This is a little aside from the usual content that I post on here, but I thought it was still relevant enough to share. My senior year of high school, I was part of a program in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival called the New Jewish Filmmaker Project (NJFP). I, along with 8 other Jewish teens from around the Bay Area, was privileged enough to make a movie, Four Short Films About Love, that aired at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival during the summer of 2003. Now, 6 years later, I am again able to continue my contribution to the growing young Jewish voice and to reflect on the experience of being an immigrant from a former Soviet country.
When you create a design, a comp, or a layout, you’re putting together pieces that will fit together to make a whole, similar to the way you would write a story. The problem lies in how all these pieces work to tell the story of the website, the typographic poster or the novel. If a piece is missing or misplaced, does the story come to a halt, or just change its meaning? For most of my life since immigrating, I’ve known that the reason we came to America was to escape anti-Semitism, yet, in remembering the actual experience, that fact is nowhere in my memories.
I was four years old when we left Kishinev, Moldova, sometime in the Fall of 1989. I think it was October, but I’m not sure. I remember that on our way to Rome, we stayed in some little village and there were bunk beds in this cabin and I think I slept on the bottom bunk with my dad or my uncle. I remember there were wood chips outside, and lots of trees. We were possibly in a forest. After that, I can only remember bits and pieces of Rome, where we lived for a month while we waited for our Visas and the announcement of our final destination; it would either be Israel or America. I don’t remember leaving in secrecy or being shunned by our community as traitors to the Communist government. I do remember that it was cold at night.
Once we arrived in Rome, there were only a few things I could recall, including walking down this sandy alley with extremely high wooden fences to either side as my brother (13 at the time), taught me how to blow bubbles with the Italian Bazooka Bubble gum that seemed to be everywhere. It took me a while, but I finally got it. I also recall a beach with an overturned canoe and my brother sitting on it, peeling a tangerine and eating the peel. As far as our living situation, I remember that our apartment building had marble floors that were always cold, and you needed to dial a number outside to get in, which seemed very fascinating and futuristic to me at the time. 
The parts that I don’t remember - waiting in line for nearly a day at the embassy to get our papers and Visas in order, my grandfather’s health problems and the fact that he nearly didn’t make it, any problems with language, not knowing how long we’d have to stay in Italy - these were not parts of my experience.
The day we finally arrived at JFK, I remember my grandfather bought my little cousin and I a balloon each and she cried in the plane when it popped. Or at least I think I remember that; maybe it’s just a story that’s been told so many times I’ve appropriated it as my own.
My final memory of immigration is waking up on a pull-out couch in a tiny apartment in Buffalo, NY on November 17, 1989, my brother’s 14th birthday, and turning on the TV to see Woody the Woodpecker laughing maniacally at me. This was my new home, and I’d soon start to forget Russian and resent the fact that I had to speak it at home.
So, do the missing pieces mean the story is incomplete, or just a different story? I’ve since found out most of the information that fills in the gaps, but I think that each of us had our own story to tell, our own design, and each one is complete on its own.
