" When we arrived in the United States, the Jewish community in Boston assigned us to a well-meaning suburban family to help us in the acculturation process. Our relationship with them played out in accordance with a scenario followed by tens of thousands of pairings of Jewish families around the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. They were nice. They wanted to celebrate Shabbat with us and help us find our way to a synagogue. They wanted to facilitate my belated bat mitzvah and my brother's bar mitzvah, this one in a timely manner, God willing. All my parents wanted was the option, finally, of not being Jewish. I wanted something marginally more complicated: unlimited access to Yiddish musical schlock. "

― Masha Gessen , Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region