Can you go home again? Even if home no longer exists? What if it was never home in the first place?

Russian-American writer Margaret Gelbwasser explores questions of cultural identity in her novels, short stories, and essays. “Blending the Red with the White and the Blue,” which she contributed to the anthology Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally, discussed her family’s reluctance to identify with “commie” Russian stereotypes.

In “Finding a Birthplace,” below, Gelbwasser examines what separates her experience from those of her parents and sister. As she decides whether to visit her place of birth, she considers her individual relationship — as a woman raised on both caviar sandwiches and Punky Brewster barrettes — to her American homeland, and to the mysterious one nestled in the former Soviet Union.

Finding a Birthplace

By Margaret Gelbwasser

When I was little, I would spin in a circle until the dizziness made me collapse. Once on the floor, I’d close my eyes and feel myself move with the room. I’d pretend I was Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and wish to be back in the place I was born. Because I’d lived in America since I was three, that place wasn’t really “home,” but the unattainability of that country—that housed a grandmother, uncle, aunt, and cousins I had never met—was appealing. What was in that country we had left behind for a better life? That country that left impressions on every other member of my family—including my sister Diana, who was eight when we came to America but still remembers school recitals, the courtyard outside our co-op, and her first grade friends, and who grasped that language as I never would. Eventually both the room and I would stop spinning, and I would be back in New Jersey, the only homeland I knew.

The country where I was born had an amusement park called Park Cheluskinsov, where my parents shared their first kiss. It had mountains on the banks of the Black Sea where my grandparents vacationed. It had a square where people gathered to greet concert singers and to protest the government. And it had people who welcomed you with tables of red and black caviar, piroshki stuffed with meat and cabbage, cake Napoleon, and black bread topped with thick yellow butter.

But I remember none of this. All I remember of my birthplace is an elevator in my uncle’s apartment building. It was brown.

I have often been asked if I would go back. When I was young, the answer was no. Why go back to a country my family fled and that it always pained my father to talk about? Once, when I asked him about seeing the place I was born, he said, “Why do you want to go to that rathole? There’s nothing for you there.” This clearly wasn’t true because his mother had stayed there, and years later, my father did go back to the “rathole” to see her. But I never asked again.

Now that I’m older and want to see the country where I was born, I can’t because it no longer exists. It is now the country formerly known as the Soviet Union, like the artist formerly known as Prince (before he became Prince again).

I can’t say the reasons I thought about my birthplace as I was growing up had anything to do with understanding where I belonged. As a child, belonging meant tearfully asking my mother to stop giving me caviar sandwiches for lunch when all the other kids brought peanut butter and jelly. Belonging meant buying the pony tail holders with little suns on them—the kind Punky Brewster wore—instead of thick white ribbons with red trim, like my sister wore in her hair in her black-and-white first grade school picture. I tried to be the same as all the other Jersey kids because that conformity linked me to the homeland I knew instead of to the one I barely remembered. I wanted to be a regular American girl who had crushes on the popular boys. (In reality, I was the kind of girl who had crushes on the bookworms and boys who could do long division in their heads.)

And yet, as a child and teenager, I still longed to visit Minsk, my birthplace. It was a selfish longing; I was tired of being the outsider in the family. I felt disappointed each time I opened my eyes after my spinning activity because I’d never experience everything my father had—passionately hating a government that discriminated against you because you were Jewish; or that my mother had—sentimentally romanticizing where she met her husband, had her children, rode high on her father’s shoulders; or even that my sister had—learning to read the language fluently. And as I learned to read the Russian alphabet (at age ten), as for years I struggled to understand the nuances in Russian jokes told at family parties, as I used Russian expressions that did not make sense and caused everyone to laugh in amusement (“Well at least she’s trying. What do you expect from someone who came here at age three?”), as my parents pretended to include me in articles they and my sister read in the New Russian Word knowing full well I would only be able to finish three sentences in the time it took them to read a page but that it would have been rude to pass the Russian paper around without offering it to me too, as all these occurred, my jealousy grew. Jealousy that they had a world where I didn’t quite fit in. Jealousy that although my sister carried Benetton bags and wore denim jeans with holes as her classmates did, she still was able to belong in my parents’ world too. Jealousy that I never would.

When Gorbachev came to power, and Russia ceased to be “The Evil Empire,” I was in elementary school and did not have much to say on the topic. I’m sure I thought the Cold War ending was a good thing, but probably more because of the fact that it would separate me less from my classmates than because of the greater impact on society. And when my family and I huddled together in 1991 to watch the TV images of tanks outside Gorbachev’s house where he was being held under house arrest, I longed to feel something. Tears filled my mother’s eyes and my father said, “Why are you crying? This is a good thing. It’s freedom.” When I think about it now, I believe my mother’s tears reflected a longing to be in the midst of it all, because as much as she bristled at the unasked question in people’s eyes when she said in heavily accented English, “I am an American,” she also felt for the Russian people on television. Part of her—the Russian part—was with them. As much as she appreciated the American soil she now lived on and the opportunities it provided, as much as she thought of herself as an American, Russia was really her homeland, her connection to a more innocent time of girlhood, the place where she first learned about life and became the woman she was.

