For a while the fighting seemed to lighten, but the peace treaties failed and early in 1918 my unit was surrounded by German troops in the Ukraine, southwest of Russia. Thousands of us were captured and forced into labor, but the German army was also short of doctors. My next couple months before Russia surrendered were spent patching up German soldiers. . Once you cut off a soldier’s uniform and begin working on his wounds, it doesn’t matter so much what side he was on. After Russia’s surrender, the Germans just turned us loose. The roads were packed with our soldiers that spring, everyone desperately trying to catch a ride on a horse wagon or a train. I was lucky enough to catch a ride to Rostov while thousands staggered through the mud and melting snow.

I was able to return to my mother and sisters for a visit. It was a time of civil war in Russia. The Bolshevik communists had overthrown the Provisional Government and claimed complete control. Soon afterwards I was drafted into the army opposing the Bolsheviks, the Whites. The White Army was a strange mix of groups that shared only one common opinion: The Reds must be defeated. I just kept my mouth shut, did my work, and kept myself alive. Then in the spring of 1919, my group was surrounded by the Red Army and I was again forced to switch uniforms. I was given a new coat with bright red tabs and began my work as a Red Army doctor.

That year more soldiers were dying from typhus and scarlet fever than from bullets. We were running very low on supplies, with no medicine and few bandages. Our doctors worked until we fell from exhaustion into a few hours’ sleep. One morning making rounds, I found my skin was getting hotter and hotter, and the room started to spin. Next thing I remembered, I was on a cot shivering and sweating. I had typhus and perhaps scarlet fever. I was just twenty-five and strong, so I survived the fever, but I was too weak to continue working.

At that point, the Reds had taken over the entire region and I wasn’t needed as much, so the commander let one of younger brothers come and take me home to Rostov. It wasn’t clear whether or not I was over my illnesses and my mother was worried I would infect the whole family, so she found a room for me at the edge of town.

When I opened my eyes I was lying on a narrow bed in what I knew to be a rented room on the outskirts of Rostov. I was still feverish from typhus. I could feel cold sweat on my clammy face. A firm knock found me struggling to get out of bed and open the door. A young woman stood there. She told me her name was Celia Krublikov, and that my mother had hired her to help nurse me. She stayed for awhile and used procedures I found to be thorough and professional to bring down my fever. All I wanted to do was sleep and drink cups of sweet tea out of the Samovar.

The more I saw her, the more she grew on me. Celia was beautiful and bright and full of life. She seemed to like me as well. As I grew stronger, we took long walks together. A couple months later we were married in a small Jewish synagogue just outside of Novorossiysk.

After the Reds beat down the White Army late that year, the Red police- the Cheka- began searching for people who had been a part of the old government. It made no difference that I had worked as a Red Army doctor- they had my name on a list. Fortunately, the Cheka were not well organized in a small city like Rostov and we left a few nights later.

Celia and I joined a small group heading for Lithuania in order to escape the police. The journey was hard, near impossible, but we found kind people to help us along the road. We arrived in Vilna in late 1920. With passports and money organized by my younger brother Albert, who was already in America, Celia and I were able to get passage on a ship to New York. The boat was overflowing with people who, like ourselves, were leaving the ruins of Eastern Europe to start a new life. The whole ship stunk of dirty people emptying their stomachs off the side and into the crashing waves in a haze of hunger and motion. The beds were so narrow I had to lie sideways to keep from falling off the edge. The food tasted of grimy, sweaty hands and I tried to convince myself the movement I saw there was only in my mind. Every day I had to remind my despairing mind of America and all the liberties my wife and I would have there. When at last we saw the tall woman with her crown and lifted torch in the harbor, I saw her as a symbol of hope and liberty. America.

New York was different than anything I’d ever seen. Luxurious cars zoomed around us. The noise was painful. Mile tall buildings loomed over us severely, making me feel immediately unwelcome and insignificant. People wore expensive clothes, flashy and sophisticated. Women shamelessly exposed their ankles and wore their hair cropped short like a man’s. The language was the worst of it all. Harsh vowels flew out of people’s mouths at a rate I found horrifying. I could pick out a few words that I had heard in Russia, but the rest was a blur of meaningless unfamiliarity.

I could feel despair bubbling up inside of me. Back in Russia, my wife and I had a profession that gave us self-respect and the respect of others. But here we had nothing to offer. The skills that had taken us years to master held no value here. Our foreign degrees and reputations were just another part of our lost identities.

After I got over the initial shock of the new way of life, I found I was fascinated by American culture. Celia, however, was unhappy. Everyone and everything she knew had been left behind. She was surrounded by a world with no open spaces, full of loud noises and crowded with people – all so different from her home in Russia. Celia did not enjoy life in New York City, encountering strange people and trying to understand the jumble of letters known to be English. She spent a lot of time alone in our room in the tiny apartment. Sometimes she would talk with another young Russian couple across the hall, seeking comfort from a familiar language. I was helping my cousin in the bakery and taking English classes at night, but Celia would not come with me. She wrote long letters home, but we knew that mailing them was like dropping stones into the sea. I felt that if we could get out of New York, to a calmer and quieter environment, Celia would not feel so threatened by this overwhelming new life.

Through a cousin of mine in California, I found a job as a medical assistant in a tuberculosis clinic in the hills east of Los Angeles. They offered to hire me while I studied for my United States medical license. Celia felt at peace in the quieter surroundings of our little house near the clinic. As I began to make friends with my coworkers, Celia also began to come out of the protective shell she had built around herself. Little by little, she began to make friends with other women who lived nearby. After a while, I was able to convince her to join me in an English class. She began to feel more comfortable in America. Sometimes she would baby-sit for a little girl down the street and take her for walks, helping her to reach the ripe oranges on the trees in our yard.

I passed my medical exams and was licensed to practice medicine in California. Now I felt fully myself again – recognized in my new country for my medical training and experience. Celia worked as my medical assistant; she never felt comfortable enough with the English language to attempt the licensing exams. Our first child, Stan, was born in 1926. I found an older doctor in Boyle Heights in the Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles who wanted a younger partner to help him with the night calls and long hours of a family practice. We moved from the country and into Los Angeles, but we did not mind because it was less overpowering than New York and by then we were more comfortable with city life. Celia and I were professionals joining a community of other educated Russians and Eastern Europeans who – like us -- had left homes destroyed by war and revolution to start a new life in America. In those happy years in the 1920’s, we did not know that the Great Depression and then another World War, more horrible than the one we had served in, would soon pull down the lives of so many people we loved in Russia and in America.