I Am Going Home

I was seven years old and two months when my family left the Soviet Union forever.

I remember almost everything.

What I did not understand was what we were leaving for.

It was December 1989. The night before our departure from Tashkent, we stayed at my aunt’s home, where relatives and friends kept arriving to say goodbye. There was food everywhere. Toasts. Laughter that kept collapsing into tears. Adults embracing for too long. Children moving between rooms while conversations continued above our heads.

Everyone knew this was not a vacation.

When we left, we were leaving permanently.

For a seven-year-old, however, permanence is difficult to understand. A child understands a suitcase. An airport. A party. Adults crying. He does not yet understand exile, homeland, or the possibility that a door may close behind a family and never open in quite the same way again.

Early the next morning, we woke before sunrise.

I assumed we were going to the airport.

We were not.

The Last Stop

Our family formed a caravan through Tashkent.

Ten cars, perhaps more. Forty relatives. Maybe I remember the numbers imperfectly, but I remember the feeling precisely: nobody was allowing us to leave alone.

The cars moved together through the winter streets as though our extended family had become one organism.

And then we entered the Jewish cemetery.

Before leaving the Soviet Union, we had one more group of relatives to visit.

The ones who could not come to the airport.

Our grandparents. Great-grandparents. Family members buried in the earth of Tashkent.

We still have the videos.

Even now, when I watch them, that world looks almost fantastical to me. The coats. The faces. The old cemetery. Adults gathered around graves speaking to people who were no longer physically there. Children standing nearby, perhaps understanding more than anyone realized.

We were going to Israel.

But first we had come to say goodbye.

There is something deeply Jewish about that sequence.

Before moving toward the future, we stopped among the people who had made our past possible.

Only then did the caravan turn toward the airport.

The Exodus

The terminal was overflowing.

We were not the only family leaving. Hundreds of people seemed to be doing exactly what we were doing. Heavy coats. Children. Suitcases. Bags tied together. Families guarding possessions that represented entire lives reduced to what Soviet authorities would permit them to carry.

There were tense conversations with customs officers.

Documents appeared and disappeared.

Certain family paintings and artifacts required approvals. Questions were asked. More questions followed. And, as often happened in that world, sometimes a little money helped a very long line move somewhat faster.

I did not possess the language for it then.

Looking back, I do now.

It was an exodus.

Not the Exodus.

There was no Moshe standing before Pharaoh. No sea waiting to split.

Just Jewish families in winter coats carrying suitcases through a Soviet airport.

But history does not always announce itself while it is happening.

In 1989, Soviet Jewish emigration was beginning to accelerate dramatically. Budapest had only recently become one of the principal transit routes through which Jews could reach Israel. Direct Moscow–Tel Aviv service had been discussed but was not yet operating normally; Soviet-Israeli diplomatic relations, broken in 1967, were only beginning to thaw. Thousands of Jews were starting to move through Eastern Europe toward Israel, and within a year the numbers would become enormous.

We were somewhere inside that river.

Eventually, the Soviet officials let us through.

And we flew to Moscow.

The World Between Worlds

Many of our relatives came with us.

That is another thing I remember vividly.

My father rented a bus to transport everybody around Moscow. We stayed at the enormous Izmailovo Hotel. To a seven-year-old, the lobby seemed endless. We ate in restaurants where waiters wore white gloves. Everything felt grand and strange and temporary.

We were still inside the Soviet Union.

But we had already left home.

For several days, we occupied a peculiar space between two lives.

Then came Budapest.

Hungary had become one of the newly opened gateways for Soviet Jews heading to Israel. Jewish organizations were arranging transit accommodations and helping emigrants continue onward; over the next two years, more than 160,000 Soviet Jews would pass through Budapest on their way out.

Our hotel seemed filled with people like us.

Four hundred. Five hundred. Entire families.

Everyone waiting.

Everyone carrying too much luggage and too much history.

And then came the airplane.

