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I.
My brother, Sashka, ran away from home when he was fifteen years old. It is not quite right to say he ran away from home; our home deserted us. When Sashka disappeared, strictly speaking, there was nowhere to run from nor to return to. Our home was one of approximately four million homes foreclosed in the U.S. during the subprime mortgage crisis of the aughts. Our mother expected her four children who were fifteen and older to make their own way. That we did. It was 2008. I was then a 19-year-old philosophy student at Hunter College, CUNY and Sashka, a high-school junior. It would not be until April of 2024—16 years later—that Sashka and I would meet again. By then, he would be a married father of two small children living in a Brooklyn neighborhood close to where we grew up and lost each other, and I, a philosophy professor in northern California. The foreclosure took two homes from us: it took our physical shelter and it dissolved our family unit. Home became an idea I would spend years mourning and striving after. I thought I’d never see my brother again.
In reconnecting, we now share the burden of trying to explain what happened to our family. I reconciled myself to my brother’s absence not with the acceptance that comes after mourning, but as if he had never existed at all. His features dissolved into basic shapes and colors. I couldn’t stomach looking at our childhood photographs until the spring of 2024, when Sashka returned to me.
Our family’s story is but one of millions of untold stories of foreclosure. Yet, American popular culture—films, novels, theater, television programs—has ignored the housing crisis, as it was experienced by ordinary Americans. News reports neglected to convey the experiences of the people who were directly affected by it; they still do. Public discussion of the crisis, if it happens at all, comes across like a sterile intellectual exercise, bloated with the technical jargon of the financial world. As a teenager, I felt ashamed that I couldn’t understand why my family had lost our home. That feeling stuck with me until I wrote this piece. Writing is an assertion that one is not a plaything of the cosmos too dumb to follow the narrative, like Job plundered by god’s inexplicable wager with the devil.
American popular culture—films, novels, theater, television programs—has ignored the housing crisis, as it was experienced by ordinary Americans.
With Sashka’s reappearance in my life, I feel empowered to confront our past. And to raise the timeless questions that have troubled the souls of philosophers: Why must the innocent suffer? Why must the rich rob the poor? Who will make it up to us? Sashka and I must learn to take stock of losses for which we are not responsible. And we must learn, as Aristotle puts it, to feel the right feelings at the right time in the right way. A cow moos, a goat bleats, and a chicken screams when it is in pain. The human animal alone learns to pass over in silence the destruction of its life. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky warns, “We humans can get used to anything, villains that we are!” As I learn to resist my own silent resignation, I offer this piece in lieu of a scream 16 years overdue.
II.
My mother arrived in New York City in 1989 as a refugee during Perestroika, a period of political and economic restructuring of the Soviet Union. In Russian, the word Perestroika (Перестройка) means “Rebuilding.”
Just prior to its collapse, the Soviet Union introduced free market reforms and permitted the emigration of ethnic and religious minorities. An exodus of hundreds of thousands followed. My mother had a Jewish mother and an ethnic Uyghur father, a Uyghur nationalist who grew up in an orphanage in Kazakhstan. After my mother finished the Moscow State University with a degree in French in the mid-1980s, she petitioned the refugee-resettlement organization The Hebrew International Aid Society (HIAS) to sponsor her emigration case. My father’s parting gift was paying for a ‘paper marriage’ to a stranger my mother met once, on their wedding day, to strengthen her petition before Soviet authorities. (My father was already married to someone else and had children.) She left Russia pregnant with me and travelled alone through Europe, awaiting news from HIAS about which country would grant her residency. I was born while she waited in Vienna. Austria had not granted us residency. In the space reserved for nationality, my birth certificate identifies me as stateless; and my mother gave me the stranger’s last name to keep up the charade of her marriage. I was born Elvira Isayeva, not Basevich. One of my favorite Russian sayings is, “Laugh through tears!” (Смех сквозь слезы!). Greetings, the Isayeva family, thank you for your enterprising spirit—selling your family name—in my hour of need. I was eventually given my father’s last name after we settled in America, safe from the scrutiny of my mother’s indiscretions by the collapsing Soviet Union.
HIAS obtained an American green card and a welfare card for us. We arrived in September 1989 and moved to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where immigrants with similar backgrounds settled. My mother’s first impression of the city was that she’d never seen so many homeless people. She had no inkling that it was a harbinger of things to come. Though she didn’t have faith in the American dream, she did not expect to see visible poverty, much less her own eventual descent into housing insecurity. Desperate for employment, she joined a minority of women driving a yellow taxicab for a living, but never adjusted to the brutal transition from being an ambitious student at the top of her class to driving a yellow cab for tips.
