My mom and dad met at a party in Estonia, where my mom—a native Finn—was living at the time. After my parents began dating, my mom brought my dad home to meet her parents, a pair of Lutheran farmers with elementary school educations. They liked my dad. But they wanted their daughter to be sure she knew what she was signing up for. “People don’t like the Jews,” my grandma warned her.

But my mom was already taken by my dad’s charm and wit. She soon moved to Leningrad to be with him. After they married, she kept her Finnish maiden name to avoid causing problems for herself.

My dad’s Jewish friends were young, ambitious, and growing tired of being second-rate people in a second-rate place. The West was better, they were sure of it. Whenever they gathered, the conversation inevitably coiled back to the prospect of leaving Russia for good.

“It was, ‘This one left, this one is about to leave,’” said Victor, a college classmate of my dad’s, who now lives in Massachusetts. “Are you going to leave? To where? When? It’s almost like if you’re sixty-five and in New York, you’re talking about Florida. Boca Raton or Miami?”

American Jewish organizations and their political allies considered the U.S.S.R.’s mandatory atheism and persecution of Jewish dissidents to be a sort of cultural genocide against the Jews. They began to pressure Soviet authorities to release Jews from the U.S.S.R., from which emigration was essentially forbidden. The effort came to a head in December of 1987, when more than two hundred thousand people representing three hundred synagogues, youth groups, and other Jewish organizations marched on the National Mall the day before Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev’s scheduled visit with President Reagan.50 In talks with Gorbachev that week, Reagan brought up the situation of the Soviet Jews before he even mentioned arms control.51

The doors creaked open. Tens of thousands of Soviet Jews began to flee the U.S.S.R. each year. American Jewish organizations hurried to line up Jewish communities across the U.S. to sponsor the immigrants.

The Soviet Jews folded their bedsheets and East German suits into their single allowed suitcase. They boarded planes for Austria, then Italy, where they would interview with the American authorities and be processed by a refugee agency called HIAS. In 1989, my family packed up and left, too.

American Jews, most of whom have family roots in Eastern Europe, awaited them eagerly. To them, as Fred Lazin, a scholar of Jews in America, described it, it felt like “our families are coming back.”

It was only upon the Russian Jews’ arrival that the Americans discovered they weren’t like family at all. They were, in fact, quite weird.