What It Feels Like For a Girl To Leave The USSR

My parents were in their early 30s when they applied for exit visas to immigrate from the Soviet Union to America. It was the mid 70s and Soviet Jews were enjoying an Exodus, sans Charlton Heston. My father was immediately fired, my mother was denounced by her colleagues as being a traitor to her country and an unfit mother for taking her daughter out of the Motherland and they were facing the prospect of leaving their parents and extended family behind forever.

I had my own problems, however. I knew that in America gum was plentiful and I wasn't sure how to maximize the bragging potential to my gum-deprived for the foreseeable future classmates.

It's hard for me to explain the allure that a single stick of gum had for us back then. I was eight years old and I'm pretty sure that I would have shipped both of my parents off to the Gulog for a pack of Doublemint. I have no idea why the Soviet Union didn't have gum. A Communist plot, perhaps.

My parents' friends who came from trips abroad would bring back gum and I knew no greater joy. One of my very clear memories is sectioning a single stick of gum and dividing it among my friends. Fortunately, I didn't have very many friends, so we each got a decent piece to chew. And by "decent" I mean tiny enough so that we could only chew it with our front teeth. If you've never chewed a piece of gum so small that you had to limit the chewing to your front teeth, you've had a charmed life and no reason to complain about anything ever.

One time I was at the Hermitage with my mother, bored out of my mind and indulging in my favorite fantasy that I was one of the lost Romanoffs (the resemblance is uncanny, especially if you add diamonds) when a foreigner approached me and handed me a pack of Doublemint. He didn't speak Russian and I didn't speak English, although I'm pretty sure he said "It is for you, because no one is more deserving." Children in Russia are not trained to scorn strangers with candy because they have better things to worry about, like famine or freezing to death, so I grabbed it and proceeded to thank him. He nodded. That memory ranks right up there with the birth of my children, except a lot less painful.

I treasured that pack of Doublemint for months. I let my friends, whose numbers started to grow exponentially, look at it, but it never left my hands. A single slice I could pass around, but never the whole pack.

So the idea that I was going to a land where I could walk down the street and buy some gum, and so could everyone else seemed like a fairy tale.

People often ask me what it was like to immigrate to the United States. I know what they want to hear. They want to hear a story of my flight from religious and political prosecution to a land of freedom and opportunity. And it was certainly that. But more than anything, it meant that I could have access to gum. And I would have wandered around the desert for years for that.