I’ll Give You Something to Complain About

A few months ago, my husband & I watched Aziz Ansari’s Netflix special Live at Madison Square Garden and he talked about what it was it was like to be the child of immigrant parents. At the end, he brought his parents onstage and they watched as the crowd gave their son a standing ovation.

My mother was born in a refugee camp in Germany on the other side of World War II. Her parents and her sister and her grandmother had left Russia on foot, but made a slight detour into a concentration camp thanks to the Nazis. It’s the reason why I’m convinced I never went to summer camp.

We don’t do well at camp.

When my grandparents were still alive, they used to tell stories, we picking up some because I knew a little Russian, some being translated through my mother. Stories about being taken out in the middle of the cold night and stripped naked and hosed down. They would huddle around the children to try to protect them from the freezing water.

The camp was liberated and they made their way to a refugee camp, with a stop in a bombed-out school in Austria (I think? They didn’t have GPS) for my grandmother to have a baby boy. But it turns out bombed out schoolhouses during WW II where a Russian Orthodox Priest is stealing your food (true story) isn’t the best place to have children. The baby died.

My grandparents, my aunt and my great-grandmother made it to the refugee camp, where my grandfather got to work collecting bits of parachute silk which he’d bring to my grandmother to make clothes. Then he’d barter the clothes for extra food (and alcohol.) Eventually my grandmother gave birth to my mother. She was too stubborn to die.

My grandfather taught my mom to recite poetry and dance. While he would collect and sell parachute silk, my mother would accompany him like an organ grinder’s monkey. People were always willing to throw in a little extra milk or bread (or alcohol) for the precocious kid with her dad.

My grandparents ended up like a lot of other people’s grandparents, in Florida by the way of Chicago. Baba and deda would sit at their kitchen table which was littered with smoked fish (heads still on) and piroshki and kasha for breakfast and they’d watch my baba’s favorite show, Sanford and Son. She never spoke much English, but my baba loved Sanford and Son.

I spent summers there with my family, my chubby thighs sticking to the plastic-covered sofa, wondering what it was like to go from watching people you love die to watching Fred Sanford grabbing his chest and declaring “you hear that Elizabeth? I’m comin’ to join you, honey!”

My mother doesn’t have an official birth certificate. It turns out that along with substandard medical care, refugee camps aren’t great when it comes to record-keeping, either. But she does has her UNICEF cup and plate, which still sits in the cupboard of my childhood home. They’re the only things I’ve asked for when time marches us on to our inevitable fate.

While other kids were brought up with the boogeyman, I was reminded that the Nazis could come get you in the middle of the night and take you away. I’ve never been a sound sleeper, and here in California earthquake country I can wake up from a deep sleep and grab the dog and my laptop and get to the safe spot in three seconds flat. One of my friends complained that the hallways of her NYC fifth-floor walkup smelled like cabbage. To me that smells like home.

While my classmates had grandparents who walked uphill to school in the snow, both ways, I was reminded I had grandparents who walked out of Russia with guns at their back. It was tough to complain.

That kid was mean to me! Sorry. Hitler.

That teacher hates me! Hitler.

I’m sad. HITLER!

You can’t argue with Hitler.

As I’ve written before, my writing career has had innumerable starts and stops. Projects that have seemed inevitable have disintegrated before my eyes, while others have dropped in my lap like a gift from the gods. But lately there’s on the horizon to be positive about. Sure, I haven’t played Madison Square Garden, but I’ve had some success. And on the days where it seems impossible I remind myself that my baba saw my name on TV.

Right next to Sanford & Son.