In the late ’80s — the last few years of the Soviet Union — a flood of Jews streamed across its boarders. Many had waited a decade or more to leave and suffered untold personal and professional hardship in doing so. The inscrutable procedures required to emigrate often included immediate firing from one’s job, public shaming, and increased scrutiny from the KGB and other government agencies. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 many restrictions began to ease as the end of the USSR neared. Thousands of families were allowed to leave for Israel and America, thereby fulfilling decades-old dreams.
Though this was a positive development for the majority, the process was not without its hurdles and setbacks. In the last few years, some of the children that made that momentous journey — now adults themselves — have been trying to make sense of their immigration experiences. Lev Golinkin’s “A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka” is the latest book to mine this territory.
Golinkin starts his memoir in 2003 as he’s graduating from Boston College with no clue about what to do next with his life. He decides he must go back before he can move forward, so he returns to Kharkov, Ukraine — the town in which he was born and which his family left in 1989, bound for America.
The early chapters detailing his life in Kharkov are unremittingly miserable. Lev is beaten up and abused so much in school that his parents take every opportunity to keep him at home. His best friend stops talking to him once it is revealed that Lev is a Jew. He quotes his friend:
“You are a zhid. I know you are. You have the a— of a zhid, the face of a zhid. … We learned how to look for them in school.”
His older sister, though at the top of her class, is refused entry into medical school. The whole town lives in fear of the secret police and of one another. Those wishing to leave their “workers’ paradise” are required to have approval from their employers to emigrate. At the time Golinkin’s family was going through the process, there was added urgency as the country was rife with rumors that the United States was about to cap its quota for asylum seekers. His father waited in line for days, gaining the necessary documents just as the window of opportunity was about to shut.
The heart of the book is Golinkin’s account of the grueling dayslong bus ride to the Czech border and the subsequent layovers in Austria and Italy while the family waited to be granted entry into the U.S. He convincingly relates the purgatory of statelessness, the confused anticipatory state of the immigrant. Because Golinkin was but a child during this period, we must assume that many details that give this part of the book its power come from the recollections of adult family members and acquaintances who went through the experience with him; a memoir is always a mixture of one’s own memories with those of others.
Golinkin travels back to Austria to meet the nobleman who took his family under his wing, as well as the relief agency that gave him his first proper winter coat. He’s searching for his origins to find a way forward in his life and seems to find what he’s looking for. Oddly, the part of the book about his years in America are a lot sketchier than the long-ago saga of his immigration. Perhaps he would’ve benefited from interviewing people from his more recent past to flesh out his memories as he did for the part about his childhood. His high school years are barely even mentioned.
Golinkin’s prose is workmanlike, but the value of this book is as a document of the time rather than as literature. As the dissolution of the Soviet Union recedes in our collective memory, it will be more and more important to have first-person accounts of that turbulent era. Golinkin’s memoir provides one such window.
Dmitry Samarov is a painter and writer in Chicago. He is the author of “Hack: Stories From a Chicago Cab” and “Where to? A Hack Memoir.”
“A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka”
By Lev Golinkin, Doubleday, 308 pages, $25.95