Eligibility Factors: What Do We Declare? What Do We Deny?
By: Ирина Задова / Irina Zadov
2020 was the year that the last of my dedushki and babushki passed into ancestorhood. I read the eulogy for my babushka Luba vacillating between Russian and English as snowflakes blanketed our small companiya gathered at Mt. Nebo cemetery. After the funeral, I came home and started looking through my grandparents’ things. I found my dedushka Venya’s briefcase hidden in my bedroom closet. My mama put it there for me to find. At first I didn’t recognize what it was. A busted old briefcase from the Soviet Union being held together by a belt. When I opened it, memories flooded back. I saw all of my family’s important documents: Soviet passports, birth certificates, marriage license, applications for food stamps, and this envelope declaring our refugee status.
When I was seven, I remember asking my babushka Luba, why we were moving to America. She told me: “Iza tebya” for you, so you can be better. I was often sick as a child. I was only 2 years old when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded and covered 70% of Belarus with 400 times more radiation than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I remember in that moment, feeling the pain of guilt, believing that it was my fault we were leaving behind everything we knew and loved. I felt in my body, a deep family rupture that would continue to bleed for years; we were being ripped from our rodina forever.
I asked my mama why we weren’t going to Israel — several of our family members immigrated there in the 1970s — she told me what her aunt told her: “Tam mi bili Zhidi, tut mi Russkiye.” There [in the Soviet Union] we were kikes, here [in Israel] we’re Russians.” Ironically, Russian / Belarussian / Ukrainian, etc. was never an identity never afforded to Soviet Jews; our legal nationality was always Jewish. In Israel, this moniker became a became a further othering, displacement, disorientation. In my version of the quote, I crossed out Russian and wrote “white” - because that’s what we became in the US - legally and socially - assimilated, homogenized, privileged, unrecognizable as having culture or past (this is particularly true for my generation of 1.5 immigrant kids who came of age in the US).
As I dug further into the envelope I found our interview appointment with Soviet immigration officials, a notification that Pan American, the airline that was supposed to take us to New York went out of business the day before our flight, as well the Holocaust Victim Asset Litigation from the Swiss Banks. In this document my grandparents had to prove in great detail, what material damages were done to them and their families by the Nazi regime; how many were killed, how many were forced into slave labor, what was stolen, and destroyed.
The final document I found was my grandfather’s citizenship application. Within it, there is a long list of “Additional Eligibility Factors” the first questions states:
“Are you now, or have you ever been a member of, or in any way connected or associated with the Communist Party, or ever knowingly aided the Communist Party directly, or indirectly through another organization, group or person, or ever advocated, taught or believe in, knowingly supported or furthered the interest of communism?”
When filling out his Holocaust Victims Litigation documents, my dedushka Venya declared his entire family: his parents, grandparents, and 2 younger sisters were among the 14,000 -18,000 Jews and 100 Roma who were systematically killed in Sarny, Poland on August 27th, 1942. Their bodies were put into a mass grave which they themselves dug. In the decades that followed, the area has been paved over and turned into a football stadium. There is no monument or plaque acknowledging the massacre in what is now Ukraine. Instead, a memorial has been erected in Holon Cemetery just south of Tele-Aviv. I imagine if we were to dig beneath that memorial, we would find the remains of another group of people killed, forced to flee their homes, and made refugees in their own country. And so the cycle continues.
The $4,500 my dedushka received from the Swiss Banks was the maximum compensation given to survivors; it amounts to approximately $562.50 per family member killed. All of this, he gave to his grandchildren. I remember the $600 given to me when I was 12. I did not know how to process this gift. I honestly don’t remember what I did with the money. Knowing me, it probably funded a subscription to Teen Magazine, some jewel toned nail polish, or it just sat in my bank account waiting for a rainy day. Looking back now, I think about the various “gifts” I’ve received throughout my life and the weight of those gifts. Access to refugee status, assimilation into whiteness, cis heteronormativity, my American accent which plagues my attempt to read Vissotsky and Shalom Aleichem in the original, and the bottomless void of grief, longing, and intergenerational trauma left behind in Sarny, Mogelov, Minsk, Kubeshev, Gomel, Tashkent, Baku, Samara, and Tbilisi.
My grandfather escaped the 1942 massacre because he was studying at University and was able to flee to Belarus when the Nazis invaded Poland. After meeting up with his surviving older brother, he got a job in a factory, met my babushka Luba, and eventually rose up the ranks in the Community Party, becoming the Deputy of Internal Trade for the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belarus. I’m not sure what his job entailed, but I know he wore a suit every day and carried a briefcase. I also know he had a car in the 1960s, a fact that my mom hid from her classmates, for fear of being beaten up or ridiculed for being a burzh (bourgeois).
Reflecting back on the “Eligibility Factors” within the US Citizenship Application, I asked my mama how any Soviet citizen could possibly deny their involvement with the Communist Party. No matter how much you were against it, it was the water in which we all swam. I even remember learning the alphabet with Dedusha Lenin. “Well, my mama told me, you have to answer the questions to get in.” So we answered the questions the questions and “got in.”
30 years after those immigration papers were filed, I continue to hold the weight of escape, survival, gratitude and accountability. I wonder what privileges we were granted, what was stolen, snuffed out, erased, and what is owed. I aim to participate in reparations in my lifetime; in solidarity with Black, Indigenous, and Palestinian communities. Because that weight is too heavy to bare alone and I know in my soul that our liberation is intertwined.
Below is my creative interpretations of the Additional eligibility factors.
