My Immigrant Experience: San Francisco, CA 1980s

My parents and I arrived in San Francisco, CA from Odessa (then the USSR, now Ukraine) on January 19, 1977. (Twenty years later, I married my husband on the same date; it meant that much to me.)

**Author Alina Adams and her family arriving in America from the Soviet Union after a long journey through Austria and Italy, 1977.**

I was 7 years old. I was sent straight to second grade (as a result of the time it took to immigrate from Odessa, through Vienna, Austria, then onto Rome, Italy before finally hitting the US, I skipped first grade entirely).

In 1977, there were very few Russian speakers in San Francisco. We were among the first of the Soviet Jewish immigrant wave that would peak in 1979, before trailing off in the early 1980s, until it picked up again upon the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

“Communist, communist, you’re a communist,” my fellow second graders gleefully taunted me. “Why don’t you go back to Russia, you communist?”

At the time, I did not have the English vocabulary, nor did the average second grader have the geo-political sophistication to understand that, were I, in fact, a Communist, I would have remained in the USSR. (And I wasn’t even from Russia, you ignorant children! I was from Ukraine! Though I spoke Russian. And I wasn’t Ukrainian. Yes, the world is a nuanced and complicated place). The fact that I was now not in the USSR would suggest that I was an anti-Communist.

But you can’t blame the elementary school students for being confused. Their parents weren’t much better.

San Francisco in the 1970s, almost as much as now, was loudly proud of its liberal credentials (even - especially - when actual civic actions failed to match their stated ideals; for instance I was quite surprised, based on my own experience, to learn that there was no anti-immigrant sentiment there prior to 2016).

**Seven-year old Alina posing for the obligatory photo taken by every Soviet immigrant to America. It’s called: Here is a picture of my child with food. Look how much food there is here!**

The Jews who’d come to America from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Rumania, Hungary, etc… prior to those countries becoming Communist, were so delighted to meet the new immigrants. They couldn’t wait to share how they, too, had fought for socialism and progressive causes the minute they hit America’s shores.

It came as quite a shock to them to learn that these new arrivals shuddered at words like “socialism,” and “progressivism,” and that they found the political opinions of those who’d held “Free the Soviet Jews” rallies to get them out of the USSR to be hopelessly naive, at best, irredeemably stupid, at worst.

Living in San Francisco from 1977 until I moved out (first to Los Angeles, then, ultimately to New York City) in 1994, the only representation I saw of Jews in the media was either of the “Fiddler on the Roof” variety, or of the been in America for so long the only way you can tell they’re Jewish is that periodically a Yiddish word would pop out of nowhere, in shows like “The Nanny.”

Books were no better. As a family saga reader, I could find plenty of titles which began with the poor, downtrodden immigrant leaving the shtetl for a better life in America. Everything from “Evergreen” by Belva Plain to “Bloodline” by Sidney Sheldon. Once in America, they either became wildly successful and assimilated capitalists (see, once again, “Evergreen” and “Bloodline,”) or self-righteous radicals like the characters in E.L. Doctorow’s, “The Book of Daniel,” which was absolutely not based on the Rosenbergs - except for the parts that were.

In other words, I never saw anyone like me.

For “My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region,” I wanted to write about someone not exactly like me… but closer than all previous depictions.

So I set the “present day” section of the book (actually 1988) in San Francisco. The San Francisco I grew up in, the San Francisco I knew best.

My lead character, Lena, is perennially stuck between two worlds. The daughter of a Soviet immigrant who survived Stalin’s purges and an American soldier who spent part of World War II in a German prisoner of war camp working alongside Soviet comrades, Lena feels like she doesn’t fit in with the American Jews, or with the more recently arrived Soviet ones.

Her husband, Vadik, is from the latter group. He thinks Americans who sing about how “The Russians Love Their Children, Too” and have been fooled into thinking that Gorbachev is any different from all the despots who came before him aren’t just what Lenin called “useful idiots.” They’re idiots—period.

Meanwhile, Lena’s father knows that not all Soviets are bloodthirsty monsters who spend every hour scheming to take over the US and establish the real-life version of the 1987 mini-series, “Amerika.” He knows that Soviets can be good, brave, principled people—like his wife. And like the missing soldier who once saved his life.

All aspiring writers are advised to, “write what you know.” We are also told that “if you don’t see the book you want to read, you should write it.”

With “My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region,” I attempted to do both.