Every year on July 20, my mother and I celebrate our “independence day” — our “Americaversary,” the day we came to America from the Soviet Union.
Today marks 37 years since we arrived in the United States. It was 1978, and though I was a young child I was raised with one mantra from the get-go: You are American, and freedom is everything.
Members of my family were let out of the Soviet Union in stages.
My grandmother and her sister were first. They arrived in 1976, two women over 50, starting new lives in a mysterious country they knew nearly nothing about.
When my father arrived the following year, New York and the country were in turmoil. He worried about what my mom and I would find when we got here.
It was the Summer of Sam, the New York City blackout. Crime was at an all-time high; Iran was holding our hostages and mocking us.
There was the gas shortage. And President Carter seemed lost and ineffectual.
Better days were ahead, but my parents had no way of knowing it.
Still, no one was reconsidering their decision to come to America. They were free, for the first time in their lives, and there was nothing else like it. And America’s willingness to welcome immigrants with open arms — its beacon of hope to the persecuted and downtrodden the world over — was what saved them.
Ronald Reagan would become president three years later — and two years after that, I’d get a brother named Ronald.
As the Soviet Union recedes into history, it’s getting easier for Westerners, especially those born during the Gorbachev era or after the Cold War, to forget what a horrible, backward place it was.
It’s also worth remembering — perhaps more importantly — that it really was locked in a global competition with America over what the future would look like.
Getting to America, and getting to be the “us” in the “us vs. them,” meant everything to my family.
Communism was spreading, and the Soviet brand of hopelessness and misery was spreading with it.
Today, people forget how evil the Evil Empire really was. Recently, a writer for the food Web site Eater.com favorably reviewed a Soviet-kitsch restaurant in Brooklyn.
When commenters pushed back, noting that the Soviet Union was responsible for far more death and enslavement than, say, the Confederacy, the writer of the review noted “many noble causes have been promulgated around the world under the hammer and sickle, and the oppression of the present Russian regime rivals that of the Soviets.”
Only someone who’s had no experience with oppression could write something like that. I’ll never defend Vladimir Putin, but Stalin, who wiped out people by the millions, including my great-grandfather for the crime of owning a bakery, is in a category all his own.
In college, I heard a lot about how the Soviet Union wasn’t so bad and only American propaganda made it seem so. After all, it had the kind of equality that America could only dream of.
Such (perhaps well-meaning, or at least innocent) nonsense came from my friends whose families had never worried that the wrong opinion would get them jailed for life or who’d never seen an empty supermarket.
The Soviet Union had some equality, sure — because everyone was equally poor, equally afraid. For Jews like my family, no equality of employment or housing existed.
We were “others”; all of our papers noted our Jewishness. We’d never be Russian or Ukrainian, not really. In a society where fitting in was the key to survival, Jews didn’t.
Talking about freedom, or American pride, may sound shmaltzy in our snarky, everything-is-ironic age.
But knowing how close our family came to living a very different life, where being free wasn’t a possibility, has us celebrating our “Americaversary” every year with no embarrassment whatsoever.
We raise a glass (of vodka, because not all Russian traditions are bad) and talk unabashedly about how much we love America.
While I love celebrating the day, what makes me even happier is that my children won’t have an “Americaversary” of their own.
They got to be born here; they’re the luckiest of all. They’ll never know the cynicism and darkness of the place of my birth. They’ll only know American optimism, determination and store clerks telling them to “have a nice day.”
Being proud of America is not about being proud of a president or Supreme Court decisions or whether our team beat their team.
It’s about pride in participating in the greatest experiment in human freedom and liberty that the world has ever seen.
If you were born here, appreciate it. If, like my family, you’re an American born elsewhere, but got here as fast as you could, be open about how lucky you are that you get to live in the land of the free.
Such freedom is still a distant dream for so many around the world. If you’re living the dream, acknowledge it and be grateful. I am.
Twitter: @Karol