The minute you get off the subway train at Brighton Beach in Brooklyn New York, you find yourself in the midst of Russian or rather Soviet surroundings. Cyrillic signs on the storefronts, Russian language newspapers, Russian spoken everywhere on the streets, and usually cheap produce pilot on sidewalk stands. There are prices more compatible with those of the Soviet Union then of New York's other neighborhoods. You'll pass restaurant selling borscht, and pelmeni you notice shells of sunflower seeds spread around the benches on the beach. And older men playing chess outside on park benches, since the mid-1970s Brighton Beach became home to Soviet and primarily Jewish immigrants. Today we will talk about the history of immigration from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union to America. Different groups of population from that corner of the world came to the United States for different reasons in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. But we will focus in particular on Jewish immigration, and we will discuss how America was perceived through the eyes of the Jewish settlers. Their experience, of course vary dramatically, to understand just a tiny fraction of how they made sense of their adopted homeland. We will look at the writings of a prominent naturalized American author, Gary Stain Guard who left Leningrad at the age of six, and settled with his family in New York in 1979. First, let us start with a few facts about Jewish immigration from the territories of the Russian and Soviet Empires. To talk about this history's inevitably to talk about anti-semitism, the roots of which run deep and Eastern Europe. From the violent programs against Jewish settlements throughout the 19th century, which intensified around 1900 in particular. To the repressive policies against Jews under Stalin, to the so-called doctors plot In 1953. In which Jewish doctors and Moscow were accused of conspiring against the Soviet government. To more generally widespread quotas on juice in their pursuit of education and certain professions. Russian and Soviet history is documented systematic and long-term oppression of Jews. Although anti-semitism was officially crime in the Soviet Union, it was tolerated and in fact frequently practiced and provoked by the government. A first wave of Jewish immigration from the Russian Empire took place between 1880 and 1925, about two million Jews from Eastern Europe not just from Russia came to the US at the time. Settling primarily in Boston, New York, Philadelphia Baltimore and Chicago, already then Brighton Beach began to be populated by these immigrants whereas before it was home to wealthy native New Yorkers. A second significant wave of immigration began in the 1970s, a number of international diplomatic steps were taken to he's immigration from the Soviet Union. Significant among them was the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 by 35 countries, including the Soviet Union, part of which emphasized human rights and more freedom for immigration. This provided Soviet Jews with a streamlined process of leaving the country, many left for Israel and many ended up in the United States. In the 1970s and 80s more than 100,000 Soviet Jews arrived in the United States believing in America as the land of opportunity. The United States in turn eased the legal process for entry for this immigrants. Literally fiction and Memoirs are incredibly rich sources through which we can understand the experiences of these newcomers, and how they made sense of the American way of life. Gary Shteyngart was part of the 1970s wave of immigration. He has published several novels to critical acclaim as well as a memoir titled Little Failure, which came out in 2014. Much of what Shteyngart describes in his writings integrates common literary themes of immigration and exile. A sense of displacement, feelings of nostalgia and loss and confused attempts simultaneously tragic and comic to reassert oneself in the newly adopted homeland. It becomes painfully clear in Gary Shteyngart's writing that the experience of displacement makes it difficult to accept and adopt the beliefs and customs of another country. He dissects microscopically and with irony American values that are taking for granted and accepted as true by most Americans. American consumerist culture, racism, education and language itself become the subject of Shteyngart incisive pros. He describes for instance his compulsion to use the typical American expressions of personal empowerment and freedom, while simultaneously feeling to believe in just what he says. He remembers his parents being fooled by an American advertisement package announcing that they had 10 million dollars only to realize that it wasn't a subscription magazine scheme. And Gary Shteyngart discusses at length his own and American racism existing in tune with one another. When they first arrived in the US his family was literally scared of African Americans and Hispanics, since they had never crossed their path in the Soviet Union. And Gary Shteyngart soon noticed that his family occupied a higher place in the social hierarchy than people of color. We happily recognized he writes, that as unemployed and clueless as we are there is a reservoir of discussed in our new homeland for someone other than ourselves. We are refugees and even Jews which in the Soviet Union never want you any favors, but we are also something that we never really had the chance to appreciate back home, we are white. At the same time Gary Shteyngart suggest that the ethnically and racially diverse, New York, made it hard for racism to survive. What is there to say he writes, when the smartest boy in school is of Palestinian descent the way of South Africa. Among Shteyngart's endless experiences of successful and failed acculturation, one particularly stands out. The American University to which he dedicates a few chapters in his memoir. Oberlin the prestigious Midwestern liberal arts college that he ultimately attended takes central stage here with all its unresolvable contradictions. It is here that the writer reconsiders just what education means. Before Oberlin and his renowned Stuyvesant High School in New York, the young Gary perceived himself as a clown and the failure graduating at the bottom of his class. In Oberlin he is right in the middle of his college class rankings while being drunk and stoned all day long. Drugs and alcohol indeed seem to have occupied a good part of his Oberlin years. He ridiculous Oberlin's courses as absolutely unchallenging, during my first semester here, writes. My longest assignment is watching Ridler Scott's Blade Runner and then writing a paper describing my feelings about the same. He has some equally sarcastic words to say about the social class and ill perceived liberalism of the elite American college education. He writes, the truth is the rich will rule, even at a place like Oberlin where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the power structure to suit their needs, they will come out on top no matter what. But it is precisely in this environment that Shteyngart learns, he learns how to become a part of what he calls the cultural industries. That is to speak the language of the cultural left, and to differentiate himself slightly from his own duplicates. He learns that self-involved students who are skillful at marketing their identities in terms of class, sex or idiosyncrasies for example, being a be liberator. Or also fully accepting of Shteyngart's own particular past, taking it seriously when he describes himself, ironically as an immigrant from the former Soviet Union from a developing country crushed by American imperialism. And he also learns to write with the patient guidance of an Oberlin professor gradually abandoning his parents hopes for a locker year. Finding his authorial voice and producing creating that sometimes sucks, but sometimes it strives for the truth and it works. The very fact that Gary Shteyngart puts this word truth in his text, the text that dismantles all kinds of truths that he encounters, redeems the value of his education. Through writing he gains the sense of himself by the end of the Oberlin's four years, even if itself is still a shaky construction. Gary Shteyngart's writings offer us intimate insights not only into an America perceived through Soviet Jewish immigrants eyes. But also into in America made by Soviet Jewish immigrant, despite all the distance that Shteyngar creates between himself and his American surroundings. He constantly reminds us that he is a major part of the United States foreign self.
