Lev Golinkin is the author of the memoir “A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka.”
It’s somewhat distressing, knowing that your childhood mirrors that of an anthropomorphic cartoon mouse.
Any good cartoon will have something people relate to, but usually there are limits. My native-born American friends didn’t spend their preteen years chasing roadrunners and dodging falling anvils. But when I watch animated Jewish rodents leave everything behind and head for the New World, singing that all will be well in America, that hits hard. There’s no room between me and the screen; I am the mice and they are me.
I love “An American Tail,” the 1986 saga about the Mousekewitz family who flee cat Cossacks and journey to New York, but I also avoid it. So when I heard in September that Jesse Eisenberg, Whoopi Goldberg, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and other actors would be staging a live-streamed table read of the movie to benefit the Workers Circle, a Jewish social justice group, I logged on — with a certain reluctance.
Cartoons reduce the world to the basics, and so does becoming a refugee. When I was 9, my family escaped antisemitism in Soviet Ukraine and spent six months in refugee camps in Austria before making it to the United States. Within three days of departing Ukraine, I went from having things like a bed and an address to joining a ghostly, stateless procession making its way through Central Europe.
We had next to no money, no identification beyond refugee visas, just suitcases with changes of clothes and pots and pans. We didn’t even have a real destination — rumor had it that Jews who made it out of the U.S.S.R. should head for the western train station in Vienna, so there we went, propelled by an unshakable, “American Tail”-grade faith.
And it worked. The humanitarian workers who waited at the platform around the clock pulled us aside and got us into the refugee shelter system. Eventually, we were adopted by a Jewish community in America.
A part of me has been almost embarrassed about our optimism. We didn’t know a soul, belonged to no country. What if there had been no one at the Vienna station? What was our backup plan, to launch into a musical number?
“America! What a place!” exclaims Papa Mousekewitz in the “American Tail” trailer, regaling his family with stories of breadcrumbs on every American floor. Every time I heard it, I wanted to grab whoever I was with and sob, “It’s all true, it’s not a cartoon, God help me, it’s a documentary!”
In the refugee camps in the Austrian mountains, we’d dig newspapers out of the trash and scour them for news from America. A woman everyone called the Hat Lady couldn’t stop talking about the hat boutique she was going to open in Brooklyn. Two brothers with fiery red hair planned to set up a plumbing business. One man was going to be a congressman from either New York or New Jersey. “It’ll depend on the taxation climate,” he’d say, even though he, like the rest of us, had nothing to tax.
Last month, I watched online as the celebrity reading of “An American Tail” proceeded with gusto. Bernadette Peters preened and fussed as a rich socialite mouse. Mark Hamill twitched and sputtered playing an overly excitable cat. “America! What a place!” rasped actor and comedian Richard Kind as Papa Mousekewitz. I got the shivers.
As the mice segued into one of their musical interludes, I thought of someone I met at a talk I gave in New Jersey last year I was signing books when a pair of veiny hands gripped the table in front of me.
“You think it’s dead — the American Dream?” the man asked with quiet intensity. He looked about 70, spry and wiry.
“No,” I said.
“You sure about that?” He raised his eyebrows and walked away, looking unconvinced.
I wanted to chase him down and say, “Yes, I’m sure” — just as I want to say it now to people who have been asking me the same question. My answer might come off as too optimistic these days, as the Trump administration slams the door on refugees and unleashes Immigration and Customs Enforcement on American streets. But there are some things that can’t be deported.
The American Dream doesn’t just live in America. Often it is born thousands of miles away, in refugee camps and migrant shelters. It’s kept alive by those hurtling over the abyss, defying gravity because they refuse to look down and take their eyes off the promised land. I helped keep it alive myself, as a 9-year-old, when I needed it most — before I set foot in the U.S.
The table read ended, but I couldn’t stop watching the feed. An image of Fievel Mousekewitz, the film’s young protagonist, remained on the screen, hat jauntily askew. Beneath it, the credits rolled, then the donor list, and still I stared at Fievel.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I said to the screen and closed the laptop. I didn’t need to explain it to Fievel. He already knew.
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