O Gristedes! My Gristedes!

Gristedes Supermarket, W 86th Street, New York City.

Months before we fled the Soviet Union I got to taste a Snickers bar. They had finally penetrated our fledgling perestroika’s black market at half of my parents’ monthly salaries. I remember my mother carefully unwrapping it, like a live explosive, and cutting it in 4 equal-size lumps: one for me, one for my kid brother, one for dad, one for herself. For everything else, if you endured the hours-long lines, you were grateful to have the last cut of something dead and soggy wrapped in the pages of Pravda.

That was my world less than 48 hours before we landed in JFK. More than 30 years since, it's hard to imagine a child’s shock at the abundance that was Gristedes. But it must have rewired my 10-year-old brain. Bursts of colorful citrus fruit, a rotisserie chicken spinning all by itself inside a see-through oven, twenty different kinds of salami, already sliced. I was especially impressed with the marshmallows: strange puffs of processed sugar packed snuggly into pouches so cheerful that their actual taste was an afterthought to me. The shelves were stacked and endless, like some space-age amusement park, bright and pungent with aromas I couldn’t name. Nor were they cordoned off or lorded over by some aproned torgovka with a permanent scowl. I took what I wanted, piled it into a sleek cart, and wheeled it freely along the isles.

9/11/1997

I was not yet American when I first glimpsed the New York City skyline. I saw it from a small round window of a flatbed cargo van which was taking me, my baby brother, my parents, grandparents, another family, and everything we owned into Manhattan from the JFK Airport. Until that moment, the tallest building I'd ever seen was the one in which I spent my childhood—a 16-story Soviet prefab in Kharkiv, Ukraine. But when we reached the midpoint of the Queensboro Bridge, those of us still awake from a ten-hour flight shared a vision: a wall of towers shrouded in a dreamy Autum mist, some rising so high their crowns disappeared in the rainclouds. No one moved. I held my breath. My father cried. 

Years later, in Brooklyn, somebody took this photo with a disposable camera from the rooftop of Americana—the tallest building in my neighborhood. It was 1997. I was 18 and a U.S. Citizen.