Mila Vasser Anderson Interviewed by Carol Zuckert (with interpreter) August 2000 CZ  We're here in Tucson, Arizona. Mila Vasser Anderson and Carol Zuckert at Carol's home and we're going to talk about Mila's remembrances, memories of her times in the former Soviet Union. When were you born? MVA  January 17, 1970. CZ  Where? MVA  In Kiev, Ukraine, Soviet Union at that time. CZ  Can you tell me something about the circumstances of your birth? Were you born in a hospital? MVA  Yes; it's an interesting story. My dad and my grandma dropped my mom off at the hospital and figured they wouldn't hear any news for a while because Mom had a very long labor with my brother - two and a half days. She came to the hospital, they sent her home, she went back later, it was a long ordeal. So they figured it would be the same thing with me. But literally an hour and a half later I came out. And then she got a cold, so she ended up staying in the hospital for a month with me. She was in a room with 15 other women in the maternity ward. The nurses would wheel in the babies for feeding. And I was a small baby; I was two and a half kilos. CZ  Which is the equivalent of about six pounds? MVA  Five and a half pounds. My mom was tiny and she didn't have much milk. Other women who had plenty of milk were encouraged to express it, so I had extra from these other women. This didn't help my Mom develop her milk production and hurt me in the long run; she couldn't feed me for long. But the main reason she was there so long was because the ob-gyn found out that she was a translator at the Kiev Institute of Microbiology, so he kept bringing her articles to translate. He was working on his dissertation at the time and she helped him, so he kept her in the hospital and brought her extra food. CZ  Journal articles? MVA  Yes, medical journals. I was a month old when I came home; I had gained quite a bit of weight in that month. Mom said she walked in the house with me and there was a huge gathering of all the relatives; they all came to see the baby. And my brother (he was 8 at the time) was passing out surgical masks to everyone so they don't breathe on the baby, made sure they don't touch the baby; he was protective of me actually for many years. CZ  But I'm wondering if you had a vast store of antibodies that some other child wouldn't have had, having been wetnursed? Were you a healthy child? MVA  Yes. I was fed by a neighbor after that because my Mom lost her milk when I was about three and a half months, although my brother she nursed for a year. But for me she bought milk from a neighbor, who was a healthy, strapping woman, with plenty left over after she fed her boy. I had it pretty good. Mom says I didn't get sick at all my first year and a half. CZ  Probably good, sound basis for your upbringing. How long were you breast fed? MVA  Well, my mom had to stop at about three and a half months and then she was getting milk from the neighbor in a bottle. So I had breast milk for about a year. CZ  And was that traditional in the Ukraine? MVA  I don't know whether traditional or not, but it's just something that my Mom insisted on very strongly since she knew this was the best form of antibodies. She insisted, and they had to pay the woman a lot for it. CZ  How old is your brother? MVA  He is eight years older, he's 38 now. CZ  Where does he live? MVA  He lives in Monterey, California. CZ  So your Mom was able to afford to have the breast milk purchased. What was she doing? She was working as a translator? MVA  Well, there are certain things that she felt really strongly about and she would push for her agenda. She worked as a translator in the Institute of Microbiology, a translator and librarian, she worked with articles and journals, and she interpreted for visiting delegates. And my dad was an economist at the main gas plant for Kiev county. CZ  What kind of positions were these considered to be? MVA  Middle class. Once you get into the professions, everybody's pretty much the same. There were small variations as far as pay went. My dad was making 150 rubles a month and Mom was making 120 rubles a month, which was pretty much average. CZ  One of my interviews was with a woman whose mother was the head of a whole bread factory. She was a chemist. She was making 200 rubles a month. That was all. MVA  Right. CZ  Bread apparently is such an important component in the diet of Ukrainians or Russians. MVA  Right, it's a huge staple of the diet. But somebody's who's working in a food industry probably had an opportunity to make a little extra on the side. CZ  Black market? MVA  Well, sure, grab a couple of loaves to give as presents. There's potential there. Often doctors got food presents for their services. CZ  I see. So there wasn't potential for your father as an economist. MVA  No. What could he do? Pick up a suitcase full of gas? CZ  Where was he trained, your dad? MVA  He had a master's equivalent from Kiev University in Economics and Political Economy. CZ  And tell me first about your mother's training. MVA  She actually started out training to be a nurse. She had to leave that program because she couldn't do the clinical part of it. She went through the first year, which was all classroom learning, but in the beginning of the second year they had to give patients shots and she just couldn't do it. It was pretty traumatic for her to leave the program, depressing even. But then she went to work at a shoe factory, where she met my dad. After they were married she went to the Institute of Foreign Languages. CZ  I see, so she was good at foreign languages. MVA  Yes. And from there