A Complete Life

The soft, yellow fruit I just bit into didn’t taste like I imagined it would. I tried one more time before abandoning it. That was my first taste of a banana, at the age of 6. In the former Soviet Union that seemingly ordinary supermarket staple was just one of many things citizens weren’t able to access. As a child, biting into my first one on the streets of Vienna, after having to conquer the novel unwrapping process, it was my first realization that a lot of surprises were looming, some unpleasant ones and some thrilling.

The joys that accompany the early years of our lives would be that much more vivid upon emerging from behind the iron curtain and entering an entirely different kind of world, like stepping into color from a life of black, white and gray. On the precipice of a new life, we were three generations, my grandmother, my parents and myself. Each of us had different hopes and fears, an array of goals, our lives already and permanently marked by authoritarianism, but there was an entire future ahead following our release.

Since leaving my birthplace in the late 80s, I was nurtured and shaped by the same shared culture and history that raised millions of other kids my age. I’m an ordinary millennial American, and although my family and I were born in and immigrated from Odessa, I can tell you much more about the Adventures of Pete & Pete than I can about the Potemkin Steps. But I do have a perspective on life I’ve lived in peace and with autonomy, away from tyranny, and that is that it’s ushered me towards tenderness. With freedom comes choice and there comes risk, and the chance to acquire deeper understanding of our place in the world, opportunity for forming closer connections, an urgency to take care of the people, things, even ideas that need looking after.

When I was a teenager, my grandmother and I went to visit Odessa. The refugees who boarded a train there 10 years ago, now naturalized citizens living in the North East of the United States, were all born in this “jewel on the Black Sea”. The thick smells of fruit and forest that embodied our dacha, the city-dweller’s residence for the summer, would stay with me forever, but for my grandmother, there was so much more there, her life had been there. Odessa with its striking architectural feats, as well as its unpretentious cafes, schools, medical facilities and government buildings, was where she had lived with her parents, where she married, where she had worked and raised my father. I wanted to know how she was feeling and what she was thinking, but she was impossible to read. I relegated my thoughts to the apricots that carpeted the ground at our dacha.

The gift that I’ve been given, the opportunities, experiences and independence, would be harder to appreciate without also having the chance to witness it in the context of my family and others in the Russian immigrant community, who have had their humanity compromised and their dignity robbed by persecution and suppression. As someone who fled to America as a refugee and has been able to live in a constitutional democracy, now a mother myself, I know the most important component of living as a whole person is what the fight for freedom is about. It’s not having to temper your love for your family with fear of what tomorrow can bring. It’s about loving yourself enough to make sure your needs are met, to acknowledge your feelings and to speak your truth. It’s love for your community and for your planet. The ability for love, tenderness and nurturing is what we lose when our freedom is in peril and that’s all that we really have. On the surface its bananas and blue jeans, but it reaches all the way down to the heart.