smuggle them out. The clamor from the examination chamber continued.

Finally, Mom couldn’t contain herself any longer and cracked open the door. “There’s a search going on—do you want to get arrested?!” A tamozhnik flung open the door.

“Get back in the waiting room! Your turn will come soon enough.” Mayhem reigned on the other side: clothes, books, shards of porcelain were strewn everywhere, and anything that could’ve been broken lay shattered on the cement. The Zhislins had taken a chance on hiding a little gold; they had their family valuables melted down and spun into thin flexible wires, which an expert tailor had sewn into their clothing creases. Whether through bad luck or good searching, the tamozhniki found the gold and were now ripping everything to shreds.

Yura was bent over a table, arms and legs spread, being frisked by a tamozhnik. Gera, Vicki, and Igor were lined up against the far wall, their faces expressionless. Panic struck Dad as all hope of a relaxed search vanished. A few grams of gold were nothing compared with classified power plant schematics. He was trapped inside the tamozhnya with items that could lead to arrests, imprisonment, denial of exit visas for the entire family. Witnessing the devastation of the Zhislins, the full ramification of Dad’s gamble crashed into his mind. The door to the examination chamber remained open for only one moment, but it was enough.

Yura didn’t know about Dad’s microfilms, but many people tried to smuggle contraband through the border and he assumed Dad might have something. The little man twisted his head up from the table, his face assumed a sad smile, the dark, ferret-like eyes darted over to the far wall of the tamozhnya, and the door was slammed shut. Dad waited a few minutes, coughing and rubbing his stomach, then asked the tamozhnik guarding us to excuse him. He made his way to the back left corner of the waiting hall to the bathroom, where Yura had been staring. It contained one toilet, no sink, and no trashcan. Russian toilets did not have standing water in the bowl and clogged up on the slightest pretense, so flushing the disks was out of the question. Dad jiggled the water tank lid but it was fastened shut.

He was certain Yura wanted him to check out the bathroom, but once inside, he couldn’t figure out what the man was hinting. Dad stared at the bowl, about to try flushing the films in desperation, when a flicker of light interrupted his thoughts. Set in the wall above the toilet was a fortochka, a small ventilation window common to Eastern Europe, no bigger than a sheet of paper. Dad craned his neck and peeked out the window. A lone tamozhnik sat on a crate off in the periphery, gazing over the shadowy steppe. The light he saw came from a fire blazing in a steel drum about two meters from the window.

Dad snaked his hand out the pane and began tossing the metal disks one by one into the flames, keeping his eye on the sentry. The films popped as they caught fire, and he had to carefully sync his throws with the wind gusts. The timing had to be perfect: too long and he’d arouse the suspicion of the guards inside; too quick, and the rapid popping might alert the sentry. Crackled the films, pop! Went thirty years of painstaking labor for the very regime that had oppressed him. Flashed Dad’s chances of working again as an engineer, and with each pop!

Dad grew more furious, and with each pop! Dad felt his family closer to escape. It was already past three in the morning when our turn came. Whatever anger had possessed the tamozhniki to go berserk on the Zhislins had not abated, and they pawed through us and our belongings with a malicious zeal. They carefully ripped through the seams in my coat, perhaps because they thought we had gold sewn into our clothes like the Zhislins. Whenever they chanced upon something fragile they would hold it up as if to get a better look, then let it drop to the floor.

Sounds of shattering were followed by flowery apologies as the officers rued their own clumsiness, lamenting, “I’m so, so sorry—you probably needed that. How awful!” Mom, who was always bad at masking her temper, seethed at the taunting, and Dad would periodically have to calm her down. At one point he lost it and began screaming at Mom to keep her mouth shut, and for the first time that night, the tamozhniki smiled. Mostly the five of us stood against the wall like the Zhislins, like torpid sacks. Once in a while they ordered Dad to move a suitcase, and soon I began moving them, too, becoming engrossed in the task. Everything was suddenly simple.

Existence had collapsed into itself, leaving me and ten red-violet-colored rectangles, adjusting, dragging, clearing out bits of broken pottery and glass, untangling shreds of clothes ripped up by knives and caught on suitcase zippers. The tamozhniki must’ve gotten a kick out of a little zhidling assisting with the destruction of his family’s property. Dad, who would have nightmares about the border for years to come, remembered me tending the cases, and he would always speak with pride of how I helped him at the tamozhnya, but I didn’t do it for Dad, and certainly not for those sadistic black-clad fucks.

I was sick of being paralyzed by fear, there, at school, at the yard, everywhere. Logitech Extreme 3d Pro Pdf Creator more. Moving suitcases was the only thing I could do, but it beat feeling helpless. Thanks to Dad, our only real contraband had already disintegrated in the steel barrel outside.

All they were able to find were a few minor items, like Dad’s stamp collection and a pair of antique candlesticks, and as it dawned on the tamozhniki that there was nothing else, the tone of the search changed. They dropped the clumsiness charade and simply smashed what they could.

The rummaging grew faster, more aggressive, and still they found nothing. The red exit door to Czechoslovakia was calling to us and we had begun to feel that soon, soon we must pass, soon we’ll be on the other side, when suddenly the shift captain confronted Dad.

“Where are your documents?” “I gave them to you the minute we walked in here,” Dad said, taken aback. “They were right on that table!” The documents in question were the complete record of our existence in the Soviet Union. According to the rules, all documents—passports, transcripts, my grade school report cards, birth certificates, death certificates, even official photographs—had to be surrendered at the border. The table Dad was pointing to was a small metal desk bolted into a side wall.

