Irina Del Genio, Ph.D., dean of Yavapai College Verde Valley Campus, shared her story in a talk titled “Revisiting the American Dream: One Woman’s Journey from the Steppes of Kazakhstan to a Dean’s Office in Arizona” on April 21 as part of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Brown Bag Program.
Del Genio was born in the territory of a former Soviet forced labor camp in the 1960s during the Khrushchev Thaw, a period when the Soviet government temporarily lessened censorship and repression under Soviet head of state Nikita Khrushchev’s policies of de-Stalinization.
Her father came from what is now Ukraine, but his family was forcefully moved to a Kazakhstan gulag in 1936 during one of Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s ethnic cleansing campaigns. Del Genio’s family was one of the few that survived deportation. Her father was 6 years old at the time. He would later meet Del Genio’s mother in Kazakhstan.
Del Genio recalled that without an external point of reference, she was a happy Soviet child with a circle of friends and a family who occasionally heard rumors about the “evil empire of the United States.”
One day when she was in school, her class was taught to dive under their desks in case of a nuclear strike. She asked why hiding would do anything to help in that case; her teachers did not like her asking those questions.
After graduating high school, Del Genio went to college in Yekaterinburg, the fourth-largest city in Russia at the southern end of the Ural Mountains. She remembered the 1980s as a strange time, but still one in which she did not fully realize she was living in a dictatorial regime as she went about her life with her interests and her circle of friends.
Del Genio once approached an old lady she saw praying, who told her that she was praying at the site where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
When Del Genio said that the Bolsheviks would never kill children, the old lady asked her why she believed those rumors and told her to always ask questions. Del Genio said that she still gets goosebumps thinking back on that moment.
The Ipatiev House had been demolished in 1977. The tsar, his wife and their five children were canonized in 1981 by the Russian Orthodox Church as “righteous passion bearers,” and the Church on Blood was built on the site in 1990. The church altar stands over the execution site.
When she was a junior in college, Del Genio began to ask more questions. She asked where she could read the book and see the American movie “Gone With the Wind” and was told that to be able to do that, she would need to become a member of the Communist Party. She also noticed a barricaded section of the library that only party members could enter.
Each time one of the Soviet leaders died, Del Genio remembered, state television would show “Swan Lake,” which meant, since their leaders were so elderly, she watched “Swan Lake” often.
After the economic collapse of the Soviet Union and the birth of Del Genio’s daughter in 1987, Del Genio wondered how much of the Western aid the country was receiving was being stolen when she was unable to find baby formula anywhere.
When her university founded the American Studies Center, she was appointed director on the basis of her English Language skills and arrived in the United States in 1995. Del Genio said that when she got off the plane, she smelled hope, which is the smell of coffee, something that smells great but tastes terrible. She also finally got to read “Gone With the Wind.”
Her return to Russia was followed by some of her students accusing her of being a paid agent of American imperialism. The Federal Security Service even tried recruiting her twice. Known by the Russian acronym FSB, it is the main successor agency to the Soviet Union’s KGB spy agency.
While Del Genio struggled with the decision to move to the U.S., she felt she had little future in the new Russia and did not want her daughter to have a similar struggle. She had visited the U.S. several times and had made friends.
Commenting on the immigration process, she noted that no country really wants immigrants unless they’re nuclear physicists. She was able to move to the U.S. in 2000 just as Vladimir Putin came to power as Russia’s president, which was “a very timely escape on my part,” Del Genio said.
Del Genio addressed the barriers to employment that immigrants face, which often make it impossible for them to continue the professional careers they started in their home countries, such as a lack of linguistic ability. In her case, she was able to earn a second master’s degree from Loyola University; having a degree from an American institution helped her to stay in the field of higher education. While looking for a faculty job at Elgin Community College in Illinois, she was offered an administrative position instead. She could not believe that anyone would pay an immigrant $73,000 a year.
Del Genio said that immigrants pursue an American dream one step at a time, with patience, and with the help of a circle of friends and family.
“I’m very lucky to be able to pursue and achieve my American dream, but I have to remember it’s not like that for everyone, even people that are born here,” Del Genio said. “I am incredibly fortunate, but at the same time, it takes a village.”
Del Genio ended her presentation by sharing the story of the firebird from Russian folklore, which is more commonly known in the West as the phoenix. The mythical bird is able to regenerate from injury and is therefore immortal, making it a symbol of rebirth and reincarnation. She called it the bird of her dreams and wished that everyone might catch their firebird as a symbol of their rebirth.
