“Something is wrong!”

It was June 1, 1985, my husband walked in saying “Something is wrong!”
He just came home after opening his first bank account; it was the day of his first paycheck. He supposed to be happy and excited. We came to the USA as refugees from the former Soviet Union on December 20, 1984, so it took him only 4 months to find a job, and not just a job, he got a job of his dreams. Starting May 1, 1985 he was working as research scientist at New York University.
What could be wrong? And he told me the story at the bank.
I have to mention here that we are white. I am Russian and my husband was a Jew. In the USSR that was always a nationality not a religion, so I, probably, had to say not practicing Jew, but he did visit a Synagogue on Yom Kippur and he always knew he was a Jew.
He came to the Chase Bank on Fifth Avenue, the branch located next to the arch on Washington Square, with his first check to open his first account. Within a few minutes the account was open and my husband could go home. However, he noticed at the next cubicle another bank officer was serving a black man. The man was already there when my husband came in. The man was dressed very professionally, in a suit with a leather attaché. The officer kept asking the man to produce some kind of verifications for this and for that and the man very obediently kept showing more and more paperwork. This was a moment when my husband realized that the man was trying to open an account in the same bank. My husband left and the man stayed, we don’t know how much longer it took him to open a bank account. We do know that his English was perfect, he had great manners, and his attire was sharp.
Yes, something was wrong, but it took me many more years to realize that it was the first time we used our white privilege and observed the institutional racism.
It is even more difficult for me to recognize any kind of privilege because, first, I was a Russian in Russia and then I became a white in the United States. When you always belong to majority, it’s not enough to say you can’t imagine how the others live, you just never think about them, the “minorities”. You assume, automatically, they are exactly like you and leave that thought over there. I did know that some people were Jews and some were Georgians, Uzbeks, Kalmyks, or something like that, the name and the appearance were the only differences in my childish view.
As a child at school I noticed, of course, some kids teasing others by name calling, one of those names was “Jew”. So it did stick in my head, that it was a “bad” word. You can’t imagine my awe when I first saw this word written in one of my friend passport. The thought was: “She will have this “bad” word written in her passport forever”. How is it possible? How will she live on with that written in her passport? How do we allow such an unfair thing to happen to a girl on her 16th birthday? This was my first lesson on privilege and chauvinism.
Very soon I met my future husband and was introduced into the life of jewish minorities which was not much different from my own, with one exception: if we had never talked about nationalities in my family, now it became a topic which was brought to the conversations all the time, almost into every other topic. I did learn that it is important to people to be recognized not just as individuals, but also by the group they were born into. This is much harder to keep your identity surrounded by a different majority whose traditions you are being forced to adapt. This “force” is not visible, but suddenly a jewish boy takes the last name of his russian wife during marriage so “it’s easier for the kids” or Samuil suddenly becomes Semen to sound more russian. Who knows at what moment you completely lose you national identity and become a jew only in the passport? I learned all of that. I understood the pride of my husband and his family to carry the title of being Jews.
This is why my husband was so sensitive and recognized prejudice right away. When people are really proud of who they are they can respect others.
I am trying to pass this understanding on to my black students.
Last year one of the girls asked me about Malcolm X. The teacher in her History class told them that Malcolm X was for segregation and she couldn’t understand why anyone would be against integration. This was the moment when all these things that my mother in law used to say about jews in Russia came to me and I used those ideas to explain to a black girl in America why one of the black leaders would teach his people about segregation. Here is what I told her: “I have never read books by Malcolm X, but I am sure he didn’t want his people to learn the traditions and history of white people before they learn the traditions and history of their own. First, you have to learn who you are and be proud of that, only then you’ll be ready to learn the story of other people.“ I think the girl got it.

My Family Health History 1

Contagious and children’s diseases

I have to start this blog because my younger daughter asked me to. She said she needed to know our family health history. Since I have energy to write down my thoughts and memories very seldom, I’ll try to go in chronological order of my own life and mention the diseases of other members of our family by association.