She had three more children in America, a son and two daughters. Her hope for us was that we’d turn out fine. Not excellent, not great, but just fine. “Let’s be like normal people,” she’d say. We watched America’s Funniest Home Videos, ate fat Russian sausages in hot dog buns and slowly lost our native tongue. I assumed responsibility for my siblings’ care. I loved grocery shopping, impressing my siblings with my haul eked out of a WIC check and $20 bill. They squealed with joy as I pulled out Little Debbies, Lunchables, Capri-Sun, and huge ‘family-size’ bags of potato chips. We didn’t own a camera. Our childhood photographs were snapped by a distant relative who had collected barcodes from discarded packs of Marlboro cigarettes. Along with numerous American companies, such as General Mills cereal and McDonalds, in the ‘90s Marlboro offered rewards for high consumption. My relative didn’t smoke; it was a long process of rifling through garbage on the streets and mailing barcodes to procure a camera.
My mother believed that her crowning achievement as a first-generation immigrant was buying a home in the affluent neighborhood of Manhattan Beach, nestled between Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach. The bank approved a subprime mortgage for her for a house valued at over a million dollars. Yet, her annual earnings as a cab driver put us in an income bracket shared by some of the poorest families in NYC. In fact, I received aid reserved for the neediest college students, qualifying for both federal and city grants in CUNY’s financial aid office. Banks had simply stopped underwriting subprime mortgages to financially insecure borrowers who they knew wouldn’t be able to pay off their loan. My mother would eventually cash my student aid checks to fend off foreclosure. Our time in Manhattan Beach was thus filled with absurd contradictions. Notwithstanding my pride in bringing home sugary snacks for my siblings, not having enough food was a constant source of anxiety. The hot water was shut off in the wintertime. As property owners, we were responsible for filling the propane tank. When we got desperate, we heated water in pots on the stovetop and bathed in the tub, like Dickens characters. This grotesque play-acting at being middle-class homeowners did not last long. By the spring of 2008, the bank began foreclosure proceedings, having pilfered enough of my mother’s cabby earnings and my student aid checks. I don’t know how long my mother had gone without paying the mortgage. I suspect that if I wanted to, I could have applied for a subprime mortgage and bought the multi-million dollar house next door. I could have joined the class of landed gentry if I’d only thought to ask!
I was powerless to stop the dissolution of my family because a desperate and pleading love is not a currency with which you can pay the mortgage.
Though she never outright said so, Sashka sensed my mother would not take him with her. He stopped talking to both of us in the last months we all lived together in Manhattan Beach. A child abandoned by caregivers experiences the betrayal “like swallowing shards of broken glass,” as Sashka recently put it. “You’ve got to be careful in your recollection of it because it can cut just as much coming up as going down.” When he disappeared, I convinced our mother to visit his high school to bring him back, but the dean said that he didn’t want to see us. I was powerless to stop the dissolution of my family because a desperate and pleading love is not a currency with which you can pay the mortgage. After Sashka’s disappearance, our mother began hallucinating him, as the grieving sometimes see ghosts . “I can’t look at them,” she once said, pointing to a group of children playing in the street. The sight of little boys made her physically sick. The first time I entered a toy store after the foreclosure I had a panic attack in an aisle lined with LEGO and Nerf guns. In his heart-rending memoir about facing criminal charges for writing poetry, Joseph Brodsky observed, “No country has mastered the art of destroying its subjects’ souls as well as Russia.” As it turns out, America does a pretty good job, too.
III.
In the aughts, a wave of foreclosures swept the U.S. and triggered a global financial crisis, bankrupting private mortgage lenders and leading to the bailout of federal mortgage companies at taxpayers’ expense and eventually an economic recession. But, at the heart of the crisis, are millions of ordinary, working-class families like my own who descended into financial ruin from which many have not recovered. Homeownership is a coveted ideal; it remains the most reliable mechanism for building intergenerational wealth. The financial sector preyed upon poor people’s aspirations for upward mobility and defrauded us.
