Episode 14: Home, Sweet Home
The year 1977 was notable for a few major events. One was the snowstorm of ’77, which dumped all of 3 or 4 inches of snow on Louisville, paralyzing the city and closing school for a few days. My family was completely baffled. We were from Leningrad, a city where snow was a fact of life between December and April, and where snowfall measured in meters at a time as a matter of course. So, when we all woke up to some cute, fluffy flakes coming down for the first time in late January, my parents were pretty amused.
Then we heard the breathless, panicked announcements of school closures, traffic accidents, and other world-ending repercussions of the snow, and their amusement vanished and was replaced with disbelief and confusion. Why was Louisville shutting down in the face of what looked like very little snow to us? The answer was simple. Apparently, in 1977, the city hadn’t invested in snow plows or road salt, and we all had to wait until roads were made passable again by virtue of high temperatures, sunlight, and the passage of time.
My brother and I were thrilled. No school! We could watch tv all day, if we wanted to. We could go outside and make a snowman. We could have a snowball fight. What’s not to like? I don’t actually remember what we did that day, while we waited for the snow to melt and life to go back to normal. I’m pretty sure that hot chocolate was involved. The activities of that day didn’t stay with me. The fact that a measly couple of inches stopped an entire city in its tracks did.
The second major event of 1977 was the death of Elvis Presley on August 16. I was outside, hanging out on the stoop of the apartment building we lived in when I heard. And I mean “heard.” The day was a typically hot, humid, quiet one. I heard kids riding bikes (I’m pretty sure that’s what my brother was doing at the time), cars passing by, the general buzzing of bugs, and not much else, as I sat there, bored and waiting for something to happen. Suddenly, I heard a woman’s voice raised in a wail, coming from an open window, followed by more adult voices, talking and then crying, as people began coming out of their apartments and gathering on porches and in the parking lot. It took quite a few minutes of listening and trying to figure out what was happening before I was finally able to understand that The King was dead.
I had absolutely no idea what that meant. What king? There was no king in America, I was pretty sure. Grown women were crying, though, so somebody important had died. I began to hear the word elvis in the conversations. I had no clue what an elvis was. Then, someone put on a record at high volume, and suddenly the neighborhood was filled with that voice.
Until that day, I had not heard Elvis Pressley sing. And to be honest, even after hearing him, I did not understand the depth of sadness that people around me seemed to be feeling at the news of his death.
I was twelve, and I hadn’t grown up in a culture that encouraged such personal attachment to artists. I understood pride in and appreciation for great Russian composers and authors. Knowing the music of Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich, and the works of great Russian authors, such as Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Pushkin qualified one as “cultured,” possibly even one of the intelligentsia. There was also a sense of national pride attached to this appreciation. The argument was that Russia was a great land to have produced such great talents.
This was different. The outpouring of feeling over the death of a pop singer, conducted openly and communally on the porches and in the parking lot of a Louisville apartment complex, had nothing to do with refinement or “culture” or national pride. These people mourned the passing of someone they loved. It was a new thing for me, this love for someone whom you’ve never met, never interacted with, but who gave something of themselves in a way that made such an impact that their death was felt as a personal loss.
I’m pretty sure that it was shortly after the death of Elvis that the third major event of 1977 happened. We moved out of our apartment and into our first house! Only a year or so after arriving in the U.S. as refugees, with the sum of our earthly possessions in eight suitcases, my parents were now the owners of a small, three-bedroom, ranch-style home. They had purchased a car, a gigantic Ford Fairlane, several months before, and now this.
The purchase was accomplished through the good auspices of new friends my parents had made. The house cost $23,000, and while my father’s earnings from his job at a dental lab were enough to pay the bills and buy food, as well as the car, there was no way there was enough left over for a down-payment on a house.
This is where a local couple made all the difference. They had been refugees, too, many years before, as survivors of Nazi concentration camps. In their 50s in 1977, they took my 30-something parents under their kind and generous wing. I don’t remember much about them, except that they were nice, and they owned a small, private plane, on which they took my parents for a fun flight over the city. I also remember that, while the husband seemed like a man his age, the wife seemed child-like and fragile. She had been sixteen years old when she entered the concentration camp, and she had remained sixteen years old for the rest of her life.
My father saw the house one day, as he was driving around town with his friend. He told me the story of how, thinking about his American dream, he pointed to the house and said, “I’m going to own one of these some day.” “Why some day and not now?” asked his friend. They called the real estate agent listed on the sign, took a tour of the house, and before my father knew what was happening, his friend was taking him to a bank and working out a loan. And presto!, my parents became home owners.
At the time, it didn’t seem to me like the huge milestone it actually was. After all, I was a pre-teen, getting ready to start the seventh grade. I had much bigger things on my mind, like clothes, boys, friends, and music. Thinking about it now, I’m astounded at the seismic shift this purchase represented in our lives.
In the Soviet Union, my parents had lived with their parents until marriage because the government would not assign an apartment until then. After marriage and my birth, they were able to get a room in a communal apartment, a two room box that they had shared with another whole family, made up of a husband, wife, child, and grandmother. Then followed another apartment, our own this time, but on the outskirts of Leningrad, not convenient to public transportation, and so also fairly isolated. But at least we didn’t have to share it. It wasn’t until two years before our emigration from the Soviet Union, that my parents, with the aid of under-the-table deals and bribes, were able to get an apartment in a pre-revolution building, in the heart of Leningrad, close to transportation lines, within walking distance of the Neva river, etc. Sort of the equivalent of a luxury condo in the best part of the center of any American city today, but a lot smaller.
Even after leaving the Soviet Union, we had assigned housing. There was an assigned apartment in Ostia, where we waited to be processed for entry into the U.S., and an assigned apartment in Louisville, procured for us by HIAS, where rent was subsidized through Section 8, the affordable housing program executed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This house would be the first place we would live that was not assigned to us by a government agency or a NGO. The magnitude of personal freedom the $23K mortgage represented can’t be expressed. I’m sure that my parents were overwhelmed and probably terrified. But I’m also pretty sure they became addicted to real estate after that first home purchase. If memory serves, they ended up buying and selling 11 different houses and condos between 1977 and 2019.
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