You know what 1990 tasted like?

It didn’t taste like turkey. It tasted like freedom, and it tasted like dill.

I was six months in America. I was still trying to figure out why the supermarkets here were the size of small airports and why strangers on the street kept asking "How are you?" when they clearly had zero interest in the existential answer.

That morning, Thanksgiving 1990, I turned on the TV. In Odessa, a parade is a WAR display. It’s tanks, it’s ballistic missiles. I turn on NBC, and what do I see? A fifty-foot Snoopy floating down Broadway.

I was shouting at the screen: "Where are the tanks? Where are the rockets? Where is Comrade Stalin?!" I didn't know who Snoopy was. I assumed he was a deity. Maybe an American Lassie with a glandular problem. But when I saw Bugs Bunny, my mind didn't just blow—it emigrated. They had a parade for cartoons. God Bless America. Right then, I knew: I preferred the giant inflatable Capitalism dog to the Communist ICBM. It was pointless. It was colorful. It was magnificent.

Then, the dinner.

We did not have a car and got picked up by Boris. Boris drove the Smoked Fish Minivan. This vehicle was a legend. During the week, it moved herring, lox, and mackerel. On holidays, it moved Babushkas and the newly arrived OTBs from the mother country. It was the Mayflower of the Borscht Belt.

But let me tell you, this van was clinically clean. You could perform open-heart surgery on the floor mats. And the smell? It wasn't fishy; it was a symphony. You had three grandmothers holding trays of fresh-baked Pirozhki that smelled like maternal love, and Boris with a platter of smoked fish that made the air smell like a toasted bagel with lox. It was heaven on radial tires. The food, the smells... it was magical. It is also the direct reason I am currently negotiating with my insurance company for Ozempic.

We went to a "Friendsgiving" before marketing people invented the word. We went to the home of one of my Dad’s friends. The tradition was simple: whoever had won capitalism that year, whoever had climbed the highest, they hosted. Everyone else brought the soul.

We walked into this house, and to my Soviet eyes, it wasn't a house. It was a palace. It smelled like "sweet heaven"—expensive carpet and the total absence of fear. But more than the luxury, it was the welcome. We were the new arrivals, still dusting off the soclism, but they made us feel like we had been there for decades. We were instantly family.

And the table... you have to understand this table.

It was a geopolitical compromise. Yes, there was a turkey. It was dry, it was enormous, it was obligatory. But right next to it? A platter of herring in a fur coat. Potatoes with enough dill to kill a small animal. And pickles. My God, the pickles. There were six different jars. Tomatoes, half-sours, watermelons. It was the only Thanksgiving table in Five Towns where you could get a drumstick and a brined tomato on the same china pattern.

And where did they put me?

The Kids' Table.

The social Siberia of the holidays.

I was 13. To be 13 is not to be alive; it is to be a walking apology. I was a hormonal disaster zone. I was anxious, I was sweaty, and I was obsessed. All I thought about was girls, cars, and then girls again. And here I was, the only kid in the room who had essentially just walked off a cargo ship.

They sent us to a separate room. This house was so big we we exiled to a kids' table that felt like a UN summit for awkward teenagers.

And I was wearing a sweater.

It wasn't just yellow. It was aggressively yellow. It was a cry for help woven into synthetic wool. It was a radioactive, Soviet-polyester yellow from the mid-80s. It glowed. It hummed. It screamed, "I just arrived, and I am highly flammable." I looked like an extra from a very low-budget, depressing season of Stranger Things.

I sat there with the American kids. They were watching football. They were rolling their eyes at their grandmothers. And I was paralyzed. I understood English perfectly—I was a sponge—but I was too terrified to speak. So I had my routine: "I look TV." That was my defense mechanism. I stared at the football game like I was decoding the Enigma machine, just praying no one would ask me about my neon torso.

The other kids... they were nice, but they were assessing me. You know that look? Friendly but judgmental. Like they were inspecting a rescue dog. "Is it housebroken? Does it bite? What does it eat?"

Then, one of the older boys, the ringleader—this kid was fourteen going on forty—he decides to process my paperwork. He looks at me, then he turns to the other shareholders at the table.

"he says samething that I can't even understand over football and grandma No screams just my name Mikhov," he announced like we are at a doctor's office.

Other kids nodded and went back to doing what they were doing.

It was efficient. It was tribal. And the other kids? They stopped eating their stuffing and nodded. They accepted the data. "Ah, yes. The Mikhov. Proceed."

Suddenly, someone was handing me a soda. Someone was making sure I tried the cranberry sauce. I was the mascot of the 16th bedroom. I was an alien, but I was their Odesa alien. I was sweating in that plastic sweater that I think was a hand-me-down from one of them, thinking about girls who would never talk to me, but then I looked into the dining room.

I saw my Dad.

He didn't have the money, the business. He didn't have anything, just his words and his smile. But he was standing at the head of that table, raising a glass of vodka and reading something funny about all of them. He was holding court. He made a toast that made that whole mansion shake with laughter. His friends—the rich ones, the established ones—they looked at him with such love and respect. I will never forget that, and I miss him extra today.

He was the funny man of Odessa on Long Island. And I realized: We made it. We’re weird; we eat herring with turkey, but we made it. God Bless America. Happy Thanksgiving. Gobble Gobble.

That was 35 years ago.

My Dad is gone now. And I’d give anything to see him hold that glass one more time.

My life... well, let’s just say it’s a work in progress. And I look at this city—our city—and I get worried. We didn’t come all this way, we didn’t survive the lean years and the yellow sweaters, to watch New York lose its mind. I see the craziness, I see the politics, I see Zohran trying to turn Park Avenue into a compost heap, and I think: We need the grown-ups back.

We need to sit at the big table again.

So, look. I’m not asking for charity. I’m asking for a tactical investment.

I need 5 million dollars.

Why? Because I have a plan. I’m going to buy a trench coat, I’m going to recruit a squad of angry Babushkas from Brighton Beach, and we are going to find the Kompromat on everyone ruining this city. We are going to save New York with guilt, stubbornness, and very good information.

Let’s make the old man proud.

Happy Thanksgiving. Pass the pickles.