She wanted to be a writer because dialogue always failed her. She found herself incapable of carrying on a debate that evolved into something, something like a solution to life’s problems, to our own biases and bullshit. One would enter a healthy discussion armed with his own ego and ideas, he would wear a heavy armor of collected quotes and statistics from sources he trusted to lean in his favor. The entire interaction would take on a distinctly American theatricality, and she wanted nothing of it.

She was born in the Soviet Union when it held its international position as the USSR, so vast and encompassing as to rival the USA for best acronym country. Slowly but surely the bloc collapsed and, incapable of tolerating the rampant anti-semitism of her mother country, she fled to the United States. Not for opportunity—for a new language. She wanted nothing but a tongue divorced from the old prejudices and associations of the homeland which insisted on denying her, pushing her out of its population of citizens, blocking her admission to universities and educational institutions because she was born a Jew.

To be a Jew in this world is much the same as being a Jew centuries ago. She brought few things with her to America, so there would be fewer things to carry should she move again. Perpetually on the move, she was able to travel from one city to the next thanks to donations and loans from local Jewish community organizations and distant relatives already in the States. She liked New York City the most, because it was big and easy enough to blend in. When she saw an ad one day for a journalism class, her old passions for the written word bloomed again, and within a number of years she was proficient in a language free of any negativity—at least to her.

She was amazed at the subject matter of her classmates’ articles. All sorts of personal opinions on gender and homosexuality, race and socioeconomic divisions, rape, abuse, survival, power. Where she came from, such wild and unobstructed arguments were only murmured amongst close friends, or joked about in particularly diverse universities in particularly big cities.

At first, she only wrote about the noise of New York City, finding it a neutral enough topic. Her teacher recommended she try a more personal tone in her work, so she wrote about enjoying the weather. After a while she felt the shells of etiquette begin to crack under the sheer volume of everyone else’s opinions. She began writing about being “Russian,” then being an immigrant, then being a Jew.

She wrote long matter-of-fact pieces on the traditions and customs her mother had to teach her in a basement, about the pogroms and the dirty looks, the quotas imposed upon her, the sheer oppressive and offensive words she’d heard growing up. She wrote about the language itself, its nuances, its infiltration into the Yiddish speech of her grandparents, their unending and biblical dream of the holy land Israel. Having survived the Holocaust, they didn’t want to leave the remnants of a community that flourished under the uniting ideology of Zionism. They wanted to belong finally, to a country, to a culture, to a system of laws and politics that embraced them. She dared wonder, sitting in her open and honest journalism class, if such a space existed for her in the United States, not the promised land of her ancestors.

One day she happened to write a particularly eloquent account of her hope for the land of Israel. She was aware of the war there, she wrote, but unable to understand how such a jewel from God could be tarnished by shed blood and shorn skin. She didn’t know the names of all the wars, nor the names of all the places. She never learned Hebrew and could not utter them even if she’d known. She was even less informed about the Palestinians, their culture, their struggle, their faith. Neither did this seem to matter, as her words tripped over her tongue when she read it in class. She said she didn’t know much, she couldn’t follow the news here too well. But she was sure the land was Jewish; she heard it from her grandparents, they sang songs about it, and it must be true.

By the end of the article, she came to a surprising new conclusion. The land must be Jewish, she said, because it is an outsider like herself, because it must always be prepared, and will always be looked upon with the same suspicion and the same disdain. Israel is the idea of community for a small group of people, she went on, but it will always be a product of the language used to describe it. For some it is a dream, for others an abomination. For some a miracle, for others a threat.

There is a reason she came to America, and not to the land of Israel. She explained to her class that the Hebrew language was already one of abuse and broken vows. She knew this language would separate her from the rest of the world, brand her an outsider. But English, she said, this kind of English in the New York City of the United States of America—here was a chance at it, to belong like everybody else belongs, to have a say, a right to it.

Promptly after she finished reading her article, her hands still trembling with the emotion coursing through her arms, the class erupted into a debate about the war in the Middle East, the politics, the injustice, the unilateral aggression, the bombing of Palestinian kindergartens and Israeli nightclubs. Some classmates shouted questions at her, solid in their complete certainty. They were sure Israel was unfairly handed to the Jews by the British government, disenfranchising tons of people, causing tons of wars, just as she was sure the land was Jewish, if not by origin then by its mere existence. She was sure, too, that the question of Israel was only a stopgap for the larger question of global anti-Semitism, and hearing the reactions of the class confirmed it. She was not yet free to be a vocal part of her new homeland. Perhaps Israelis would have been more accepting, she thought.

Upon the completion of her class she would no longer read her articles out loud, in front of anybody, like a speech or a sermon. She moved to a small city in Western New York, where some great uncle on her mother’s side was the proud owner of a pharmacy. She worked there in the afternoons, and wrote poetry at night by a television set. By then she knew what was talked about on the news, but she cared even less. Her poetry was quiet and contained, strong in its beliefs but weary in its tone. Her convictions drained her, and the silence of her own words weighed as oppressively as her language once had.

When she ventured out into the field of American commerce she still spoke with an accent. She wore a small gold Star of David around her neck, a birthday present from another great uncle in Israel. Cashiers would notice it occasionally, and avert their attention the way they would when she mispronounced a brand name. But slips like this didn’t matter; she knew she was at the outer rim of their country—a citizen by name, always a Jew by language.

Marina Blitshteyn is a senior English major and Literary Editor of Generation.