“Well, I’m leaving! You can stay, but I’m taking the kid and I’m leaving, with or without you,” exclaimed Ernestina Kagan to her husband of 8 years, Savva, across the small apartment in Minsk. Savva sighed deeply and agreed to go with his wife to the United States, leaving behind his family, his friends, and everything he had known for his entire life to travel halfway across the world.
It was 1989 and Jews were fleeing
the Soviet Union in droves. Between 1968, when the border was opened to let a
limited number of Jews reunite with their families in Israel, and 1989, when
Mikhail Gorbachev opened the borders for all Jews to ex-patriate, the “Soviet
Jewry Exodus,” as it is commonly known, saw between 140,000 and 400,000 Jews
leave the Soviet Union seeking a better life abroad. Since the early days of Communist
rule, antisemitism was prevalent. So much so that Jews were marked as outsiders
through their passport.
“We didn’t have driver’s licenses
like you do in the United States,” Tina Kagan, as she is now known, told me.
“All we had was our passports as our identification.”[1]
On those passports was a section, commonly
known as “Paragraph Five.” Soviet passports were much more complicated than
American passports. The first paragraph was your name. The second, the names of
your parents. Paragraph Five was where your nationality was listed. Jews were
not listed as Soviet citizens. Paragraph Five listed their nationality as
“Jewish.” This marked them as outsiders among the Soviet population.
“As Jews, we were limited in the
kinds of jobs we could take,” Tina told me. “There wasn’t much choice in what
we could do, where we could go, and how we would earn money. I wanted to be an
astronomer, but that job wasn’t open to Jews. I had to become an engineer.”
Suffering from extreme antisemitism
in the Soviet Union was a near daily occurrence.
“They would abuse us. Not physically
but mentally and often that was just enough,” she recounted.
“In school, I was bullied and
treated like garbage. They would glare at me and push me around. I knew I was
an outsider every day I went to school,” said Tina’s son, Vadim.[2]
Jews were treated as third class
citizens and often feared pogroms against them.[3]
They were restricted in what occupations they could hold, what kind of
assistance they got from the Soviet regime, and often left to the struggles of
being poor in a country that never seemed to care about them
Tina said, “Homeless people wore
better clothes than we did. We would spend 6 salaries to buy a winter coat that
had to last us 20 years. But the homeless were walking around in fancy shirts
and name brand pants. I would think to myself, ‘Well hey, why am I being
treated less than someone who is homeless?”
Food was scarce in the Soviet
Union, a direct result of corruption in the government. Citizens, both Jews and
non-Jews alike were being starved. Even though they had state-sponsored
apartments and an income, they still were not able to make the most of their
situation. Times were hard.
And yet, Jews were still allowed to
ex-patriate on the grounds that they had a homeland outside of Russia, or to be
reunited with family that was no longer within the motherland’s borders.[4]
Through word of mouth and an incredible underground support network, Jews who
left the Soviet Union were handed names on a sheet of paper that they would
take with them to their new homeland and give those names to the organizations
that helped them escape, in hopes that one or more of them would later get the
phone call that they were being permitted to leave and resettle.
A Jewish non-profit, the Hebrew
Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), founded in 1881 as a response to a mass migration
of Jews out of Imperial Russia, began as an organization dedicated to helping
the fleeing Jews resettle in other countries, namely the United States.[5]
Broadening their original mission just after the first world war, they helped
Jews all over Europe and Asia escape totalitarian regimes and immigrate
primarily to the United States, by way of Ellis Island. HIAS would provide
financial support, language education, and assist these Jews with the
immigration process. In 1961, working with the American Joint Distribution
Committee (JDC), and the Council of Jewish Federations and welfare, their
attention fell back on the suffering Jews of the Soviet Union. Offering
financial assistance and support as they immigrated, HIAS, the JDC, and the
Jewish Federation, offered these Jews a choice to immigrate to Israel, or the
United States.[6]
HAIS worked with the newly founded
State of Israel to bring the Soviet Jewry to Israel, as part of the declaration
of a Jewish homeland. But word-of-mouth travelled fast in the Soviet Jewish
population, and they found out that the Jews who were leaving in the early days
of the exodus were not all leaving for Israel. Some were headed to the United
States. Known as “dropouts,” these Jews would arrive at the Israeli consulate
in Vienna, Austria, and be asked if they wanted to go to Israel or the United
States. By 1989, over 90% of the Jews who fled the U.S.S.R were “dropping out.”
