We are proud to present an immimentary* about an immigrant who came to America, become a doctor and enjoys his work.

Hi, I’m Jacob Khurgin. I’m a Urologist currently practicing in Brooklyn, and I want to tell you a little bit about my life and how I got here.
I actually grew up in Israel, but I was born in Manhattan at Beth Israel Hospital in Lower Manhattan. I think it’s now part of Mount Sinai. I don’t remember any of that, obviously, because I was just born. About two or three months later, my family took me back to Israel, where they were living. It’s a little strange that I was born in New York City, while my whole childhood, everything I can remember was in Israel. This has to do a little bit with my grandma, who was a big part of my life. I used to call her Babushka. She had a lot of foresight in general throughout her life and a lot of strong will. One of the things she believed in was that, even though she was a big lover and supporter of Israel, where we lived.
She wanted to make sure that her grandson, me, would be able to leave Israel if needed, have citizenship elsewhere, and not feel obligated to serve in the Israeli Army. She wanted it to be an option rather than mandatory. So, here I am, the only family member to date who was born in America, as an American citizen from the beginning.
An ongoing joke in my life was, “Jacob, Yasha, he can be president!”. Back then, it was a big deal to be president; now it seems anyone can be. Anyway, my whole life, I grew up in Israel in Haifa, which, for those who don’t know, is the third largest city after Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It’s a very beautiful city, and I am obviously nostalgic about it. It has mountains on one side and the sea on the other.
My childhood until the age of 5 or 6 was very uneventful, but I remember things very fondly. I spoke Hebrew as my first language, and my family consisted of my dad, my mother, my older sister, and me. We also had a dog named Gypsy, a big German Shepherd.
I don’t have a lot of memories of her, but I do remember walking into the room and noticing that the big dog didn’t really like me. We would go on walks as a family, and I would always get plopped on her back because I was small and tired. She would have to carry me like a horse. So, most of my memories involve walking into the room and, sure enough, seeing her slinking out, trying to avoid me.
My dad, Boris Khurgin, grew up in Russia. He was born in Leningrad and lived mostly in Moscow. Together with his mom, my grandma Babushka Sara, they escaped from the former Soviet Union to Poland, then to Austria, Italy, and eventually to Haifa. This was in 1959, definitely before the large migration to Israel from Russia and the Soviet Union. At that time, there weren’t many people coming to Israel, so they were there quite early, facing all the difficulties associated with that. My dad was 18 at the time and became one of the early Israelis.
In 1973, I think, is when he met my mother, Marina Rabinovich. She was from Ukraine, somewhere in Kiev, and she came with her parents about 14 or 15 years after my dad. From what I can tell, it was not love at first sight, but my grandma said she came from a good family and that he should meet her again. Anyway, they met again and ended up getting married.
A short time later, my sister Rachel was born. She’s 5 years older than me, and I’m still very close with her. That was a lovely family dynamic. I remember our apartment: I had a bedroom, she had a bedroom, and we had a little balcony where our dog would run around. We also had a big palm tree, and we would eat dates from it once in a while.
Haifa is a very beautiful town where we lived on Hacarmel, which is Mount Carmel. You could overlook the Gulf of Haifa, and we were about a 10 to 15-minute walk from the Bahá’í Gardens. It was really a beautiful place. Most of my childhood memories are just of playing outside. We didn’t have much planned; we would just go outside to play with the neighborhood kids. Before you knew it, it would be dark in the evening, and it was time to go home.
One of my best friends was in Bal Breno, and I remember her. I actually reconnected with her recently; she’s a psychologist living in Israel.
I remember we would play games where we took giant leaves and fashioned them into bowls, putting little leaves and flowers in them, and saying we’d made a salad or some sort of delicious meal for everyone to enjoy. Things like that contributed to a fairly simple, happy childhood on David Marcos. I remember the name of the street.
I actually came back 30-something years later when I became a dad to show my older son, Sebastian, where I grew up. It was a very touching moment for me. We even knocked on the door of the old apartment and introduced ourselves, saying, “Hi, I used to live here a long time ago. Is it okay if I look around?” The kids there probably didn’t have the best judgment, but they opened the door, and I was able to show Sebastian where I used to sleep. I pointed out the backyard, the date palm trees, and the dates that we used to eat.