Dad had watched the captain place the fat stack of papers on the desk when we first entered the examination chamber, but now the table was empty, its surface devoid of anything but dull metal. The documents were gone. “You stole them!” the young tamozhnik captain bellowed. “You took them while we were inspecting your luggage! This is a goddamn criminal offense!” I remember little from the next half-hour, but the few moments that remain are seared into my brain like a vivid nightmare.

I remember clenching my jaw to the point where it felt like my cheekbones were going to shatter. I remember Mom’s eyes flashing with unbridled hatred, Lina’s lips uncontrollably twitching, Grandma collapsing on one of the opened suitcases, her face ashen. I remember the yelling, and I remember four soldiers storming out of a recessed side door and positioning themselves, one in each corner, feet apart, machine guns slung across their bodies. Dad and the tamozhnik captain continued their recriminations until a groggy woman staggered out from the same door as the soldiers.

“What the hell is going on here?” The newcomer was buttoning her uniform as she shambled toward us, looking very much as if she had been roused from a deep sleep. The tamozhniki hastily assembled. “These people have stolen their documents while we were examining their belongings, Comrade Overseer,” the shift captain reported with a slightly annoyed tone in his voice. “I’m not sure how they did it, but I believe there is reason to suspect they’re smuggling other contraband, Comrade Overseer. I recommend we put them on the pots.” Putting someone on the pots was a technique employed when a person was suspected of concealing something, usually drugs or diamonds, in his stomach. The prisoner was force-fed a potent laxative, such as castor oil, then locked in a cell with a large pot, where he would remain for the next two days, voiding everything in his body. Dad’s heart dropped when he heard those dreaded words, and I don’t know what would have happened next had the woman not reached out her arm and started groping around the empty metal desk.

“Are these the papers you’re talking about?” In her hand, as if by magic, were the documents, neatly stacked together just as Dad had them when he had surrendered them to the captain. The desk had a secret compartment. A slight push in the right place and the metal surface tilted down, sliding its contents into a little niche hidden in the wall.

This mechanism was a fail-safe, a pretense for the tamozhniki to detain those who had no real contraband. My father rushed over to the woman. Did you see what he was doing?” Dad caught the dejection on the captain’s face and launched into a full assault. “This is the kind of blatant Soviet criminal behavior that is broadcast all over the Western world. What is your full name? I have reporter friends waiting for me in Vienna—in a few hours your names and your provocative actions will be aired all over the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and the BBC!” That was a lie, of course, since we knew no one beyond the fence.

But it was a lie bolstered by reality. Every night, as it had for fifty years, the Voice of America crackled across Eastern Europe, broadcasting the crimes of the Soviet Union, and every day, human rights groups pressured the regime to end its abuses. The difference was that for the first time, the USSR was listening. A mere year earlier, the tamozhniki still had the power to detain anyone they pleased, for as long as they pleased. They didn’t have to resort to rigged desks and cheap charades of vanishing documents. They could have done whatever they wanted. But in 1989 a strange thing happened, and a shift, long prayed for but never expected, took place.

Earlier in the year, the country was stunned to read that a squad of policemen had been arrested on charges of prisoner abuse. During the summer, state media announced an official investigation into the Red Army Spetsnaz murders of the nineteen Georgian girls slain during the peaceful demonstration in Tbilisi. And on November 9, six weeks before my family stood at the border, a group of East Germans scampered atop the Berlin Wall and tore down the dreaded symbol of Communist power. And the culprits, these timid rodents armed with chisels and sledgehammers, they weren’t shot; they weren’t beaten or imprisoned: they were photographed, and the soldiers on the Wall were ordered to stand down and make way for the cameras.

It worked—somehow, the leaflets scattered on American college campuses, the church petitions signed by midwestern housewives, the letters, the protests, the vigils, the boycotts, the countless irritating stings by countless little nuisances had worked, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the marked Mikhail, took away the Party’s ability to destroy lives on a whim, and by doing so, he had destroyed the Soviet Union, and the old women’s prophesies were fulfilled. The tamozhnya overseer and her soldiers returned upstairs, leaving us with the wilted captain. “I apologize, it must have been some sort of a misunderstanding We’ll have to have that desk fixed,” he mumbled.

He rifled through the paperwork, fished out the pale green exit visas, which were the sole documents permitted to cross with us, and thrust the rest at a dour older subordinate. “Burn these,” he spat, and waved his hand at us. “What are you waiting for? Gather your belongings and go across.” Before anyone—we or the tamozhniki—had a chance to exhale, Yura and Igor sprang into the room from the exit door and began scooping up suitcases and hauling them to Czechoslovak soil. The Zhislins had known us for less than a week.

They could’ve been licking their wounds on the bus they should’ve been licking their wounds on the bus. It would’ve taken a divine act to get me back into that cursed building. I certainly wouldn’t have gone back for them.

Instead, Yura and Igor remained in the hallway during the entire search, chomping at the bit for the chance to help get us out of there, and to this day, the fact that they came back for us remains the bravest, most insane thing anyone has done for me. Something inside gave me strength and I dragged the suitcases as best as I could, trying to keep up with the men.

When I got to the bus, I saw Yura briskly tuck a bag into an undercarriage compartment. The little man looked down and gave me a wink, and it was only later, when we were already safe in Austria, that I found out that in the chaotic aftermath of the search Yura had managed to snatch the one bag that contained our books and Dad’s stamps, petty contraband the tamozhniki meant to retain in Russia.

The examination chamber had no windows, and we had lost all sense of time during the search. It was already past six in the morning, and the first hints of light began to pierce through the fog.