Due to war, terrorism, a hostile Rabbinate, and fears of living under a
socialist government, not all that different from the one they were fleeing,
may Jews saw better economic and religious opportunity in the United States.[7]
But transferring Jews from the
Soviet Union to the United States was no easy task for the governments involved.
Fearing that Austria would become tired of having destitute Jewish citizens in
their country and close the border to any further Jewish immigrants, Israel and
its Liaison Bureau organized an effort to transfer immigrating Jews to a town
just south of Rome called Ladispoli, where they could apply for American visas at
the American Embassy in Rome and wait for several months for the overly
backlogged United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to
approve their asylum visas.[8]
In mid- 1989, Tina got that phone
call.
She, her husband of 9 years, Savva,
now known as Sam, and their 6-year-old son, Vadim began the arduous process of
ex-patriating from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union did not make
ex-patriating easy for Jews. They demanded that Jews pay back the money spent
on educating them as a deterrent, known as “The Ransom Tax,” which was codified
into law in 1972.[9]
“It was six month’s salary, and we
didn’t have that on hand. We didn’t have any savings at all, we were so poor,
so we borrowed from friends, family, anyone we knew, to get the money together
to apply to leave,” she said.
In addition to demanding exorbitant
sums of money, the Soviet Union also took their passports and labeled them
“traitors of the motherland,”[10]
which opened them up to further abuse through the antisemitism that had been
rampant in Russia since it’s imperial days.
In 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev was
elected to power in Russia. Flabbergasted by the amount of corruption in the
government, and pressured to help his citizens out of starvation, Gorbachev
initiated two pivotal policies that would eventually lead to the fall of
Communism in Russia: Perestroika, “restructuring” in Russian, a policy that was
meant to restructure the government to end the corruption, and Glasnost,
“openness” in Russian, which was a policy of opening previously censored media
to the Russian people.[11]
Glasnost would end up backfiring because, once Russians became able to access
outside media, they became aware of the massive corruption in their government
that had kept them starving and destitute. No longer was the glory of Communism
a twinkle in the eyes of the Russian people. Now they were going to overturn
their government.
Gorbachev would later say, “I
believe that Perestroika started at a time when it was necessary, and when the
country was ripe for Perestroika. Not only objective conditions were in place,
but also the subjective conditions were in place for Perestroika. Perestroika
could not have started because of the initiative from below. It could not have
started outside the Party system.”[12]
In August of 1989, the Kagan family
left for their new opportunities. Their journey would take them from their home
in Minsk, Belarus, to Vienna by train. Trains were crowded, described by Vadim
as being like cattle cars, crammed with departing Jews who were routinely
abused by the guards. Others, such as Vilena Zaliznyak, along with her husband
Grisha, also known as Greg, and their 6-year-old son, also named Vadim,
travelled by bus from Kiev, Ukraine, to Vienna, paid for by the Jews who were
leaving.
“We were originally going to go to
Israel,” Vilena said, wistfully. “My parents immigrated to Israel in 1972,
before they closed the border. But when they died, I had nobody that I knew in
Israel. So, when we got to the consulate and they asked us where we wanted to
go, we told them we wanted to go to America.” [13]
But freedom of choice was not
always granted by the Israeli Liaison Bureau. In the early days of the
migration, Dutch authorities oversaw the immigration in Vienna, and the Soviets
would not let Jews just leave for anywhere they wanted to go. Relations with
the United States were still very chilly, and the Soviets would only allow Jews
to leave if they were bound for Israel, and “dropping out” was almost never an
option.