A subprime mortgage is a mortgage that lenders give to people they perceive to be high-risk borrowers. People might have bad credit, medical expenses, or be divorced. Racial and gender biases played a huge role. These groups were historically unable to qualify for a mortgage due to insufficient capital and low wages. In a tactic known as “reverse redlining,” the sociologist Ruby Mendenhall observes that “lending institutions targeted […] low-income families of color for loans” who had been “historically excluded” from homeownership. “Black women have the highest levels of subprime loans of all groups; specifically, they are 256 percent more likely than white males to receive these types of loans.” Black and Latinx households of any economic standing were 1.6 times as likely to receive subprime mortgages than white borrowers. Subprime mortgages charge higher interest rates and impose spurious penalties; and the interest rate is subject to balloon over time, with the mortgage often becoming more expensive than the house it mortgaged. The result is that even middle-class families with modest savings end up bankrupt. Banks doled out subprime mortgages that were impossible to repay.
The accessibility of mortgages in the aughts was a byproduct of government deregulation of banking and financial industries. Passed by Congress in 1933 in an emergency session and signed into law by FDR, the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act had separated commercial from investment banking. The objective was to stop predatory lending practices, such as banks charging high interest on loans and reselling loans as financial commodities. Deregulation of the ‘80s and ‘90s set the stage for the housing crisis. In 1980, Congress passed the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act, which eliminated caps on the interest rates that banks can charge on loans, meaning there was no external limit for how high interest rates on loans can climb. The Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999. This allowed banks to bundle mortgages and resell them as security commodities to financial investment firms, which, in turn, sold them off again. The process of reselling was riddled with fraud. On the one hand, banks had a financial incentive to give more mortgages to increase their investment portfolio. Banks hawked a lot more mortgages to a lot more poor people. They exploded the number of subprime mortgages they offered. In effect, poor people became a new infinitely exploitable resource. Banks cajoled borrowers like my mom into signing mortgages they could not afford by waiving basic underwriting standards, which were supposed to certify a household’s financial stability. On the other hand, banks made their subprime mortgages seem like attractive commodities to financial investment firms by hiding their toxicity. They protected themselves against the inevitable rash of mortgage defaults by reselling risky securities quickly. The short-term profits were astronomical. And the unpayable debts became someone else’s problem: that of other investment firms and future homeless people. Ironically, this was a case of the snake eating its own tail since commercial banks were also buying up mortgage securities as financial investments. Laugh if you’re not stifling tears.
Banks cajoled borrowers like my mom into signing mortgages they could not afford by waiving basic underwriting standards, which were supposed to certify a household’s financial stability.
While my family was hit hard by foreclosure, many were hit harder still. Spiking unemployment rates and unaffordable housing continue to lead to an ever-worsening homelessness crisis in the U.S. There is little public investment in affordable housing. People are still losing their homes to predatory lending practices stemming from the aughts with the resurrection of so-called “zombie mortgages.” During the subprime mortgage crisis, families sometimes took out two subprime mortgages: one for the actual cost of the home and a second for the down payment. For the few families that managed to pay off one subprime loan, the second loan would ‘come back from the dead,’ engorged with interest, even though the bank had repeatedly assured them that the second loan had long been forgiven. Families receive a foreclosure notice just as soon as they thought they had full home ownership. Public schools and universities across the U.S. report record levels of homelessness among students. Kids attend school in the day and sleep in shelters and parking lots at night. In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that American cities can destroy homeless encampments. According to the SCOTUS ruling, these actions “do not constitute ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ prohibited by the Eighth Amendment” of the Constitution. The state of California contains the highest number of unhoused people in the country. After the ruling, the city of San Francisco wasted no time dismantling homeless encampments, busing unhoused people out of the state and, if they resisted, arresting them.
IV.
In the last sixteen years, I often dreamed about Sashka. In my dreams, we spoke as if we were friends and hadn’t lost each other. The dreams menaced me with their simple longing. Awaking, I experienced the brief, excruciating moment of readjusting to reality. It was just a dream. Our first meeting was a Zoom call. I hardly spoke. I was wonderstruck looking at him. I felt the warmth of vanity. He is as handsome as I remember. Dimples, brown eyes with long, droopy eyelashes, and full lips. We look a lot alike. “I knew I had to see you when my daughter was born,” he said. “She reminds me of you.” He continued, “she’s sensitive, too. She gets upset if I yell at someone who cuts me off in traffic or witnesses an animal suffer – a fly trapped inside a windowpane or a seagull suspended motionless in the air, flying against a strong wind.” When he shared this anecdote, I knew that he hadn’t forgotten me. Through the years, he kept a vestige of who I am because he recognized and loved its incarnation in his daughter.
