Two Suitcases and the American Dream |
Thirty-four years ago, I stood in the Moscow airport with my parents and two suitcases.
Just a few months earlier, the Soviet Union had collapsed. The country we were leaving was already disappearing, and the system that had shaped our lives was coming to an end.
We had been granted political asylum in the United States and given permission to leave.
I was seventeen. It was my first time going to America and only the second time I had ever been on an airplane.
Leaving was not simply boarding a plane. Before we departed, we were searched thoroughly, almost stripped of everything but the clothes we wore. It was a final reminder from the system we were leaving behind.
Months earlier, in August 1991, my parents had made the decision that would change the course of our lives.
They would leave and start over in a country they had never seen.
My parents were in their early forties. With two children, they packed what little we could carry, closed the door on the life they had built, and stepped into uncertainty.
I often ask them how they did it.
How they walked through that airport, boarded the plane, and chose the unknown.
Fear must have been enormous.
But hope for their children was greater.
On March 14, we arrived in America with two suitcases each.
I still remember the small details from those first days with unusual clarity.
The taste of Coca-Cola.
The drive through Stamford and the perfectly manicured highways that seemed impossibly orderly to someone who had grown up in a very different system.
And then reality began.
I walked into my first American classroom very much an FOB. My English was limited, and every conversation felt like a puzzle I was solving in real time.
While going to school and learning English, I took two jobs. One of them was at a Hilton hotel. That is where I learned what an English muffin was, how to order food in a restaurant, and how to load a commercial dishwasher.
With my first paycheck, I bought a jean jacket and a pair of rollerblades.
They remind me what the American Dream actually looked like in the beginning.
Two jobs. Learning English. A dishwasher. Small victories that slowly turned into a life.
There is another detail about that March that only became meaningful later.
When we arrived, it was Purim.
It was the first Jewish holiday I truly learned about. In the Soviet Union, being Jewish was not something you practiced. Religion was suppressed. Jewish identity existed mostly as a line in official documents identifying your nationality. If that line said “Jew,” everyone understood what it meant. Certain universities, careers, and opportunities quietly became harder to reach.
In America, I began to understand something different.
Being Jewish was not just a category in a passport.
Purim tells the story of Queen Esther, who hid her identity until the moment she revealed it to save her people.
Years later, when my daughter was born, we named her Esther Aviva.
Esther for the courage of the Purim heroine, and for my grandmother who defied the odds. Aviva means spring in Hebrew, a reminder that renewal follows even the hardest winters.
In that name, those threads come together.
Memory. Courage. Survival. Renewal.
Today, as antisemitism rises again and synagogues are attacked, I find myself thinking back to that journey.
As someone whose family once had to leave their country because we were Jewish, I hope deeply that this moment is only a painful anomaly and not something darker.
Because I know what it means when Jews must leave their homes.
And I also know what it means when a country opens its doors.
America did that for my family.
And I remain deeply grateful.
Grateful to my parents, who in their early forties, packed two suitcases, took their children, and chose courage over fear.
Grateful to the family who hosted us when we arrived.
Grateful to the students at Stamford High School who helped teach a seventeen-year-old immigrant what it meant to be American and encouraged me to believe that my dreams were possible.
I still remember Ms. Gibson from my American history class. I am not entirely sure how I ended up in an AP class with my broken English, but it was there that I first began learning about the American experiment.
But for someone who grew up inside a closed system like the Soviet Union, it was extraordinary.
Here, people argue. They debate. They criticize their leaders openly.
But the system ultimately rests on something powerful. Merit, hard work, and the belief that your future is not predetermined.
Which is why it is hard for me to watch Marxist and collectivist ideas entertained today, even in my beloved New York.
For those of us who lived under them, they are not ideas.
Thirty-four years ago, we arrived in America with two suitcases and hope.
And I still believe this country, imperfect as it is, remains one of the best places in the world to turn that hope into a life.