I was about eight when my grandmother began having me study Russian after school. I vividly remember one lesson — a cloudy day during winter break, trying to make sense of a foreign alphabet in a little blue study book, and looking forward to not having school the next day. I can't remember what I was thinking that prompted me to ask, but on this day, I remember asking my grandmother a question I asked time and time again. "Can you tell me about Baba?" I knew the story — at least what I had thought to be the whole story, but it was so intriguing that I never grew tired of hearing my grandmother tell it again and again. Perhaps it was my way of trying to wrap my young mind around what I knew to be a difficult topic. My grandmother would tell me every time I asked, and I could tell she loved talking about her mother. So, I sat on the floor beside her recliner and listened. She would begin by telling me about these horrible peo...
I was brought up with a culturally colorful childhood. Russian Jews on my mother's side and Andean Colombians on my father's side. My father, being an immigrant, made Colombian culture a large part of my life, and my grandmother, being an immigrant, refused to have me be sheltered from the horrors the Holocaust cast on her family. I grew up as a small child spending an hour or two after school being taught Russian by my grandmother, and spent weekends mangling broken Spanish together with my Colombian family over Skype calls. I got to enjoy making arepas with my dad and eating tostones for lunch, and my mother's tangy borscht soup for dinner. Like I said, a very colorful childhood. However, there's something other than joy and warmth that the multicultural individual often experiences. When I was young, I didn't exactly feel a cultural connection among my peers. Usually for show and tell or storytime, I would bring something my dad brought back from Colombia...