Looking for the Enter Sign

By Alexandra Retana

A TALE OF PERSEVERANCE, SACRIFICE, AND HOPE

 

Sasha's childhood in Leningrad was happy, sheltered, and in may ways, privileged. But, in the fall of 1989, just as she finds herself on the brink of adolescence, her secure existence is pulled out from under her.

 

Amid the chaos caused by the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, her family joins the millions of Jews fleeing the country to seek asylum in the US.

 

Written with care, razor-sharp wit, and an eye for detail, Looking for the Enter Sign paints a heartwarming picture of a family in transit, tracing their steps from their home in Leningrad across Europe to their final destination in Boston. The book explores culture shock, belonging, Jewish identity in the Diaspora, and the meaning of family and friends in times of hardship. Most of all, Looking for the Enter Sign is a story about coming of age under uncertain circumstances, as every stop along Sasha's journey marks an increasing awareness of the baffling and sometimes cruel realities of a grown-up world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: And Why Not Books
• Release date: Aug 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393930853

Alexandra Retana

Retana and her parents immigrated to the Greater Boston area in 1990 from her native St. Petersburg after travel restrictions were lifted in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. She attended Brandeis University as an undergraduate, and received her Doctor of Medicine degree from Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia. Her clinical training in Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology was completed at Tufts University in Boston and the University of Massachusetts in Worcester. Begun as a labor of love, Looking for the Enter Sign is not only a tribute to Retana’s parents, but is also a missive to those who have not experienced the immigrant story and who might be touched by a different perspective.  Retana currently resides in Rhode Island as a practicing physician with her husband and two children.

Book preview

1.

VCRs, WALKMEN, AND BARBIES

My mom often tells this story: one day, when I was just a toddler, she and I got on a busy Leningrad city bus. It was packed, but some bleeding heart had given me his seat after I had loudly announced, much to my mother’s chagrin, Oh, how I wish I could sit down!

My mom stood next to me, swaying with the bus while I sat and swung my legs, enjoying the satisfying thunk my little blue double-knotted boots made on the back of the seat in front of me.

Sweetie, don’t knock your feet on the back of that seat. You might bother the person in front of you. It’s rude, my mother said.

The person in front was a sweet-looking old woman in a gray mohair kerchief. When she heard my mom, she whipped around and hissed in my direction with such bitterness and hatred, my mom actually took step back. What can you expect from a little kike!

I don’t remember this at all.

At all.

I had a blissful childhood.

We left the Soviet Union when I was eleven years old. Up until that time, I had been so skillfully and carefully sheltered by my parents, that I didn’t see any anti-Semitism. I had simply not been exposed. My parents’ circle of friends was made up of people with similar mindsets—liberal, Westernized—and my circle of friends was made up of those people’s children. Thanks to my parents’ connections and machinations, I even went to a special school where more than half the class was Jewish, so I never knew I was a minority.

I grew up unaware that certain paths were closed to Jews, as an unofficial rule. For example, Jews could go to certain institutes—places for higher learning and trade—but to go to a major university, where they could advance academically, was impossible. Jews could go to the Second Medical Institute or the Pediatric Medical Institute but not the First Medical Institute (the best one in Leningrad). The Herzen Institute, where my mom went, trained teachers and interpreters, taught humanities, foreign languages, and philology, and was Jew friendly, so Jewish applicants could expect to be given a relatively fair chance to get in. Of course, it was still not a guarantee. My mom got into Herzen because my grandmother paid for a tutor who coincidentally proctored the entrance exams. The lady tutored my mom, but she also made sure things went smoothly when exam time came. It was a laundered bribe. Papa, my biological father, went to Herzen also (it’s where they met and married at nineteen years old), but it was his second choice; he had wanted to go to Theatrical Institute and be an actor. But he couldn’t because he had failed his audition, supposedly for bad diction. He has perfect diction. He was a Jew, though. It was the same as the First Medical Institute: you were welcome to apply, but they’d find a reason to reject your application.

I didn’t know you could go to a job interview and be told, I would love to hire you, but I already have two Jews working here, and I don’t want to develop a reputation. Or that my mom, a literature and Russian language teacher, chose to work in a technical vocational high school, as opposed to a regular academic high school, because they were nicer to Jews and there was less communist influence on the curriculum. Or that she’d had to convince parents a Jewish woman (born and raised in Russia) was fit to teach Russian to their kids.