I would have been shocked at how long we had been searched, but my emotions were all tapped out, so I simply noted that it was dawn with an apathetic, almost bemused reaction. A wind gust whooshed by my hands, and I felt they were soaked with sweat. I squatted on the ground, reached down and grabbed a fistful of earth, and it felt good to run the cool, damp soil through my fingers.

I was crouched in the no-man’s-land separating the USSR and Czechoslovakia as two sets of silhouettes milled about in the fog. To my right, on the Soviet side, several tamozhniki were checking the area, making sure the gate was secured. To my left, in Czechoslovakia, was the box-like outline of the bus, with Yura, Dad, and Igor sorting and storing suitcases, trying to clean up the broken pieces of our possessions. I remained where I was, crouched on the ground, waiting until they were finished. The driver turned the key, filling the air with the sickly-sweet smell of cheap gasoline, and we resumed our journey to Bratislava. It was only after I crawled back to my seat next to Dad that I realized just how exhausted I was.

My knees were wooden, and I couldn’t lift a finger, which was fine because I didn’t want to move; I wanted to pass out and not think, or hear, or feel anything. My head felt stuffed to the brim with cotton, and for some strange reason, the story of the Odyssey kept swimming through my mind.

I had read an abridged version of the epic many times, during days spent holed up in the Kharkov apartment, and I remembered how Odysseus spent ten years wandering from sea to sea, wanting so desperately to return to his native soil. I had just crouched on the ground at the very edge of the world that I had known, but I did not miss it, nor did I have another place where I wanted to be, and I remember thinking how Odysseus wanted to go home, and how I wanted to keep going, and debating whether that was a bad thing or not. Dawn chased away the fog, and for a brief moment I caught the last few stars before they were snuffed out by the gray morning sky. * * * Back on the Soviet side of the border, the friends and relatives of our three families heard the coughing of the engine. They had not been allowed to enter the tamozhnya or even approach its territory, so they had spent the entire night huddling on the steppe, listening for the sound of our bus, which was the last communication they would hear from us. There was no shelter, so they took turns in the center of the group, doing their best to ward off the steady, unrelenting chill emanating from the plain.

Six hours had elapsed, and at last they heard the engine, stretched out their frozen limbs, and set off on the hour-long hike to Uzhgorod, the nearest town with a train station. No one spoke.

They knew that a long wait meant trouble with the tamozhniki, but beyond that there was no way of discerning what had transpired or which family had gotten the brunt of it. Once in Uzhgorod, they snagged some clothes on the black market to cheer themselves up and caught the next train back to Kharkov. I’m not sure why the tamozhnya overseer saved us.

Perhaps she was sleepy, or hungover, and did not even realize it when her fingers fumbled through the desk and grasped our documents. Maybe she was moved by the horror on our faces. However, it’s difficult to imagine that the head of a tamozhnya would not be aware of the devilish intricacies of her own building. Likewise, as tempting as it would be to believe in her goodness, the fact remains that the majority of people who attained positions of power in the USSR had long been stripped if not of compassion, then at least of the desire to act upon it. The most plausible explanation is that what transpired at the tamozhnya had nothing to do with us. The entire Soviet society, from rural cooperatives to the red halls of the Kremlin, operated on an intricate system of espionage.

Graduate students spied on professors (Communist Party came before school). Workers kept an eye on the foremen (Party before work). Children, too, were encouraged to participate: every Little Octobrist and Pioneer learned the story of Brave Pavlik Morozov, a young Pioneer from the 1930s whose father was trying to subterfuge Stalin’s cooperative farming programs.

But Brave Pavlik was an exceptional Pioneer, burning with love for Lenin, and he brought his father’s activities to the attention of the Party. Pavlik’s father was promptly sent to the gulag (and eventually executed), and the noble boy became a cult figure and inspiration for generations of Soviet children. * Party before family. Nowhere was this spying more prevalent than in the Party bureaucracy itself. Hungry young cadets, fresh from training and ready to claw their way up the command chain, were recruited by the KGB to report on their superiors. The cadets either found or fabricated evidence of treachery and corruption, and the supervisors were executed or exiled to the gulags, and the cadets became supervisors themselves, and new trainees were sent in to monitor them. This was an old system developed and instituted by Stalin himself, who routinely purged the top ranks of the Party, the Red Army, and the KGB.

The mechanism was designed to sow paranoia and ensure that no one could trust anyone, thereby preventing underlings from colluding against the dictatorship. The tamozhnya overseer must have suspected (whether rightfully or not) the young captain of being out to undermine her. So she decided to embarrass him in front of the same zhidi he was terrorizing.

Ironically, the very factors that we ran from—anger, fear, instability, paranoia—united to push us through our last, awful night in the Soviet Union. In the mid-1990s, after the USSR had fallen apart, my father contacted the newly established Ukrainian Patent Bureau and inquired whether, since the economy was now capitalist, he was entitled to compensation for the dozen patents seized from him by the defunct Soviet government.

The bureau offered him the equivalent of six hundred dollars, but only with the stipulation that he personally fly into Kiev to accept the check. They wanted to make sure they awarded the right person, they explained. The whole thing was a joke, since the cost of the plane ticket was triple that of the reimbursement, and the bureau was well aware of it. Dad’s response was to send them a letter in which he declined their invitation but gave them his expressed written permission to keep the money, provided they shoved it, along with the patents, directly up their asses. The Ukrainian Patent Bureau did not reply, and whether they took Dad up on his offer remains unclear. * “Wanna know the rest of the story?” asked Lina the evening after Anna Konstantinovna told me and my classmates about Pavlik Morozov.