During the 60’s and 70’s, pressure was
being laid on the American Jewry to assist these Soviet Jewry in escaping
Communism. Due in large part to the guilt at having closed the borders and rejecting
so many Jews during World War II, sending them back to countries that were
occupied by a regime that would murder them, American Jewry began a large,
coordinated effort to bring their fellow Jews to America. Though the State of
Israel had been created as a Jewish homeland, American Jews and HIAS believed
in the freedom of choice and pressured the American government to accept these
refugees.[14]
In August of 1989, the Kagans
travelled by train from Belarus to Poland, crammed into a small car with four
bunks, with Tina’s best friend from college, Irina, and Irina’s husband, who
were not immigrating. It wasn’t unusual for Jews to travel with someone that
was not immigrating. Vilena describes how her uncle went with them on the bus
from Kiev to the border “to protect us.” Due to their newfound status as
“traitors to the motherland,” they were at the mercy of the Soviet guards who
saw them as “scum of the earth” and only took them to the border of the
U.S.S.R. before dropping them off at a train station. The Kagans were left at
just such a train station in Poland.
They said goodbye to Irina and her husband and waited for the next train
to Vienna.
Upon arriving in Vienna, the Kagan
family was taken to the Dutch consulate, where they met with immigration
authorities from Israel. Upon revocation of their citizenship to the Soviet
Union, they were granted visas to travel to Israel, but had no other form of
identification.
And they were headed for America.
Once at the consulate, refugees
were asked if they wanted to go to Israel or the United States. If they wanted
to go to Israel, they were put on an airplane within days. However, if they
opted to go to America, they now had to wait for their paperwork to be
transferred to the American Immigration Authorities, which took several weeks
to a month. Tina, Sam, and Vadim waited for a month for their paperwork to be
transferred. This didn’t grant them American visas though. It merely shuffled
their paperwork around. They were now country-less and bound for Italy. HIAS
would give them $1200 and gave assistance processing their paperwork with the
American government, but largely they were on their own.
Once arriving in Ladispoli, they
were told to find an apartment and wait for the minimum of 90 days that it would
take the backlogged and underfunded Immigration office to process their asylum
request, an office that would eventually run out of money to process these
visas in May of 1989, requiring fundraising from the American Jewry to keep
going.
“(The apartment managers) knew what
we were getting (From HIAS), and they would charge that exact amount for rent,”
she said.
Not speaking the language, having
no resources available, and knowing it would take several months to process
their visas, Sam went out in search of work. He would help stores unload boxes
and work menial labor for the money they would need to survive in Italy. At
night, the laborers would dig through grocery store dumpsters for food to feed
their families. There was no meat, but fruits and vegetables were all fair game
as they were not sellable but were still edible. Vadim recalls his dad bringing
home boxes of fruits and vegetables for them to eat and the rush Tina would
make for them to eat it quickly, lest it spoil.
“(The food) was still good. It was
thrown out (into a dumpster), but it was still good,” Tina recalled.
For four months, the Kagans stayed
in Italy, waiting on their visas to come through, and in February of 1990, they
finally did. They were to be one of 15 young families sponsored by the Jewish
community in Phoenix, Arizona. Vadim speculated that if his parents had been
willing to go to New York City, they would have processed out of Italy faster,
but because Tina didn’t want to move to the Big Apple, it took longer to find a
sponsor. Within days, they boarded an airplane, bound for Phoenix.
When they landed, they were warmly
received by the community.
“There were balloons, signs, and
everyone was very excited to see us,” said Vilena. The Kagan family was loaded
into a car and driven to a new apartment in central Phoenix. Tina recalls being
shocked at how spacious the apartment was. “It was only 400 square feet, but I
got lost trying to find the end of the apartment. We thought it was the high
life.” Vilena remembers, “The couch was UGLY. It was brown with flowers, and it
was UGLY.” They were set up in an apartment complex with many other Russian
Jews who were also being absorbed into the local community. They were told that
they would be given a stipend, healthcare, and food stamps for four months, and
the kids were sent to a local Jewish school free of charge for a short while,
but it was expected that they would find jobs and become self-sufficient in
that timeframe. Grisha would find a job working as a repairman through a man he
met at the Jewish Community Center. Vilena would go to beauty school and become
a beautician. Sam began working a landscaping job and carried various odd jobs
until he learned enough English to be hired as an technician. Tina would take
on work as a housecleaner for some local Jewish families. Tina would come to
find that her Russian engineering degree did not translate to American
engineering standards, so she went back to school to get her credentials
updated. She considers her first job to have been one of the luckiest breaks
she had.