she got a job at the Institute of Microbiology. So her medical background isn't that extensive, per se, but she sure knows all the technical terms for all the viruses and diseases. CZ  And your father went to the university. From some of the people I've spoken to from the former Soviet Union, they kept you out of the university, but you didn't have any sense of that restrictions? MVA  Oh, certainly. I know that there was a quota for Jews. Mom didn't get in to the Foreign Languages Institute the first time she applied, so she applied the next year and got in. When she was applying the second time, she was pregnant with my brother so she hid the pregnancy and then started in the fall after he was born. CZ  OK, so your Mom, what other languages did your Mom speak? MVA  Russian, English, she understands Ukrainian and Yiddish and some German from knowing Yiddish, that's it. CZ  What about her religious background? MVA  She's Jewish. CZ  How do you know that? MVA  Well, we're a Jewish family. We've always known that. CZ  But see, some people don't know that from the former Soviet Union. They don't know it in their heart. They have it on their passport. What happened to you to know that you were Jewish? What made you really Jewish? MVA  Well, that's a different story, but I'll backtrack to my Grandma, my mother's mother. She grew up in a little shtettel called Boguslav not far from Kiev. She grew up in a traditional Jewish home. Her first language was Yiddish. She didn't start learning Russian until she was 14 and the family moved to Kiev. So she had all that in the home, the candles and the Shabbat, very traditional mother. Grandma's name was Chaya-Zisel, which means "long life" (I hope I'm getting the second part right), they called her Chaya, but when they moved to Kiev and got all Russified, she changed it to Klara. CZ  Could she read Hebrew? MVA  Yiddish. CZ  Just Yiddish. MVA  Well, it's the same alphabet, but Grandma doesn't know Hebrew. CZ  But did they pray in, was the prayer book in Hebrew? Or it didn't matter? MVA  I don't know how they prayed. CZ  Before we get too far would you explain, would spell please the name of the schtettel, as best you can. MVA  Boguslav. It means, literally, Bogu is 'to God' and slav, from slava, is 'glory,' so it means 'glory to God.' CZ  Very cool. And it was mostly... MVA  It was Jewish. CZ  Oh, it was all Jewish. MVA  Yes, or at least mostly Jewish. CZ  What did the family do there? MVA  Her father was a furrier. CZ  And what kind of furs? Do you know? MVA  I don't know specifics. He made coats and hats. CZ  For whom? Do you know? MVA  I'm assuming the people in the town. CZ  ...or did he sell them to the Russian Army? MVA  No, no, I can't imagine he had a "government contract," because they didn't have that kind of money. In the stories my grandma tells about her youth, they were poor. Her mother was very sick. She had tuberculosis. In 1917, the Bolsheviks came to the town and then bandits came and raided, the family ran to hide and hid in a swamp; they stayed in the swamp all night, and she got tuberculosis after that. CZ  Now you're talking about your maternal grandmother's mother. MVA  Right. Her name was Rachel. One of the stories that Grandma likes to tell is that her father would buy her mother little presents because she was sick and that would be his way of nurturing her. One time he brought her a little piece of chocolate. And it was sitting on the table. And my Grandma, youngest of four kids and spoiled, ate the piece of chocolate that she knew was intended for her mother. Her father was very disappointed with her. So clearly they didn't have much money, if they could afford a little piece of chocolate for just one person in the family. CZ  What was their lifestyle like? Do you have any idea? You said they were practicing Jews, which meant on Friday night they lit candles? MVA  Yes. CZ  They have challah? MVA  Oh, yes. Her father would go the shul, there were actually two not far from them, and he took her with him. She says she loved going, was full of awe. CZ  Does she have any brothers? MVA  Yes, the oldest one was a brother and then three girls. My grandma's the youngest. CZ  I see. And did the brother go to shul? MVA  I don't know. The only thing I know about him was that he was bitten by a dog on the cheek when he was young and that he died very young in the war. CZ  So as far as you know your great-grandma was a traditional housewife in this little schtettel in the Ukraine. OK. MVA  And then they moved to Kiev. CZ  About when? Do you have any idea? MVA  When Grandma was 16 or 17, so 1933 or 1934. CZ  I see. And why did they move to Kiev? MVA  Because in Ukraine there was famine. CZ  In the schtettel, in the outlying area, not in the main cities. MVA  And so they moved to the city to try to find work. Grandma would tell me about how they would get food relief packages from the States. CZ  Still do that. MVA  Yes. Actually one of her fondest memories is about these canned hams in the relief packages and they are, with the traditional Jewish background, and hungry. And she remembered it in her mind as this delicious, wonderful food. And then when we came to the States she attacked these hams because of the memory of that taste in her childhood, but of course once she tried it at age 62, it was a whole different taste. But it wasn't a matter of an internal conflict about eating pork as a Jew - the hungers in Ukraine and during the war and even after the war pretty much took care of that. In fact, Grandma makes the best pork chops in the world. One time Grandma was carrying a heavy food relief package