Former Soviet refugees Ena Feinberg and her husband were having dinner at a Moscow restaurant when they received a call: Terrorists had hijacked planes and used them to attack the World Trade Center. For the next two days, unable to reach their sons and friends in the US by telephone or e-mail, their only connection home was the around-the-clock TV news coverage.
Making matters worse, Mrs. Feinberg was scheduled to fly home the next day, Sept. 12, but there were no flights to the US. It would be another four days before she took the first-available flight.
"I was caught in the country I once wasn't able to leave," she says, referring to her family's eight-year struggle to get out of the oppressive and anti-Semitic Soviet Union. "I thought I would not be able to leave Russia again…."
After the initial shock, she was bewildered. "Then [I felt] frustration. Who could have done this to the United States? Then anger and grief. Then all the mixture of these feelings and these emotions. This was the feeling of gray grief." And that feeling persists.
Feinberg says she now lives with a feeling, however slight, of insecurity. Even though she has flown several times since the attacks, she says she's nervous every time her son boards a flight. "The moment he's safe home I feel relief."
The director of New American Services at the Newton, Mass.-based Jewish Family and Children's Services, Feinberg's work-life has also changed. Immigration has become more difficult and the process of getting refugees to the US takes longer. A complete moratorium on refugee immigration was imposed between October 2001 and February 2002.
"We used to have a certain amount of arrivals each month and now they are very low because people are not admitted," she says. "But life as it is goes on, and it should go on."
And that's where she credits the Bush administration's response to the attacks. "Everybody understands that if there is no peace, there is no life…. Terrorism will never lead to peace. [It] should somehow be destroyed to the roots, deep to the roots, otherwise mankind will not survive."
– Steven Savides, photo by Stuart S. Cox Jr.