As children my brother and I had many diseases together. When I was 4 we both got dysentery, that time I almost died, blood was coming out of me. Somehow the doctors at the children’s hospital in Moscow saved me. I understand that children’s and contagious diseases were not in mind of my daughter when she asked me to write this blog. However, everybody, but my mother, had dysentery at one time or another. The diet during and after infectious stomach disorders and diseases is very important. This was time when I started my learning about the importance of food for health. On the other hand, maybe we all had this genetic predisposition to catch dysentery except for my mother she never got it.

In elementary school I developed tonsillitis and in fourth grade was sick every other week. I missed half of the school year, maybe even more. If it was in America I would be left back, but in the Soviet Union you always were moved forward if you could pass the tests. Poor attendance, if it was medically excused, was not a reason to keep a child in the same grade twice. And I passed all tests. By spring of that school year my tonsils were surgically removed and I never was sick for more than once or twice during winter season again.

My brother, however, was born with diathesis, covered with bloody crust. He was not allowed to eat eggs, oranges, tomatoes, and many more tasty things. With age his diathesis turned into asthma and he suffered from asthma attacks regularly. We all knew what to do: windows open, 4 pillows under his shoulders, and no dust. When doctors developed test on allergens, my brother showed reaction to all of them. The worst reaction he showed on aspirin. Twice he had to be taken to the hospital by paramedics with clogged air ways. Thank god he survived and grew out of his asthma. Now he suffers from time to time with an allergy attack as a reaction to cats, dogs, birch blossom and other unpredictable things. He learned to deal with that, especially after medicines like Benadryl and Sudafed were discovered.

My mother never allowed him to feel like an invalid. She was experimenting with different methods of dealing with all his conditions. My favorite memory is about this Indian doctor who taught us how to breathe. Theoretically, I didn’t need those exercises, but if my brother had to do that, I had to do that too, that was the rule, so both of us learned how to breathe with our stomach, not shoulders. This was training for my brother; he had to learn that during asthma attack instead of panicking he should watch his breathing and it worked pretty well. Now I know that this way of breathing is taught to all people who learn Ayurvedic medicine and philosophy.

The first disease I remember myself without my mom telling me about was the mumps. There was no vaccine for it in the fifties. Both: my brother and I had mumps together, he suffered awfully, had very high fever, couldn’t move for a couple of days. I remember how my mother was changing our compresses a couple times a day and in a few days we both started our recovery. We loved to be getting better because mom cooked our favorite dishes, we didn’t go to school and could run and play all day long.

Chicken pox left me with a couple of scars on my face. Sometime later I had shingles, so the virus stayed with me for a while. Here it is interesting to mention that both of my daughters had chicken pox before the vaccine was introduced and the same summer they both had shingles. The doctor mentioned to me how unusual one shingles at this age was and was stand that both of them developed it almost at the same time.
In the fifties we did have vaccinations for diphtheria, polio, tuberculosis, and plague. That was standard at that time, all 4 diseases took millions of lives in previous generations. Plague alone is blamed for loss of half of population of Europe in 14th century.

Here I want to state my opinion about Vaccinations. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, gave birth to 8 children. Only 4 of them survived the childhood. The other 4 died from children’s diseases. I can’t hear the conversations that hygiene could save those children. I know how good and clean my grandmother was. She alone saved her husband, my grandfather, from wounds he got while being executed during the civil war in Russia after the revolution of 1917. He was shut in multiple areas. His jaws, legs, and chest were completely messed up. My grandmother found him among dead bodies and took home, luckily the place of the execution was nearby their village. She took care of his wounds; she fed him liquid diet with a straw, because he couldn’t move his jaws. He survived, lived longer than she did. Now, tell me she didn’t have clean house to bring up her kids, of course she did. Hygiene does not protect from children’s disease. If people knew the history of their families the way I do, they would never argue about vaccinations. Vaccinations save kids’ lives. How many of you know mothers who lost their children our days? A hundred years ago it was every family. I worked with new mothers for 20 years none of the kids died from infectious children’s diseases.

One last thing, my husband didn’t have rubella as a child, he got it at the age of 29, we were married already. An entire week of a fever over 103 made him think he was dying. Luckily this was the day when the rush spread all over his body and the fever subsided. I still have not had Scarlett fever and I am thinking from time to time of the day when it will catch up with me.Vaccinations to kids are done not to just protect the kids, they are done to make sure that the adults do not die from children's diseases.