and leaned against a window sill to rest for a minute and apparently leaned too hard and broke the window, but her dad was really nice about the whole thing; he paid the people and didn't make a deal about it. CZ  That's pretty funny. What did your grandpa do then when he was in Kiev? MVA  Grandma's father got a job at a fur factory making coats and hats. Or do you mean Grandma's husband? CZ  Yes, Grandma's husband. MVA  He worked with her in the court. He was a lawyer, a prosecutor. CZ  She worked in the court? MVA  Yes. She got a job in the Kiev Supreme Court. She was everything from a secretary and a record keeper to stenographer. She kept crime statistics for all of Ukraine, the whole republic, she had a security clearance to handle all kinds of paperwork. It's very surprising because she was the only Jewish woman in the court. CZ  Do you have any idea how that came about? MVA  Actually it was a friend of her father's that got her in there as a big favor. But to backtrack, back in Boguslav, Grandma didn't go to school until she was 9 and then she went to take the entrance test and she placed into the third grade. She knew German really well. CZ  How? Maybe because of the Yiddish? MVA  Probably. Then she came to Kiev when was 14 or 15 to go to a Jewish teacher's college. She was even doing student teaching. She went for a year and a half, but when she came home for holidays, she got sick and had surgery, and after minor surgery got an infection and got so sick she couldn't go back to school for months. By then she missed so much class time that she had to drop out. She says by that point she sensed how much anti-Semitism there was in Kiev and that there wasn't much future in Jewish schools anyway. Then the rest of the family moved to Kiev after that and Grandma thought about what to do next, so she went to truck driving school. And she's tiny, she's about 4 foot 9, so they didn't want to take her because somebody said, how's she going to drive a big truck? And someone else stood up for her and said, OK, she can drive the mail cars, the mail vans. So she went to the school, learned some auto mechanics, she was getting a good stipend, but she never worked as a mail delivery person. She just wasn't hired. CZ  What did she do after that? MVA  By then she was 19 or 20, a friend of her parents' arranged for her to get a job at the courthouse, working with actual trials. Then later she was transferred to a different branch of the courts in a different building, the prosecutorial branch where the case is investigated and put together before going to court. But she met her future husband at the courthouse before that. He was this big dashing lawyer and everybody said stay away from him but she fell in love and married him against her mother's wishes. CZ  Why did they object to the marriage? MVA  Oh, she says her mother could see that he was a playboy, a rogue. But she was in love. The rabbi's son from Boguslav tried to court her and he came out to Kiev before she married to see her and tried several times to woo her. But by that time it was too late. She was already in love. And so they married in 1937 when Grandma was 20 and my mother was born in 1939. CZ  Before that though, tell me the names of all the people you're going over. MVA  My grandmother is Klara Loyeva, she's always kept her maiden name. CZ  That's traditional. MVA  Yes. In fact, my Mom kept her maiden name Tverskaya until we came to the States and all of a sudden they made her Vasser in the process. And my grandfather's name is Gregory Tverskoy. CZ  Is he Jewish? MVA  Yes, he was Jewish. His father was a rabbi, in fact. And his family has some interesting stories. His family was wealthy landowning gentry in the Kiev area before the revolution. The wife (my mom's grandmother) ran the business, took care of everything, while the grandfather prayed and studied. They had a bakery and kept it running through the famines. CZ  That's pretty unusual. MVA  Yes, very unusual. Mom jokes how she should be so grateful to the Soviets for liberating her ancestors from evil bourgeois influences. In 1917, when the Soviets came to power, they started rounding up all the rich people and arrested Gregory's mother and she was going to be executed for being wealthy and landowning. They took her to prison with what she had on, so she had on her rings and she bribed the guard with her rings and she escaped with her life. CZ  Wow. They were tsarists probably? Or somehow they were seen as tsarists. MVA  Well, anybody who was wealthy or owned property was suspect. Part of the reason why there was hunger in Ukraine was because the Bolsheviks went around to all the well off farmers and took all their livestock, crops, possessions. This was called collectivization. Many farmers killed their livestock rather than give it up to the Bolsheviks. So that's why there was the first of the waves of famines in Ukraine. CZ  OK, so now, your great-grandparents moved to Kiev, and then your Grandma marries the dashing, rich attorney. MVA  Well, at this point his family is no longer rich. CZ  Because they've taken away everything. MVA  Right. The family had lost almost everything. It's an interesting family. My mother's father had a brother and a sister. The sister reportedly was very beautiful and there was a neighbor guy who stalked her and one day killed her with an axe. Her name was Roza; my mom was named after her. She left behind two little kids, a boy and a girl - my mom's cousins; he became a physicist and she became a doctor or researcher, I believe. But the family had lost all their land holdings and wealth. They had