This story is from Inna Lokshin:
I went to the Polytechnic University of St. Petersburg and graduated with a master's degree in applied physics. My thesis was on gallium arsenide, GaAs: a hot, promising semiconductor, low-noise and at least five times faster than silicon. It was promising enough that I landed a job at Motorola while we were still in Italy waiting for our U.S. entrance visas.
But first I had to start my career in the Soviet Union.
None of us could choose where to begin. We had to go and work for at least five years "where the country needed us most." Thankfully, because of the standing of the university, and because so few graduates had a specialty in semiconductors and solid-state physics, we did not have to worry about getting an interesting position in research or academia in Petersburg.
That is, all of us but Jews.
We also could not just leave college, go home to our parents, and not work. Socialist society did not foster "parasites." So before the final call came down, I, like my fellow Jewish graduates, had to find an employer.
My parents asked a friend they had gone to medical school with. Her husband was in a high enough position, and he was not afraid to hire a Jew.
I started sometime in late summer of 1976 in the data center of an R&D company. I had really wanted to do materials research. But computers were just beginning to make their way into research organizations. I had taken a FORTRAN class in my last year and was excited to become an expert in computers.
Instead I was assigned to a rather large group of young people, not all of them with college degrees, responsible for making punch cards. A punch card is a rectangular card with small rectangular holes punched in it. The card is fed into a computer reader that converts the information into tasks. A single run could use a few cards or a stack of hundreds. To fix a bug, you replaced as many cards as needed.
My job was to sit at a punching device all day and create the cards, following instructions on where to punch each hole.
After a few weeks, I went to see my manager. He was very nice, about fifty. He called me Innochka, and he knew I was a protégé of the boss of his boss.
He was beyond amazement when he realized I was asking him for assignments that fit my education.
Then he said: "But Innochka, for crying out loud, you are YID!"
It was an antisemitic slur, like "kike," but worse.
Three years later, we landed in Phoenix, Arizona, where a new Motorola factory had just opened.