11/23

My niece and my dad were born one-day-short-of forty-nine years apart. This year, their birthdays immediately follow Thanksgiving, which means this Thursday through Saturday will basically be non-stop celebration in the Romm family. (I need to find my stretchiest pants and loosest shirt.)

Juxtaposing my niece and my dad is an interesting experiment. My niece will turn three on Friday. She is a giggly little human. She knows a lot of words and speaks in complete sentences and with great sincerity. She is both very musical and very mechanical, and she can understand words in at least four different languages. My dad will turn fifty-two on Saturday. He is your typical Russian-Jewish immigrant dad: deadpan humor, inimitable intelligence, and love for his family that beams through every pore of his ever-grinning face. He melts at the sight of my niece; this great, big man becomes a little puddle of joy in the presence of an almost-three-year-old.

My dad and my niece remind me of my family’s greatest trait: our love overwhelms us.

The first time I held Rachel, I was both incredibly terrified and incredibly delighted. I was so scared of dropping her that my arms and shoulders quickly cramped up. I had to sit down, so that I could rest my elbow on the chair’s arms for support.

She was tiny, and I was smitten.

We all were.

None of us could take our eyes off of her. My mom and I took turns holding her, laughing and smiling and cooing at her itty bitty face. I gave her a little baby Dumbo toy I had bought at Disneyland for her months before.

We were all completely in love with Rachel from the first moment we saw her. And to this day, she remains the itty bitty, sassy, hilarious, spunky center of our world — a world built almost singlehandedly by my dad.

I was going through old posts on my Facebook page because I wanted to find out if Rachel was born on a Tuesday or a Thursday (I did not realize until later that Facebook would not be able to tell me this and that I would have to, then, Google “November 27, 2012” and try to figure it out from there). One of the first posts that appeared on my Timeline from November 2012 was a link to this article (which, it seems, doesn’t give you the full article, so this might be a better option), which my dad had sent me around that time. His email had the subject line: “Interesting reminiscence.” The article is written by Edward Frenkel, an incredibly accomplished and popular professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley. The quote I had chosen to use in my Facebook post was this one:

“Having established that by this definition I was a Jew, the woman said:

‘Do you know that Jews are not accepted to Moscow University?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I mean is that you shouldn’t even bother to apply. Don’t waste your time. They won’t let you in.’”

By then, I knew very well what my dad had gone through while applying to Moscow State University (commonly referred to in Russian as МГУ), years before Frenkel would do the same. How he had, despite everything he was told and knew already, gone to МГУ’s entrance exams. How he was given exponentially harder exam questions than his non-Jewish classmates. How humiliating it was, and how enraging, too.

In fact, I knew this story long before my first year of college. I don’t know exactly when my dad first told me about it, but I do know that when I got into Berkeley, and we screamed and laughed and cried together, and I reread the acceptance email, and I saw that I was a Spring Admit, and I got upset and worried that “they didn’t want me enough,” my dad took me by the shoulders and said, “Listen. I was rejected from МГУ because of who I was. But you were accepted to Berkeley because of who you are.” And it was then that I decided that my education , and all my professional growth onward, would be my dad’s vengeance.

Growing up as the child of immigrants offers an incredibly unique perspective and understanding of parenthood and family. How do you quantify the sacrifices made by your parents, humans who bore you and raised you and loved you and fought tooth and nail so that you may have even a slightly better life than theirs? How do you quantify the time your parents spent crying, screaming, shaking, praying, weeping, shouting, aching if only it meant that you would never have to do the same?

My dad has carried his whole family on his back for decades — and he leaves no doubt that he would do it again for all eternity if he had to. When I see my dad with my niece, how he melts at every thing she says or every note she sings, I see the kind of love he carries in his heart — and has taught us to carry in ours, too.

My niece will have a very different life than my dad’s or even mine. She will not know what it is to live an episodic life, to know that home is old apartment buildings scattered across the globe. She will not know the simultaneous wonder and petrification of a Trans-Atlantic transplantation. She will not know what it is like to lose a language, to grasp at words here and there even as you know that you will never understand a string of Hebrew words delicately rolling off another’s tongue. But she will grow up with her fair share of hardships, of challenges, of grappling with questions — both global and personal (Rachel is the first biracial member of my family, for instance) — that neither my dad nor I can even begin to comprehend.

I always wonder what Rachel will be like five or ten or twenty years from now. Will she have curly hair? Will she be more humanities-driven or more scientific? Will she be quiet and shy or loud and bubbly? One day she will look at a little toddler she is related to (a child of mine, perhaps) and wonder the same things. She will wonder, “Was I ever really that little? Was there ever a time that I did not think and feel the things I do? Can it really be that my family has always been so full of love for me?” When I look at her, I wonder the same things.

I occupy a very interesting position in my family tree.

When I look backwards, I see my dad. My past. The giant upon whose shoulders I have stood in order to see ever farther. I see sacrifice and love and support, and I see how it has provided and continues to provide the foundation I have needed to pursue things my parents probably never even dreamed of.

When I look forwards, I see my niece. My family’s future. The little bug around whose shoulders we drape our greatest hopes and dreams. the wide-eyed, grinning face upon whose cheeks we can never plant enough kisses because how do you quantify such overwhelming love? I see the product of my dad’s sacrifices. I see the product of my mom’s sacrifices. I see the product of my brother and sister-in-law’s sacrifices. I see a new branch sprouting from a strong bark, arms reaching towards the heavens as the tree’s roots sigh gently from below.

Almost half a century separates my niece and my dad. And yet they’re not so different, after all. Both remind me of hope. Both remind me of promise. Of sacrifice. Of faith. Of endless support and of bird-like flight.

More than anything else, both remind me of love — heart-melting soul-crushing life-changing love.

This weekend, my niece will turn three and my dad will turn fifty-two. And when we sing the last words of “Happy Birthday” and they blow out the candles on their cakes, and everyone claps and yells yay!, I will feel the familiar warmth of overwhelming love wrapping its arms around my soul.

Happy birthdays, my darlings!