Thinking back, of course, there were signs, like this one time when I told a classmate, I’m a Jew, as a point of interest, as one might declare I’m a lefty, or I’m pigeon-toed, and she stared at me blankly and open-mouthed. I then asked her if she was Jewish or Russian, and she said, I don’t respond to such stupid questions. And I watched her walk away, momentarily confused, before going back to play with another friend and forgetting the incident completely until now. I didn’t know the word Jew was a profanity, an insult, and to publicly admit I was one was a shock even to eight-year-olds.

I once told my grandmother I wanted to be an actress.

Not with your nose, she muttered under her breath as she continued to knead dough or towel-dry dishes, or whatever it is grandmothers always seem to be doing with their busy hands.

Huh? I said.

Nothing, never mind.

No, what? I insisted.

She stopped moving her hands and sighed. "What a zanuda you are," she said.

Getting called a pest was off-putting, but still, why couldn’t I be an actress?

Your nose is shaped wrong, she finally said and went back to her task.

And I stared in the mirror, looking this way and that at my nose, wondering what’s wrong with and completely missing the anti-Semitic trope, or the implication of my limits as a Jew.

To put it even simpler, I was protected enough not to be scared of getting beaten up for having that wrongly-shaped nose and didn’t wonder if the store cashier or my doctor or teacher hated me for being me.

Other people remember things differently. Recently, I was discussing our respective childhoods with my best friend, who came from the Ukraine around the same time we did. She had a vastly different experience growing up. She went to Jewish camp, for one thing, which was unheard of in St. Petersburg, where assimilation was of utmost importance. She told me her father and brother were beat up routinely for their Jewishness, and as a result, she wasn’t allowed to walk home from school alone. Meanwhile, my own happy childhood is so imprinted upon my memory, I had to fight the very insensitive urge to tell her to stop exaggerating. That is not how it was, I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t, because for her, that is how it was, and I’m sure for many others too.

But not me.

No. And even though I knew my parents were trying to get out of the Soviet Union, if you had asked the eleven-year-old me why they wanted to leave so badly, I probably wouldn’t have been able to give a good answer. I mean, knew the right answer was we were looking for Freedom, with a capital F, but the meaning of Freedom with a capital F, in any sort of civil, political, or global sense, was beyond me.

Back then, what I did know was America had all this cool stuff we didn’t have, like VCRs, and Walkmen, and music videos. But I intuited that if anyone asked, this was the wrong answer. I also knew life must be better over there, but I didn’t know why. Even now, I only know what my mom tells me.

She tells me this: It’s not just the anti-Semitism. Imagine you have nothing to live for, she says. Imagine, you go to school, you graduate, you go on to a higher education. You get a job. And that’s it. Can’t build a career because it doesn’t matter if you’re a professor or a janitor—everyone was the same. Can’t start a business because all business is government-run, and entrepreneurship is illegal. No one ever got promoted—nor did I, personally, really want a promotion, because it meant selling out, and what was the point anyway? Salaries never went up, but it didn’t matter since you couldn’t buy things because there is nothing to buy: no cars, no real estate, no electronics.

True... I don’t remember ever buying anything major. I think our apartment was furnished in the ‘60s when my family moved in, and nothing had been bought since. I remember how our fridge, the kind with a latch and a freezer compartment on the inside, started dripping and icing over. So, we lined the floor under it with towels, and my grandmother was forced to take a screwdriver to break up the ice sealing off access to the freezer. This went on for months while we were on a waiting list to get a new fridge. And then we got one, but it didn’t fit in its nook, and my dad had to saw off pieces of cabinetry. In short, a mess.

The one thing people did buy was books. People were proud to own books. We had lots.

But the worst, says my mom, was being unable to travel. Do you know how painful it is to read about magical places like New York or Paris and knowing for absolute certain you would never ever be allowed out of your cage to see them? You weren’t even free to move around within the country. You were assigned to a city, assigned to an apartment—so many square meters of living space per person—and could only move for certain well-specified reasons, like marriage or work. There was nothing. It’s why people got married young, had kids early, divorced often, smoked and drank all the time.