But everything changed, as it does in life, around age 6. I remember having a very serious conversation with my dad. It turned out my parents were getting divorced. No divorce is perfectly beautiful and congenial, but this was not a very friendly divorce. Within the span of a year, maybe two, we moved from my home on David Marcus Street to another street where my grandma lived, staying with her for a little bit while the divorce was finalizing. We were living with my dad, my grandma, and my sister, and before we knew it, we were moving to America.
Initially, we were going to move as part of my dad’s sabbatical for a year or two, and that was in 1987. I’ve only lived in America since then, so it was not quite a sabbatical. Now that I’ve arrived in America, I’m going to wear American clothes, not the IDF Sahale t-shirt. I’ll say a little bit more about that.
Here I am, about 8 years old, almost finished with second grade (I didn’t quite finish it). I didn’t speak any language except Hebrew, and I understood a little bit of Russian just from spying on my parents and grandparents. We came to America in 1987, specifically to New York. For those who were around back then, this was not the densely populated, bright lights of New York; this was a gritty New York, reminiscent of films like “Taxi Driver”. It was definitely a culture shock.
I remember coming from the airport to Manhattan, to the Upper West Side where we were going to live, and just seeing crazy things everywhere, people of every different nationality and a language that was completely foreign to me.
I remember seeing the staircases on the outside of the apartments and thinking, “Wow, the Americans are really stupid. We usually build the stairs inside the building”. I also recall a squeegee guy attacking us in the car, squeegeeing and dirtying up the windshield. That was my first few hours in America.
When you arrive in a new place, your identity changes. In Israel, we were kind of Russians, I guess, but in America, we were Jews and Israelis. This made me question who I was, what I was, and where I belonged. That’s when I started thinking more about family history, who’s from where and for what reason.
My dad’s dad, whom I never met, was named Jacob; that’s who I was named after. He was a physicist who worked in Russia, in the former Soviet Union. A lot of what took place is obviously not always out in the open, but best we can tell, he worked on the nuclear program during the formative years leading up to World War II. Around 1943, when my dad was 2 years old, he died. How did he die? We’re not sure. One story is that he got mercury poisoning; another story is that he had appendicitis and died from that.
The more we’ve looked into it, the more we think he probably died from radiation poisoning, which wasn’t really well known back then and is related to what he was doing. My dad explained it to me; he is a physicist, but I don’t fully understand it. It has something to do with building the accelerator, and he did important work that probably predated some English physicist who did similar work.
This is the best understanding I have of that: my dad grew up without a father from the age of 2. I think that left a big hole in his heart forever. The older I got, the more I appreciated how difficult that must have been, especially when I became a father myself.
My dad’s grandmother, Babushka, was a very strong personality and kind of took on the role of two or maybe even three or four parents, depending on who you ask. From the age of six until her death in 2012, she was the closest thing I had to a mother figure. I remember her very fondly; she was definitely a matriarch.
She was born Sarah Freilih, which is a Yiddish word for some sort of dance, a happy or joyous dance. She grew up in Odessa, and being from Odessa gives one a unique sense of humor and a specific culture that still exists to this day. You can see it in Brighton Beach here in Brooklyn, where that culture remains quite vibrant.
She was rebellious. She started her life as a very fervent communist; she was very much about, you know, the party and would give lectures and talks. Over time, she became more and more disillusioned with communism as she faced anti-Semitism, which eventually led to her leaving the former Soviet Union in 1959.
There was a period of about, I guess, 15 or 16 years when she was a widow living hard while World War II was raging, and everybody was starving, experiencing all these horrible things that I never experienced. She made it through that, and she married a Polish guy for money, which allowed her to leave the former Soviet Union with him because she was married to a Polish citizen. She took my dad along and left from Russia to Poland; from there, it was much easier to escape. She eventually escaped to Austria.
There’s a family legend that when they were in Austria, because she spoke Yiddish, she would speak Yiddish everywhere, and people understood her even though they didn’t like the fact that she was speaking Yiddish and not German. But it was close enough that she was able to get around.
I think she was very aware of the difficulties of living in the former Soviet Union and was always forward-thinking about how to get her son and then her grandchildren to a better place in life. Initially, that was Israel, and eventually, it was America. You only realize the weight of the past when you get older, but I do remember having a hard time in third grade, not knowing the language and not really understanding who I was in comparison to everybody else. What I remember most was not speaking a word.