“Well, some of Pavlik’s relatives had escaped the Communists, and later on they found Brave Pavlik Morozov and they slit his brave little throat. Because that’s what happens to brave little boys who inform on their families,” said Lina, and lightly drew a finger across my neck to underscore the moral. DOZENS OF SENTINEL GRANDMAS Czechoslovakia, Late December 1989 The old Soviet bus creaked down the gray outline of a Czechoslovak road. Overhead, dark shades of gray reluctantly yielded to slightly lighter shades of gray. It was the dawn of Christmas Eve. The bus was silent.

The tamozhnya had sucked the energy out of us, as if vitality, like our documents and valuables, was forbidden to cross the border. Now we were truly refugees. Back on Soviet soil we had belonged to a nation, however horrible that nation was, but here, beyond the fence, we were ghosts, drifters, entities with no recognizable destination or attachment.

This awkward freedom of being beholden to nothing save for the mercy of others still lingers in my psyche and, I imagine, in the psyche of many ex-migrants. The terror at the border made saying goodbye to the Soviet Union much easier for my father. Dad was about to turn fifty-two, and he had stockpiled his good moments, good memories—even the USSR couldn’t steal those from him—but the tamozhnya had torched the nostalgia. Mom kept reminding herself that every passing kilometer was taking us farther away from them, the tamozhniki, the anti-Semites, the Communist Party of the USSR. She gazed out at rows of cottages perched on hills lining the road. Colorful garlands of gourds and dried peppers hung from their eaves, and something about the bucolic Slovak countryside made Mom believe that it was possible to establish a life beyond the border.

I only remember that the bus was quiet, very quiet, and that we had distributed a significant portion of our dwindling vodka supply at gas stations and checkpoints along the way. Dusk had fallen by the time our drivers pulled up to the sprawling gray Bratislava train station and killed the engine, which shuddered a few times before coughing up its life. This was as far as the drivers’ permits allowed them to go.

The workers loading crates onto freight trains ignored us; they’d seen Jews pass this way before. A few bored Czechoslovak policemen approached, punched our visas, and ambled away, vodka bottles in hand. Yura, Dad, and Sergei Kantler bought tickets to Austria.

All three men had been told to head for the Westbahnhof rail station in Vienna, but no further information had been provided. People who left the USSR before us had embarked for the Westbahnhof; beyond that, our plans ran out. Before the three drivers began the return trip, the head of the team pulled Dad aside. “Watch out for the Kantlers,” he warned. “Five minutes after they walked into the tamozhnya, a tamozhnik came to the bus and went straight for where we kept the money you paid us. He left us only enough to make it back to Kharkov.

They’ve done this before, at other border posts, but this bastard didn’t even have to search. He went straight for my seat cushion. Now how would he have known that?” Dad nodded. He’d noticed another driver carefully tucking bills into a tiny flap under the seat. (“It keeps my ass warm,” the man told Dad when he saw him stashing the rubles.) The Kantlers’ behavior had been strange from the start.

Sergei had insisted his family go first, and they had waltzed through the examination room in half an hour. Several times before the journey, Sergei and his wife had asked us and the Zhislins what contraband we were packing, and then after the border, they kept to themselves. Maybe they sold us and the drivers out (they wouldn’t have been the first family to do so), or maybe they just felt awkward for no other reason than that they were spared and we were not. Dad’s the only one who spoke with the driver at the Bratislava train station. Yura was in shock for a good couple of days after the border, and doesn’t remember anyone warning him about the Kantlers.

Mom thinks it’s all bullshit and Dad’s imagining things. Either way, the tamozhniki’s ministrations left both Yura’s family and mine shaken and terrorized; the Kantlers, in the meantime, took a nap on the bus.

Whatever the cause, Sergei and his clan barely spoke to us afterward, and we behaved the same toward them. We boarded a standard, decrepit Communist train with two-bench cabins and an aisle running down one side of the car. The cabins’ sliding glass doors made me think of the see-through cages for monkeys and reptiles at the zoo. Strewn inside our enclosure were the suitcases, members of my family interwoven among them. Dad, who up to this point maintained the red-violet luggage in regimented formation, was now too exhausted and temporarily allowed the cases to rest wherever they lay. Evening returned, and the black windowpanes threw our reflections back into the cabin, underscoring the fact that, as of now, all we had were our bags and our bodies.

As we lumbered across the Czechoslovak–Austrian border, a group of customs officers boarded the train. We were jumpy around men in uniform, but the Austrian inspectors were easy: a few quick glances, more stamps on the visas, and we were back to creaking through the darkness. The gloom was finally broken, first by small depots and then by the orange glare of Vienna’s Westbahnhof station. The train stopped, the doors slid open, and we stepped out onto a platform teeming with refugees. Some must have arrived before us. Others apparently had shared our train—we hadn’t even noticed.

Porters dawdled by stairways, announcements buzzed over loudspeakers, and all up and down the concourse Soviet Jews squinted, stretched, and yawned, making the transition from motion to stillness, train to ground, Communism to freedom. This sleepy moment was interrupted by a short, pudgy gentleman with glasses, a round, hoggish face, and a blue blazer.

He strode among us, six or seven assistants in tow, all of whom were consulting paperwork and gazing around the platform as if whatever was written on their papers didn’t quite jibe with what was in front of them. The short man nosed his way through the crowd, then spun around and yelled, in shrill English.

“We need you to rapidly relocate to this side of the station. Do so immediately! Go now!” “What’s he saying? What does he want?” the grumbles began, and even once translated, the message had no effect. “What’s so special about that corner? Where are we going afterward?

Who are these people?” The pudgy man’s eyes darted all over the platform, his lips wordlessly moving. Finally he launched into the speech once more. He had a strong voice for a small man, one that reverberated throughout the concourse; it was imperative to have us in that corner.

