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Ph.D. in 1975. “He pursued his work against great odds,” says Anatoly Katok, a longtime friend and colleague from Moscow. “There was resistance from the establishment. They didn’t want Jews and they didn’t want outsiders.”
    In 1977, Mikhail attended an international conference, where he met foreign researchers and academics. It was a life-changing event. He went home that night and told his wife that they had to get out of the country and settle in America, where real opportunities lay. The problem was that just expressing a desire to leave the Soviet Union put them in danger of being declared “refuseniks,” which would have caused even more discrimination.
    But the one advantage Russian Jews had at that time was that they were among the few who were allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Katok, also a mathematician suffering from the same ethnic advantage as Brin, had developed connections at the University of Maryland, and with their sponsorship, he managed to emigrate first, in 1978, and secured a teaching position at the university. He then worked to help his friend Brin find a position there as well.
    In 1978, Brin’s family applied for an emigration permit, one that included Mikhail’s mother. They told the authorities that they wanted to settle in Israel, which is what many Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union did. But applying for emigration got Mikhail fired from his job; Eugenia had to quit hers, and the family had to relinquish its Soviet citizenship. While they were waiting for their application to be reviewed, Mikhail earned money translating technical documents from English to Russian. Without jobs, they struggled for several months, but in 1979 their application was approved—just in time. Soon afterward, the Soviet government ended all emigration.
    Leaving almost all their possessions behind, the Brin family set up temporary residence in Paris, often the first stop from Moscow. Some families end up as refugees, stranded in a country for months or years until they manage to obtain a visa to their new country. But Katok and other colleagues helped Mikhail (now Michael) secure a visa and a teaching position at the University of Maryland.
    â€œBoth myself and Michael Brin were fortunate because there was tremendous empathy and solidarity from our colleagues,” says Katok. “We were able to avoid being refugees in the usual sense.”
    Sergey didn’t know the extent of the anti-Semitism his parents faced until much later in life. But it affected him nevertheless; he has said that even as a child he never felt at home in Russia. Although the family was never deeply religious, Sergey has visited Israel three times, the first time as a teenager with his family. While there in 2008, he gave a rare interview to Ha’aretz magazine, and confirmed that the difficulties his family had experienced in Russia “certainly had a significant effect on my life subsequently.” He noted, “My family had a lot of challenges in the Soviet Union.... I think that just kind of gave me a different perspective in life.” 2
    The Brins had very little when they reached the United States. Sergey told Ha’aretz : “The U.S. was very good to us. It was a great place, but we started with nothing. We were poor. . . . When we first moved to the States we rented a little house, and my parents didn’t have a proper room to sleep in. They had to wall off the kitchen. It was a very humble beginning.”
    What role did this play in molding his character as an entrepreneur? “We learned to get by,” Sergey said. “I think being scrappy and getting by is important. . . . The most important thing is the background [of being Jewish]—of just having gone through hardship and being able to survive and thrive. I think that’s at the core of the Jewish experience.” But he never went through the process of having a Bar Mitzvah at