Why America?
Originally published in late 2020—a year when many called for a national "moral reckoning"—this personal essay by Alexander Zubatov draws on his family's journey from the Soviet Union to New York in the 1970s to illuminate why America, to him, remains exceptional.
In 1979, my parents and maternal grandparents came to New York as refugees from communism from the former Soviet Union, from that ever-overcast northern city where the Neva River meets the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea, memorialized as the miasma-beset protagonist of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, and which, in our time there, bore the nation’s founder’s holy name.
My parents and grandparents brought with them in tow a few possessions—some clothing, jewelry, photo albums and the like—the four-year-old me, and a grand total of $300, the maximum you were permitted to take with you when you left back in those days. My family was educated. My grandfather was a dentist, my grandmother a teacher. My mother had a degree in British history, while my father was working on his Ph.D. dissertation in psychology. My grandparents, especially, lived a comfortable life, with a spacious apartment in the very center of the city. Why, then, did we flee? Why would my parents and grandparents leave behind everything and everyone they had ever known, their culture and heritage, their apartments and their lifetimes of cherished, accumulated objects for a country where they knew no one, where their degrees and skills would be of little use, where unfamiliar words would be mashed together and left to bound around in what sounded, to the earthy Slavic ear tuned to the patter of plosives and hiss of fricatives, like so many thick, plucked strings echoing out their facile twang?
Timeless reading in a fleeting world.