On the April morning in 2024 when we first met in person, seismologists recorded a 4.8 magnitude earthquake in New York City. I didn’t flinch as I got dressed. Like Moses, I was ready to part the sea to get back to him. Sashka lives in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, close to our childhood home. I feel a lightness revisiting that sleepy corner of Russian-speaking Brooklyn that I never thought I’d feel. It used to be a desolate landscape in my mind. I’d take new boyfriends to show off the alleyway I grew up in, the home I lost, as if my life milestones were morbid curiosities at the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. Sashka lives off the stretch of Belt Parkway where our mom took down a lamppost with her cab. After dropping off a fare past midnight at JFK, she fell asleep behind the wheel. When she got out of the hospital, she took me to the site of the crash to show off the twisted metal of the lamppost that the city hadn’t removed yet. “When they arrived,” she added, “the medics were sure I’d be dead!” I earned my first wage here at the fast-food sandwich restaurant Roll-n’-Roaster and burned my uniform—a miniskirt and an apron—when I quit. I had overheard my male co-workers compare the size of my breasts to the other teenage girls who worked there. Swans live in the bay year-round, gliding past bloated fish carcasses and beer bottles. Oily ribbons of rainbow ripple on the surface of the water in their wake. They are so stubbornly beautiful, a beauty heightened by their instinctual faithfulness to each other for life. In high school, my best friend and I slipped onto the boats docked in the bay with Negro Modelos and dime baggies of cocaine, leaving puddles of urine and vomit on the deck. In our minds, we were delivering poetic justice by punishing boat-owners for owning a boat. I wrote my first poems here under a cherry tree planted in memory of the Holocaust. Now I feel an unexpected lightness anticipating the new, happier memories I might make here yet. I wonder if I am ready for happiness.
V.
In reuniting, Sashka and I fill each other in about what became of us after the foreclosure. Sashka moved into the home of a childhood friend and was later informally adopted by a rabbi in New Jersey with 13 children. As for me, a friend invited me to crash on the top bunk of his bunk bed. Though I considered him a good friend, I couldn’t shake the presentiment that he expected sex in return for his generosity. Every time he said, “No worries, I got you,” he maintained eye contact for a few seconds too many, enough for nausea to rise in my chest. I chose to work as a live-in nanny for a pair of married academics in Forest Hills, Queens. I was keen for a bed to sleep in, but, in my naivety, I couldn’t resist daydreaming about the three of us having intellectual conversations. The afternoon I arrived they told me I could not use the house’s common areas. They were not looking for a “roommate,” they explained. My room could fit a reading chair that folded out into a cot, an ottoman, and a nightstand, just wide enough for me to place a glass of water and an alarm clock; I was not to leave it, if not on my nanny shift. I was not paid for my work. I did waged work in addition to my nanny responsibilities, while still enrolled full-time in college. Sometimes I wonder about them. Would they bless a similar arrangement for their child if he gets to college and finds himself unhoused? Would they feel gratitude for the big-hearted people who put their son to work for free?
At Hunter, I befriended an older woman earning a second degree in philosophy. She was a Croatian-born refugee who grew up in the outskirts of Caracas. She was an artist—a sculptor—and a social worker by profession. She was tough. She wore a leather jacket and had a thick New York accent. You didn’t want to cross her. But once you were admitted into her confidence, she was as soft and sweet as a wad of cotton candy. Her friendship was a gift that I did not see coming. She took me in. Her daughter had just moved away for college; she rented me the empty room for a merciful sum in Astoria, Queens. She expected me to join family dinners, sharing every meal she prepared. She even let me sit on the couch in the living room. When I asked her why she was so good to me, she joked, “I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing this for the future of academic philosophy. You’re the real thing. You will finish college under my roof.”
VI.
Looking back, in many ways, Sashka and I fared better than our sisters. We had only ourselves to take care of. We both eventually found informal foster families who took us in and were instrumental in us finishing college. Our sisters bounced from apartment to apartment with our mother. They briefly squatted in the foreclosed house on Manhattan Beach, as it sat empty for months. I remained close with them, helping them graduate high school and enroll in my alma mater, Hunter College. My youngest sister, Nelly, was steadfast in work and school and found professional success. Nelly made first contact with Sashka and was instrumental in arranging our reunion. Our other sister, Xena, could not withstand the instability. She dropped out of college and broke off contact with me a few years after Sashka’s departure.
