Amid a rancorous national debate on the future of immigration, America lost an immigrant recently. She wasn’t a symbol or statistic. She was my mother. Olga Kagan was the strongest woman I knew — and probably the reason I’ve spent my life with other strong women.
Her iron will was evident at every major turning point in her life — and never more so than in her decision in 1976, as a single mother, to move to America with her elderly mother and 6-year-old son in tow. Coming from the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union to the United States, she might as well have been moving to another planet.