When Deana left Belarus, she was numb to the fact that she would probably never see her grandmother again. After her family arrived in Texas, Deana was depressed and her grandma was on morphine for her cancer pain. They didn’t talk on the phone much. Deana would often sleep late, and her mother told her not to bother her grandma at odd hours. Deana didn’t really get a chance to say goodbye. “I wish my grandma was there when I graduated with my PhD,” she said softly. “Knowing that I’ve inherited that grit that my grandmother had, it just makes me so proud.”

“I never felt like an outsider with her,” she continued. “It’s hard to find that kind of support. It’s hard to open up, be real and honest. Whenever you open up, you invite hurt.”

At this point, I was crying too, thinking about the last real conversation I had with my own grandmother, who raised me until I was three. My parents and I were visiting her in her tiny apartment in Saint Petersburg a few years ago, before her mental faculties began to deteriorate. She was in her usual, bizarrely high spirits. When my parents and I got up to leave, she looked me dead in the eye in a way that said, “This is the last time.” Outside, my parents asked me why I was crying, and I mumbled something about not being able to find an Uber. But really, it was because I feared that I would never see her, at least not in that way, ever again. And the weirder you are, the fewer and more precious are the people who truly accept you.

Deana and I cried for our Soviet grandmas for a few silent minutes. Then we gathered ourselves and walked out into this foreign land.

Acknowledgments

I’m  fortunate to have so many people in my life who have helped enormously with this project.

I’m so thankful to my agent, Howard Yoon, who tirelessly shepherded, shaped, and cheer-led this idea from the beginning. Without him this book would not exist. My wonderful editor, Brant Rumble, had such sharp insights all along the way and is perhaps the fastest, and kindest, email answerer on the East Coast. He made the book so much better and the process so much less stressful. The Hachette copy editors are also the most gracious yet exacting readers, as are Michael Gaynor and Laura Bullard, who checked parts of this book.

Many people read early drafts, and their feedback was invaluable. I’m so thankful to Anton Tripolskii, Nicole Deterding, Anastasia Kolobrodova, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, and Marissa Chmiola for chugging through a Word document version of this and offering their take. Richard Rushfield is an extraordinary friend and mentor who also read the book and kept me going.