We came around May or June, and my grandma, with her broken English, taught me English from, you know, “The Cat in the Hat” and things like that. By the time I entered third grade, I spoke very little, just like my grandma. But at that age, you integrate pretty fast. I remember not saying a word for, I don’t know, a few weeks, and then about 2 or 3 months after starting third grade, English just came pretty naturally.
I actually remember a few months after that, I had my first dream in English. I don’t remember what it was about, but I remember thinking that my brain had changed. I was no longer thinking or dreaming in Hebrew; it was English that became my primary language.
I remember, towards the beginning of my third grade, we had a spelling bee, and all the kids participated. Sure enough, I had to participate as well, and I remember winning the spelling bee just a few months after arriving. I can still recall that the winning word was “juice”. A big part of my learning the language was, you know, reading the backs of cereal boxes, juice boxes, milk, and things like that. “Juice” was one of the words I knew.
At first, my older sister Rachel took it harder coming to America from Israel because she had a lot of friends and was about 12 years old, a more difficult age, I guess, than being seven or eight. We used to speak Hebrew to each other and make promises that we would always move back there.
And you know, that never happened, but the link and the desire to go back became a little bit thinner and weaker over the years. Soon enough, we were Americanized. It’s not a bad thing; it’s just a change. Initially, we didn’t have a lot of money. We had a nice apartment on the Upper West Side, but my dad, with his very respectable education as a top-notch physicist who ran a big department in weapons development in Israel, had a hard time. He spoke English well, but there was an accent, and being older made it more challenging for him to get a job. I remember he was trying to find anything and everything possible. He even considered being a cab driver for a while and started different businesses. It was a stressful time, so I remember feeling that I just needed to avoid contributing to any problems and be a good kid, if you will. And I really was a good student and never got in trouble.
Third and fourth grade were my first exposures to the American education system. I remember struggling a little bit with English, but I recall that math was always a strong suit for me. In fact, until maybe fifth or sixth grade in America, we didn’t reach the level of what I learned in Israel until the end of second grade. Soon after starting in third grade, whenever we had math class, they would take me out of the class and give me my own coursework to do because I was more advanced than the other kids.
Sure enough, after a little while, another kid joined me who became a very good friend. His name is Paris Pender. We would sit there, laugh, crack jokes, and do some math together. We ended up being friends until high school, pretty much. Ironically, I think I was a little bit better at math than him, and years later, he became a mathematician. I don’t know exactly what he does, but he became a mathematician.
So, in third and fourth grade, that’s where I was. My dad, I think, was pretty lonely. You know, you feel out of sorts. Long story short, he met a woman named Oksana Yovlonskaya. To backtrack a little bit, my sister was a very good pianist and cellist; she was very talented musically. I was somewhat talented musically, not as much, but I used to play piano.
We used to go to our teacher, Lena Tatulian. We would drive up to Washington Heights; first, Rachel would have a lesson, and then I would have a lesson. At some point, Lena invited her friend Oksana, who was actually the head of the piano department at Juilliard. My dad hit it off with her, and long story short, we moved to Ardsley, where Oksana was living. Ardsley is in Westchester, about 30 to 60 minutes north of New York, depending on the traffic.
We lived there for a year. I was living in Westchester in the suburbs. I remember we had a dog named Fu, a very stubborn but cute cocker spaniel. I would spend most of my time in school, and after school, I would just be alone in the backyard playing with my dog and pretending I was a Ninja Turtle or something with some of the sticks I would find. It was a peaceful year, I guess, but again, it ended a little bit surprisingly for me. Everybody seemed to get along with Oksana, or so I thought, but it turned out that only I was really getting along with her. My dad and my sister really butted heads quite a bit.
So, about a year after being there, we moved back to the Upper West Side, and Oksana left our lives. She was the last person I remember thinking of as a replacement for my mother, someone who would actually be my mother. I knew that my grandma was a mother figure, but she wasn’t my mother. At that point, I remember thinking, “Okay, I don’t have a mother per se, but that’s okay”. We moved back to Manhattan and lived there for the next couple of decades.
