Why the first two waves of emigration from the USSR – in the early 1920s and in the 1950s – are more or less clear to everyone. At least, as the business newspaper "Vzglyad" notes, many books have been written about this, and many memoirs have been published. As a result, the first wave of the "philosophers' steamship" era acquired an almost romantic image, and the second wave found a weighty explanation in the form of the war and the "tyrannical image of the leader of all peoples."
The Third Wave
It is believed that the third wave began with the so-called "Pilots' Affair". Then, in the early 1970s, a group of Soviet pilots tried to hijack a plane to Israel. Of course, they were arrested, but the information managed to leak into foreign media. As a result, Western public opinion demanded an open trial of the traitors to their homeland, who claimed that they would not have been allowed to leave the country if they had simply wanted to emigrate.
The USSR leadership had to explain to everyone that no one in the country is held by force and that anyone is free to leave whenever and wherever they please. The USSR joined the Helsinki Agreement, which established the provision that citizens of the Soviet Union are not property of the state.
It was then that the first brave souls appeared, who applied to leave the country. Be that as it may, even until perestroika, leaving the USSR to somewhere for permanent residence looked almost like a feat.
It is precisely such a person, who performed a feat together with his family, that is the father of I. D. – the main heroine and at the same time the author of the book "Emigration", the first part of the novel "The Experience of My Life".
I. D., together with her parents and her grandfather and grandmother, came to America at the age of fifteen. The autobiographical book "Emigration" is written in the form of a diary of a person who had already been shaped by Soviet culture, but was thrown into the culture of a country where at first glance there is no culture at all. A girl who perceives the world romantically, brought up on Tolstoy's novels and dreaming of entering the Literary Institute, suddenly ends up in an average American school, where none of her classmates knows about the existence of the American classic Dreiser.
The value of "Emigration", which is just the first book of a large series, does not lie in the author's artistic skill. Any teacher of the same Literary Institute could, if desired, criticize the book. The novel attracts with its honesty and frankness. It is felt that I. D. is absolutely free in her attitude to both American and Russian life. "Emigration" is a very personal diary that was kept over ten years, and now it has fallen into your hands.
The audio version of the book has already appeared in New York and, frankly, I want to believe that it will appear here too, since everything described in it concerns two countries after all. If we are to be objective, then we must be on both sides, as they say. I. D. herself, voicing the main heroine, confidentially narrates how in 1980 she experienced her first disappointments in America, having arrived, as it seemed to her, in a "land of abundance and freedom". According to the book, her family left Nalchik, abandoning there a luxurious two-story house, a decent income by Soviet standards, and the feeling that, no matter what, you are at home.
Abundance and freedom, upon closer examination, turned out to be the father's unskilled labor for a minimum wage, furniture thrown out by someone (there is no money for new), the need to get rid of bedbugs, and cockroaches in a tiny apartment, which, as it seemed even before departure, could not be in America.
Acquired Illness
The father of the heroine's reasoning for leaving his homeland comes down to the fact that even a talented scientist in the Union cannot get anywhere. Especially if he is Jewish. Therefore, he was simply obliged to take his family to a "better world". Where not immediately, with difficulty, but at least his children would live "like human beings".
I. D.'s grandfather, of crystal honesty, begins to send letters to his homeland, in which he describes only the abundance in the stores of New York, keeping silent about all the difficulties that the newly minted family of emigrants from the USSR faced. "What, do you want the whole of Nalchik, having read our letter, to say that we are idiots?" he answers his granddaughter when she asks why her grandfather doesn't write the whole truth, but only part of it.
The heroine marries twenty-year-old Lenya, who amazes her with his poems and sublime attitude to life. But then it turns out that the poems are not his, but Levitansky's, and that the sublime attitude towards life ends on the couch in front of the TV or at the movies watching horror films (the explanation – "you need to know all sides of this life"). Lenya, with memorized phrases, tries to explain to I. D. that it was necessary to flee the Union, because "Stalin destroyed so many people". What relation did Stalin have to twenty-year-old Lenya and to the generation born in the mid-sixties? And perhaps not everything in life needs to be known, if even the Americans themselves have come to the view that the amount of violence in cinema should be reduced?
Asking herself such questions, I. D. suddenly realizes that she cannot find in America those absolute benefits that her father dreamed of for her. "I feel that I have ended up in some kind of dump instead of civilized America," she says at one point. Fearing to rot in such an alien country, never having returned back, she realizes that in New York she exists, having lost a vital organ for her. The organ of the homeland, which for some reason is not written about anywhere, but without it people in emigration become invalids. It turns out that this organ disappears somewhere when a person leaves his country, when he finally tears himself away from his roots.
“Emigration is a disease when a person has lost himself,” is the conclusion I. D. reaches in her book. Moreover, the disease is acquired, because no one forced I. D.’s father to emigrate to America. And in general, where did this psychosis, this unhealthy interest in the USA, come from in the USSR? Where did the very dream of leaving come from?
After all, the Soviet Union was not, for instance, Vietnam, where there was a war, or Israel, where explosions never cease. Why does it not occur to any American, even the lowliest bum, to emigrate anywhere?
The Stakes
At some point the book’s heroine realizes that the nostalgia that emigration brings into life does not go away after two years. Communicating with second-wave emigrants, she sees that nostalgia does not go away even after thirty years.
In emigration, a person becomes inferior, turns into a robot, often not responsible for his words or actions. So is that unattainable “human life” that I. D.’s father came to America for worth all these experiences and emotional shocks? Who said that in the USSR it was really worse?
Trying to compare the American and Soviet systems, I. D. does not find a clear answer to the question of what moves people when they decide to leave their homeland forever. Having left the USSR as a Jewish woman, in America I. D. feels belonging primarily to Russian culture, and to Russian literature in particular. The Russian language becomes for her that magnificent “Volga” on which she could confidently drive through life, had she not left it at home – in Nalchik. The only linguistic “means of transport” that awaits her in America is a wheelchair.
At times, far from her homeland, I. D. begins to idealize Soviet life, and even the customs officers who once did not take away her childhood diaries at the border seem to her people who appreciated the literary talent of a young author.
When after many years I. D. returns to Russia, she will understand that in this country everything is also not so ideal. The next book in the series “The Experience of My Life” is called “In the World of Wonders, in the Land of Fools.” A twenty-five-year-old girl arrives not in the same country she left. With a mature look, she observes what is happening in Moscow. At the same time, within a few months she manages to find herself among the top ten names of the largest entrepreneurs of renewed Russia.
The incredible success against the backdrop of daily television news that another businessman has been killed in Russia forces I. D. once again to rethink the experience of her life. As if under a microscope, she examines the path from dirty New York kitchens to the offices of the highest-ranking people in the state, where the only person not quite accessible to I. D. was the president of the country.
This novel-self-analysis, a personal diary in which the parallel development of two great political systems is examined as if under a magnifying glass at one of the most interesting moments of modern history, is perhaps the only large-scale literary work to date about the third wave of Russian emigration. Which, by the way, has already lasted more than thirty-five years! It is very difficult to understand the true causes of this phenomenon. I. D. tries to do this by publicly analyzing “the experience of her life.”