owned the house where my Grandma ended up living. They had owned the entire house. It's three story, big, I don't know how many rooms it has, but it's an old, big house, built in 1870. It's on Gogol Street, in the old section of town. And then when the Soviets came, they allotted the family one apartment. CZ  This is back in the Revolution days? MVA  Right, the government gave them one apartment. And then by the time my Grandma married her husband, they had one room. The whole building was divided up into communal apartments, which means a whole family lives in one room and all the families in the apartment share the kitchen and toilet. There were five bedrooms, one of them, I swear, was probably originally a closet - it was so tiny. CZ  You remember them? MVA  Definitely, because I lived there with my Grandma from age four and a half to six and a half. She had the best room out of the ones in the apartment. She had the biggest room with a balcony. But still it was one room. And there was one toilet down the hall, and each family had its own toilet seat that hung on a hook on the wall. There was one big sink in the kitchen and two stoves to share and there was no refrigerator. You needed to have your own fridge in your room. There was running water but no bathtub. CZ  Even when you lived there? MVA  Even when I lived there in 1974-1976, there was no bathtub so people had their own big metal tubs in their rooms or once a week they would go to the public bath. CZ  Your mother's parents had how many children? MVA  Just my mom. She was born in March of 1939 and when the war started her father sent Mom and Grandma off to Kazakhstan to evacuate. They evacuated out of Kiev and he stayed on. He was a prosecutor through the war and later on he became prominent in the party and even participated in the Nuremberg trials. He had a car and a chauffer later on. CZ  Where were they in Kazakhstan? MVA  I don't know, some village. CZ  Do you know anything about any of those stories? MVA  What I know is, this is my Mom's formative time, so the stories are basically of her, how she coped mentally and so forth. It was very, very traumatic. On the way out, when they were in the train, the train was being bombed as they're going. And my Mom had dysentery, so Grandma had to get off the train every time the train stopped to have Mom go to the bathroom. Mom was so sick that the people on the train were telling Grandma that Mom won't survive, her skin was all blue. And at one point they barely made the train - the train started moving and Grandma was running with Mom and she handed her to some people by the door and she still has to jump on and the people pulled her up onto the train at the last second. That was one of the most terrifying moments in her life. I can tell by how many times she talks about it and repeats it just how traumatic the experience was. And when they got to the settlement or village where they were in Kazakhstan, Mom did not want to be in daycare and my Grandma had to go to work to survive; otherwise they wouldn't be able to eat. They hardly had any food anyway. The Soviet government was paying for the refugees and mom's father sent them some money to survive. At some point later on when Mom was able to express herself better, she refused to go to daycare. So Grandma had no choice but to leave her alone in their room. Mom remembers it as spending most of the time under the table hiding. Mom was between ages 2 and 6 during the war. Clearly, you can imagine how that affected her. There's a lot of really interesting little vignettes. One of my favorites is when she was 6 years old, at the end of the war, right before they left, she had her first egg. Grandma somewhere procured an egg. And just the way Mom describes, she says, "I sat with that egg for three hours." This clearly is an exaggeration but you can just picture this little kid slowly, deliberately eating this egg, this awe at this egg. CZ  I wonder what aspect was so important to her. Did she know what an egg was? MVA  I'm sure she had eggs as an infant before the war broke out but didn't remember. Grandma was telling me how when Mom was 5 or 6 months old, the two of them went out to a farm for a while and Mom got all fattened up with fresh foods, fresh cow's milk; I'm sure there were eggs there too. But during the war it was something that she was deprived of and now here it is, now she's got it. Now here's her egg. And they came back after the war from evacuation, they went to a town called Saratov, where Mom's father was working; he greeted them at the train station and said that he met another woman and is living with her and that they should leave. During the whole evacuation Grandma had no idea this was coming; in fact he had come out to visit them and everything was normal. Apparently he sent a letter telling her what was going on, but some women intercepted it so as not to upset Grandma. So you can imagine how devastated she was when she got there. She saw the other woman at a store and started yelling at her, but some women got her out of there. He got her a room so she and Mom would have a place to stay for a few days, and some people there stole her clothes. So after a few days she packed up my mom and they went to Kiev and Grandma tried to reclaim her apartment, which had belonged to her husband's family. But there was another family living there, and it took her a long time fighting in courts to get the apartment back, to prove that she had lived there before the war. So during that time they lived with Grandma's sister Rose and her son. Her husband had died in the war and she had a