I attended Columbus Academy Junior High School and did well; I never really got into trouble. I then passed the test to go to a specialized science high school, where I spent 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grades. It was a good school with a lot of smart and hardworking people, and I did well there. I ended up being accepted to Columbia University in Manhattan as well and started going there.
I think around this age was when my life as a “no problem child” with no real issues started to change. I experienced some sort of crisis, and long story short, I met a lady seven years older than me named Sophia Moroshkovsky. She was a sort of family friend, but we got into a relationship, and I ended up getting married around age 19. It was never a good marriage, but it was definitely a learning experience. We lived together, and it was filled with wild ups and very low lows.
Around the age of almost 21, we got divorced. I do remember that was the only time I ever went to the former Soviet Union. She and her family were living part of the time in Moscow, and I went to visit them. This was Moscow in the late ’90s, and it was a strange place. I did not really like it, maybe it was because I was in a bad marriage, but I also remember seeing very expensive cars and people wearing expensive clothes on one side of the street. On the other side, you would see little babushkas who obviously had no money, selling snacks on the street just to make ends meet. It was a strange place.
And that’s the only time I’ve ever been to Russia. I probably should go back, but maybe only if Putin lets me, not right now, probably. The marriage eventually ended, and I went through a significant depressive period in my life, which I eventually snapped out of. I took my time to finish college, and I think I did something very smart: I worked a lot in computer operations at an investment bank. I would make presentations look pretty for investment bankers, which paid pretty well. I did overtime to make as much money as I could, and then I spent it traveling. Initially, I went all over Europe, then to New Zealand, and later to South America. I got to see a good chunk of the world.
I had a feeling that I would eventually come back and settle down, not be a world traveler, so I was using my time to do that and made a lot of great memories. It’s funny because when you recall things in your life, you don’t necessarily remember them in the same order they happened. You don’t recall everything like a clock; one year may be eventful in your life, while another year not so much.
There’s a concept called a homunculus, which refers to how the brain perceives our body. For example, our hands receive a lot of sensation and motor attention, even though they comprise a relatively small part of our body. Our lips, mouth, and face in general are also represented a lot in our brain. I think that sometimes, when you reflect on your life, it resembles a homunculus: the significant events take up a big part of your memory, even though, in terms of time span, there wasn’t that much.
I remember ages 21 to 26 as a good time, gaining independence, earning some money, traveling the world, coming back broke, and doing it all over again. It was fun.
But I always knew, I don’t know how, but I always knew that going into medicine was my eventual path. That’s what ended up happening. There was nobody in my family, per se, who was a doctor. My grandma’s mother, my great-grandmother was an OBGYN at the turn of the last century in Ukraine. She was the only close family member, if you will, who was in the medical profession.
The story I was told, and that I think I remember as well, is that shortly after we moved from my original home to my grandma’s house in Israel, I was playing somewhere in another room, quiet and thinking about something. My grandma, who was in a different room, remembers that I came out and declared that I was going to be a brain surgeon. I never became a brain surgeon; I became a urologist, which some would argue is the male brain surgeon.
So how did I get there? I’ll tell you a little bit more about it right now. Here we are in the summer of 2005. I had a very fun summer. I went with my cousin and my friend to Thailand, where we spent almost two months. I also spent some time in Israel for my cousin’s wedding. I came back happy, fit, tanned, and ready to take on medical school.
So, in late August 2005, I started orientation and then medical school. I remember on day two, while we were here in Long Island at NYIT, which was previously called NYCOM, a medical school at Old Westbury an DO school, I saw these two girls: one cute girl and her friend. I said to myself, “Oh, it would be nice to get to know her”.
Of course, that became my wife, so Tanya was there with her friend Marina, who’s my friend too now. She was just a very cool, cute girl. I didn’t think too much of it at first, and we hung out as friends initially. Then we began dating, and pretty much since August or September of 2005, we’ve been inseparable.
We’ve been lucky to meet someone who, as the years continue, seems to get better and better. You know, things you never think about when you initially meet a young lady, she was probably 23 at the time, maybe 24, but no, she was 22, sorry. You don’t think, “Is she going to be a good mother? Is she going to care about me when I’m down and out?” The years have proven that she’s more than I could have hoped for. I feel very lucky to have met her.
