Week 27 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge is “Planes.”
In 1993 when Alex was 18, he and his parents emigrated from Russia. Unlike previous waves of predominantly Russian Jews who left the country in the 1980s, his family was able to fly directly to the United States. Friends who departed before them, such as the Rutman family in 1989, had to take the train from St. Petersburg to Warsaw, and then fly from there to Vienna or Rome and wait months for sponsorship before flying to the United States.
Figuring out what to pack was a challenge. Short of sending a shipping container ahead of them, which was quite expensive, there was only so much they could bring with them. To complicate matters, they knew Russian customs officials confiscated anything they deemed valuable or historically significant to the country, including books. “My dad and I had to go to Riga in Latvia by train and bring bags of books with us to ship to the States because we were afraid they would take them away otherwise. We also had to have friends with us at the airport to take things they might not let out, but they didn’t take anything,” said Alex. Alex and Evgeny made several trips to Riga to mail books to Evgeny’s cousin in New York, where they planned to stay initially. It was risky. Border patrol boarded the trains and often inspected boxes. Evgeny hoped that by carrying the books in sacks instead, they’d go unnoticed. His gamble paid off. They were never caught. Once safely in Riga, they boxed up their library and shipped it to America.
On January 25, 1993, the family arrived at Pulkova Airport outside of St. Petersburg with about a dozen large boxes and a dog crate containing Dina, their “worthless” dog. Some friends were there to see them off, including Alex’s closest friends still in Russia, Denis, Natasha, and Iula. He didn’t know when or if he’d ever see them again. Elena and Evgeny bid farewell to their dearest friends. Saying goodbye to Elena’s parents, Berta and Mendel, was the hardest part about leaving. They hugged each other tightly and tearfully. Though their own immigration paperwork was in the pipeline, they didn’t know whether it would be months or years before they’d see their only daughter and eldest grandson again.
When they boarded their Finnair flight they were awestruck. While they’d flown before within the Soviet Union, they’d never flown in such style! Alex recalled, “The planes we flew on before were old, fairly bare-bones planes, so traveling on a large western plane like an Airbus or Boeing felt luxurious.” The first leg of their flight was from St. Petersburg to Helsinki. When they landed, they felt the sharp contrast between Pulkova Airport and Helsinki Airport jarring. “The Soviet-era airport was an old, gray building built in the 1960s, and then we got to Finland and it was a large, modern, brightly lit airport with a mind-blowing duty-free shop.” More surprising than the clean, modern space, was the kind way they were treated. From the terminal, they saw Dina’s dog crate being unloaded from one plane and loaded to the other. They all wondered how the poor girl was holding up and whether or not her tranquilizers had worn off. “I went to customer service to ask how the dog was doing. My parents were like, ‘They’ll never tell you this!’ because we were used to Soviet-style customer service. This very polite agent asked me to wait a few minutes, and sure enough, in a few minutes she came back and said, ‘We contacted the ground crew, and your dog is sleeping comfortably.’ My mom remembered that experience for years later because that was such a kind gesture on their part to find out about our dog for us.”
From Helsinki, they flew to their final destination -- New York City. “I don’t remember much about the flight from Helsinki to JFK. It was pretty uneventful. Then when we got to JFK, we had to clear immigration, which took forever. I remember we each had a manilla envelope with all of our paperwork from the embassy in Moscow, and they had to process everything and give us the refugee stamps in our passports. By the time we got out – there wasn’t a ton of other immigrant families on that flight – it was an hour or two after landing. By that time all the luggage for the other passengers was picked up. I remember coming out into this huge hall where the baggage claim was in JFK. It probably wasn’t all that big, but I remember it being absolutely enormous.”
Evgeny’s cousin Naina, and her husband Stanislas, picked them up in a rented van so they’d have room for everyone (including Dina) and their luggage. What was Alex’s first impression of America? “When we got out of the building the first thing that hit me was how clean the air smelled….and it was outside of JFK in New York City!”
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