little boy the same age as my Mom. They were all in one room, sharing one bed, trying to survive. But that was pretty much the last Mom saw of her dad. She saw him once when she was 13 and once right before we left Kiev; that was pretty much it. When we were leaving the Soviet Union, there was a law that everyone had to get their parents' permission to emigrate, so Mom had to find her father and get his permission, after not seeing him for so many years. At first he gave his permission and then he took it back, so Mom went to see him in Saratov and said, if he can interfere like that, then he's taking on the role of her father and she's moving her whole family in with him so he can take care of us better. That worked, he signed the papers. His wife, that same woman he left Grandma for, told Mom to tell Grandma that Grandma was lucky to get rid of him when she did, that he made her life miserable, cheated on her constantly. They have two daughters, both doctors; in fact, he told Mom that out of his whole family, she's the only one who doesn't have a Ph.D. Mom went to see one of her half-sisters at the institute where she worked and she had Mom thrown out. Mom has no idea whether her father is still alive or not, or how he died or when. She's tried to find out through official records, but no luck. CZ  Let's go back to after the war when your mother and grandmother are back in Ukraine. MVA  Back in Kiev, yes. CZ  Is your Grandma working? I mean, they're trying to survive? MVA  Yes, after a while she went back to her job at the courthouse, again after having to fight for it. Actually she ran into her old boss from the prosecutorial office and he wanted her to come back to work there, but his boss refused to hire a Jew, so she went to the courthouse. Later she was transferred to the Kiev Supreme Court. CZ  Nice position, probably doesn't pay very much though. Was she managing financially? MVA  No, not really. I mean, they were at a very basic subsistence level, where you had to save up for six months to buy an article of clothing. Once an acquaintance offered to pay Grandma to help her sell clothes on the black market; Grandma was afraid but the woman said all she had to do was stand there. It ended with Grandma literally running away from a policeman, running through a store and running out the back and hiding. So much for that. But Grandma had second jobs in the evening on and off throughout her life. CZ  Did she get along with her sister? MVA  Oh yes. Actually they've always been close. CZ  And the kids get along? MVA  Sure, they were OK. They didn't live together all that long. Grandma Rosa and Eesya, which is Isaiah. He later changed his name to a Russian name. CZ  What happened to them? MVA  She was a cleaning woman, so she had a very small income, and she had the tiny room. CZ  And what did the boy do? MVA  He grew up to be an engineer, I believe, definitely a good profession. He did well financially in Kiev. He and his wife had an almost unheard-of luxury - a car. Then when they came to the States, he got a job in his field and made decent money. Not often do immigrants get jobs in their profession in the States, mainly due to language. CZ  And he changes his name away from the Jewish name. MVA  Yes, he became Vladimir, and went by Volodya, which is the nickname for Vladimir. CZ  And Vladimir is common like John, right? MVA  Yes, it's a very common name. There's a Saint Vladimir in the Russian Orthodox church who's very important; maybe that's why it's a common Russian name. And he married, had a son, they came to the States two years after we did, lived in New York. Grandma's sister, Grandma Rose, died seven years ago. Grandma and I went out to visit them in 1986. They wrote each other every month, Grandma and her sister. But it's an American reality that families are so spread out and they only saw each other that one time. CZ  Are they still in New York? MVA  Yes, the family's in New York. Volodya died of stomach cancer three years ago. His son Alec is my third cousin. He's a big computer whiz, has a big house, is married, has two boys, is a practicing Jew, from what I understand. CZ  Then what happened with your grandma? MVA  Grandma never remarried. She tried dating a little bit but Mom didn't take to it very well. Besides, Grandma was used to fending for herself, being defensive about her space, so she had a hard time letting people in. And keep in mind that after the war there were probably three women for every man, so the pickings were slim. She dated a shoe maker for a while, a nice man, he made a good living. He wanted to marry her but she turned him down because she wasn't in love with him. Just goes to show how independent she was. CZ  Well, think of your poor mother, though. Spent all those years alone. MVA  Yes, she was alone a lot. She read all the time; when she was a teenager she sometimes ditched school to go sit in the library and read. And Grandma was a loner too, not many friends. She worked two jobs most of the time. After the courthouse job she worked in the evenings. She worked in a daycare for a while. She even worked as a night guard at a warehouse, which is funny because my grandma's absolutely tiny and it's really hard to imagine her in that kind of jobs. But she's just got such a strong character. CZ  Did what she needed to do to get by. MVA  Did what she needed to do and convinced people she could do it and was very protective. CZ  Of your Mom? MVA  Yes, and of her space. And she had to fight for everything. CZ  I lost something. Your grandfather, he was in the war? MVA  No, he did not fight in the war. He was a