She is 20, a straight A student with a job on the side where she works 40 hours a week. She is looking very tired. ``It's a pity that you work so hard that you are always tired.'' I say.
``That's America,'' she says with her easy laugh.
``What do you mean?''
``America is so much more stressful than Russian and most other countries.''
``I'm writing a book about Russian immigrants of the last wave.'' I tell her.
``Why?''
``Because I'm interested in why people move.''
``Nobody knows,'' again the laugh.
``Really?''
``The first year you're here, everyone asks you. By the third year, it's a taboo subject.''
He studies Amway literature in his spare time.
In the meantime, he holds another job. From 4:59 to 5:00 he calls the time number continuously. When the phone says it's 5 PM, he walks away from his desk muttering, ``And not a second too soon.''
``I realized I was dealing with an unpredictable system, which gains its strength by abusing people... In a way, I'm living my second life now... different from the first one. The principal difference, the way I see it, is that an educated person here, in this country, can live with style, modesty and decency. And that was impossible in Russia, just on a practical level. You had to bend in order to get certain things...to go through a humiliation just to have a piece of bread and a glass of milk''
He participated in World War II ... It's an interesting generation, their generation, because, on one hand they were saying that everything is going to be all right if you work hard, try to achieve your goals, and don't make too many waves, so to say. On the other hand they had, what Nadezhda Mandelshtam calls grief positivism. So, my father was telling me: ``You must be a physician, you must go to Medical School, because if one day you'll be imprisoned and get into a concentration camp, you'll have to be able to survive, and you've got a better chance to survive if you're a physician.''
Eric, a recent graduate of New York University, says that his grandfather had been imprisoned during the Stalin era for telling a political joke.
Eric: The propaganda then was so strong that everyone was convinced that the harshness of the prison was due to Stalin's underlings. Stalin's mercy alone prevented the prison authorities from being even worse. My grandmother even cried when Stalin died, convinced that her husband would die under what could only be a worse regime. Then her husband was released a month after Stalin's death.
(Larisa Kabrinskaya, in her forties, lives in Houston)
Only here, in America, have I understood what personal freedom is. I don't think I would ever understood that have I stayed in Russia. Because the one interesting thing about freedom is that it's not only freedom for you, but for everybody else around you as well. It took me some time to understand that... But I remember the moment when I did: I was walking in the crowd, in the airport, and all of a sudden it became clear to me that nobody, not a single person in that crowd, paid any attention to me, cared who I was. I was used to getting people's attention in Russia -- maybe because I could never quite fit in. But here, in this crowd, nobody cared about me... that was a very freeing sensation, somehow. People around were all so different from one another, but it was OK to be different, it was normal. Nobody was bothered or alarmed by that. I suddenly felt I could be whatever I wanted in this crowd, I wouldn't be punished for being different. I can be ignored -- that's another side of it... but I won't be punished. That was a very pleasant feeling...
I remember how on the XXth Communist Party Conference Nikita Khruschev declared that present generation of Soviet people will witness and live under communism. Back then I was convinced in Khruschev's insanity in making such a statement. Now I realize, he was right, at least as far as I'm concerned: I'm living under communism. (laughs) I can buy anything I want. I don't have enormous needs, I like collecting things... things that I dreamt of having as a child. I have a big collection of naval blades (knives), collection of swords: I like old Russian swords...I'm collect smoking pipes, old coins. My apartment looks like a museum. I have to fill my spare time with something, so I'm collecting all these things. And I can tell: every dream comes true in America for someone who knows how to work. A person who doesn't want to work is a different matter. But I enjoy working. And working here is a pleasure, I must say.