When I was four, I wanted a colored pencil set more than anything in the world. 

The memory of this seemingly trivial desire has followed me into my 40s, a permanent etching in my mind.

At the time, we were living in Italy. We had just left Israel, where we had sought asylum as Russian-Jewish refugees. 

Our Soviet Union family passport photo

Now we were awaiting permission to enter the United States. I know now, as an adult, when we left the former Soviet Union we were not sent off with kisses and well wishes. We were stripped of our possessions and sent into the unknown with $100 to mark our family fortune.

But my dad is stubborn and a hard worker. I’m sure we were given some type of social assistance when we arrived in Israel because they really do try and take care of their people. I know my dad was a reservist in the Army. 

Dad on left

But by the time we went to Italy, to await the bureaucratic green light, we still weren’t living anywhere near the financial elite. We shared a rented room in a boarding house in Rome.

This was not our room in Rome. This was actually taken in Israel right before we left for Rome. In Italy we didn’t take any pictures because we didn’t own a camera.

 

I sincerely sat down, crossed leg, pondering on the checkered tiles in the aisle of the market. I put my little chin into my small hand and asked myself with unflinching honestly: could I really make this commitment? Was there anything else I would ever want? No! I answered myself. There was nothing else. This was truly it.

I got the set. My parents took pity on my passionate plight and relented, I’m sure spending a good percentage of their remaining financial resources to satisfy their four year old’s questionable needs. And needless to say, I have asked for one or two things since then. 

This memory comes to mind because now I have a new wish that falls in the same category of urgency and fervent desire with which I yearned that pencil set. Only this wish is for my father. I want him to live in a nurturing, safe environment. One in which he would have help and supervision. He’s reached the age where he shouldn’t drive, he can’t cook for himself and cleaning has never been his forte. He won’t come live with me. I know he doesn’t want to be a burden, though he never would be, or so I tell myself now. He also doesn’t want to leave his paradise: the beach in Santa Monica. So, I need him to move into an assisted living apartment.

It is a vision I never thought I’d have for my dad, the pillar of strength in our family who threw away everything he and my mom had known to walk into the unknown, in search for a safer, more secure place to raise their daughter and by the time they got here, a soon to arrive son. 

 

Except for my visiting grandmother in the middle, that is my entire original family in our first apartment in America. I’m on the right, my grandmother is holding my brother (born here).

 

 

keep this woman away from your daddy

It is in the aftermath of that drama that I now find myself. My dad needs help. Because of his stubborn, self-sufficient nature, he never got the therapy that he should have had after any of his ailments. Since his second stroke, he is limping and no longer able to do the yoga handstands that once stood for his ability to survive despite anyone else’s prognosis for him. He has never asked anyone for help and would thwart any attempts when it was offered. That’s partially why it’s been hard to admit to myself that the best situation for him would be in an assisted living environment. I know what a battle this is going to be, one that needs to be fought with finesse and patience rather than muscle. It’s an amount of energy that, on most days, I can’t muster.

The other reason is I still see my dad’s bulging bicep and his defiant attitude towards anyone that would dare tell him he couldn’t do something. I still see that glimmer of mischievousness as he joked with my friends and flirted with the check-out lady. I still see the sailor that learned all of the Soviet propaganda he had heard growing up, about the United States, wasn’t true. 

He found there was hope for a Jewish man, raised by a single mother with three kids in the wake of a vicious war, to find freedom. 

My cutie-pie dad on the left

Freedom to raise his daughter without the anchor of racism weighing down her ability to soar.

Everything my father has ever done has been for his family. I only hope now, with the desperate hope of a four-year-old who still sees sparks of her father as the superhero he once was, that he now allows his family to do for him.