I had my annual mammogram today. I don’t know what it’s like
where you live, but in New York almost every mammogram technician is from
eastern Europe. I always ask where east Europeans are from, since, back in
1991, I co-founded a nonprofit, the Network of East-West Women, supporting
women activists in the post-communist countries, and still co-moderate a
workshop on their issues.
Today’s
tech was a late-middle-aged woman with short dark hair. When I asked where she
was from, she answered by asking me to guess. Hmm, I thought, is she Russian?
Polish? Serbian? Croatian? Not Bulgarian, I thought. “Russia?” I guessed. Yes,
she replied. I said I’d traveled in eastern Europe, but wasn’t good at
distinguishing accents. She said their languages were all Slavic, so they
mostly sounded the same. I said, not really, Czech sounded quite different from
Polish.
When I
asked where in Russia she was from (maybe I’d met someone from there?), she
confessed that actually she was from Tajikistan, near Afghanistan, in what they
called Middle Asia, but she’d stopped saying that when most Americans had never
heard of Tajikistan. (My workshop has had a couple of speakers from
Tajikistan.) I asked if she spoke Tajik. She said, the Tajik speak Farsi, but it’s
written in Cyrillic. She still speaks it, but not so well, and her children,
born here, don’t speak it at all and aren’t
interested in Tajikistan.
One
hundred years ago, there were massive numbers of immigrants into the United
States — including all my grandparents. It feels like we’ve having another wave
now, and I welcome them.