We pretty much went through the entire med school curriculum together. I remember Tanya coming into med school saying that the only thing she did not want to do in terms of her specialty was to become a dermatologist. Why? Because she had spent the summer before med school working at a dermatology office and said, “Well, I definitely don’t want to do that; that’s boring and stupid”. Of course, she ended up becoming a dermatologist!
At that point, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had some guidance in the medical field because my dad, in 1994, met a woman also named Tanya Voitovich, who has been part of our lives ever since. She’s a wonderful, amazing woman who was an OBGYN back in Kiev, Ukraine.
When she immigrated to America around age 30, she eventually became a doctor here as well, a family practitioner. Her daughter, Olga, became my sister, and I became an older brother, which was very nice. I always felt like I wanted to have a younger sibling. We received some advice from Tanya and other people in our lives about becoming specialists and not going into primary care, which is what my stepmom Tanya was doing.
We didn’t really know what we wanted to do, but I do remember a very specific conversation during my second or third year of medical school with an advisor. I think his name was Dr. Goldstein or Goldbird, something like that. He was a dentist who worked in the medical school. We approached him as a couple; Tanya said she wanted to go into dermatology, and I said I wanted to go into urology. He just started laughing and said, “Well, that’s not going to happen”. Then he added that if it did happen, we definitely wouldn’t be in the same place geographically.
Nothing like being told something can’t be done to light a fire under your butt! Sure enough, we ended up proving Dr. Goldstein wrong. I’m sure he meant well.
So, why did I get into urology? Like I said, I had no idea what I wanted to do during the first two years of medical school. You are in the classroom, passing tests every month, doing anatomy class, and learning in a classroom setting. In the third and fourth years of medical school, you transition to clinical work. You go into hospitals, offices, see patients, help in surgeries, and engage in things like that.
So, in my third year, the first thing I started doing was surgery. I didn’t know anything else, but it was exciting. We would help in the trauma setting; people would get shot, and medical students who didn’t know anything would go and help. It was very exciting, but also difficult. You know, we would wake up at 3:00 AM and come home at 9:00 PM. However, I didn’t know anything else at that time.
The next few rotations I had were in internal medicine and family practice, which were not as exciting. Pretty soon after that, I realized I wanted to be some sort of surgeon. I did not like general surgery as much for different reasons and stumbled onto the field of urology. I think nobody thinks, before medical school, “I’m going to go into urology”. That’s a strange declaration to make unless your family or someone you know is a urologist.
But the more I looked into urology, the more I realized it was surgical. It involved very interesting surgeries, including open surgeries, laparoscopic surgeries, robotic surgeries, microsurgeries, and endoscopic surgeries. In this field, you get to see patients of all ages, old, young, and middle-aged. You treat life-threatening conditions as well as lifestyle-related, elective conditions. It was really the most diverse field, and all the people I met in the field had a great sense of humor. You know, we had plenty of access to penis jokes, which was one of our favorite things.
I became interested in urology, worked hard to be accepted, and eventually got accepted at a hospital called Albert Einstein Medical Center in North Philadelphia, where I spent the next five years.
In the meantime, Tanya was accepted into an internship in Philadelphia, and she ended up going fairly close to Philadelphia, in Allentown, to do her dermatology training. I completed my urology training until 2014, while Tanya finished her residency in 2013. After that, she spent a year in New York, where she did a fellowship in dermatopathology.
We lived together, and she would often come to visit on weekends, and sometimes on weekdays, I would visit her. Things were difficult but good; we worked a lot. I was working 80 to 100 hours a week, not sleeping much, and not eating much, but I became friends with my co-residents, kind of like army buddies in the trenches of war. It was a good time.
At the end of residency, I had to decide what to do. I liked urology in general, but I also knew I wanted to go back to New York City. I wanted to pursue extra training, so I did a fellowship at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, specializing in andrology and sexual medicine. It was a very good experience; I learned at one of the best institutions in urology in the world. I started taking some responsibilities as an attending physician without anyone to supervise me, which was good but also scary.
Tanya and I had a great time in Baltimore. She was working while I was a fellow, and she got pregnant on purpose. I remember we left Baltimore when she had a big belly in June, and in late August of 2015, she gave birth to Sebastian. That was a crazy year for me: we finished fellowship, moved to New York, and I became a father. I got my first real job in my life, and Tanya also had some health issues, so it was a very eventful year.
