Like many immigrant daughters before me, I’ve known what career I’d pursue since before I stopped wetting the bed. Which, okay, was later than I’d care to admit, but my point stands—I was nine years old. I didn’t have a single armpit hair, and yet I was already terrified of financial ruin. My family had immigrated to America as Jewish refugees from Moldova seven years prior. I’m not going to play the “we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps” card: my parents had professional degrees and spoke fluent English. Our whiteness granted us privileges that we were denied under the Soviet Union’s state-sanctioned antisemitism. Not that I was aware of any of this at the time. Mostly, I understood that it was because of my parents’ healthcare jobs—my mother was a pharmacist and my father a physician—that we went from living in a cramped apartment with my grandparents and great-grandmother to an apartment where I had my own bedroom to a house. Read More
