I was a Russian girl and an American teenager. I had no choice about the first but I tried very hard to be the second. Now as a grown woman, I mostly deem myself a New Yorker. While I never truly considered myself an American, being a New Yorker encompasses more. New York has a special tolerance for Russians.
My immigrant story begins when I was five years old. I don’t recall a sense of fleeing from our home country or the idea that our life was difficult. As a child growing up in Kiev, I recall very little. I remember snapshots here and there, mostly stories retold that have tattooed themselves onto the childhood story log.
I remember getting my ears pierced when I was three years old. With gold studs in my ears, I descended sub ground to a quintessential ice cream parlor. I remember the dark wood paneling and the taste of the vanilla. The memory of that vanilla has solidified itself as the definition of vanilla perfection to me.
My grandmother, who came to America three years before us, used to send me clothes. My mother would then go on to dress me up in the fashionable American garb and pose me in front of the navy plaid wool blanket on our couch. To this day, I have a portfolio of me as a mini Russian fashionista in bell-bottom jeans, short skirts, and sweaters of the itchiest caliber.
Yet sometimes there were style malfunctions. A roll of film serves as proof of our afternoon strolling through an urban Russian park. Me, a three-year-old with long hair on the swings, wearing as a complete outfit, American Popeye Underoos. My father developed all of my childhood photographs in our bathtub and my mother would send them to my grandmother as proof of wear.
My grandmother arranged the visa that got our family out of Russia. I remember very little of the immigration process. My mother packed the only life she had known into a couple of suitcases and moved to a foreign country that made no promises beyond hope. She was twenty-five years old. I am now thirty-four years old with my own six-year-old and cannot imagine confronting a task half as challenging.
We came to America by way of Vienna first and then Rome. We were thrust together with other immigrants into a holding pattern of unglamorous proportions. I can’t recall one iota of our entire time in Europe. The family stories that circulate regarding the European purgatory are few and random. I got motion sick habitually so my mother carried a plastic bag with her everywhere she went. My mother was amazed that so many Italian men knew her name; she didn’t realize that her name, Bella, was synonymous with beautiful in Italian.
I remember my grandmother coming to visit us in Italy; she couldn’t wait the two more months for us to get to America. When we picked her up at the airport, I remember seeing a strange woman who I knew had to be someone important shoving a doll against the glass wall. I didn’t understand if I was supposed to be more excited about the doll or the woman. I don’t remember being thrilled by either.
Early life in America seems distant, a shadow of a childhood where I didn’t really fit in but wasn’t completely ostracized. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment across the street from my grandmother’s identical apartment in Queens. I would look out my first floor window and up to my grandmother’s eighth floor window; with binoculars I could see her waving.
The whole neighborhood holds few memorable moments for me. I remember learning to ride my brown Huffy bike there. I remember playing on the monkey bars and a grown man came to hang upside down. He was wearing loose running shorts and no underwear.