Getting married and having kids, incidentally, was also no easy feat. Imagine: you’re still young and hopeful. You meet someone, fall in love, and decide to get married. But where will you live? You can’t just pick a town and rent a U-Haul. You apply for an apartment of your own and the housing authority puts your name on a waiting list, which could take years. In the meantime, the two sets of parents get together and start discussing who you’re going to live with until then. Whoever draws the short straw starts moving furniture around their apartment to make space and puts up a partition so you can have a few square feet of privacy. You’re newlyweds, after all.

One of my mom’s friends told me when she and her husband were first married, they lived in a two-room apartment with her parents, her younger sister, her grandmother, and an ancient great-grandmother. Early one Sunday morning, she and the husband made quiet love on their mattress behind the bookshelf used as a partition, careful not to wake everyone else. Then, once the afterglow was gone, they started arguing, in a loud whisper. After a few minutes, they heard a voice. It was the ancient great-grandma from behind the partition: Kids, don’t argue. Five minutes ago, things were going so well...

But you keep on living behind your partition or on a fold-out couch in the kitchen or in a cupboard under the stairs... And let’s say, a few years later, you maybe have your own place and possibly a child in the picture. But then you decide to get divorced, like my parents did.

Fortunately, when this happened in my own family, my mom was able to take me and go back to live with her own mother. My grandmother and her unmarried sister, whose fiancée had been killed in the war, lived in a four-room apartment in Kupchino, a building project from the heady post-Stalin 1960s, a bustling neighborhood by the time I was born. So, when my mom’s personal life didn’t work out, she took me and went back to live with them.

But say, that was not possible; then, you would have to put advertisements like this on lamp posts across the city:

TRADING: separate 2 room apartment close to city center for 2 separate 1 room apartments close to center or on the metro line....

Sometimes, people got lucky.

Then maybe you met a new significant other—you would have to bring the new person to live with you, as my mother did when she married my stepdad.

My stepdad had been married previously as well, and, at a critical time, a committee showed up at my mom’s work to talk to her boss in regards to her breaking up a wholesome Russian Soviet home, the subtext being, how dare she, a Jewess, disrupt a rightful superior match, although that would never be said out loud. Fortunately, my mom’s boss, a normal human being, saw this wholesale intrusion as entirely non-work related and ridiculous, and the complaint didn’t come to anything. That certainly wasn’t always the case. To have a random committee of local party officials get involved in your personal life and bring it to your place of employment was totally normal, and, for other people, such intrusions could create serious difficulties, perhaps even loss of a job.

This was Soviet helplessness, ever-present, all-consuming.

So, maybe the meaning of Freedom was beyond me back then. But you cannot be from a place like the Soviet Union and not eventually see it for the dystopia it was, fond memories notwithstanding. And I didn’t grow up in a vacuum. Over the years, I have talked to my parents, I have listened to their stories. I have read books. I have learned history. I have had the chance to reflect back on my own experiences and see them in a different light. Information was passed on generationally, maybe even soaked in by osmosis. And there came a point when, as a young adult, I found myself reading Orwell’s 1984 and realizing there it was, laid out for me. The meaning of Freedom. The real reason my parents wanted—no, were desperate—to leave.

But at eleven, all I knew was we desperately wanted to leave. My parents’ reasons notwithstanding, I knew exactly why I was leaving. I was going to America for the VCRs, Walkmen, and Barbies. We did not have these things in Mother Russia, but they did have them in America, and soon, so would I!

2.

THE INTERPERSONAL GENIUS

Iloved New Year’s as a kid. In the weeks before the 31st, storefronts would suddenly sparkle, the air smelled of evergreens, and the world was full of magic. Every year, we’d decorate a fluffy tree with antique glass or porcelain ornaments shaped like houses, birds, snowflakes, and glittering stars. I always pulled out the box of tissue-wrapped old ornaments out of storage and made sure each one got a good spot on the tree, even the pieces that were maybe a tiny bit cracked; after all, it was only because they were veteran ornaments, and they still deserved love. Then I’d pluck a few needles off the tree, crush them with my fingernails, and smell the joyous evergreen scent all day long.

