A Soviet Jewish �migr�Decides To Teach Her American Daughter Russian – Tablet Magazine: To be honest, Russian is not a language I’m proud to know. When strangers marvel at my bilingualism, I defensively counter with the fact that I have no ties to the country I left as a child. I feel lucky to have escaped from what is now the former Soviet Union, where Jews like me were subject to plenty of anti-Semitism. Like many of the other 1.6 million Soviet Jews who emigrated, we broke all ties when we left.
Or so I thought, until my daughter was born and I realized my ties to Russian run deeper than I knew.