We migrated slowly, individuals keeping in families, families gathering by cities, Muscovites here, Leningradians there, and so on. The man weaved in and out of the huddles, once in a while tossing a perfunctory glance at a visa. I misliked the porker at once. When Pig Face came near us, Dad overheard him muttering about terrorists being around the corner and needing to get us out of Vienna immediately. Dad made the mistake of translating the man’s words, and some of the other English speakers must’ve done the same, because a restless murmur churned through the crowd.

It was Christmas Eve, and last-minute shoppers scurried around the platform, juggling parcels and packages in the rush to get home. We gawked at their clothes and strained to catch a peek of what they carried. Many Austrians cast surprised glances back at us, and at some point I realized that as exotic as I found the Westerners, we were the ones who didn’t belong. My family wasn’t alone in racing to beat the December 31 deadline for asylum in America: more trains arrived, disgorging refugees who’d gone through Krakow, Budapest, and Bratislava, and the crowd had swelled to over one hundred people.

Each new batch was greeted by Pig Face’s half-pleading, half-barking “relocate to this side” command. Judging by his exasperated expression, all the man wanted for Christmas was a few Scottish border collies, the ones that can corral sheep on cue. But time and again, despite his feverish prayers, the dogs would fail to materialize and he would sigh and start his speech anew. A tall woman trotted back and forth between the platform and the street-level concourse at ten-minute intervals.

She wore a long brown coat and had a tower of salt-and-pepper hair hovering over her head, and I can still recall the wind playing with her beehive and whipping the exposed ends of the paperwork clutched to her chest. Dad chatted to a group of Armenian Jews encamped nearby, reminiscing about the eateries he’d discovered on a trip to Yerevan five years back.

I watched him, transfixed. Three days earlier he, like the rest of us, had jettisoned his entire life. He was a stranger in a strange land, stranded in an alien train station with no money and few possessions beyond some pots and spare underwear. The station was freezing, the food had run out that morning, his family was nervous, the Armenians were nervous, the Austrian shoppers were nervous, Pig Face was one violent sneeze away from a massive aneurism, and here was Dad, extolling the superiority of Armenian shish kebab over its Georgian, to say nothing of Azerbaijani, counterpart. That’s who Dad was. Bells ringing in Midnight Mass pealed through the city, the flow of shoppers died down, and one final train screeched in. Two hours later the woman with the salt-and-pepper beehive rushed down the platform steps, eagerly chattering to Pig Face.

“There are buses located outside,” he announced. “Load quickly—terrorists are here! Whatever cannot be placed on buses will remain behind. We must leave Vienna now!” In a flash, I focused on the move. Shove, shove, grab everything. Big suitcases and Grandma first. Up the stairs, to the long line of idling buses.

Pick bus, leave suitcases by it, Grandma will watch them. Run back, grab more. Lina and Mom already moving toward Grandma. Dad’s behind me. Shove, drag, move to bus.

Grandma’s sitting on a suitcase and watching everything. Next to her is another grandma. Next to that one are more. Dozens of sentinel grandmas, all guarding suitcases.

Load cases under bus. Count and load, count and load.

Where are the Zhislins? Pillow’s here. Mom, Lina, Grandma, Comrade Bear are here. I don’t know if they had prior intentions of sorting us or taking a census, but any such plans quickly disintegrated in the slapdash race to board. After making sure our bus was full, someone barked something to the driver, who slammed the shift into first gear and rumbled off.

I never got to see the terrorists. The pudgy man wasn’t crazy. Western Europe had been reeling from the deadly onslaught of radical Islamic terrorism long before it reached U.S. What’s more disturbing is that some of the terror strikes were aimed directly at Soviet migrants. In 1973, the Austrian government intercepted three members of Black September, the Palestinian group infamous for the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre, en route to bomb a Vienna hostel that housed Soviet refugees.

Later that year, the as-Sa’iqa sect hijacked a Bratislava–Vienna train (the same corridor my family took) filled with migrants bound for the West: the terrorists’ main demand was for Austria to close its border and refuse asylum to displaced Soviet Jews. And on December 27, 1985, merely four years before my family walked out onto the Westbahnhof platform, the Abu Nidal Organization made international headlines by executing coordinated attacks on El Al Israeli airline passengers in Rome and Vienna airports, which resulted in nineteen fatalities and 138 injuries. Terrorists lurking under train wheels was an exaggeration; the need to evacuate a huge crowd of Soviet Jews milling around an exposed platform was real.

* The bus wound through Vienna proper. It was late on Christmas Eve and the city slumbered under an enchantment. Rows of nutcrackers, puppets, candy, and chocolate beckoned from giant window displays. Christmas trees lit up plazas; garlands of snowflakes, crescents, exquisite ornaments, and intricate tinsel were draped across streets and twined around lampposts. It was bright, festive, varied, nothing like the anemic New Year’s lightbulbs people hung up in Russia. And the roads shocked everyone, too: the smooth pavement and lack of potholes felt like being in a land where people drove on butter. As Vienna faded into the distance, the glimmer of Christmas was replaced by the red-and-white glow of reflector posts that lined the highway.

These also were a surprise to us, after we’d traversed the dark roads of Czechoslovakia and the steppe. The Austrians even splurged on side streets and parking lots. How much light do these people have?

The bus was warm, very warm, with soft seats and classical music on the radio. The music, the warmth, the gentle lilt enveloped us. For the first time since we had set out from Kharkov, we were no longer in control, and, paradoxically, that brought us peace.

