"I saw being a Jew as a stigma, a disability.”
myself and my parents,’” Brenner told JNS.org. “We just couldn’t have existed anymore. That is what happened to the rest of my family that didn’t get out—all of them were murdered in the gas chambers. There was nothing else I could do but make it. You just had to make it.”
Gershowitz said that “the economics of surviving” often mark the first several years of the immigrant experience. It is only after that period that immigrants become more like others—focused on family life, a career, and a future for their children.
Over time, this was the case for Brenner. Once she and her husband could afford to leave the rest of the family and live on their own, they had two daughters whom they raised to be American Jews, as opposed to Jewish Americans. Brenner said she wanted to leave her horrible past behind for a new life, which she feels she received “by the grace of God.”
“She was always proud to be Jewish, but it was always extremely hard for her to talk about how she got here,” said Benjamin Kopelman, Brenner’s grandson.
Lev Golinkin, author of a memoir on the immigrant experienced titled “A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka,” noted the irony that Soviet Jews came to the U.S. in search of religious freedom, yet many of them choose not to practice Jewish traditions, his family included.
“As soon as we could, we got away from the synagogue and Jewish organizations and melded into the secular American world,” he told JNS.org.
Golinkin, who arrived in the U.S. from eastern Ukraine in 1989 at the age of 9, surmised that people turned away from religious observance because it was precisely the Jewish faith that made them targets for persecution in the former Soviet Union. Before escaping, Golinkin was being homeschooled because he had been regularly teased and beaten for his Judaism. Religion, therefore, was nothing to celebrate for him.