I think that’s one of the reasons I love living in this country - I can say “I love you!”
I think that’s one of the reasons I love living in this country - I can say “I love you!”
One son became an NYPD officer and the other an FDNY firefighter. They still speak Bengali; it’s helpful to have an extra language in their line of work.
In our culture the best thing that parents could do was to get their daughters married off and pass the responsibility to someone else. As Arab Christians, divorce was not in our vocabulary.
For 7 years it felt like I was in prison. I wasn’t able to have a bank account or a phone. You can’t do anything if you don’t have legal documentation.
I thought, “There’s a country where girls want to hang on my every word.”
My parents weren’t required to give a dowry, but my mom had jewelry that she gave to all the daughters and daughters-in-law anyway, and there were 9 of us children.
At that point my dad said, “This is not for you. Stay home. Be the math guy with the clean clothes.”
It was supposed to be me, my brother, and our other sister. Sadly, my sister passed away just before we were all supposed to leave.
I couldn’t tell my parents anything ahead of time, so they didn’t know that I had planned to defect.
When I came back from Haiti, I asked God to give me the path to help those children, and that’s how I came up with the Unspoken Smiles Foundation.
I was buying furniture not only to store his CDs! I also had things I wanted to store! It’s funny actually, but it is a balance - it’s my style, but it houses his collection.
To me it’s symbolic, because if things get difficult here, I remember that back home they are a lot more difficult.
We lived in Washington, D.C. during the War. We’d drive in to the city because Lionel Hampton or Frank Sinatra were at the Loews. Then we'd drive back in the middle of the night. But it was too much fun, so we got divorced.
I would make my mom either tie my hair back because I hated flyaways, or she would just put the kosinka on me to avoid a tantrum.
It had been illegal for soldiers to steal things from Germany after the War, so you can see that the maker’s mark was rubbed off in order for it to have been smuggled out and brought to the Soviet Union.
This was right before the Revolution. They were from wealthy families and were very afraid to draw attention.
We had been mapping out microchips, the plans for which were routinely stolen from the U.S.
I took an orthographic dictionary so that I would always remember how to write properly.
When we arrived here and walked into our rental apartment, we found what seemed like hundreds of these boxes stacked everywhere, just waiting for us.