military prosecutor throughout the war. CZ  Oh, so he's the one that took off. MVA  Right. CZ  So she never saw him again. MVA  Right. He's out of the picture and not sending any money. CZ  Your Grandma is raising her daughter alone and it's after the war. MVA  Yes, and it's under Stalin, the Stalin era is coming up. My mom is growing up. CZ  Your Grandma has two jobs. MVA  Mom's not making it much easier. She would ditch school. CZ  Now why, do you know? MVA  Well, I don't know exactly. Maybe it was partly that she just hated to be confined indoors. Even today she needs big spaces, needs to be outdoors, to be doing things. And it was incredibly rough growing up without a father, financially, emotionally. She would tell kids at school that her father died in the war. Of course this was before the days of school counselors. And Grandma just didn't know what to do with her. So periodically she would send her to her oldest sister who lived out on a farm to be with her cousins in the fresh air and get fattened up and healthy over there. Of course, Mom was pretty much traumatized by older male cousins. When she was 7, they threw her in the water and she didn't know how to swim, and so to this day she has a phobia of being in the water. She says she spent the rest of the summer hiding in the kitchen and eating tomatoes. They had these big buckets of tomatoes sitting there and that was her refuge. Those boys really tortured her; when she was older one tried to molest her. CZ  Terrible, when you think of the anxiety of the war, and then having to spend those early ages, years alone in that apartment. We're post-World War II now. Go ahead. MVA  When she finished high school, she went to nursing school and she did one year, which was the theoretical year and she did fine. And in the second year they started doing the practicum. CZ  The clinical practice. MVA  Yes. And she could not do it. So she snapped and had a fight with some of her classmates and she was so miserable that Grandma told her to go ahead and leave the program and she sent her again to Kamenka to the farm to recuperate and clear her mind. And then she came back and went to work at the shoe factory and that's where she met my dad. CZ  How do you think those cousins in Kamenka survived World War II and the Nazis? MVA  I have no idea. I don't know whether they were there through the war or evacuated too and then came back. CZ  Maybe they went to Kazakhstan or someplace as well. MVA  That is an interesting question. Anyway, my mom and dad dated for a year and then got married when she was 20 and dad was 23. CZ  She's at the shoe factory? MVA  Yes, she's working at the shoe factory and Dad's working at the shoe factory and trying to go to school. CZ  To become an economist. MVA  Yes. And she is applying to the Institute of Foreign Languages. She didn't get in the first year. I think she got in the second year. She applied when she was three months pregnant with my brother and school started when he was a few months old. He was part of that whole experience. She would have study groups at girlfriends' houses and she would bring him and he would be playing right there next to her. At first, when Mom and Dad got married, they had no apartment of their own, they got on a waiting list. So first they moved into Mom's mother's apartment because it was bigger - I say apartment, but I really mean room - it's a bigger room in square footage. But Dad and Grandma could not get along at all, they fought all the time. Grandma spent all those years of being alone and protecting her space, safeguarding her stuff from neighbors; she likes things to be just so, she's very particular. And just trying to be emotionally strong to raise a child alone - she's not used to giving an inch. And here's this guy who is a stranger... CZ  Interloper. MVA  ...interloper in her house. And Dad grew up without his father, his father died in the war early on. He was one of the first to go and was one of the first to die. So Dad also went with his mother to Central Asia. So he was used to being the man of the house. CZ  And he's a man. In that society. MVA  Yes, yes. And he was used to his mother giving him her money and saying, you take care of the money. So Mom and Dad lived there until after my brother was born, so probably two years they lived with Grandma. CZ  Oh, they made it that long? MVA  Yes, they did. Mom says every day on the way home from work she would pray, don't let them kill each other. Just don't let them be fighting again. CZ  It was that bad? MVA  They argued a lot. Yelling and screaming and slamming of fists on tables, and Mom was caught in the middle. CZ  We're talking about 1960... MVA  They got married in September of 1959, my brother was born in February of 1962, so two and a half years, let's say three years. And then they couldn't stand it anymore and went to Dad's mother's apartment, which was a tiny little hole. There was space literally for Grandma Sonya's bed and my parents' bed right next to it and Sasha's crib in the corner. CZ  How romantic. MVA  Exactly. Mom told me how on their first night there she felt somebody pulling her arm in the middle of the night. She had her arm on top of Dad, and her mother-in-law is saying, don't put your arm on him, it'll make it hard for him to breathe. So this is the start of communal living. Then Mom started going to school in the evenings and working part time during the day, she was working in a library. And so Grandma Sonya was the lady of the house. She did the cooking and she was taking care of my brother. And she would complain about her daughter-in-law to