In 1979, when I was toddler, the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and my whole family fled to Vienna, Virginia. Far from home, my parents were determined to raise my two sisters and me according to Afghan traditions.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My father was an immigrant from Russia and my mother was first generation.
My grandparents left the Pale of Settlement at the border of western Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, fleeing anti-Semitism and hoping to make a better life for their children in America.
I was born in Budapest, Hungary, and moved to the United States in 1956. It was during the Hungarian Revolution when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest, and my family - me, my brother, and my parents - escaped over the border to Austria. We just took whatever we could carry. It was perilous, but we made it across.
I was born in Russia in 1901 of Jewish parents and came to the United States in 1922 to join my father, who left Russia for the United States before World War I.
The first time I visited Afghanistan in May 2000, I was 26 years old, and the country was under Taliban rule. I went there to document Afghan women and landmine victims.
My father emigrated from Lithuania to the United States at the age of 12. He received his higher education in New York City and graduated in 1914 from the New York University School of Dentistry. My mother came at the age of 14 from a part of Russia which, after the war, became Poland; she was only 19 when she was married to my father.
About 1900 my parents came to the United States as children from what was then the Polish area of Russia.
Both my parents came with their parents during the revolution in Cuba. Both my parents were born in Cuba. They left everything over there. My family got stripped of everything - of their land, of their jobs, everything.
My family fled Iran in October 1978 as a result of the coming revolution when I was two years old. In the early days, my entire family lived together in a very crowded house, where I shared a room with my sister, cousin, and grandmother, and we would all listen to my grandmother tell stories before bedtime.
My parents came to the United States in the early years of this century as part of a wave of Russian Jewish immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity in the New World.