It isn’t every day an average American teen turns a 400-word essay about grandma’s stuffed cabbage into a $100,000 scholarship. Either it was very good cabbage or Yelena Shuster is no average teen.
Or maybe both. Shuster, 17, is the talented San Francisco high school senior who last March won the essay contest co-sponsored by Campbell’s Tomato Soup, NBC’s “American Dreams” and Scholastic Marketing Partners. Shuster bested 40,000 other entrants to take the top prize.
So how’s that six-figure payday working out for her so far? She is planning a big move to Manhattan, where she will attend Columbia University’s prestigious journalism program starting this fall.
The scholarship made Columbia affordable for Shuster’s Ukrainian Jewish family. But before she heads east, Shuster has one more amazing card to play: She will premiere her new short documentary at this summer’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
“Yelena’s Story” is a first-person short film in which Shuster examines her immigrant family and her own bicultural balancing act. There’s even a scene in which Shuster’s grandmother teaches the teen how to make galuptzi or stuffed cabbage.
“The [film] project was incredibly important,” says Shuster. “It provided me with the reflection needed to write the essay and discuss my relationships with my
grandparents. You don’t normally think about these things.”
The film is part of “As Old as Our Eyes,” a trilogy of student-directed pieces made under the supervision of the New Jewish Filmmaking Project and Citizen Film.
“I was always interested in writing and acting,” says Shuster. “The goal of the project was to give teens an opportunity to discuss their stories and backgrounds at the [San Francisco] Jewish Film Festival.”
In Shuster’s case, that memorable kitchen scene gave her the idea for the essay. “I cherished my grandparents all these years,” she adds, “but I never stopped to think of what that means to me. It opened my mind.”
Shuster came to America with her extended family in the early ’90s. Her parents, Dmitriy and Irina Shuster, settled into new careers as a programmer and registered nurse, respectively, while their eldest daughter took to academics and Judaism.
“I know all the Jewish traditions,” she says, “and I embrace them fully. My parents were forbidden from knowing anything [in Ukraine]. I lead the seders and take care of the traditional things.”
The essay contest brought out the best in the multilingual teen (she speaks English, Ukrainian, Spanish and Hebrew thanks to 12 years at the Lisa Kampner Hebrew Academy).
Though brief, the essay’s crisp prose and touching subject matter impressed the judges. Here’s an excerpt:
“She takes out the ground meat and we mix it with the boiled rice. It is as if we have traveled to the past on the back of her vegetable grater. I am again the helpless little girl before her; she guides my hands with certainty in the dark pot containing what feels like freshly ground brains.
“Twelve years earlier, we both emigrated from Khmelnitsky, Ukraine, a land where only fools and heroes wore the Star-of-David openly, she at age 52, I at age five. Along with open arms, America greeted me with the new, anglicized name, Yelena. I had to practice twisting my mouth to pronounce how I would now introduce myself, “Ye-ley-na.”
After receiving the good news from the Campbell Soup people, Shuster, along with her mother and grandmother Raisa Roytman of San Francisco, flew to Philadelphia to claim the prize.
“I had to read my essay in front of all the Campbell executives and maybe 500 people,” recalls Shuster. “Thank God I had public speaking experience. I still feel ecstatic.”
In addition to the Jewish Film Festival screening, this summer will be a fun one for Shuster. She heads for Israel on a two-week trip with her classmates. She also won another scholarship, the Toyota Community Award for Community Service, worth another $10,000.
Shuster is very grateful for the awards and accolades, though she says nothing beats the pride she sees in the eyes of her parents and grandparents.
“They were used to the anti-Semitism in Russia,” says Shuster. “I overheard them say this would never happen in Ukraine. But now, their moving here and being separated from what they’ve known has been validated.”
And so, Yelena Shuster’s American dreams keep on rolling. This time next year she will be well on her way to her dream job.
“I want to be a journalist,” she says. “So I may never have this much money again.”