Exits and Entrances: An Independence Day Pastoral

Travel Stories: Amerikanetz Joel Deutsch joins immigrants from the former Soviet Union for a Fourth of July picnic in Los Angeles

06.30.01 | 1:03 AM ET

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A few at a time, lugging food baskets and beverage coolers, the people I am joining for a July Fourth picnic come into a small public park in Pacific Palisades and make their way over to the two long wooden tables and a barbecue that earlier arrivals have staked out. Because the park sits nestled in a hillside only a few miles from the ocean and the coastal fog has not quite evaporated, the light is misty, the air moist and cool. When our head count has risen to a congenial dozen or so, I remain the only Amerikanetz, the only one native to this country whose birthday has brought us together. For the rest, life began somewhere in the vast geography of the former Soviet Union. And all of them, as I already know and am to be reminded today, experience the displacement, the challenges, the bewilderments, and the hard-won triumphs typical of nearly every ethnic group’s fitful initiation into this incomparably seductive and perplexing nation.

It is at the invitation of my friends Irina and Dima that I am present here today. Irina, a perceptive, insightful graduate student in psychology in her mid-twenties, grew up in a city on the Volga. When we met, several years ago, she was struggling to refine her English and attending a community college with hopes of eventual admission to UCLA. Now, with those goals, and more, attained, she is fluently bilingual and comfortably, confidently bicultural. So is Dima, thirtyish, a cultivated, gracious former Muscovite who works as a programming specialist on the design of such things as the high-resolution optical systems used for scientific research and space exploration. My friendship with him and Irina has opened a vista for me onto the contemporary Russian-speaking community centered around West Hollywood, so insular in language and custom as to have remained completely opaque, otherwise.

Snacks and drinks come out: a serving dish of thinly-sliced onions, dressed in vinegar and pepper, a bowl of pickled cucumbers, soft stacks of pita-like Armenian bread, bags of potato chips. To drink, there are sodas, and beers, and the ubiquitous liter bottles of Gerolsteiner mineral water, a German brand currently much in favor. Thus supplied, we sit around talking.

Borya, a dark-haired, open-faced man from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, says he is happy today because his new position as a Metropolitan Transit Authority mechanic is working out, thus capping off a long, difficult period of scraping by on part-time situations while his language skills and his luck were improving.

Work is an omnipresent concern, the quest for a steady job that calls on one’s better abilities and pays decently a ready topic for conversation. Grisha, a burly, bearded software developer with a mischievous smile, holds a university-level engineering degree but had to cram to learn computer science when, once in the U.S., he found his diploma to be a mismatch for existing opportunities. His wife Tanya, whose yellow outfit is a brush-stroke of sunlight against the muted, rustic scenery, had just graduated medical school when their visas came through, and now, in order to practice as a doctor, needs to do a residency and acquire certification, formidable tasks made yet more daunting by the fact that she has to study English as she goes.

Professionals with backgrounds outside a few high-demand technical fields often find even a roughly lateral career transition impossible. True, some fare not badly at all, snagging the brass ring of an upper-middle class income, a nice new Camry or Accord, maybe a modest investment portfolio. But many others do not. There exists a virtual subculture of overqualified individuals, especially middle-aged men, for whom English, against all their advances, remains an inscrutable, walled city, and a second career anything like the first a distinct unlikelihood. Former film directors, educators, and industrial technicians are delivering pizza and driving cabs because there is nothing else to do, and because they perhaps know, at some level of consciousness, that they are the heroes in the newest layer of immigration narratives that their children’s children will hear recited, years hence, from the safe nests of their own unequivocal residency.

And, too, because at least a modicum of self-respect can yet be salvaged by recalling, even in dark moments, some version of the Buddhist understanding that all work, elegant as well as rude, is just chopping wood and carrying water. Equally vital, equally worthy.

Nina is a pianist and former music teacher from Ukraine whose eyes light up at the mention of the Beethoven sonatas or the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues. I ask what kind of work she is doing now. Drawing blood for testing at a medical office is the answer. Her husband Sasha, once a choral conductor, has at least been able to stay closer to music by becoming a piano tuner. He is not at the picnic because a client with an engagement today required his pre-performance services.