We had no choices, we didn’t know when to stop or where to go; we couldn’t even speak the language, but it didn’t matter—we were safe and we were moving, and within a half-hour of leaving Vienna nearly everyone on the bus was fast asleep. When Dad nudged me awake, we were idling in a lot illuminated by powerful spotlights mounted on a large building, the only structure in sight. Several other buses were parked nearby, and the people from the train station were already outside, making tracks in the fresh snow. Now that we were out of the city and confined to buses, the workers appeared calmer, a lot more confident. The pudgy man in the blue blazer carried on a discussion with a short bald man who somehow managed to sweat despite wearing just a thin white shirt and a tie, and no coat. After a few minutes he signaled to his assistants, who fanned out, each going to a bus.

The tall beehive woman in the brown coat approached ours. The driver hopped out, unlatched the storage compartments, began tossing the suitcases onto the snow, and we sprang into action.

It’s amazing how efficient and ingrained the process had already become: Dad and I haul from lot to building, Grandma watches in building, Mom and Lina watch in lot. Go back and repeat, count and haul, count and haul. Dad carried the suitcases whereas I dragged them, and by the time I deposited mine under the wary eye of Grandma he was already on his way to pick up another one. I took a few seconds to regain my breath. People scrambled with their belongings as the short bald man darted around in the snow like a matador dancing with fifty bulls. Rich, velvety darkness concealed the world beyond the lot. I inhaled, and the cold air stung my lungs.

It was crisp, thin, and clean, and I liked it because it woke me up and made me concentrate on the cold instead of my hunger. A throng of migrants laden with bags pushed by, Yura Zhislin and his son, Igor, among them. Igor flashed me a smile though his thick mustache, and I ran to drag another suitcase. Families coalesced around their belongings, each one staking claim to a little piece of the lobby. The tall woman in the brown coat positioned herself by the rear wall, in front of a line of men.

The head of each family presented her with the only documents he had left, the pale green Soviet exit visas. These had several folded pages, which three days ago had been blank but had since broken out in a rash of seals, stamps, and scribbles worthy of an international treaty.

The woman jotted down information on her clipboard, then directed the refugee to the bald man in the thin white shirt, who presided over a box of room keys. Suddenly there was an epidemic of illness and obscure medical conditions as everyone in line angled for the best rooms. Someone had a blind mother; someone else was recovering from abdominal surgery. When our turn came, Dad, who was nervous about asking for handouts, started stammering. The man looked up at him, sharp blue eyes flashing from his flushed face. “Not worry,” he rasped in a thick German accent.

“You—I find rooms. It is okay,” and in a few minutes a young blond woman approached us with two keys. Before hauling anything, Dad and I went upstairs to investigate. The rooms were tiny, comprised of a single bed, a table, and a little closet, with not much floor space left over. “Two whole rooms—two beds—that’s wonderful!” Dad mused. “Lina and Grandma will share a bed, and Mom will get this one, and the two of us—the men,” he winked at me (Dad was extremely proud of my help with the suitcases), “we’ll figure something out.

If we get any food, we’ll use the balconies for storage; in this weather, they’re as good as fridges. Agreed?” I was gawking at the floor. I was exhausted and starving, but still, I grew up on linoleum and didn’t even know fully carpeted rooms existed outside of the Arabian Nights. “Agreed?” Dad repeated to snap me out of the shag-induced trance. “Agreed!” I nodded, trying to sound as manly as possible, and we hurried downstairs to give the ladies the good news. Once everything was heaped onto the floor you couldn’t see much of the carpet. Mom and I reclined on the bed and watched Dad play with the suitcases.

Mom suggested we wait until morning and I couldn’t have agreed more, but Dad persisted and would’ve probably arranged everything if not for the young blond woman, who handed him a napkin with a number smudged on it and waved for us to come downstairs. There we joined the tail end of a line that snaked into a cafeteria. At the far end was a table with coffee, tea, and small brown rolls with dabs of butter on them. Each person received one cup and one crispy, hot roll.

I forced myself to nibble at mine, because I remembered reading in one of my books that you shouldn’t eat quickly when you’re starving. Afterward, Dad gingerly folded the napkin and tucked it in his pocket. Others were already wrapping their rolls in pieces of newspaper, fudging the numbers written on the napkins, and getting back in line to try to sneak out another one. Quietly, effortlessly, life stripped to a bare hierarchy of needs. Not sure when there’ll be more.

Better change the number, get back in line, try to get more. Eat a little, save the rest. Save, save, save. Like a squirrel.

* * * I woke to the sound of the adults rummaging through suitcases for toothbrushes, towels, and soap. Lina stopped by to say hi and was off to find the bathroom. Russians were everywhere, milling around the hallways, yelling up and down the stairwells, lounging on couches in the lobby. I tagged along after Dad, who went downstairs to the cafeteria, following the aroma of warm bread and fresh coffee. I grabbed juice, Dad got coffee, and we walked outside, where the tracks from the night’s bustle were dusted over by a fresh coat of snow.

We were standing atop a hill, next to a road, the only road in sight. Down the slope to the left was a tiny village, so small one could easily walk to the farthest house.

To our right, the road meandered through snowy fields, losing itself in a patch of forest on the horizon. A wavy line of small blue-gray mountains rested against the bright winter sky. The only mountains I’d ever seen were two grim black monoliths that rose from the Black Sea in Crimea. These looked different, clean and beautiful, and I instantly loved them. Behind Dad and me stood the white flat-roofed building, four stories of identical windows ringed by black balconies.