all of the neighbors. They called her "student boarder." CZ  Probably pretty appropriate title, huh? MVA  True, but Mom didn't see any humor in it. Even today, after so many years that whole situation upsets her. CZ  Well, it wasn't tongue in cheek. They probably meant it. MVA  Right. She says the neighbors would gossip about her, say what a nice man Mark is and he brings this woman home who doesn't do anything, and at least if she were pretty, it wouldn't be so bad... But Grandma never stood up for her. CZ  How interesting. So they lived cheek to jowl in this apartment. MVA  For eight years. I asked her recently why she couldn't just hang up a blanket on a rope or something to separate out their bed from Grandma's bed area, and she says she didn't even think of doing that, and if she did, it would be considered rude. My immediate reaction is to fight for my space. I'm approaching the situation from a 1990s independent American woman perspective - it's a whole different psychology. CZ  You were born there? MVA  I was born right after they moved; they got a bigger apartment finally after waiting for 10 years. CZ  Right after? MVA  Mom was pregnant with me when they moved. CZ  Wonder how she managed that? MVA  Actually, Dad wanted to have another child before, he wanted a girl, but there was no money for another child. There was no room for another child, literally, in that room at Grandma Sonya's. There was no way to bring in another child. But I guess when they heard they were getting an apartment, they went for it. CZ  Interesting. So then she has you eight years later and she's working at this point? MVA  Yes, at this point she's already been fully established at the Institute of Microbiology and my Dad was at the gas plant. And they move into an apartment that has two bedrooms but it's called a 3-room apartment because the living room is counted as a room. My brother has one room, Mom and Dad have another, and my crib is in their room, and Grandma Sonya came too, she didn't want to be alone. CZ  And they needed a babysitter. MVA  And they needed a babysitter, exactly. And that's what babushkas are for. She slept in the living room. She took care of me during the day. I remember I was always a picky eater and it was a huge challenge for her to feed me, to distract me long enough to sneak some food into me. She would get all the forks and spoons out and I would play with those and she would feed me. One time she brought in the neighbor's cat and the cat was fighting to run away and screaming; I don't remember this but Mom and Dad told me. There's not much I remember about her unfortunately. She died when I was 3. She was 63, died of a heart attack pretty quickly. CZ  Do you remember that? MVA  I remember her being carried out by the ambulance. I remember they didn't have a stretcher. They came with a blanket and they carried her out on the blanket. That is the most vivid image I have of her, which is pretty bad. CZ  Earlier we've already dealt with your birth to some extent, stay in the hospital. And your Grandma took care of you for a couple of years because she was around and your brother was in school. Regular school? MVA  Yes, regular school. He wasn't a good student in the later grades, didn't want to go to school. CZ  Why? MVA  He was just bored. He'd read his books and fall asleep and then Dad would sit down to study with him, but it didn't help. He was always really good with his hands, making things, good in drafting class. I remember when he was 13 or 14 he built a telephone from scratch. Mom says Grandma Sonya would say, "He's a genius, you all just wait and see, he'll surprise you all." CZ  OK. What do you remember of those early years? What was your life like? What did you do? Did you go to playground? MVA  Yes, we lived in a 9 story building CZ  Walk-up? MVA  Elevator. CZ  In the middle of the city? MVA  Actually, we were in a new neighbor toward the outskirts of the city. The neighborhood was built up in the '60s. It was by a canal of the Dniepr River, right overlooking the water. It's a 9 story building, divided into blocks across, there were 5 or 6 blocks across, 4 apartments per floor in each block, and each block had its own front door. We were up on the 8th floor. And the way they have the buildings, they would have like maybe 5 or 6 buildings sort of making a loose square and in the middle there would be a playground. And on the first floor of most of these apartment buildings were stores. So the first doesn't count. They count the European way, the second floor is considered the first floor. CZ  Can you tell me some of your memories? MVA  Sure. Probably my earliest is when I was about 2 years old and I went to the bathroom to get my little potty and I brought it out into the living room to do my business and Mom telling me that this is not how it's done, that you don't share that with everyone else, and laughing her head off. I remember I was 3 and my brother Sasha and I were left alone at home and he says, let's open the windows, pour water on the floor - it's all parquet floors - and it'll freeze and we can ice skate. CZ  Oh, creative. MVA  Yeah! And I said, great - I'm 3 years old - I think this is great. CZ  And he's 11 so he's not understanding the implications. MVA  Well, sure he knew. We didn't do it; he was just teasing me. I remember my crib was at the head of my parents' bed and I would reach through the bars, twirl my mom's hair around my finger and fall asleep holding her hair. Later she explained to me she would wait for me to fall asleep and free herself. In the summer sometimes Dad and I would sleep on the