About my mother

My mother, Anna, was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1951. Her father was born in Poland, and because of Polish support for Israel at the time, they were able to leave the anti-Semitism of the USSR behind and emigrate to the Middle East when she was 5 years old. With her mouth taped shut, my mother and her family boarded trains and boats for a long journey which led them to Israel 8 years after its birth. Hardly the advanced country that exists today, Israel was young and underdeveloped. Her family lived in a hut on a mountain side in Atlit.

A professional soccer player in the Dnipropetrovsk, my grandfather became a butcher and my grandmother, a former nurse, plucked chicken feathers for work. My grandfather brought home chicken fat and my mother and her sister ate Schmaltz sandwiches for lunch and dinner. It took five years to get a visa to come to the United States, where my grandfather had an uncle. They never planned to settle in Israel, as many did at the time. My grandfather had his heart set on America.

In 1961 little Anna was just 10 years old when she sailed towards Lady Liberty and arrived at Ellis Island.  Her first home was in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where she discovered what are still some of her favorite things: Television, Bugs Bunny, potato chips, pretzels, hot dogs and pizza. The new American family quickly learned and embraced the language of the land, and made it the tongue of the house as well. Now my mother has a thick Brooklyn accent. (Imagine a 5ft tall, blonde, female Donald Trump sans the comb over and sadly, the millions.) It didn’t take long before she started to forget Russian and Hebrew and schmaltz sandwiches. Fast forward 15 years and you’d never know about my mother’s journey or past. When asked the common “what are you?” question her answer is always the same: American. When I remind her of her birthplace she claims that it was just a geographical error, she was really meant to be born in the USA.

When she had children of her own, my mother never thought to teach us the Russian language, or to incorporate Russian culture at home. That was fine until 1985, when strange speaking relatives began to visit us from Russia.