“I am good at drawing blood,” says Nina, “I am skillful, and I am quick, and when I am finished, the patients thank me for what I have done for them.”

But no amount of either occupational success or accommodation quite relieves the queasy, persistent sensation of having fallen headlong through some looking glass into a hyped-up, glad-handing hallucination of a new society. I’m always trying to help, to interpret. Irina and Dima have assured me on other such occasions that I am under no obligation to play solicitous ambassador or anxious host to every discomfited foreigner I meet. But, sensible as their advice may be, I persist, conceivably because so many post-Soviet immigrants come here to escape the anti-Semitism forever rampant in their homelands, and I am the child of Eastern European Jews. Or just because of never having felt completely at home, anywhere, myself. Whatever the reason, I go on trying to mediate between our cultures, ameliorate discomforts, quiet apprehensions.

Now the skewered chunks of shashlik meat sizzle aromatically on the grill, and new side dishes, including a green salad and roasted potatoes straight from the coals, are put out to augment the others. More sodas are poured, more cans of beer popped. And interspersed with other conversation, come some of the familiar, inevitable questions about life in America, Southern California more particularly.

Grisha is my interrogator du jour. He wants me to decode the promiscuous amiability of public encounters, where complete strangers act as if they like you before they even know your name, and then toggle off the too-ready smile as soon as the transactional moment is over.

“You turn around and they look completely different,” he says. “Like someone with a split personality.”

“Those people at the mall have nothing either for you or against you,” I assure him. “And they don’t really have fraudulent intentions.”

“Then why do they behave this way?” Grisha asks. “To me, it is very insincere. It makes me nervous.”

I propose that may be just the grim centuries of well-learned Russian skepticism and prudence butting up against the tacit American social agreement to greet each other with displays of good cheer and good will, any troubled thoughts suppressed and natural reticence concealed, lest offense be inadvertently given or some chance of friendship, love, or profit, however slim, be discouraged, swept away forever in the fast waters of our hit-and-run life in the agora.

“Okay,” says Grisha. “I see what you mean.” Possibly he accepts my explanation, probably he doesn’t. But now he wants to talk about the arts.

“Tell me this,” he goes on, as I tear into the delicious shashlik, “where are the real films, the real plays?” I grab a piece of Armenian bread. “And where are the poets that people will fill up a stadium to hear them read?”

As I’m eating, I explain that, though the clamorous marketing of blockbuster productions tends to obscure the rest, we have our thoughtful movies, and, in the theater, our own Chekhovs, not to mention our Mamets and Shepards, as well. I do concede that we have no single poet as widely known as Yevtushenko once was, but then probably, I think to myself, neither does the new Russia, half asphyxiated in its democratic incubator by a miasma of brain-candy mass culture.

Abruptly, the inquest leaves off, like an outworn protocol dutifully or compulsively fulfilled, as if Grisha is actually tired of asking such questions, whether or not the responses he gets really satisfy him. For now, enough is enough, and we abandon our self-appointed diplomatic posts to enjoy the food and the company and the pleasure of a sweet, free summer day.

After awhile, the men get up a game of cards called preferans, while some of the women spread blankets on the grass for conversation. I slide over next to Dima for a look, but all I can figure out about the game is that it involves three or four players, and whoever deals has to sit out that hand and keep score. Preferans is such an institution, explains Dima, that it has its own universe of jokes, slang, and proverbs, much like poker in that respect but otherwise more strategically complex and less dependent on luck, as is clear from the web-like graph on which negative and positive points are recorded. Dima returns his attention to the game, and I, as if watching a foreign film without subtitles, space out pleasantly, lulled by the impenetrable phonetics of the men’s card-table repartee.

During the course of the afternoon, another crew has arrived and begun playing softball on the park’s diamond, filling the air with excited shouts. I try to imagine what they must sound like to Russian ears, their voices almost barbed with confidence, so relentlessly major key, all those flattened vowels, all those utilitarian consonants devoid of gutturals or trills, the pitch rising at the ends of declarative statements as if to file down the rough edges.