You can convince yourself that your life is a byproduct of your determination, an achievement that you willed into existence, until an external contingency unravels it, and you stand naked of will, begging for a reprieve from a great chain of world events.
I often think about the fragile boundary between trying and giving up. You can convince yourself that your life is a byproduct of your determination, an achievement that you willed into existence, until an external contingency—a swift blow or a series of swift blows—unravels it, and you stand naked of will, begging for a reprieve from a great chain of world events. In college, I worked at the Morgan Museum and Library in midtown Manhattan. I loved shelving books in the library’s subbasements. The lowest level had a vault with a round steel door out of a Looney Tunes cartoon. The stacks of rare books exuded a sweet medicinal odor, a cross between vanilla and a blown-out match. My favorite books to shelve were illuminated folios that contained maps of the universe drawn by medieval monks. In the center was God and his angels, the earth and the sun, and in the outskirts unbaptized babies, Jews, and Muslims, often depicted as tiny acephalous monsters with eyes set in the chest or kneecap. Those chauvinist cosmographies comforted me. “That’s me, that’s where I am right now, a hair’s breath from the void,” I thought to myself, as I pinched my ears and nose to make sure they were still on my head. Just as I began my years-long journey to claw my way back to civilization, a demented angel kicked Xena on her back, and she flew off the map. I will never stop waiting for her return. I only hope that I will not have to wait sixteen more years to see her again.
VII.
The day Sashka and I reunited in person, I felt the shock of mortality. More than our catastrophic plunge into adulthood, parentless and alone, I mourn the irretrievable loss of time, the years we could have spent together, rebuilding our lives and sharing new memories. We’re in a hurry now; we’ve only so many years left to live. Having just reunited, it feels like we’re running out of time. I worry about his cholesterol and that he doesn’t exercise enough. I worry that a demented stranger might attack him on a train platform. I worry about all the contingencies that can send him to an early grave. Time feels loaned by a predatory celestial bank that charges outrageous interest and we are counting down the days before that credit shark collects. If I had it my way, I’d strap a helmet, knee pads and elbow pads to him and make him carry a pool noodle, just in case, to make sure he returns home safe every day. I don’t trust the world to keep him.
Time feels loaned by a predatory celestial bank that charges outrageous interest and we are counting down the days before that credit shark collects.
The early patriarchs of the Jewish Bible lived hundreds of years. Noah died at 950 years old. His eldest son Japheth died at 600 years old. According to Torah scholars, Moses died “tragically premature” at 120 years old before reaching the promised land. These men had to learn to discern the value of a fleeting moment, being new to the experience of moments fleeing. God in his generosity gave them time to get used to it, steeling them for the eventual loss of loved ones and their own deaths as newly minted human beings. The poet Natalie Shapero in the poem “Not Horses” describes the passage of time from the point of view of a bug that is content with its fill of a single day, happy to have existed at all:
What I adore is not horses, with their modern
Domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore
Is a bug that lives only one day, especially if
It is a terrible day, a day of train derailment or
Chemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a day
When no one thinks of anything else, least of all
That bug.
Like Shapero’s bugs, Sashka and I will learn to make peace with our ration of time, like a crust of moldy bread, complete with train derailments and chemical spills; we often think of little else. Still, my mind wanders. I dream about lazy days at the beach with our growing families, drowsy and bored on sun-kissed shores, when time doesn’t feel so precious. I’ve surprised myself, again, at what I’m capable of and my willingness to learn something new. I’ve learned that love destroys the boundaries that mark the passage of time. Sixteen years can disintegrate inside a single moment shared with someone you love and blow away, like a dandelion seed. Inside this moment is the only form of eternity that I want—and that I’ve earned. The affection we feel for each other is the same as when we were kids, as if no time has passed at all. Praise be.
Elvira Basevich is a poet and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Davis. In 2022-23 she was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, where she completed her second monograph A Duboisian Democracy: On the Political Philosophy of Counter Publics (Oxford under contract). Her publications include the book W.E.B. Du Bois: The Lost and the Found (Polity, 2020), as well as articles that have appeared in Kantian Review, Journal of Moral Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, Journal of Political Philosophy, and Journal of Social Philosophy. Her first poetry collection, How to Love the World (Pank 2020), was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award.
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