After the Bolsheviks took over, they did away with religion, but the people needed a winter holiday, so Christmas customs were converted into New Year’s festivities. Everyone, Jews included, celebrated (and still do celebrate) in a distinctly familiar way: with a decorated tree, presents, and a Santa-like figure called Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost). Instead of a portly Mrs. Claus, Grandpa Frost goes around with a girl named Snegurochka, supposedly a granddaughter, though, for some reason, she is always depicted as a leggy blonde. He doesn’t ride reindeer or come down the chimney (no one had chimneys anyway). Instead, he knocks on the door like a civilized human being, at midnight, to welcome the New Year with a giant bag of gifts.

Every year, I tried to stay up till midnight to meet Ded Moroz when he came a-knocking, and every year I failed. But I’d wake up and find presents under the tree, a worthy consolation.

The New Year’s in 1988 had to be extra-memorable. My parents and their friends wanted to really make it count: the atmosphere was buzzing with the possible emigration, and no one knew what might happen from one month to the next. There were rumors coming through the grapevine that while the borders were being opened up a bit in the Soviet Union, America would stop letting people in, so many were trying to get out as soon as possible, while they still could. My mom kept saying, It might turn out to be our last big holiday together, and who knows where we’ll end up and whether we’ll ever see each other again. My parents and their friends planned a huge yelka, bigger than ever before. Friends invited friends, and those friends invited more friends, and, in the end, the party had as many people as a good-sized wedding. All the kids wore costumes. I was, of course, going to be a snowflake. Dressing as a snowflake was a New Year’s rite of passage for any girl, and it usually involved unnamed quantities of tulle and tinsel and several hours of sewing by dedicated grandmothers and mothers.

My mom was always in charge of the entertainment, and this year, she didn’t disappoint. She wrote a skit show with songs and dancing, and all the parents took part in it; the kids loved it. Ded Moroz was going to be played by my mom’s best friend, Galina.

Galina and my mother were bosom buddies since meeting at the Herzen Institute, where they both studied to be teachers. She could show up anywhere and instantly become the center of attention without even trying. She was a large woman, and she capitalized on it. Her jeans tightly hugged her immeasurable derriere. Her dresses had flounces around the bosom that fluttered as she walked, and if she ever wore a hat, it made wide turns. In the summer, her flip-flops slapped loudly off her heels, setting the rhythm to which everyone else walked. She was loud and laughed all the time. And her constant absurd stories! Like when she talked her way into a museum after hours by acting like a lost American; or when she pretended to be a government official to get a hotel; or even when she got her winter shoes stolen and walked around wearing knee-high rubber fishing boots all winter, starting some sort of a city-wide fad. She taught English to my friends and me and we spent the whole hour laughing and couldn’t take our eyes off of her because she was so entertaining and electric. Once you met her, you were caught up in her whirlpool.

She, her artist husband, and her daughter—my best friend, Nina—lived in a one room apartment doubling as an artist studio, filled with finished and unfinished paintings, cigarette smoke, and a constant stream of people. Because of her natural magnetism (my father had branded her The Interpersonal Genius), she always had an entourage around her. Everyone loved her, and she flourished as the queen bee of my parents’ friend group.

Our families hung out together all the time, and sometimes we went on vacation together. We spent every occasion and holiday together, especially New Year’s. Especially this New Year’s. By then, we already knew Galina was leaving to go to America. She was one of the first people to receive an invitation and get approved for a visa. So, this play at the yelka was like her last loud splash in Leningrad before disappearing into the unknown.

Galina was perfect as Ded Moroz, with a voluminous white beard made of cotton balls, the curly white wig, the fat suit making her significant size look even bigger, and the pair of knee-high rubber boots. And over her shoulder, a duffel bag of gifts.

Ded Moroz! Ded Moroz! we chanted.

Louder!! demanded Baba Yaga, a hag, played by my friend George’s father. I can’t hear you!

Ded Moroz!!! we screamed at the top of our lungs.

Galina finally appeared from backstage, where she had been waiting for the rest of the play to be over, her giant rubber boots squelching with every step.

I’m really sorry, dear children, she said, huffing. "Ded Moroz is sweltering hot right now under this big suit, shvitzing like crazy, and might melt altogether before long! So he’s just going to sit down right here and not do a dance for you all. She sat down on the cold stone floor of the rented hall with an oof, pulled her beard askew a bit, and used it to blot her brow. But no worries, she continued, the bag of gifts between her legs. I still have gifts, and there will still