“I barely spoke English. I was
drawing pictures. There were so many other applicants who could (speak
English), but they hired me.”
Culture shock was inevitable. Tina
spoke of hers and Sam’s awe at the number of brands of ketchup at their first
visit to an American grocery store. “We couldn’t believe it! In Russia you get
one brand, once a year, and you save it for the holidays. Here, there were so
many brands that Sam and I just counted them. And meat on demand! There was so
much meat!”
Vilena recalled her first taste of
a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “We didn’t know what peanut butter was. I
took one bite and blech! It was so disgusting! I said, ‘I’m never eating that
again.’” She also said that she had never seen a banana or a pineapple until
she arrived.
English classes were not always
provided. Vilena says that she took classes, while Tina just learned by walking
around. Though Tina had a rudimentary grasp on English when she left the Soviet
Union, she “only had about 7,000 words. I couldn’t talk like you and I are
talking now until year three. And by year five, I was able to think in English.
Now I have to translate English into Russian when I speak Russian.”
The children, meanwhile, were
speaking English fluently by the end of year one. Vadim recalls learning to
speak English by watching television. “My parents were never home. They were
working 2, 3 jobs at a time. So, I sat in front of the TV all day long.” He
said that his favorites were the commercials, “Because they showed you what
American culture was really like.”
However, at school, they were once
again ostracized, this time because they were not observant Jews like the other
children. They were taken out of class and given specialized instruction on
English, but both Vadim’s recall that they had nothing in common with the
observant children, so they stuck to their little cluster of Russian friends
and tried to ignore the bullying. Both Vadim’s were put into karate class with
another boy, Boris, to teach them self-defense and give them an outlet for
their energy.[15]
Eventually the Jewish community’s
sponsorship ended, and the Russian Jews moved away. Neither family is particularly
religious, nor were they when they came to the United States. But because they
were in fear of the deep antisemitism that existed in Russia, they endured the
hardest trial of all: becoming a country-less refugee in search of a new life
where they wouldn’t be judged for being Jewish and it wasn’t broadcast to
everyone they met.
One theme that resounded through
all interviews was that the more important reason for leaving was to give their
children something they would never have gotten under Communist rule: that of having
the freedom to choose how to live your life.
Works Cited
Kagan, T. (2021, October 08). (K. Kagan, Interviewer)
Kagan, V. (2021, October 02). (K. Kagan, Interviewer)
Lazin, F. A. (2009). "We Are Not One":
American Jews, Israel, and the struggle for Soviet Jewry. Ann Arbor, MI:
Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library. Retrieved from
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.13469761.0016.001
Mikhail Gorbachev ‘Looking Back on Perestroika’. (2002, November 14). Retrieved from The Harvard
Gazette:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/11/harvard-gazette-mikhail-gorbachev-looking-back-on-perestroika/
Our History.
(n.d.). Retrieved from Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society: https://www.hias.org/
Silver, M. G. (2021, May 14). I left the USSR for
America. Now I feel like I shouldn’t have bothered. Retrieved from The
Independent:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/russian-immigrant-america-trump-republicans-putin-b1847882.html?r=86695
The USSR in the Gorbachev Era: Perestroika, Glasnot,
and Upheaval. (2017, June).
Retrieved from The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies:
University of Washington:
https://jsis.washington.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/USSR_Gorbachev_Perestroika_Glasnost.pdf
Timeline of the American Soviet Jewry Movement. (n.d.). Retrieved from American Jewish Historical
Society: https://www.ajhs.org/timeline-american-soviet-jewry-movement
Zaliznyak, V. (2021, October 01). (K. Kagan,
Interviewer)
Zaliznyak, V. (2021, October 07). (K. Kagan,
Interviewer)
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Grade: 140/150
Professor Comments: None
