They’d spend their nights reciting Pasternak—they knew it all by heart! “Anywhere is heaven with the one you love!” “Until the first frosts,” I’d laugh. “You have no imagination,” my mother would reply, hurt. We were your typical Soviet family: For breakfast, it was always buckwheat or noodles with butter; we only had oranges once a year, on New Year’s Eve. I can still remember how they smelled. Not now, but back then…it was the smell of a different life, a beautiful life…Summer vacation meant a trip to the Black Sea. We’d go to Sochi as “savages”—without reservations—and all share a single
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