Anna
I often look for meaning in my past. That’s a common mistake. Meaning is in the moment.
Strangely, though, hints of past meaning sometimes reach me unexpectedly from across great distances and time, like the spooky actions of subatomic particles or the millennia ride of photons across the universe.
I received, for example, a message from my new friend Anna in Brooklyn, reminding me that soon she and her mother Irina would celebrate the 30th anniversary of their arrival in the United States.
You see, it was our quantum entanglement that helped bring about their migration from Moscow.
Negative Entropy
My tale begins in 1977, three years before Anna was born, at Northwestern University’s School of Music, where I was an entropic student. Soviet trumpet virtuoso and Bolshoi soloist Timofei Dokshizer, on a tour in the United States, came to play in our recital hall.
Most Americans had never heard of him, including me. In another world I might have skipped his recital. But he was from a strange vodka stain on the map, he played my instrument, and my professor had arranged his concert.
So I sidled in with other latecomers at the back of the hall. Dokshizer entered the stage, greeted the audience with a Mona Lisa smile, raised his horn to his chops...
...and replaced my entropy with clarity. He played impossible showpieces with maddening ease. Some tunes were conceived for the violin or coloratura soprano, yet he made not a single mistake on his limiting pipes.
His bell seemed pointed at me, and I thought I could hear tiny imperfections that weren’t at all: they were the bosons and quarks emitted as perfect human lips collided at high speed inside a silver mouthpiece.
Agile. Accurate. Bold. As an athlete and musician, he was everything I wasn’t.
His performance was brief. I sloped back to my studies confident only that if there existed a path to self-discovery, I was on all the other ones.
With the merciful excuse of lip pain I eventually gave up the trumpet to study History and, for unrelated reasons, Russian. After college, my search for purpose took me to Africa.
But Dokshizer had left an impression. How was he even possible? Could I be too?
Six years later when I went to Moscow as a graduate student, I sought him out at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall without a clue what I might say to him.
At Tchaikovsky I learned that he taught at the Gnessin Institute. So I walked there, rang the doorbell, and asked to meet him. The dezhurnaya summoned a young man. Dokshizer was not here, he said. But he told me to wait and disappeared. When he returned he asked me to write my name and invited me to return the next day.
I did, and he handed me two vinyls and flyers, each with the master’s autograph and personalized best wishes.
This was 1985. Anna, Dokshizer’s granddaughter, was five years old.
Synchronicity
I returned to grad school, worked in the USSR and settled near DC to look for a job.
Back in Moscow, young Anna was a budding pianist. Her father Sergei — Timofei’s son — passed away. The Soviet Union collapsed the same year. Chaos followed. Mafias took over and security faded. The Dokshizer family applied to emigrate to the United States through a new refugee program run out of the “Washington Processing Center” in Rosslyn, VA.
By the time they mailed their forms, however, family ties were a requirement for consideration. With no relatives in the United States, Timofei, Irina and Anna seemed to have little chance of being selected among the hundreds of thousands of applicants.
They didn’t know it, but a special immigration category nicknamed the “genius visa” for people of special talent could have qualified them for an interview. And at the time, only a very few people in the United States knew both of Dokshizer’s ability and the relevant visa law.
One day friend of the Dokshizer family called the Rosslyn center to check on their applications.
“What’s the principal applicant’s last name?” asked the Russian-speaking operator.
“Dokshizer,” was the response.
“First name?” asked the operator.
“Timofei,” he replied.
There was a femtosecond of silence on the other end of the line.
The operator asked, “Excuse me, but do you mean Timofei Dokshizer, the famous trumpeter?”
The friend replied in the affirmative.
A longer silence followed. Excitement now in his voice, the operator said he couldn’t find their applications. Cryptically, he urged the caller to try again in a couple of days.
The family soon learned that their application had been located and their names entered into the system thanks to the “genius” category. Someone they’d never heard of was listed as their U.S. contact. Their interview was ultimately scheduled for September 18.
Anna had just turned 11.
“My Dear Genius”
One of three people answering phones that day
The likelihood that I’d be the the guy to answer that morning in 1992 was sub-Planckian. But there I was, in my second year at the Center, fielding calls from applicants in the former Soviet Union. Able to confirm Dokshizer’s ability to the powers that be, and foreswearing any further access to the case, I exercised my right as a U.S. citizen and temporarily assumed the role of the family’s “anchor.”
