La Rusa — The Russian Girl

People often like to remind me: “But you’re Jewish. So why is your company called La Rusa — ‘the Russian girl’?”

Yes, I’m Jewish. And I’ve never hidden that. In fact, I know all too well what happens when people are divided by nationality.

I was born in the Soviet Union, where official documents identified not just your citizenship, but your nationality. This was known as the infamous “fifth line” (the passport ethnicity field) in Soviet passports — a system that often enabled discrimination, particularly against Jews, limiting their access to education and career opportunities.

Because of this, I was denied admission to university. For my parents, it was the last straw — the final push that led them to decide to emigrate.

Many years later, already living in America, I started my business working with Spanish-speaking clients.

And they gave me a nickname: La Rusa. The Russian Girl.

That’s why my company’s name is in Spanish.

Because they saw us through an entirely different lens.

They didn’t divide us the way we were so accustomed to dividing ourselves: Russian, Jewish, Georgian, Ukrainian, Yakut…

To them, we were simply people who had come from the same country. That was it.

And at some point, I realized just how symbolic that name had become for me.

In the country where I grew up, a single line in a passport could separate people and close doors to their future.

But here, people from an entirely different culture didn’t even see those divisions.

And that’s how my company became La Rusa.

To me, the name has long since stopped being about nationality.

It’s my personal victory over the antisemitism my family endured and that I experienced myself.

And at the same time, it’s a reminder of unity.

A reminder that sometimes people looking at us from the outside simply cannot understand why we continue to divide ourselves.

That’s what La Rusa means to me.