Water does not appear under the stone
that lies down.
Russian proverb.


Sometimes, when I take look at my parents, and think about what brought them into the United States, I'm smiling and thinking, maybe it is a dream. My parents grew up in a "healthy environment" in the Soviet Union, and could not even dream about the "other side of the Earth". They were sure that they lived in the best country in the world, and taught me and my brother the same way. Our parents were working hard and never thought that their life was terrible or that they wanted to change anything. The Soviet Union was a unique country, where people lived behind the "iron curtain" and didn't know anything about other countries. Of course, we learned geography, literature, the history of the world, but all the information about the life abroad was dosed in the exact amount the ruling Communist Party deemed sufficient for the Soviet society.
The idea of emigration was born in the head of one young guy, with whom my brother and I were friends. That guy was telling us about America, about the freedom and thousands of opportunities that this country gives to people. His stories were like fairy tales to us. He believed in that imaginary heaven like many previous generations of immigrants, people who never saw the U.S. before, but wanted to see it and dreamed about it.
I really thought our friend was crazy. All we knew about the United States at that time was from our mass media and schoolbooks that taught us that "there is capitalism, racism and unemployment in the U.S., and there are lots of people living on the streets because they don't have a place to live." Certainly, this information was also true, and as I know now there has always been a gap in America between the rich and the poor, between the dark and the light side of life. At that time, I didn't know [and didn't want to know] about the life of our "class enemies" and believed that life in America was still like Jacob Riis described it in the 1890s, one hundred years earlier: "The hall is dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there… All the fresh air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall door and it is forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms that in turn receive from the stairs their sole supply of elements God mean to be free, but man deals out with such niggardly hand".
I think, in the Soviet Union only a crazy one could believe that America was a nice place to live.
All our talks would be only talks, if that guy hadn't fled from the Soviet Union and left his dream about America as a heritage to me. He wished to be in America, but his application was denied, and very soon he moved illegally to the Western Europe. The end of the 1980s was unstable in USSR, and even the fact that government tried the carrot-and-stick approach by linking favorable trading [and emigration] privileges for the USSR, it was very difficult to get a chance to move to the United States .
My friend fled in July 1991, and a month after that the Soviet Union, the supposedly "inviolable power" collapsed. A huge, powerful country collapsed and disintegrated into its pieces, and Uzbekistan, where we lived, split off from the former Soviet Union into independence. Destruction is a fast and easy process, but if you want to build something, it takes time, money and human resources. Extremely quickly, Uzbekistan became poor and messy. The standard of living went down and down, and I realized that here I couldn't be sure not only about my whole future life, but even about tomorrow. It was a scary time: different political and religious Muslim parties were created, and regular people were drawn into their whirlpool. One day, a bomb explosion destroyed a few buildings in the center of our city, some people died and some lost their property. The mass media and news channels didn't say anything about it, but people knew that in some regions of the country there were spontaneous revolts of different Muslim parties, and many people were involved in their fights and went to jail. Sometimes, I caught myself thinking that everything that was going on around was a nightmare, and the coming morning would bring relief. I asked myself: "Is this the beginning or the end of the 20th century? What the hell is going on here?!" We used to think that history is something that happened long ago, but those days showed me that history was our everyday life, too.
Day by day, my thoughts were turning back to my dream, but I didn't have any idea what steps to take to make my dream come true.
A year later, I got married, and my family life was like a rat race for survival. The situation in our country worsened. Magically, sugar and soap disappeared from the store shelves. Then, meat, cotton oil, matches; flour and macaroni products also became rare. We could buy meat, milk and dairy products only on the market from private sellers, but the prices were so high, that we would spend all our money for food. The government made special coupons, to help people to get some minimum food for reasonable prices. People received those coupons with their salary, if they were working in city jobs, or if they received a pension. All the others didn't have the right to buy anything in the stores without those coupons. Even with coupons, you could buy only 800 grams of sugar, 1 kilogram of meat, 2 kilograms of macaroni, 800 grams of cotton oil and one soap bar per person per month. I remember a joke from that time, when the head of the family asked the guests if they washed their hands with soap. When they said "yes," he went on "well, then you will get your tea without sugar." The amount of food was limited, so there were huge lines in stores during working hours.
