Julia Ioffe

Julia Ioffe Instagram – Today is a day I’ve been anticipating for a while: the 30th anniversary of our arrival in the United States as refugees from the Soviet Union. I remember that day—April 28, 1990—as discrete packets of memory of a day too long for a 7 year old to fully understand, one that began in our Moscow apartment (where the first picture was taken shortly before our departure); continued on to Moscow’s Sheremtyevo airport, where my parents’ friends and my grandparents sobbed as if at a funeral; through passport control with what little we were allowed to bring; the long flight during which none of us slept, thanks to my bouncy sister; waiting on the tarmac in the snow in Shannon, Ireland as the plane refueled; our arrival at Dulles International Airport, where we were processed and given our refugee cards and expelled into the Virginia suburbs that seemed to me, in the brightness of its sun and the lushness of its greenery, to be the tropics.
A lot has happened in the 30 years since. The country we left soon ceased to exist. The country we came to has flashed us its teeth in recent years in a way that triggers deep, historical fears. We’ve all been back to Moscow countless times and I even made that vastly changed city my home for a few years. My mother recertified as a physician and has become a successful and prominent clinician and professor. My father bought a used car and got a job within two weeks of our arrival and quickly became the bedrock of the family, bringing over his parents and his sister and her family as well as a dozen other relatives. I went to college and horrified my parents by studying Soviet history and then horrified them again by becoming a journalist. My sister, that little blonde spark plug, is now a beautiful woman and a doctor, finishing up her residency and caring for patients with the coronavirus.
It was a hard road, but we’re here, American as fuck and proud of it, though I don’t think any of us could have foreseen that, in 30 years, we’d be back to a toilet paper shortage—this time, an American one. | Posted on 28/Apr/2020 10:29:25