Refugee Stories | A Pingry Spring Intensive Course

Trip to Paterson

On June 7th, we took a trip to Paterson, NJ, to visit different Middle Eastern shops. We started the day off at Fattal's, which was a bakery and grocery store serving mostly Middle Eastern cuisine. We tried different kinds of pita there, including plain pita with...

Trip to Chinatown!

When everyone in our Spring Intensive course was initially asked what they were most excited about for the first week, practically everyone replied ‘Chinatown!’ This neighborhood located in the Lower East Side in New York City is a huge hotpot of culture. The...

Trip to Brighton Beach

On June 5th we took a trip to Brighton Beach which is located in Brooklyn, NY. It is a place where a lot of immigrants and refugees moved from the Soviet Union in the 20th century. Throughout Brighton Beach there are plenty of Russian and other Soviet country shops....

Movie Review: “The Swimmers”

"The Swimmers," directed by Sally El Hosaini, is a Netflix film based on the true tales of Yursa Mardini and her sister, Yalla Mardini. The two girls are young Syrian Refugees, who escape the civil war in their homeland to flee to Germany and chase their dream of...

My grandmother

My grandmother is not like any grandmother that everyone has met. My grandmother has her very own special story. She was born in the Soviet Union, in 1940, during the Holocaust. It was a very dangerous time period, and as a little girl, she saw basically, her whole...

My Maternal Grandpa

In 1945, my mom's father, a 17-year-old soldier of the youth military (青年军), followed the Chinese military academy to the small island of Taiwan to pursue military training. At the time, China was under the rule of Chiang Kai Shek, the leader of the...

Movie Review: “Refusenik”

The movie "Refusenik" created by Laura Bialis in 2007 illustrates the struggles of Jews in the Soviet Union trying to leave their country in the 1960s and 70s. By definition, Refusenik means "a person who refuses to follow orders or obey the law, especially as a...

Myanmar: Its “Missing” History

A country double the size of Germany, home to 135 ethnic groups, and going through the world's longest civil war is a missing piece of the world. I have only heard of Myanmar once in my life, and it was merely glossed over as "a part of Southeast Asia." Never have my...

Soviet Jews: A Journey to Liberation

We learned about the refugee crisis of Soviet Jews, Syrians, and the Burmese. Each story comes with tales of hardship, determination, and courage. In class, Dr. Lasevich, a Jewish refugee from the then Soviet Union, told her story of her journey to America. We watched...

Far Away From Home

My mother, Amna Pervaiz Bajwa, was born in 1978 and grew up in Pakistan. My whole life I have heard stories about her childhood but I never really asked how she moved to America or why she decided to. My mom received her American citizenship in 1995 after waiting for...

Masak Lemak

The first ever field trip we took was to Chinatown to try out Malaysian food. Unlike my friend who tried sesame chicken (no hate) I was determined to get something I had never had before. After a lot of indecisiveness I decided to order the Masak Lemak. As I...

Paterson, NJ

We went to a middle eastern restaurant in Paterson, NJ which had a variety of meats and sauces to try. We had pita bread laid out for us to try with hummus and baba ganoush while also having 3 other sauces, one of them had a savory minty taste to them, while the other...

Interview with my Grandma

My grandma was born in Romania in 1941. In 1959, due to the fear that the spread of communism would initiate another Holocaust-like experience, she and her family went from Italy to Israel. They left Romania very poor because they could only take 200 dollars with...

Refugee Poem Summary/Analysis: Mimesis by Fady Joudah (2013)

The poem Mimesis by Fady Joudah illustrates the way people become refugees. The spider is the refugee, the web is their home, and the bike is most likely the region that the refugee lived in. An example could be a Syrian refugee, who lived in their home in Syria but...

My Father – a Chinese Immigrant

Where are you from? Why did you choose to immigrate to America? What were some of your hopes that you believed you could achieve in America? My father was born and raised in Shanghai, China. During the cultural revolution, his family was classified as one of the "five...

Jewish Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union to Israel

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/tingting.luo/viz/JewishImmigrantsfromtheFSUtoIsrael/Sheet1?publish=yes This dual-line graph shows the total number of immigrants to Israel and the number of Soviet Jews who immigrated to Israel. This graph not only shows the...

Internal Displacement in Myanmar

This bar graph shows the amount of new internally displaced people every year, caused by domestic conflict and violence, over the course of 13 years. It is important to align this graph with key moments of Burmese political history. In 2012, the Democratic Party won...

A Trip to Paterson

I didn’t think this Spring Intensive course could get much better, but our trip to Paterson on Wednesday definitely proved me wrong! Despite the seemingly apocalyptic weather that forced many of us to wear masks, the Refugee Stories group persevered and was able to...