![]() So in 2005, 10 years after my first trip back to the former USSR, I travelled to Pabradė in eastern Lithuania on a dual mission: to find my beloved berries and track down the man who had helped my family and so many others escape the Soviet Union. Still, I wanted to taste the berries where I’d first discovered them. Zemlyanika, it turns out, was what led my mother to place fresh strawberries by my bedside each morning on my birthday, and likely steered me towards a job of planning strawberry and raspberry plantations in Bosnia in my early 20s. The subconscious, scientific reason why I remember loving strawberries so much as a child in California was connected to what I couldn’t remember about zemlyanika as an infant in Lithuania. ![]() And though I could communicate with them in fluent Russian, I found it uncomfortable to do so all day. We only really knew of each other’s existences through old photographs, letters and strained calls. I stayed with my maternal and paternal aunts whom I hadn’t seen in 15 years. When I returned to Russia at age 18 for the first time since our emigration, Leningrad had been renamed St Petersburg, the Soviet Union had fallen and Russia was now a sovereign country. Both physically and emotionally, Russia felt a world away. In fact, as a child, my main memories of my aunts and paternal grandmother were of being woken up so we could scream at one another on the phone in my parents’ bedroom. ![]() Due to the 10-hour time difference between us, we received calls in the middle of the night and had to yell loudly into the receiver to hear each other over the static. Our relatives had to travel an hour to the central post office in Leningrad to make a five-minute call to the US. Instead of bridging the distance between us during the Cold War, phone calls from our Russian relatives were a loud interruption. Many Soviets didn’t have a home phone, and family members who did thought that the Soviet spy agency, the KGB, was tapping their line. Mom read my sister and I the birthday cards and letters because we couldn’t decipher the cursive writing. The smell of the dark chocolates and shaved wood from the toys permeated the parcels. Twice a year, our Leningrad relatives mailed us packages with black-and-white family photos, vinyl records from the state-owned Melodiya label, children’s books, stacks of Russian matryoshka nesting dolls, dark chocolates and wooden toys with stencilled Cyrillic writing on the boxes. My sister and I learned about life in the former Soviet Union through bedtime stories, infrequent letters and middle-of-the-night phone calls. 'I'm from a country that no longer exists'Īfter arriving in the US and taking a series of Greyhound busses, we settled in San Jose, California.Is this the world's most dangerous sea route?.My parents didn’t want us to suffer any longer, and when they chose to flee, they thought we’d never return. Fortunately, she survived, but due to rampant anti-Semitism in the USSR, my Jewish father could only find a job that forced him to travel a lot and my mother couldn’t handle taking care of two children alone. My sister had a rare kidney problem and Soviet doctors thought she was going to die, so I was born to “replace” her. Most Soviet families only had one child, as it was too expensive to support any more. ![]() I was the catalyst for my family fleeing from a city and country that no longer exist. I was only three years old when my parents, sister and I emigrated from Leningrad in the USSR to the United States in 1980 as “traitors”, losing our Soviet citizenship and turning our backs on Communism for the “evil capitalist West”.
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