I think my life as it is now kind of started around then. I had a lot of impostor syndrome; I wasn’t sure if I knew anything about medicine, how to practice it, or how to take care of patients. I also felt that I wasn’t doing a good job as a father or as a husband. There was a lot of self-questioning, but that has gotten better over the years. I love my life the way it is.
Thankfully, in 2020, I became a dad again. We had another boy named Aiden, who was born on March 15, 2020. For those of you who remember, that was right when COVID was really heating up. Maybe two or three days after he was born, the COVID pandemic really reached its peak, and everything shut down. If he had been born a few days later, I wouldn’t have been able to see him in the hospital when he was born.
We spent basically the next year in seclusion: Tanya, me, Sebastian, and Aiden living together. It was a very strange time. We call Sebastian “Bashik,” and a lot of times we refer to him as Bashik. Aiden’s middle name is Joseph, so we call him AJ. It was a strange time. A couple of months after AJ was born, the entire hospital I work in, Maimonides in Brooklyn, became a COVID center, overflowing with patients who were sick and dying. They had to have every doctor in the hospital, whether you were a specialist in infectious diseases, a pulmonary expert, or not; it didn’t matter, even urologists were helping everybody.
I remember there were trucks full of corpses of people who had passed away, and we had no idea what was going to happen. I remember preparing to leave to go live in a hotel nearby the hospital to start helping, thinking that there was a good chance I’d never come back. Much like I think now, “Oh, I’m too young to have my life end,” I thought that way at that time. I was 41, but I also thought, “If it’s time, it’s time,” and I was proud of who I had been. If it had to happen, I was ready to go away.
Obviously, I didn’t die, and nothing serious happened. Things have been good since then. It’s hard for me to reflect on what they were like because they are still developing, but I think of myself now as a urologist, as well as a husband and a father.
I also very much enjoy teaching urology residents, these are people who are doing their training after medical school to become urologists. I’ve had the privilege of graduating a few classes, and I think of them as my work children. I have my home children, Bashik and AJ. I think that the older I get, the more I appreciate people in my life, such as my dad. Being a father, I try to emulate him. He had no one to emulate; he did not have a father growing up. Seeing how he was and realizing that things he made look effortless were obviously full of effort is humbling.
I think about my grandma and the many challenges she faced. I’m not sure if I would be up for the same challenges, but I’m grateful that they made life a little bit easier for me. I want to share a few pictures to show a little bit of my family. Also, my grandma wrote a book in Russian titled “Buri Storms of My Life”. We got it translated into English. She wrote it in Russian and also had it translated into Hebrew.
This is the original “Storms of My Life”. It’s basically an autobiography, but my sister and I feature prominently in it. We had a good friend who has passed away, his name is Yuri Krasniy. He was an artist who agreed to do little doodles and pictures throughout the book. I remember he would come over to my grandma’s; he had severe Parkinson’s at that time and was shaking a lot. But he would just take a napkin and a pen, and while my grandma was talking, he would create these shaky lines that looked like my grandma. I don’t know how he did it; I guess it’s because he was an artist.
Here is Yakov Berka; this is my grandma’s dad. He was a prominent Jew in Odessa and built one of the first synagogues there. Apparently, this is my grandma’s mother, Rosa, who was the gynecologist I mentioned before. Here is my grandma’s dad; this is my grandma, her brother who passed away in World War II, and my great-grandma. This is my grandma with her sister, Fira, who passed away not long ago, and Grirsha.
This is the entire Misha. I want to fast forward a little bit and show you some pictures. This is my Babushka as an adult; she was a fervent communist at that point but later became anti-communist. This is who I’m named after: Yakov, Jacob. He was a physicist and about 6’1″, which is very tall, especially for that time.
Nobody in my family has reached that height, but he was a handsome man. I’m not sure if anyone else in the family inherited that trait. This is Grisha, who passed away early in World War II. My grandma told me that the Stalin government had the bright idea of sending motorcycle scouts to the front lines to gather information, and pretty much every single motorcycle scout, including Grisha, was killed immediately.
