Stella Rukhman Research Paper

Stella Raukhman, currently 66 years old, immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union on February 11, 1981. Hers was one of the last families to leave during the immigration wave at that time. It was a difficult decision, leaving the home she had grown up in, but she didn’t want her children to grow up experiencing antisemitism. Latvians were proud, and judgemental of those who differed from them, as were Russians. Both disliked Jews. She also wanted her children to have better opportunities in life. Even so, it was still scary considering leaving her friends and many relatives behind and become dependant on others in a different country.
She used to live in Ogre, a small town near Riga, Latvia, with her husband, son, and daughter. There were woods next to their house in
Having been an English teacher back in Latvia, she was not entirely lost with the language, but she had only learned British English, so she still had a lot of difficulty in pronunciation and unfamiliar words. She joined her sister here in their house, then owned by the brother of her father’s friend. (It has since been bought by her sister, Eleanora, who still lives there with her husband.) She considers herself a lucky immigrant for having such connections, which made their journey easier. While housing wasn’t an issue, Stella was concerned about raising her children in this new culture that she didn’t know. She considered her children a priority and worried about the amount of individuality here, unlike the expected norm that people were expected to follow in Latvia. She didn’t like what was shown on TV and worried that the extremes in the culture may hurt them. She tried to find her own way of parenting, find a place in this new country where there were more choices than she had