More Russians stomped around the lot, smoking the remnants of old Soviet cigarettes. Three rows of black letters over the entrance spelled out “Hotel Restaurant Binder.” “What’s that mean, Dad?” “Well, the first two are clear: there’s a hotel and a restaurant here, but I’m not sure about the binder Lina!” he shouted to my sister, who poked her head out from the second-floor balcony. “What’s a binder?” “Bin-der? I Binder!” The short bald man who’d been handing out room keys earlier scampered outside. “ I Binder,” he repeated. “Hotel,” he gestured toward the upstairs floors; “Restaurant,” he moved down to the lobby; “Binder!” he ended with a flourish that clearly indicated he saved the best for last. “Inside food.

Come.” While we munched on ham sandwiches and fruit salad, Binder gathered the forty heads of the newly arrived families in a circle inside the hotel’s meeting hall. Waiting to address them was the pudgy man from the train station.

He was seated next to a thick stack of forms, still wore the same rumpled navy blazer, and looked as tired as the migrants. “Dear gentlemen, ex-citizens of the USSR, you are currently located in the town of Nondorf, which is two hours to the northwest of Vienna. My name is Oswald Prager, and I shall be the liaison person between you, Joint—which is the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—and HIAS, which is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Joint and HIAS are American-Jewish organizations. Joint will be providing sustenance for you while you are stationed in Austria and Italy, and HIAS will be overseeing your resettlement process.” Mr.

Prager spoke in broken English, every so often reverting to German. Although none of the refugees knew regular German, some were fluent in Yiddish, an Eastern European Jewish dialect roughly equivalent to medieval German. Yiddish had been spoken in yeshivas and shtetls before Communism made such things obsolete.

Afterward it was secretly passed down from father to son, and while diligent persecution greatly diminished its number of speakers, the language had survived among the older generation. The conversation with Mr. Prager was choppy: he’d utter a few sentences, the English and Yiddish speakers would translate, a short discourse over the meaning would ensue, and Mr. Prager would continue. “I require you to take these forms. Please fill them out today because tomorrow morning, at six o’clock, there will be buses waiting to convey you and your families to the Israeli embassy in Vienna. Please understand that each of you was permitted to leave the Soviet Union and enter Austria at the request of the Israeli government.

As of right now, each of your visas designates Israel as your final destination. Those who desire to be admitted to a country other than Israel will have to first approach the Israeli embassy and officially refuse its offer of asylum. That shall be step number one.” Mr.

Prager didn’t need to address what would happen to families who actually wanted to go to Israel. Those had already been pulled aside and put on a plane to Tel Aviv. “Following that, the buses shall convey you to the Australian, Canadian, and American embassies. You will go to the embassy of the country you would desire to emigrate to and apply for political asylum. HIAS representatives will assist you with communication and paperwork. That will be step number two.” Questions erupted, just as at the train station. Russians are notorious fretters, and for good reason: they’ve been conditioned by their past to worry about the future.

“How long will we be here? How will we eat? Will we get any spending money? Will America take us?

How do you know for sure?” “Live, you will live here,” Mr. Prager ticked off the answers.

“Your next transfer point shall be Rome, where you will receive linguistic, financial, and cultural training from HIAS and Joint. Due to such a large spike in refugees, there is currently no room in Rome, and so you will remain here until space clears up or more space is created.

I do not know when that will happen. In the meantime, please know that while you are in Austria, you are not permitted to work or to travel anywhere outside a fifteen-kilometer radius of where you’re staying. Food, you shall receive twice a day. Additionally, everyone in your family shall receive a stipend of two and a half schillings per day.” “Only two schillings? People before us got ten!” A family friend stationed in Vienna just six months prior to us even stocked up enough money to buy a fur coat or so he averred in a postcard mailed from Naples. The postcard gingerly made the rounds of Kharkov’s Jewish communities, and the fur coat dominated the talk of the neighborhood for a week. Prager spread his hands.

“That was before the numbers of refugees went up. We no longer have the budget for ten a person.

Dear gentlemen, I apologize, but I must do several more stops. Please fill the forms and be ready at six.” The questions only got louder. “But how long before we go to America?” “You will stay until the appropriate agencies make the decision about your refugee status.” “What agencies?” “The agencies whose job it is to make the decision will be deciding.” And on that philosophical note, Mr. Prager buttoned up his jacket, excused himself, and left. Later, much later, experience taught me that Mr. Prager and the other human rights workers we encountered weren’t being facetious; they weren’t lying or being evasive about dates, estimates, and explanations.

They were in the refugee business, an occupation whose very nature was defined and governed by chaos. And the small percentage of those who didn’t burn out or succumb to cynicism had been forced to learn to, as the adage goes, accept what they couldn’t change and concentrate on what they could. What more could we have asked from them? But ask we did. We asked and we griped and we grumbled, and every fielded question spawned several more. Human nature, I guess.

As promised, the buses were waiting at six the next morning, and as promised, the first stop was the Israeli embassy in Vienna, and it was awkward. The Israeli clerks were well aware that we did not want to go to Israel, but they still extended the offer. “Israel is where Jews belong. Why live in crammed rooms in Austria and Italy? You could be in Israel in two days! We’ll find you a place.” Everyone rattled off their excuses: we couldn’t deal with the hot climate, we’ve already started learning English, we had a friend in America who promised to get us a job, etcetera, etcetera, but valid or not, an ungrateful undertone seeped into the reasoning.

Israel was a country bleeding on the front lines in the battle for Jewish rights, a nation without whose efforts we wouldn’t have been able to leave Russia, yet there we stood, beggars choosing, telling Israel “Thanks, but no thanks.” Then it was our turn. “We considered this extensively, and we want to go to America,” my father avowed. “Aren’t you Jews?” prodded the young official. Dad grew irritated. “Yes, we are Jews, and believe me, the Soviet government made sure that we were aware of that.