I see one of the key causes of this worsening of our standard of living as the breaking of economic ties that followed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Every region in this country depended on others. Uzbekistan was a great cotton-producing country. All the arable land was used to grow cotton, and the food processing industry was not developed. So, many people left for Russia, Ukraine and other former "sister republics" for a seasonal job.
When I think about the turning point, when I decided for sure that I would live in America, even if it would take my life, I remember one specific day. My husband worked for a small business, but didn't get paid for six months in a row. I was babysitting my children and received a little amount of money as public assistance for the kids. It was a day on which I didn't have any food at home, and in my pocket there was my last money with which I needed to buy some milk. I took my kids, the two-and-a- half-year old one and the seven month old baby, and went to the market. On the way back, my sons started crying, because they wanted to eat and I rushed home to feed them. The carriage with the baby got stuck in the building entrance, I tried to take it out, but it was heavy, I was exhausted and at this moment I dropped a glass bottle with milk on the floor. The first seconds I could not even understand what had happened, but when I realized the awful situation, I began to cry together with my children. I was sitting on the dirty, wet floor, on the spilled milk and broken glass and could not stop crying, and could not find the words to explain to my children that I didn't have any food to give them. Nothing. Thank God we had good neighbors, who came out upon the sound of the crying, helped me to get inside, and brought some food to feed my children and me. When, a few years later, I was reproached by people living in Russia, that I had sold my homeland for an American sausage, I didn't know what to say. How to explain the mother's feelings, when her children are hungry, when they look upon a banana or yogurt as upon things from another planet, because they have never tasted it? I decided to find a way to move, because every day was worse than the previous one, because inflation was growing, because we never had enough money even for food, no telling about clothing, because we didn't have any hope of a better life and didn't have a future there.
The way to America was long. I shared my idea about immigration with family and made all of the people around me mad. People, raised in the former Soviet Union still believed in the ideals of the vanished country and didn't want to work towards changes. The first in my family to receive an invitation was the grandmother of my husband. She got it from her granddaughter. Grandma was eighty-nine at that time and didn't want to move anywhere, but she made a wise decision when she agreed to go. She opened the way for the rest of the family. My mother in law, my husband's brother, our family, my parents, my aunt, and my brother with his family – all of us immigrated here one by one. Such a "chain migration" became possible due to the 1965 Immigration Act that allows non-quota immigration for the reuniting of families. It means that a new immigrant after obtaining the U.S. citizenship can invite and sponsor the other relatives.
I was so excited, so happy to come here. My dream came true, I'm in America, my children will grow up here, in a free country, no one will call them "smelly Jews," and they will never be hungry again. I could not believe that I had done it. I was almost crying, when after eighteen flying hours our airplane finally landed in JFK airport. Upon arrival we spent about two hours for all official procedures, and when we got out to the street, I was terrified by how humid and heavy the air was. "Oh, my God," I said to myself, "how to live here??… But we will learn. There is no way back." The striking feeling of unreality overwhelmed me; everything was like in a gigantic panoramic movie with me in the center. I tell you, really, the skyline was gorgeous. It was beautiful. But then, of course, it was just a little bit scary – we were so new and strange, and never been away from home.
All our documents for immigration were prepared before our arrival: medical check up, all permissions and papers, we brought them all in a sealed envelope, which we didn't have the right to open. Of course, nowadays the procedure of entering the country is different from what immigrants experienced on the Ellis Island. It takes much less time now than before. But in a way the procedure remained the same: the officers were nice and understanding, the interpreters were available, and the health condition criteria for the people entering the United States are being kept.