I dropped a letter to Timofei Dokshizer relating the above history, and asked for any U.S. contacts who might help him and his family get settled.
Due to a postal foulup he didn’t see my mail until months later.
“For a long time,” he finally responded, “I couldn’t understand where you came from, my dear genius.” His interview, he said, had been “fantastically easy”: The officer had granted him and his family members refugee status without him saying a single word.
He seemed to credit me for greasing the skids. But no: Timofei Dokshizer, a bona fide genius, earned his family’s refugee status in accordance with the law. My tiny role was an accident of Rube Goldbergian events set in motion years before, during his recital in Evanston, and the result of almost incredible luck. After that, the system simply worked.
Moscow on the Hudson
Luck can be fickle, however. While awaiting their chance to travel, Irina’s office building, where she stored their refugee papers for safekeeping, caught fire. In the Soviet 1990s, papers were everything. Naturally, Irina ran into the burning building and tried to retrieve them.
She failed and despaired but was unhurt. A fireman finally brought her the bag with the papers inside, soaked from the fire hoses but still intact. She brought them home and laid them on the window sill to dry, filling the apartment with the smell of must and smoke that she and Anna would remember for the rest of their lives — an olfactory symbol of the strain they endured.
Timofei delayed travel for health reasons. His family tried to convince him he could get better treatment in the United States. He chose to remain at his house in Lithuania, and the difficult decision was made that Irina and Anna would go without him.
They began their new life in Brooklyn. The refugee program ensured a soft landing, but Irina was proud. Instead of living “on the dole” she found a job. But it was soon clear her employer was engaged in shady business. People in the office carried concealed weapons. This was Moscow all over again — but on the Hudson.
She quit and found better work.
Young Anna faced her own uniquely New Yorkian challenges: with limited English, she enrolled simultaneously in a Brooklyn school and a music institute in Manhattan. Overwhelmed, she left the latter to focus more on her studies. After school she earned a Bachelor’s in Management, then worked with the Bolshoi Ballet touring the U.S. — a reunion of sorts, as she knew some of the dancers from her artistic youth. But life on the road was exhausting, and the American Dream intervened: she landed a great job...
Quantum Entanglement
In the intervening years, I raised a family with my wife and had a full career overseas with a new employer. By June 2021, I was living in Virginia and nearing retirement. The Dokshizer story was just one of many fond but graying memories from a colorful life. Then I received the following email:
Dear Mr. Turner,
My name is Anna, I’m Timofei Dokshizer’s granddaughter. I’m writing to introduce myself and to let you know that my mother and I have been meaning to reach out to you for a long time and let you know how grateful we are for everything you’ve done for our family.
As you may know, my grandfather passed away in 2005 at the age of 85. My mother and I live in New York since 1993. I’ve since graduated from Pace University, had a 15 year career in the Performing Arts management and now work as a Manager of Event Finance.
This unexpected message from afar carrying a hint of meaning from my past made me wonder: What did this say about the interconnectedness of humanity? Was some greater force at work?
That was just me looking back for meaning and almost missing the moment. Because here’s what mattered:
A great man wanted — and got — better for his family;
My country fulfilled its promise as the land of the free; and
Someone who was a child when our lives intersected felt compelled, 28 years on, to say thanks. That said a something about the goodness of people — and a lot about Anna.
But this still meant something to me personally: as a young man in Moscow I had gone looking for a brush with greatness, hoping some would rub off on me. Instead, I would have something more meaningful: Anna’s gratitude.
How often does someone receive a gift like that? There was only one thing to do: meet her and her mother...
...Which I did during a trip to see my kids in New York. Anna invited me to the rooftop of her Brooklyn condo building. Irina soon joined us. Her English was excellent; Anna’s was native. We told each other our life stories during a walking tour of their neighborhood. We had only just met, but they already seemed like old friends. Later they met my daughters.
For years, Anna told me, she’d been after her mother to try to find the man who had helped them get to the U.S. Irina looked through Timofei’s papers and found the letter I had written him. Anna then found me on social media and got in touch.
She just wanted me to know that she and her mother were good, hard-working, tax-paying citizens, and that they were worthy of my efforts to bring them to the United States.
Take it from me: the U.S. is very lucky to have them.
Irina, Anna, Maria and Anna
Note: Anna’s personal story is related here with her permission. With the growth of the internet and changes in the way officially held information is handled, the above scenario could never play out again the way it did 30 years ago. Still I like to think the outcome — such wonderful people coming to my country — would be the same.
