As you enter Inna and Alex Khazanovich’s home, you immediately feel the couple’s warmth, comfort and creativity. Inna’s artistic talents are everywhere. From the diagonally laid wooden floorboards that allow for not a single threshold throughout the house (it’s all about freedom and flow for these folks), to the handcrafted Frank Lloyd Wright French door glass, and the 12 magnificent, framed Chagall-win- dow needlepoints Inna’s mother made for her daughter for her first apartment, their home is a paean to modern Jewish culture, art and family.
The kitchen walls are peppered with Passover plates and Judaica, while multiple Shabbat candlesticks and Hanukkiot are displayed above the cabinets. Their set of steam-punk metal table and chairs, once a rusted-over garage sale find, is truly spectacular. The smell of homemade soup wafts through the air, and you know immediately that Inna Khazanovich is a woman who can turn anything ordinary into something extraordinary. Inna offers me a beverage and invites me to sit at the dining room table while Alex prepares a cup of coffee for his wife. I pull out a chair and am gently asked not to sit at the head of the table. “That place is reserved for Alex,” she says respectfully. “Nobody sits at the head of the household’s seat but him.” She adds their now grown boys sit at various seats at the table, depending on who has friends with them at any given meal. “But we are the parents,” Inna clarifies. “I sit here, to the right of Alex, because I am his right hand. The boys can sit anywhere else.” This message of parental separateness is a key component to Alex and Inna’s parenting philosophy. “Children need to understand parental authority,” she explains. “I really believe you are doing your children a disservice if you don’t teach them to respect their parents and authority. This is how you raise self-sufficient, respectful human beings.”
In today’s child-centered society, that might sound severe. But Inna’s intention and thoughtfulness around this issue suggest a well-designed philosophy developed consciously by both parents. It’s hard to argue given, the four happy, successful and well-adjusted boys the Khazanovichs have raised. Mark, 24, is an ASU grad turned business analyst living in Tempe. He and his girlfriend Brooke stop by to help with Passover preparations and slip into our conversation easily. Zakhary, 22, lives in Tucson with his wife. Jakob, 19, is at ASU studying biomedical engineering and premed. Corey, their youngest at 16, is enrolled in the Center for Research in Engineering, Science and Technol- ogy program, a small specialty school on the campus of Paradise Valley High School. As I visit, the family is planning two seders – with 25 people at each one. “The kids always ask us how many friends they can bring,” explains Inna. Alex chimes in, “I tell them, ‘Let all who are hungry come and eat.’ So we add a table. We pour another cup of water in the chicken soup.” The two laugh warmly, and I think about abandoning my own family for an invite to their second seder.
Both Inna and Alex were born in Kiev, Ukraine, in the former Soviet Union. They left in the 1970s. Inna, her mother and her brother emigrated to Toronto, Canada. Alex and his family went to Edmonton. The two met as adults after Alex gradu- ated college and stopped in Toronto after a student advocacy trip to Israel in 1986. They dated for two weeks, became engaged and married three months later. In September they celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary.
I inquired about how they ended up in Phoenix. After their second son, Zakhary, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at 7 months old, Alex, who was working as an engineer at Honeywell, applied for a transfer. Both Inna and Alex had strong business backgrounds and were given work permits to come to the United States. A self-made success and hard worker, Alex contends, “If people want to find a job, they’ll find one.” “We came for Zakhary,” says Inna. “He had gross motor difficulties, and we wanted him to be in a warm climate where he could be outside year-round.” She adds that contrary to what so many people believe these days, “The medical care in the States is so much better than in Canada. If we need an MRI, we get one. We don’t have to wait 2 years because 5 million other people are waiting to get MRIs.”
Inna became a U.S. citizen in 2005. Alex gained his citizenship in 2007. Asked if either had ever been back to Russia, Inna exclaims, “I will never go back. I have no relatives there, no connection, except negative. I don’t want to waste the money to go there when there are so many other places I’d really like to see.” Mark respectfully disagrees and hopes that Alex will accompany him to Russia at some point. “I want to know about my heritage,” Mark says. “I know my mom will never go back. But I’d like to go there with my father, who understands the culture and the language better than I do.”
Inna, on the other hand, wants to forget the past. “If I didn’t have this Russian accent,” she confides, “I would never admit that I was from there.”
Both Alex and Inna share a few memories of the anti-Semitism they encountered as children. “I remember friends, neighbors, telling me at 9 years old not to look at a Jew,” says Inna. Alex was 16 when he left. He recalls boys picking fights with him and ganging up in unfair packs against him. “There was so much propaganda,” Alex offers, “It was a government tool to promote hate.” Jewish kids had little or no chance to get into colleges in Russia. “It was practically impossible,” he says. “We left after high school. My sister and I were able to go to university in Edmonton.” Keeping in the family tradition of high achievement, his sister is now a well-respected biochemist in Edmonton. “We were allowed two suitcases per person when we left and exactly $63 each.” Alex wearily shares. “We were the lucky ones. Right before the invasion of Afghanistan, the Russian border was completely closed. The number of Jews who could leave was a trickle at most.”
Both Inna and Alex wanted to live openly as Jews and celebrate their history and heritage. “We left for religious freedom,” Inna tells me pointedly. I look past her at the stunning needlepoint Chagall windows surrounding the dining room, and suddenly it all makes sense. The Khazanovichs are living their Judaism out loud, and it is artistically reflected everywhere I look. “My mother made those needlepoints for me when I left home,” she tells me. “She asked me what she could make for me that would be special. I told her I’d always loved the Chagall windows.” The day she moved into her first apartment, her mother presented her with all 12 of the window pieces. “Now,” says Inna, “Wherever we live, the first thing I do is hang these pieces. Because once they are up, it always feels like home.”
Debra Rich Gettleman is a freelance writer based in Phoenix.