balcony; there was a big daybed out there. Sasha would take me for rides on the bar of his bike. We were close. Actually the story is that I was a pretty spoiled kid. Mom loves to remind me of the fits I threw. One time we were all outside somewhere, came back home in all our winter gear - hats, coats, gloves, galoshes - and I wanted something and threw a fit and wouldn't get undressed, so Mom just left me there by the coat rack and a few minutes later I was asleep in all my clothes on the floor. It's one of those "just wait until you have kids, you'll see" stories. CZ  Who lived in your apartment building? Did you have friends next door or down the hall? MVA  Sure. CZ  And who were they? MVA  I don't remember so much. There was an old couple across the hall, the man was a veteran, he lost his leg in the war. I played with kids out on the playground, but don't remember anyone specific. When I was four I was diagnosed with glomerulonephritis, which is a kidney disease; they said my right kidney stopped functioning. I spent 3 months in the hospital, June, July and August, where they didn't do anything. All they did was keep me on a salt-free diet and take my blood every couple weeks. That's all they did. I don't remember getting any medicine or anything like that, but they just kept me there. I was in a room with probably 15 other kids. On the way to the hospital we got a ride from some friends of my parents, it was my first time in a car, and I got car sick and threw up on the floor of the car. The poor people, such thanks for their troubles. Grandma came to see me every day because the hospital was close to where she lived; often she brought me fresh berries from the market in a little glass jar. And when it was time for me to go home, the doctor said I couldn't go to daycare because I wasn't supposed to catch any colds, get any germs, and so forth because this was such a serious life threatening condition. So my Dad called my Grandma and told her she needs to take me. She quit her job and took me to live in her apartment. Then I had my tonsils taken out right after the 3-month stay in the hospital, my tonsils and adenoids. I remember that really well because I wasn't put to sleep or anything. I was tied to a chair. I had my hands and feet tied to a chair and I remember getting a shot, the huge needle going in, then this instrument going in and the doctor pulled some lever and I remember spitting up all this blood on the doctor. CZ  And you're 4? MVA  I'm 4 years old. And they didn't let anybody come see me so I was in this children's room alone. It was a dark little room and there were a lot of kids in bunk beds, but one girl had her dad there and I was so upset that I had no one to be with me. But that dad gave me a piece of marshmallow, my only comfort of the day. I was totally a daddy's girl and Sasha was with mama. She had a really, really close relationship with him. She took him everywhere. When she went to visit her girlfriends, she took him; she took him to museums, and took him places, everywhere. They talked, played. CZ  Because you weren't old enough yet, really. MVA  Right, I was a lot younger and then I was kind of sickly and so I was left behind with Dad and they went off. CZ  But you hated it? MVA  I remember feeling something missing. One time I rebelled - Mom and Sasha went to the beach and I wasn't allowed to go out of some health consideration, I don't remember what the deal was, but I ran away to the Dniepr, which was right outside the house, and stripped down to my underwear and laid out on a blanket, and Dad had to come get me. CZ  You were feeling left out? MVA  And once I moved in with my Grandma, I would be with Grandma during the week and on the weekends Mom or Dad on Friday would come pick me up after work, we'd take the subway and bus to their apartment and I would be home for the weekend. CZ  This is post tonsils, right? MVA  Right. This is at 4 and a half, when I moved in with Grandma at the end of the summer after the hospital. And then at 6 and a half I went to school, which was younger than most kids; most go at 7. CZ  No kindergarten? MVA  No, there's no kindergarten. There's preschool but there's no kindergarten that's attached to the school like we have here. CZ  What did you do? What was Russian life like? MVA  Well, Grandma kept a pretty tight rein on me. The instructions from the doctor, coming home from the hospital, was that I was not supposed to exert myself, I was not supposed to get sweaty. I was given very limited rein about playing outside, running around and playing outside. I had some friends but Grandma would go out on the balcony and yell for me to come inside if it was a tiny bit cold out. I wasn't supposed to catch cold. CZ  She was very protective. MVA  Very protective. Because everybody was very fearful after I had this illness. In fact, years and years later, after getting a clean bill of health, even as a teenager here in the States, Dad would still say, "Don't forget! You have those kidneys!" It made a huge impact on my life, since I wasn't really active as a kid, I was lousy at sports, a little wimp. Now I wonder whether it was the right diagnosis, because if it was, glomerulonephritis is a very serious disease. I mean, even here in the States people go on dialysis. But I don't remember getting any treatment at all. CZ  Yeah, I was wondering. MVA  So I don't know. And how can you know? But at the time when the doctor tells you, this is what you need to do, you do it. So grandma took care of me and fattened me up. CZ  Did Grandma have a radio? Continue with the interview of Mila Vasser Anderson