Waiting for America

Excerpt from "Wienerwald"

That morning in the airport, to look his best, my father was wearing a navy sport coat of the sort that we used to call "club jacket" after some forgotten British fashion, gray gabardine pants, and cordovan shoes. On his knees he held a black and brown briefcase with all our papers.

"We got you out," father repeated, and he kissed me and my mother on our chins, noses, temples, like a blind person missing lips and cheeks.

That was my family at the doorstep of the West, unprepared, as we would soon discover, despite the years of waiting, for what emigration held in store for us.

Half an hour later we boarded an Ilyushin 86. The Aeroflot stewardesses, navy-clad creatures with movie star looks, no longer treated us as their own-as fellow subjects of the Soviet Empire. Which meant they treated us better. The "emigrants" in their eyes were almost as good as Westerners and deserving of proper service. In the air flying over Ukraine and Czechoslovakia, my parents and I toasted with champagne our deliverance and yet waited anxiously for the plane to touch down outside the boundaries of the Eastern Bloc. Our whole lives' belongings had been packed in five suitcases. Our proofs of identity were Soviet-issued exit visas with black-and-white frenzied photos. We'd been stripped of our Soviet citizenship. Refuseniks we had been, kept hostage by the state for nine years, and now we became refugees, stateless persons loosely protected by international conventions. All we knew about our future was that we were Jews bound for America.

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