Here I am, maybe a couple of years after coming to America. That’s me, and this is my sister, Rachel. This is my grandma’s third husband; his name is Lev Cheer, and my grandma took his name. He was an American citizen, which is how my grandma started coming to America, and that’s how we had somewhere to go after the divorce.
This is my dad, maybe 16 or 17 years old, back in Russia. I have other pictures on my phone that my grandma didn’t live to see. She lived to see my sister’s child, Eva, who was born, and my grandma was able to hold her and see her the year that she passed.
I’ll show a few more pictures, but I think one of the things I cherish about our family traditions is that pretty much every Friday, we meet up. This is something my grandma started for Shabbat dinner. We were never observant Jews; we don’t keep kosher, and we’re not even sure about God or anything like that, but we enjoy having Shabbat dinner together. Sometimes we’ll have Chinese food or pork chops, but it’s still a Shabbat dinner, if you will.
My family comes together, my dad with his wife, Tanya; my sister, Rachel; my stepsister, Olga; and they all come with their significant others and kids. I would say eight or nine times out of ten, we spend Friday dinner together, which is something my grandma started and continues at my dad’s house. Probably one day, it will continue in either my house or Rachel’s.
I’ll show you a couple more pictures from my childhood if you want. Here are some pictures: this is my wife and me getting married; we got married overlooking Manhattan. I should know the date, or else my wife will kill me! It was in 2009. Here is a little video of my Babushka talking to my wife, Tanya.
There’s my wife, this was back when we were 23, 20-something. My grandma really liked my girlfriend at the time, Tanya, because she was also from Odessa. As soon as she found out that Tanya was from Odessa, she knew that she was a keeper before I even realized it.
Here’s a picture of my dad; this is probably from 1982 or so. That’s me and my sister. Here’s another picture of us kind of enjoying nature back in Israel. Here is “fat baby”, that’s me, and my sister is holding me. She was about 5 years old, and I was just a few months old.
That’s my mother. We’re not very close, but we’re reestablishing contact. There’s a picture I’m proud of: this is my stepsister, Ola, marrying Micah. The guy in the background is me. I’ve actually officiated their wedding or helped officiate their wedding, and I’ve married six or seven other couples over the years. They’ve all stayed married except for one.
This is my grandma from my mother’s side. I’m not very close to her, but everybody says I look like her. The family always makes fun of the fact that my ears look like hers, whatever that means! This is us, maybe a few months after coming to America. This was in the same building that my dad is currently still living in. That’s me, my sister, and my friend Ben, who is my oldest friend; I’ve known him since 1985 or 1986.
Here’s Tanya and me with Sebastian, the joy of my life. Here he is a little blonde kid with my mom, my wife, and my dad, and Tanya, my stepmom. I want to show you my sister, and I actually remember when we took this picture. This was at my grandma’s place, maybe two months before we left Israel. It’s sort of one of the last photos of innocence, I believe.
And here I am with my two boys, AJ and Sebastian. They’re both sweet children. My oldest boy is such a good brother and always takes care of his little brother, who was diagnosed with autism. It’s been a little challenging, but he’s lucky to have a big brother like that. Of course, he loves Mama.
I feel very lucky to have my mama. Look at that smile! So, that’s my life now. Oh, wait! One last thing: this is for those of you who speak Russian, this is “fukanie” You know “fukanie”? It’s blowing a raspberry into the belly. My younger son is doing it to my older son, and then I’m running to see the video of it.
So, my life is currently dominated by family life and work life. I don’t know what the future holds. I do know that I started doing a couple of things in media. Less than a year ago, I appeared on the Drew Barrymore Show. I did a vasectomy live on TV. That was definitely a fun experience! My resident and I were doing it together, and the patient, who was a doctor, was very kind to sacrifice his body for the media.
I’ve been doing health segments on Fox 5 News a couple of times a month, just talking about current medical events and enjoying it. I don’t know what the future holds, but I’m talking to a camera now, maybe that’s something I’ll continue to do here and there. So, things are good; they’re not perfect. But you have to find the beauty in the chaos, and I’m getting better at that.

*The term “Immimentary” is a combination of words “immigrant” and “documentary”.
IMMIMENTARY is a film production company and a series of documentaries that feature interviews with immigrants from all walks of life. Stories told by the immigrants themselves.