By Maya Ackerman

At the start of my journey, I often felt that pursuing your passion was a privilege of the rich. Trouble is, my family was anything but rich.

I come from a time and place where material goods were valued not because of greed or gluttony, but simply because there wasn’t enough to go around.

My grandfather on my mother’s side fought in the second world war, his unmoving glass eye a constant reminder of what he had suffered. My grandfather on my father’s side, a Holocaust survivor, was left a homeless orphan when the Nazis shot his entire family and took away all their possessions. They both knew what it was like to have nothing to eat.

By the time I came around, times were better, but I still remember the long lineups for bread. My mother would stay up all night stuffing pickles into jars so that there would be enough food for winter. Although both of my parents worked from morning till night, we were barely making ends meet.

This was life in the eighties in the Eastern European city of Gomel, where I was born.

Since I immigrated twice before the age of twelve, I spent the better part of my childhood living in government subsidized housing and wearing my older sister’s used clothes.

If someone would have told me back then that money isn’t all that important, I would have laughed.

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