By Ilya Magid

Mother and Daughter

I want to tell you about one version of love. I new two acquaintances in the former Soviet Union, a Jewish woman and her daughter. The mother was divorced. Her husband was Tatar. The mother taught her daughter, "The Soviet Union is a bad country for Jewish people. You have to marry a foreigner and leave this country." She wanted her daughter to have love and happiness.

That was in the 60's, when emigration was impossible. The daughter walked around in foreign Hotels. The Soviet women were not allowed to enter those Hotels, but they devised a scheme to enter. At last mother and daughter became happy. Daughter got married to a Swiss citizen. The overseas couple divorced very soon. The mother told us, "I have a good relationship with my daughter's former husband." Then the daughter left Switzerland for America.

The daughter came to visit her mother in the Soviet Union, as a foreigner, very often. She gave my wife a pattern for knitting something for herself with foreign yarn, and my wife knitted a very special dress for her.

My wife and I emigrated to Boston in 1991. The mother emigrated later to her daughter in Los Angeles.

In 1995 the mother came to Boston from Los Angeles for one day. We met with her . She told us, "My daughter would like to receive academic training." And then she added, "It is very dangerous to meet an unfamiliar man. Right now she has a lover, a businessman from Holland. He bought her a bra for two hundred dollars."

She concluded, "There are two types of women. The first, simple women; the second, working women."

I think she referred to her daughter as the first type.


Editor Steven Siegel

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