“I am a writer, actor, comedian, guy. I moved to America when I was 7, from Ukraine. I was born in the USSR, and then it switched to Ukraine. We left in 1994 and came to America as refugees, as Jewish refugees.”
Five Things I’ve Learned About America
- Sleepovers are completely normal.
“My parents did not understand them, and they could not comprehend why I would want to go sleep on someone else’s floor when we had a bed at our apartment. They actually thought that me doing that indicated that we didn’t have a bed for me at home.”
- We take a lot for granted.
“By moving here, my parents gave me the gift of not being able to understand them, and I think that is a gift that all Americans have, mostly. We have the gift of not knowing what it’s like in other places.”
- America is not perfect.
“There is a lot of darkness, there is a lot of issues, for sure. But, I don’t think it’s as bad as in Russia, as in other places, many other places… Even if this is all a lie, I think it’s a better lie to believe in than any other.”
- We are more similar than we think.
“I also think that we focus a lot on how different we are here, where actually we’re all very much the same, more or less.”
- America is a land of opportunity.
“There is so much opportunity here to disappoint your parents. My parents wanted me to be a lawyer or doctor, they would have settled for a professor. But I decided to go be an entertainer in LA, a writer, and I got paid to write the weirdest stuff. That’s not possible in other countries the way it is here.”
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