It’s Tuesday evening and the year is 1990. I am 9 or 10 years old, depending on the month, and excited for an evening stroll with my family to pick up some new stuff for the apartment. My sister, who is four years older than me, is a lot less excited. Doesn’t she want a new chair, or perhaps a bedside lamp I ponder. Teenage girls are so moody. Who can know why they get this way? I wonder if perhaps her enthusiasm is dampened because she knows we are not going to a furniture store. Everyone in our community, meaning recent Soviet arrivals, knows that Tuesdays are garbage disposal days in South Brooklyn, and this means prime pickings!

My family left the Soviet Union in the spring of 1989. Our first stop post-departure was Austria. From there, it was Italy, where we had to convince American State Department officials first of our suffering at the hands of Soviet antisemites whose aim was to sabotage education and career opportunities for Jews, and also that our family would make fine Americans if only we were granted the privilege to join this land of opportunity.

And so, in August 1989, we arrived in NYC. The Soviet Union, aside from taking our passports and citizenship, which we gladly forfeited, also disallowed taking with us most valuable things such as jewelry, electronics, and, of course, money. We arrived with a few hundred dollars, some cloth, books – of course Soviet Jews took books, and receipts for shipping containers that we filled with household necessities back in the USSR that in theory would arrive to our final destination a few months after us.

After several weeks of sleeping on the floor of relatives, my parents found their first American employment, and the four of us moved to a small one-bedroom apartment in South Brooklyn. Since we had nothing by way of furnishing, or really anything else, we slept on the floor on the few blankets that we brought with us.

As you probably already guessed from the title, we furnished our apartment with things we found in the trash, and I will get to that. But to understand our ingenuity and appreciation for the bounty that awaited us on the curbsides of Brooklyn, one should understand garbage in the Soviet Union.

Waste in the Soviet Union........

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