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Ilya Shambat
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Our first contact at the airport in DC was my mother's friend Mikhail Alexeyev, who came from the Soviet Union to America and became an economist. We stayed for a while at his place, then he left his place behind for us and moved elsewhere. We had contact with his mother, a famous Soviet dissident named Lyudmila Alexeyeva, as well as his brother Sergei, who had on his walls the photographs of Joseph McCarthy. My brother tried to eat the dog bisquit while we were at his place. He also had a cat named Nixon and a cat named Kissinger.

I was very determined to make it in America. I went around the neighborhood with a bucket and Turtle Wax washing people's cars for $2 a piece. Of course the first thing that the kids wanted to learn was swear words in my home language. One day my father was driving into the neighborhood only to hear American kids shouting Russian swear words at one another. Another time I did exercise in my underwear in the backyard, and kids were laughing about that.

We went to an immigration office. They asked us which country we were from. My mother said, “USSR.” They asked, “There is such a country?”
I finished sixth grade at a local public school. The teacher was explaining the concept of other galaxies. Someone asked, “How can they see other galaxies?” The teacher responded, “I don't think they can see them, they just guess that they're there.”

Students taught me the flick-off gesture, which I interpreted as “pick your nose.” On one occasion I was asked to give a speech in another class. I heard someone from there talk later about a crazy Russian kid giving a speech in that class.

My father found his joblessness at the time hard to endure. He had qualifications and experience, but none in the United States. One day he was composing a resume with the help of a Russian to English dictionary. He looked up the English for the Russian equivalent for word “drill” and found the word “bore.” He put on his resume then, “boring engineer."

My mother found it easier to find work. This put a strain on their relationship. Not many Russian men are happy when the woman is in the lead, and this included my father. I have since then been told that immigration is terrible for families. It most certainly was for mine.

At one point the kids in the neighborhood started a rumor that Turtle Wax ruined paint jobs. After that I was no longer able to do what I was doing.
For a month I attended a Jewish camp. One day a person named Jacob introduced me to a girl by saying, “This is Ilya, he is Russian.” I continued with, “This is Jacob, he is American.” The kids did not know how to deal with me, but some made a good-faith effort in that direction. A tall fellow named Ken made the best effort, and we became good friends.

One day on the bus the counselor told us to use common sense. I asked, “What is common sense?,” and that resulted in a chorus of laughter. They may not be the ones getting the last laugh. In many pursuits, such as science, common sense is known as bias. When the mentality says two mutually contradictory things - “life is not fair” and “you get what you give” - there is much to suspect about the mentality.

Of course everyone had their own problems. There was a student who said that his parents were dorks. The counselor said, “But you are supposed to love your kin.” He responded with, “I love them, but they are dorks.”

Kids kept making all sorts of nasty comments about me. Nothing was ever good enough. Supposedly I was stupid; supposedly I was disgusting; supposedly they were better than me. When we went to a food place, I ordered hot tea, and that resulted in a lot of laughter. But then again they were 12, and that is easy to forgive.

I wrote large volumes of poetry. My mother was telling me that I was writing too much and not reading enough. Then I met Paul Goldberg. He was a Russian-born author and journalist who had attended a private school called St. Stephen's in Alexandria. He looked at my poetry and showed it to the administration, and the school decided to admit me on a full scholarship.

From "My Autobiography"
https://olympiapublishers.com/books/my-autobiography