I had begun to study English back in Uzbekistan. I studied spelling, grammar; I tried to memorize us much as possible. We didn't have money to pay for a private English teacher or take any classes, and when we came to America, the language barrier became the main problem. After the euphoria of the first days, I realized that I felt unhappy again: I was scared to go out by myself, I didn't like that everything was strange and different to me here, and I felt completely dumb, because I didn't understand anything that people said. If I needed to say anything, it was slow, hard, barely possible. When someone was saying anything to me, I was helpless, I heard the sounds of speech, but didn't recognize the words.
The city officials try to help us in different ways – they print forms and applications in Russian, provide an interpreter for visiting various institutions. Nevertheless, it does not waive the necessity for us to learn English.
I was lucky, and I won the lottery and got the right to study English in the Riverside Language Program. This is an excellent program with a unique method that gives amazing results. They "opened ears and untied tongues" even for those who didn't know English at all. I enjoyed being there.
The second thing I was unhappy about was the fact that I didn't have a profession that would be accepted here (I was a kindergarten teacher back in Uzbekistan), I didn't have job and didn't have an apartment to live. Two weeks after our arrival, my husband fell down into the store basement, where he'd gone to work for the first day, and broke his leg. I needed to find some job quickly.
We had rented an apartment a month after arriving, but my first job that I got there was hard and almost useless. I was working with gold at a "jewelry plant," as they called it. The owner was a Russian speaking Jew and all the workers there were illegal immigrants. I worked there for a week, and at the end of the week received sixty dollars salary, that owner didn't want to pay me. He told me that I had to work there at least for a month, and two weeks' salary would be a deposit. I didn't understand, what does deposit means, but I knew for sure that I was a legal resident and I had the right not to do this job, if I didn't like it, and if I did some work, this work had to be paid for. Only after I said that I was going to complain to the social security office about everything that was going on there I got my money and he let me go.
I was very upset about whole this situation. I understood, that all those people who were working for the owner didn't have any other chance to make their living. They were illegal immigrants and could not do or even say anything against the employer. They didn't have any rights and in most of the places, if they asked for a job, situation would be the same. They were not first and they were not last, who got stuck in this kind of situation. I didn't want to work with Russian Jews any more, people told me they were not honest with workers, and I learned it from my personal experience.
I realized that I needed the language, I needed a new job in an American company, and I needed an American education. These were three main goals that I set for myself.
I applied for a job at JCPenney department store, and I got this job. Working in the store was not easy for me at the beginning, because I still had problems with communication. My manager was patient with me, and explained the same things many times, until I got it. I used this work to practice English as much as possible, and I saw the progress. My husband changed jobs, but could not find what he wanted. Language problems were a little bit different for him: his comprehension was better than mine, but he almost could not speak. Our children went to school, received ESL program and very soon began to laugh when they heard how their father or I spoke English. The children's Russian language development stopped, they didn't want to speak or learn how to read and write in Russian. Thank God that we have a whole bunch of grandmothers who don't speak English and the children are forced to speak Russian with them, even if they don't want to. I hope they will save the language.
The Russian Jewish community is strong in our neighborhood, and home traditions in food or holidays that we used to celebrate in our motherland are still alive. Every Friday our family got together for evening to celebrate Sabbath, as we used to do it in Uzbekistan. These words fit us as well, we cooked traditional food – rice, chicken, vegetables, eggs, salads, lit candles and enjoyed our communication. We also accepted some American traditions and holidays: we make costumes for Halloween, and have fun trick- or-treating together with the children. We celebrate Thanksgiving Day, and on this day all our family gets together like for someone's birthday, and my mother always says, "God bless America, and its people. We did nothing for this country, but the country gave us a lot." I agree with her. We miss our country, the land where we were born, even my children miss it. Our roots were deep, but we made a step and changed our life. I can't say what it was: uprooting or transplanting? For me and my children – transplanting, because we feel that our home is here now. But my parents, grandma, and my aunt – all the people of the older generation feel lonely here. I wish, one day, I will have enough money to buy them tickets, and they will see their homeland again. I hope, when they fly back to America, they would feel, that they are coming HOME.