Prompt:
Identify one example of the intersection of religion and international migration, drawing on credible news sources, direct personal experience, or published scholarship. Share this example with the class, pointing specifically to the aspects of the example that relate to the various themes and concepts used in this module (religious narratives of displacement, faith-based responses to migration, spirituality as migrant resource, etc.).
Reply:
My husband, the refugee
In February 1990, Ernestina, Savva, and their almost-6-year-old son, Vadim boarded a train in Minsk, Belarus, with Ernestina’s best friend from college, Irina. Poor Jewish Engineers, forced into their occupations by the Communist government of the U.S.S.R. because they were Jewish and not “Russian,” and therefore ineligible to choose careers, they had their sights set on a new life in the United States. At the Austrian border, the train stopped, Irina got off, and a man on the train collected their Soviet passports. Now country-less and alone, they ventured towards a new life in Amerika, one where they wouldn’t face “otherness” for having been born to a religion neither felt attached to, first in Austria, then Ladispoli, Italy, while waiting on their visa to come through. In May 1990, those visas arrived, stamped with the words “refugee” and “asylum” on them, and the [edited] family boarded an airplane to Phoenix, AZ, having been sponsored by the local Jewish community who promised an apartment with more than one room, Medicare, food stamps, and a fresh start. Ernestina recalled that when she first saw the small 2-bedroom apartment in downtown Phoenix, near Congregation Beth El, she marveled at how spacious the 600 square foot, two-bedroom apartment was compared to the 300 square foot, one room apartment in Belarus had been. “Vadim didn’t have to sleep in the kitchen anymore! He slept on a chair next to the stove, you know. We just didn’t have the space,” she told me. Tina, as she is known now, immediately began taking English classes, since she spoke the most English, and began working at Intel as a construction engineer, a job she has held for the better part of the last 30 years. Sam, formerly Savva, began working any odd job that didn’t require him to talk a lot, working his way up from delivering pizzas to a full-time mechanical engineering job that he held for over 20 years. Vadim, a year behind his age group because of his language deficit, began attending school with the local Jewish children, who ostracized him for being Russian and therefore “other.” Eventually, Vadim was taken out of the Jewish schools and educated in public schools because he was unable to hold more than one language as a child and the family decided to become an English-only home. As a result, Vadim sounds like any other American when he speaks. He even speaks Russian with an American accent. You would never know that he was once a religious asylum seeker and came here without knowing a single word of English, unless you heard his name, which is actually a very common name in Russia. Tina, Sam, and Vadim would go on to become full United States citizens in 1996.
Over the next 10 years, Sam’s brother, parents, and most of his extended family would immigrate to the United States, through sponsorship and religious refugee visas. Tina’s parents and baby sister would immigrate to Israel, with her sister joining her in the United States in the early 2000’s, by way of Seattle, through an Einstein Visa, and her parents immigrating in 2017 through Tina’s sponsorship, something Donald Trump calls “chain migration.”
Belarus, home to Sam’s father’s family since the mid-1800s, and Sam's mother’s home since she fled Ukraine ahead of Nazi invasion in 1934, was no longer home to them. They are a part of the American Dream, going from penniless refugees, fleeing religious persecution from the Soviet government, to become a part of upper middle-class America. Even though neither of them are practicing Jews (Vadim is the only Jew in their family who is practicing, and he only does it to make me happy), the fact that their last name, a Russian diminutive of [edited], marked them as “outsiders” instantly barred them from any opportunities in the Communist Russian empire, no matter the fact that neither family had not stepped foot in a synagogue in three generations. Their Soviet passports didn’t even list them as Belarusian citizens. It stated “Jew” in the race category. “Jew” is even on their Russian marriage certificate. According to Tina, “Jew” was listed on every document they had in the Soviet Union. “I wanted to be an astronomer,” Tina laments. “But that job was not open to Jews in Russia. I had to become an engineer.” So they left the country of their birth, the one that kept them “othered” and oppressed because their last name wasn’t on the right side of history, in order to give Vadim an opportunity they were never afforded: the right of choice.
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Grade: 50/50
Professor Comments: None
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