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

This flag is the flag that flies over the memorial at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.Art by Michael Yessis

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.

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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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