Meaning and Exile

Walking composition

“Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured,
Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell—
We, who have sung the praises of the lord
With every fiber in us, every cell.”

—from “Bound for Hell,” Marina Tsvetaeva

I have a kid turning 15 this week, and after momentary flashback to the day he was born, the still-surreal experience of being so far gone in liver failure I didn’t even know I was dying—my doctor impressed that upon me later, perhaps recognizing that attempting to push through increasingly debilitating pain for nearly a week didn’t bode well for my future—my mind shifted to when I myself turned 15, a birthday I literally cannot remember even a moment of, though I know we were in another land, the Soviet Union, the place my father had lived in exile from for 17 years.

People often ask me if my father has dual citizenship. It’s a question that always startles me; it seems to indicate a lack of understanding of the kind of absolute rift the Cold War was, even for those of us who lived through it. He and my American mother lived in Leningrad until my older sister was two years old, when the reality of raising a child in the Soviet Union came home and they decided to leave. It took them months of advocacy and applications, and lobbying of my mother’s home senator back in the U.S., for my father to be granted an exit visa.

Their efforts eventually succeeded. My father was told he could go, and was given three days to leave his country. Three days to say goodbye to his family, his friends, his language, and all the life he had ever known. He was told that if he returned, he wouldn’t be allowed to leave again. He was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and went into exile, learning later that his own father had been stripped of his security clearance and nearly been kicked out of the Communist Party in retaliation for his son’s defection. My father didn’t return until 1990, after his own father had passed away.

Bonus photo: My father and his friends on the banks of the Neva. Leningrad, Soviet Union, early 1950s. My father is the one on the right, “the good-looking one dressed in the hand-me-down old coat.”