I keep think­ing about a scene from one of my favorite child­hood nov­els, The Road Dis­ap­pears Into the Dis­tance by Alexan­dra Brushtein. The nov­el, set in pre-Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Rus­sia, is about a young Jew­ish girl, Sashen­ka Yanovskaya. In the scene in ques­tion, nine-year-old Sashen­ka is sit­ting the entrance exams at the Insti­tute for Young Ladies. Each girl is asked to read a short pas­sage from a text­book and to dia­gram a sim­ple sen­tence. Sashen­ka, who is wait­ing her turn, is relieved to find the ques­tions so easy. One by one the girls are called to the front of the class, but not Sashen­ka. A recess is announced, at which point only sev­en girls remain. Each one is a Jew.

After the break, these girls – Sashen­ka includ­ed – are sub­ject­ed to a rather dif­fer­ent exam: com­plex pas­sages from the clas­si­cal works of lit­er­a­ture, fol­low-up ques­tions that test their knowl­edge of geog­ra­phy and his­to­ry. The girls per­form admirably; they’ve been pre­pared well. But Sashen­ka doesn’t under­stand why they are being sin­gled out. Lat­er, as she is leav­ing the Insti­tute lob­by, she is accost­ed by an acquain­tance, a daugh­ter of non-Jew­ish fam­i­ly friends. ​“None of you Yids will be admit­ted,” the girl says to her.

In this dra­mat­ic man­ner, the hero­ine of Alexan­dra Brushtein’s nov­el learns what it means to be a Jew in the Rus­sia of 1894. I read Brushtein’s book, in 1986, almost a hun­dred years lat­er. Grow­ing up in the Sovi­et Rus­sia, I had done my own share of learn­ing, though it had been more grad­ual. Some name-call­ing out in the streets or in the class­room. Some hints of the trou­bles dur­ing the Stalin’s times. Most of all, though, it was my par­ents’ insis­tence that I had to study twice as hard as my peers, because I would be judged twice as strictly.

In pre-Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Rus­sia, quo­tas for Jews were a law. But in the Sovi­et Rus­sia they were more insid­i­ous. We were all sup­posed to be equal, weren’t we? All those nation­al­i­ties. All those republics. Our songs cel­e­brat­ed the friend­ship of the peo­ple, and there was always some region­al folk danc­ing on TV.

My par­ents knew bet­ter, of course. And so did my teach­ers. My sixth-grade lit­er­a­ture teacher read to us The Road Dis­ap­pears Into the Dis­tance in short install­ments, when­ev­er we had a bit of time left at the end of the class. She was a great teacher; she could make you fall in love with a book. But when I told her I want­ed to be a writer – a jour­nal­ist maybe? – she said no, it couldn’t be done. She was Jew­ish, like me and my par­ents, and she knew what she was talk­ing about.

Col­leges had quo­tas – that’s what it all came down to. Good col­leges and mediocre col­leges alike. A few were safe bets, like the Insti­tute of Auto Indus­try or the Insti­tute of Petro­chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing. Some nev­er accept­ed Jews at all. There was noth­ing offi­cial, no laws you could point toward. You had to rely on hearsay and com­mon knowl­edge. A neigh­bor my father met while walk­ing our dog said they nev­er accept­ed Jews at the well-known insti­tute where he worked. ​“They all have poor vision,” he said, by way of explanation.

In the sum­mer of 1990, I was sit­ting the entrance exams at the Moscow Insti­tute of Elec­tron­ics and Math­e­mat­ics. I’d stud­ied hard. I’d had tutors. My love­ly physics tutor used to point out all the Jew­ish physi­cists in my text­book. He was con­vinced I would suc­ceed. But my math tutor, who actu­al­ly taught at the Insti­tute, said the out­come would depend on the Par­ty direc­tives they were about to receive. On the day of my physics exam, I sat in a large class­room and wait­ed for my name to be called. More than a hun­dred years had passed since the events of The Road Dis­ap­pears Into the Dis­tance, and I wasn’t sure whether any­thing has changed at all. 

Ellen Lit­man is the author of Man­nequin Girl: A Nov­el and the sto­ry col­lec­tion The Last Chick­en in Amer­i­ca, a final­ist for the Los Ange­les Times­First Fic­tion Award and for the Young Lions Fic­tion Award. She has been the recip­i­ent of the Rona Jaffe Foun­da­tion Writ­ers’ Award, and her work has appeared in Best New Amer­i­can Voic­es, Best of Tin House, Amer­i­can Odysseys: Writ­ing by New Amer­i­cans, Dossier, Tri­quar­ter­ly, Ploughshares, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. Born in Moscow, she teach­es writ­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut and lives in Mansfield.