Four months later, the Soviet Union collapsed and became fifteen separate countries; one of them, Belarus, housed Minsk, the city in which I was born. From that point on, I was no longer born in the Soviet Union but in Belarus. My tenth grade history teacher divided our class into groups of four to discuss the worldly implications of what had happened. A classmate sympathetically said to me, “You must be so sad because now you can never go home.” She was being nice and also trying to be mature and insightful, in that way fifteen-year-olds strive to be when they want to connect with you and show you they understand what you’re going through. So, while my urge was to ask her what she was talking about and to tell her that my home was two blocks from hers, because her statement was meant in kindness, I gave her the answer she wanted. “Yeah, a little,” I said, and she patted me on the arm. But there was another reason I answered her as I did: I felt I was supposed to be sad. Why didn’t the destruction of the Soviet Union mean something more to me? My reply to her had been technically true. I was sad, but not for the reasons she thought. I was sad because, yet again, this connection I wanted to a land and a language and a culture—the connection my family had—continued to elude me. Visiting the Soviet Union was not something I wanted to do at that particular time in my life, but the finality that I could never do it, never see Minsk in the same way my parents and sister did, made me sad. I knew that even if I did go back, I’d be experiencing something else, not the real place I was born.

The change in me began slowly, and I attribute it to a novel I began writing in 1999 as part of my Masters thesis. My book was going to tell the story of three generations of one Russian-Jewish family, not unlike my own. At first my goal had been to relate the characters’ emotions, to get my class to feel what I knew these people did, to get them to picture a country I could describe vividly only from conversations I had heard. But then I found myself longing to experience the world I’d created in my novel. When I wrote about a tree, I wondered if it still existed today, and if it did, whether the initials my father had carved into it decades before were still there. Whether they were or not seemed to make all the difference. I began searching through books my parents had brought with them to the United States and took bags of books out from the library. I pored over the photos in them as if looking at the pictures enough times would connect me to something the rest of my family shared.

After more than twenty years of not voicing interest in the country where I was born, I asked my father about it again. “I’d like to see it,” I said.

“What for?” he asked, not glancing up from a Russian journal he was reading.

“To see where I was born, where you and mom had your date, where Diana went to school.”

“You’re being silly,” he said still reading the journal. “A tree is the same anywhere you go.”

He didn’t see that not all the trees had his initials carved into them. Nor did he appreciate the fact that he was sitting there reading a journal I couldn’t, and that this was why everything was not the same.

Six years later, I finished a full draft of my novel, but my desire to visit my birthplace had only increased. I know why my father doesn’t want to go there—because the few times he has set foot in his country of origin, all it did was remind him of why he left. He had gone back only out of a sense of duty—a son visiting his mother. But every time he arrived in Minsk, old memories of persecution—memories he did not want my sister and me to have—came flooding back. I once told him that the Russia he left was not the one I wanted to see, and he said, “That’s the only kind there is,” as if by going back, I would somehow return with the same demons that still haunted him all these years.

As I wrote and revised my novel, I pushed back thoughts of flying to Minsk, a city that was in a country that didn’t even exist when I was born. My characters were discriminated against because of their beliefs, and they chafed under the oppressive regime. I kept writing, dismissing any thoughts that traveling there would help me understand what my characters were feeling, or why my father still felt as he did. In my book, I included Park Cheluskinsov and my grandmother’s birthplace, Ragachov, and tried to make a connection to who I was through the keys on my computer.

Going back had stopped being about belonging in my family. It had become about understanding my characters. Understanding my family. Understanding myself.

Recently, a good friend told me she and her grandmother would soon be visiting Ukraine, the country that houses Kiev, where they were both born. I don’t know how her grandmother feels about returning to a birthplace that is now part of a different country. The idea doesn’t bother my friend; she’s more nervous about brushing up on her Russian, a language she never speaks, and I have not once heard her speak a word of it since we met at age thirteen. I asked her about what she wants to get out of the trip. “I want to see where I was born,” she said simply. The bigger issues of belonging and identity haven’t hit her; maybe they never will. It’s different for her; she always refused to speak Russian because of her “bad accent,” while I tried to speak it at home in spite of the accent. I look forward to her return so that I can ask her to tell me about places I saw in books; this might answer some of my questions, and it might help my novel, but I know it won’t be enough to answer my questions about myself.

My parents are going to Minsk soon too, which will be the first time for my mother since our departure in 1979. She wants to see landmarks, visit her old house, check on what has happened to stores she once knew. My father is going only to see his parents’ graves—again, a son’s duty. They are catching a flight to Israel after their two-day stay in Belarus. Two days. A glitch in the airline schedule reduced their trip from three days to two. I know my father is happy about this. Less pain. Fewer demons to bring back. I haven’t asked how my mother feels about the change, but two days will not really give her time to see anything, to reconnect as I know she wants to. I was ready to go on the trip with them, but what would I gain from two days?

My husband is American, and I don’t know if he understands why I want to go, but he respects it. The respect doesn’t take away from the fact that this is not a vacation he wants to plan right now. We are going on vacation soon, though. To Bermuda.

Maybe now is not the time to go to my birthplace, to go “home.” Maybe there’s a reason things seem to be holding me back. Maybe I’m holding myself back. After all, if it’s something I so badly wanted, wouldn’t I have done it already? We hope to have kids soon, and I think this might be a good trip to take with them when they’re older. Show them a place that explains where their mother came from (but not exactly). Maybe this is something we can all learn from together, one generation teaching the next. Or maybe that’s just another excuse for me not to go any time soon. Maybe for now I’ll just have to keep going there in my novels, in my mind.

It’s been years since I spun in a circle, arms open wide. I do it now and collapse on the floor. I feel the earth spin below me, and I keep my eyes closed picturing the images from my books. It’s a long time before I open my eyes.

Margaret Gelbwasser is a freelance writer who has written for SELF, Ladies’ Home Journal, New Jersey Monthly, and others. Her essay, “Blending the Red with the White and the Blue,” appears in the Seal Press anthology Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally. She’s currently at work on a young adult novel about a Russian-Jewish teenager.