Still, we would really prefer to go to America.” “Sign your denial here.” Once everyone endorsed the denials, Mr. Prager marched the group to the U.S. Embassy, where he handed us over to his colleagues in HIAS. Prager instructed us to meet him by the buses at five, and amicably recommended that we enjoy Vienna’s downtown after the diplomats were finished with us. An imposing array of clerks and tables waited inside the embassy, but we did little talking; HIAS representatives shepherded each family around the room.

Although the U.S. Government was familiar with the plight of Soviet Jewry, applicants still had to chronicle the specific abuses suffered under the Soviet regime in order to qualify for political asylum. HIAS knew the majority of families did not speak English; they also recognized that some were too proud to ask for help, and that others were not prepared to disclose humiliation and pain to complete strangers. This reticence could easily lead to trouble, since all an impatient clerk had to do was scribble “no evidence for asylum provided” and the shy family would be denied. HIAS workers hovered over us, acting as envoys between the two worlds, clarifying, encouraging, and ensuring that everyone got an opportunity to present their case to America.

My family was fortunate to be processed early, which left us plenty of time to heed Mr. Prager’s suggestion and explore the heart of Vienna. Pillars and fountains decorated each wayward street and every plaza.

Around one corner, we ran smack into a gorgeous imperial palace with seafoam-green domes and incredible statues, and Dad had to drag me away because I wanted to examine each one. In the center of it all rose the majestic St. Stephen’s Cathedral, an enormous Gothic monolith whose spires soared over the downtown. The shops around the cathedral were overwhelming. Christmas was over, but the holiday spirit had not left the city. We saw bright decorations, shoppers with bags, and window displays brimming with everything.

To people accustomed to waiting in lines and trying to predict which common staple would be the next to vanish from the shelves, this was another planet, a cornucopia, albeit with a hefty price tag. Someone quickly dubbed the area Millionaire Street, because from our perspective, anyone who could afford to shop there must surely be a millionaire. But then Lina and Mom stumbled upon an alley shoe store with winter boots on post-holiday clearance. My sister began to woo Mom, and shortly thereafter, a very happy Lina strutted down the cobblestones with a package of boots under her arms. She was trailed by my less-than-enthused father, who was shooting Mom dirty stares. Five minutes later we ran into the Zhislins, Vicki spied the package, and five minutes after that our party had doubled to two pairs of boots, two grinning twenty-year-olds, and two sets of accusing stares. Oswald Prager was leaning against a pillar across from St.

Stephen’s Cathedral, squinting at the spires and sipping on a Vienna iced coffee—cold coffee with no ice and a dollop of ice cream floating on top. It was an unseasonably warm day, and my family and the Zhislins joined him in the afternoon sun. “Why were those people in the Israeli embassy so not nice?” Vicki asked the Joint worker. “Nobody likes ‘no,’ ” he answered. “Besides, Israel requires men. There are many people, even in America, who want to get Jews out of Russia so they can make Israel become stronger.

Some of those people apply pressure on Joint and HIAS because they think that you should have to go to Israel.” “And what do you think?” Dad inquired. “I do not think much on that,” Mr. Prager admitted.

“Two more trains of refugees came last night. More trains will be tonight. American Congress just voted to continue accepting Jews in the next year. When Soviet Jews hear about this, more will come, and more. I will meet them, and work with them, find food and place.

That is what I think. But if you ask me personally, if you desire to go to America, and if America desires to take you, there is no problem.” “Yes, yes, I agree!” Yura jumped in. “And if all those concerned Jews in America want people to go to Israel so much, they can always move there themselves. You’re good at this.” He gestured at the paperwork tucked under Mr. Prager’s arm. “Maybe you can help those nice American Jews move to Israel.” “That is an interesting idea,” yawned Mr.

Prager, and a tired smile crossed his fleshy face. * Why were Palestinian terror groups expending men and resources to target homeless migrant families in Austria? Well, if ten Soviet Jews moved to Israel, Israel gained ten soldiers, ten workers, ten more oppressors and occupiers, as the jihadists saw it. And in 1989, the Soviet Union didn’t just have ten Jews—it had 1.4 million. We weren’t homeless families; we were an army waiting to be unleashed.

And, as we found out, the terrorists weren’t the only ones who saw us that way.

• 'Purging of the Wicked' Released: June 20, 2008 Professional ratings Review scores Source Rating (positive) At Daggers Drawn is the debut album of American band, released on April 29, 2008, through Sumerian Records. The title of the album comes from the band's old name, before breaking up, regrouping, and changing labels.

Track listing [ ] No. Title Length 1. 'The First Eulogy' 0:51 2. 'Purging of the Wicked' 4:42 3. 'Unleash the Serpents' 3:34 4.

'Endless Cycle of Torture' 3:26 5. 'Eyes of the Ranger' 3:57 6. 'On the Wings of Pegasus' 4:12 7. 'Raise the Banner' 3:03 8. 'Interlude' 1:43 9.

'Back to the Surface' 4:28 10. 'And the Angels were Silent' 5:05 11. 'I Never was a White Picket Fence Sorta Guy' 4:23 12.

'Their Own Hell' 3:13 Total length: 42:36 Personnel [ ] Sea of Treachery • Alex Huffman - • Jonas Ladekjaer -,,, • Cory Knight - • Jon Wells -, • Tommy Dalhover -, Additional musicians • Mike Dalhover -,, • Cory Baker - • Corey Howell -, • Joey Sturgis -,,, • Qbert R. Seiter -,, References [ ].