The First Time

It was an El Al Boeing 747.

I remember the buses taking us toward it.

I remember looking through the windows.

And I remember the men surrounding the airplane.

Israeli security.

Armed.

Standing outside that enormous aircraft protecting it.

I had seen soldiers before. I had seen guns before. I had grown up in the Soviet Union.

But this felt different.

These men were standing there because this airplane was Jewish.

Because the people boarding it were Jewish.

Because we were Jewish.

I was seven years old.

And for the first time in my life, I felt that word physically.

Jewish.

Not as something whispered inside a family.

Not merely something inherited from grandparents.

Not something the government had written in a document.

Something powerful enough to have its own airplane.

Its own language.

Its own soldiers.

Its own destination.

I remember climbing aboard.

Four seats across the center. Three on the sides. The enormous television screens that seemed miraculous in 1989. Hundreds of Soviet Jews settling into their seats.

Then the cabin lights went dark.

People tried to sleep.

I looked at my parents.

I can still see their faces.

I wonder now what they were thinking.

They had left behind parents, graves, friends, language, work, apartments, memories—an entire civilization they understood—and were carrying their children toward a country they hoped would become home.

I was excited.

They must also have been terrified.

Arrival

And then Israel appeared.

By the end of 1989, Ben-Gurion Airport was preparing for an immigration wave that Israeli officials already believed could reach extraordinary proportions; within months, planeloads carrying hundreds of Soviet Jews at a time were arriving through Budapest, Bucharest and other transit points.

I remember the scale of the arrival more than individual procedures.

The terminal.

The crowds.

The huge halls.

Families everywhere.

Food and refreshments.

Documents being checked and processed.

People being directed from one place to another, newly arrived immigrants trying to understand instructions in a language many did not yet speak.

Suitcases again.

Always suitcases.

Then, eventually, doors.

And on the other side were our cousins.

They had lived in Israel since 1973.

They were waiting for us.

That may be the strangest thing about arriving in a homeland you have never seen.

Someone is already there waiting.

We had traveled from Tashkent to Moscow, Moscow to Budapest, Budapest to Tel Aviv.

Thousands of kilometers.

Several countries.

Days of uncertainty.

And yet the moment those doors opened, there was family.

Thirty Years

We lived in Israel for six years.

In 1996, we moved again.

This time to America.

New York became home.

Thirty years have now passed.

I built a life here. A marriage. Children. Work. Community. Torah. Friendships. Nearly every adult memory I possess has taken place in America.

And still, something in me never stopped standing beside that airplane in Budapest.

I have spent years trying to understand why.

Perhaps at seven years old, something entered me before I possessed the words to explain it.

I thought we were immigrating to Israel.

Maybe my soul experienced something else.

Recognition.

I had never lived there before.

Yet something about arriving felt less like discovering a country than remembering one.

That is the mystery I have carried ever since.

How can a place become a memory before you have enough memories there?

How can a child step onto an airplane in Hungary and somehow understand that the men guarding it belong to him?

How can a land continue pulling at a person after three decades somewhere else?

I do not think nostalgia fully explains it.

Nostalgia asks to visit the past.

I want something different.

I want to go back.

Not to the Israel of 1989. That Israel no longer exists, just as the Soviet Union no longer exists and the seven-year-old boy no longer exists.

I want to return to the Israel that exists now.

With my wife.

With my children.

With everything the intervening thirty years have made of me.

I am doing everything in my power to make that possible.

Perhaps that is what I finally understand about that journey.

The cemetery in Tashkent taught me where I came from.

The Soviet airport taught me what it means to leave.

Budapest taught me that Jews can spend generations wandering through countries that were never meant to be the final destination.

And one El Al airplane taught a seven-year-old something he has spent the rest of his life trying to understand.

There are places where you live.

There are places you leave.

And then there is the place that somehow keeps living inside you.

Thirty years later, I am still trying to complete the journey I began at seven.

This time, I know where I am going.

I am going Home.