A generous plate of sweet poppyseed rolls appears on the table along with thermoses of coffee and tea. The preferans scores are tallied up, the cards put away. As we are eating our desserts, a young woman trots up in jeans and sneakers. Someone, she says, has sprained an ankle running bases and do we have any ice they could use to hold down the swelling? No, replies one of the men after checking a container where a few forlorn, wet soft drink and beer cans remain. Sorry, no more ice.

Thanks anyway, says the girl brightly, and she jogs away. We finish our sweets and start packing up to leave.

It is late, past sunset. As I stand by the table, watching the softball game continuing in the twilight, one of the women I haven’t spoken to yet comes over and stands beside me.

“Can you explain something, please?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say. “I’ll try, at least.”

“Well,” she says, “can you tell me why people enjoy playing baseball? Or even watching it?” If there is an edge of sarcasm in the question, it is very slight, more defensive than anything. She really wants to know. I wrack my brain for a useful answer.

“I have watched it on TV and I have tried to learn about the rules,” she adds, “but even so, I do not understand why it is popular.”

Seldom is baseball called the National Pastime any more, and when it is, the phrase is enclosed in ironic, invisible quotes and haunted by the truth of just how far basketball and football have driven it down. Regardless, there is something ineradicable about the game, something in the heart, that is increasingly difficult to account for and nonetheless deserving of the attempt.

I would seem an unworthy apologist, considering that when I left my childhood I turned my back on team sports, for reasons of temperament and because I shared a not-uncommon generational distaste for many traditions, even those as benign as this one. But there are moments in middle age, more of them every passing year, when I find myself helpless in the grip of some unbidden nostalgia, ever more aware that we never know for sure how many babies we throw out with the bath water in the attempt, when young, to make the world anew for our willing habitation.

In such a moment, though, and this is one of them, all the resonant and adhesive things about baseball come flooding back to me, proofs and reminders of its power to astonish and console. Larry Doby’s backward-leaping catches against the center field wall of Cleveland Stadium in the hopeless 1954 World Series against the Giants. The rousing swell of the organ music, my own pint-size Indians jacket, the pungent squiggle of brown mustard down the middle of uncountable sweat-beaded hot dogs in their white-bread buns. And a half-remembered, heartbreaking poem about the grace and power of legendary Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder Roberto Clemente that I read somewhere after he died in a plane crash. All this flashes through my mind in milliseconds, and I think I have to say something.

And then I realize that I don’t. That her comment, and all the other puzzled observations I field from this group, are at bottom expressions of grief and anger at the thought of having lost the way back home. Because emigration, however right and necessary, permanently strikes the stage set where identity was forged, a role originated, dries up the sea of first language where one swam without having to give conscious thought to the act of breathing. It is almost as if the precarious Cold War strategies of bluff and standoff had been undone, as in “Dr. Strangelove,” by a single mistake, and Kiev, Riga, Minsk and St. Petersburg have all been wiped out by nuclear warheads, after all.

Finally, the leftovers and implements are gathered up, the trash discarded. Irina and Dima beckon me to come along. “Hang on,” I say, and grab my sweater from the bench where I left it.

The woman is still gazing over at the softball players. As the visuals fade out, the audio track of the game comes forward: the crack of the bat, the scuffling of Nikes and Reeboks on the base-paths, the smack of a hard-thrown ball against the pocket of a leather glove.

“I don’t know,” I tell her, shrugging, moving to leave. “I guess you have to learn it when you’re very young.”

She smiles, in a way that confirms my suspicion that she understood this already, and probably much more, besides. I say do svidaniya, and she says “goodbye,” and I drape the sweater over my shoulders and follow my friends out of the park, wondering how much longer the softball people are going to keep it up in this fading light.


Joel Deutsch is a writer in Los Angeles. His essays have appeared in many publications, including the Los Angeles Times Magazine. His website is JoelDeutsch.net.


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