Old Lives and New: Soviet Immigrants in Israel and America by Edith Rogovin Frankel, Hamilton Books, 2012, ISBN 978-0-7618-5784-6, pp 207.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — I am going to have to unlearn old reading habits. Someone — was it a parent, or a teacher? — told me when I was a youngster that it was “cheating” to read the end of the book before the beginning. Surely, one who didn’t read a book all the way through could not appreciate the suspense, nor the author’s technique for sustaining it. You want to know how a book turns out? You’ve got to earn it.
However, I think if I had ignored that advice, at least in the case of this particular book, I would have enjoyed it more than I did.
Edith Rogovin Frankel is a scholar, who presents to us 21 case studies of Jews who left the Soviet Union to immigrate either to Israel or to the United States. In one section, she tells us about their growing disaffection with the Soviet Union; in another, the bureaucratic process they had to submit to in order to leave the country of their birth. Then she told us about their arrivals and initial adaptations to their new countries. And finally, visiting most of them 25 years later, she recounted how they had fared.
Frankel used only the first names of her subjects –why it is not clear. Perhaps they felt able to be more candid in their interviews if no one knew for sure who they were. It’s possible the subjects were worried that relatives back in the Soviet Union could be subjected to retaliation. This is speculation on my part, having spent a lifetime interviewing people for many news and feature stories, including refugees.
The author’s research was meticulous, but the problem with the presentation of this book — at least for a reader like me — was that it was hard to remember who was who. Which back story was Lev’s, which one was Yan’s? Who again was Bronia? And which one was Serafima?
I found myself plodding through their segmented stories, unable to put the pieces together in any cogent fashion. What was the quintessence of this person’s experience? And what about this other person? Why were some happier than others? If it were not their contrasting levels of material achievement, what indeed were the differentiators?
When I finally finished the book, there on Page 207, the very last page, almost as an afterthought, was a short index showing by page numbers how a reader could follow any given immigrant’s story continuously, jumping from section to section. Ah, if only that had been at the front of the book, I would have seen it, and somewhere along the line, I think I would have pursued the book differently — having become aware fairly early into the book of my dissatisfaction with the format.
I have two vivid memories about refugees. One goes back to 1975, after the fall of Saigon, when I spent weeks as a reporter for The San Diego Union at Camp Pendleton, interviewing refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. Tent cities and quonset hut communities had been established for them on the big Marine Corps base pending their resettlement with “sponsors” in towns across America. But some of the refugees weren’t interested in being resettled; they had panicked at the end of the war, grabbed onto a helicopter to get away from the chaos, and before they realized what they had done, they were living in a tent on an American military base. They desperately wanted to go home, new Communist regime in South Vietnam or not!
Well, I had wondered then, what was the difference? Why were some looking forward to new lives in the United States, while others were desperate to go home. The more I probed, the easier it was to understand these emotions. Family. Not in all cases, but many, those who had gotten out with their immediate families were content, ready, to begin new chapters of their lives. Those whose dearest loved ones had been left behind wanted to go back. Ideology was not important to them. Husbands, wives, children, parents — those were what really mattered.
Although the extent of family unity certainly was a factor in the story of the immigrant Soviet Jews, it was not nearly so dramatic. Decisions hadn’t come suddenly, with gunfire all around. The Soviet Jews had to go through long bureaucratic exit processes — so they had many opportunities to change their minds before they signed documents renouncing their Soviet citizenship, or boarded planes that would take them to Vienna, Austria, and thence to the United States or Israel. Nor did the country of destination seem to be an important factor: some were happy in Israel, or the United States; others were sad in either country. For all I know, these contrasting feelings simply could have been elements of their innate personalities.
The other story in my own life that I so well remember was the connection that my mother Alice made with a Soviet immigrant in San Diego through Congregation Beth Israel and Jewish Family Service in, if I remember correctly, the early 1980s. The woman’s first name was Dora, the same first name as my maternal grandmother, and somehow in helping this Dora become acclimated to life in the United States, mother felt she was repaying the kindness that had been bestowed upon her own mother when she had immigrated to this country from Lithuania. I still can remember my late mother’s eyes tearing up as she explained her feeling that some great cosmic wheel was turning.
Had Frankel rearranged her narrative, telling first one story all the way through, and then another — stopping along the way to compare and comment — I might have come away with a stronger appreciation for her work. As it was presented, however, I felt as if someone had downloaded some expertly researched data to me, without really trying to synthesize it.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com