Coming to America: Life on Main Street

by Alexander Nazaryan

Life began anew at dawn. We woke up to a sunless, almost mournful Leningrad sky. These would be our last moments here, and in a few hours later we would be on board an airplane to Vienna. Our final destination was America, but we had told our peers we were heading for my father's homeland of Armenia. It was safer that way.

A car was already waiting outside to take us to the airport. The drive through the city took us past war statues emblazoned with the Russian spirit, the ancient drawbridges forever standing guard on the Neva River, to the airport, a beacon of modernity amidst the antique majesty of the city. Friends and relatives were waiting expectantly at the airport to bid us farewell. They spoke to me passionately about what lay ahead, but I wasn't paying any attention to their excited articulations. It was too early in the morning.

Hours later, we arrived in Vienna, immediately noticed its decidedly Western qualities. We remained there five months, living somewhere in its intricate labyrinth of one-way streets. The layover in Austria lasted five months and three days, much longer than we expected.

Though the city rivaled Leningrad in splendor, there was little to do, especially since we knew no German. One day we spotted what we thought was a medieval castle in the distance, and decided that – despite the unpleasant drizzle – it was worth visiting. It turned out to be a prison.

JFK airport greeted us on April 19, 1989. Too tired to even admire the view of the looming city, we huddled on the benches and slept, waiting for my “Americanized” uncle. I woke up on another airplane and discovered that we were heading for West Hartford, Connecticut. This meant nothing to me.

The next day my uncle drove us through West Hartford. This was no Leningrad. Unaware of the American institution of suburbia, I incredulously eyed the two-street intersection that was supposedly the town “center,” and – this was perhaps most shocking of all – noticed that surprisingly few people actually traversed the streets on foot, automobiles being the preponderant medium of transportation. Only years later would I grow to love the quiet life of the American suburb.

We moved into a two-family house, and life more or less resumed a rhythm of regularity. The apartment became a safehaven, a refuge from the unknown world around us. Our first day in America, my mother and I ventured out on the street, scouring the neighborhood for points of interest. We found few, save a gas station and a convenience store, whose ordinary goods filled me with inordinate amusement. I could only wonder what each object was used for, what each morsel of food tasted like (the assortment of comically packaged cereal was exhilarating). This wonder at all things American would only grow in the upcoming months.

Of course, much support was required in those early moments, and most of it came from my uncle and aunt. Sensing my Russian attire to be grossly inadequate, he arranged for his American friends to donate a gargantuan pile of clothes for me and my brother.

Among these was a miniature replica of Phil Simms's jersey, which (though too small for me to ever wear) I probably still have stashed away somewhere. Without him, we would not have known what to do, what to say, how to act. Figuring America out by trial-and-error was not something we wanted to do.

A local newspaper did a story on my family because we were among the earliest immigrants to West Hartford. We still have the story, and I often reread it. Beside a picture of our sparsely furnished living room (whose contents were, once again, provided by my uncle) was the following caption “Though not much, this is all the Nazaryans have.” Or something like that. They missed the point. Of course, they were right in one respect: our apartment was rather sparsely furnished. But it was too early in our lives as capitalists to actually care about this. Simply glad to be in America, we knew that the time would come when the task of material acquisition would be greatly facilitated. This time, however, would not come instantly upon our arrival to America, and we generally accepted this.

My brother and I always found ways to entertain ourselves, despite a lack of the toys we would clamor for in latter years. Amazed by the vast space offered by our apartment (our living quarter in Leningrad had been much more constrictive), we invented games to play with the furniture, entertaining ourselves thusly. Hide and seek was another favorite, and the simplistic game usurped much of our time. When my father became a mailman for a short period of time, a game was accordingly invented, the centerpiece being his mailbag. In our first summer in America, before I truly befriended any of the other Russian children who had moved to West Hartford, my brother and I, despite our age difference, (I am six years older), became closer than we had ever been before or would be afterward. Television became a common friend of ours and, to our parents dismay, we could not be drawn from its iridescent glow. Cartoons monopolized our Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons for years to come.

But there were plenty of struggles, and it would be foolish to neglect them here. My parents spoke no English. There were English classes, but I don't think they helped much. My father filled a huge plastic container with index cards of English vocabulary, and thought that this was a sure-fire method of learning the language.

We laughed at this method, but didn't make much progresses ourselves. It was embarrassing to mispronounce words and talk in broken and convoluted English to Americans, and though they rarely did, we always expected them to laugh at our linguistic follies. Driving was another problem. My mother had a Russian license, but still had to pass a test in English, a daunting task

On the other hand, my father had never driven a car, and took eight times to pass the driving test. This was a subject of much ridicule. Finding jobs was another difficult task for my parents, both of whom had been scientists in Leningrad, but now had to face the prospect of taking lesser jobs until they learned the language.

This was a difficult for us to swallow, but there seemed no other choice. From the onset, we had the American Dream - though we certainly didn't call it that – in our sights. It was why we came here, because whatever ambitions we previously had were not compatible with Communist ideals. And if there were now obstacles, we had no choice but to surmount them. We didn't always do it correctly the first time, or in the most efficient and timely manner. But we somehow overcame those early challenges with time.

After a couple years we moved to an apartment building near the center of West Hartford, and found ourselves in the center of a bustling Russian community with which we were glad to identify ourselves. There were about five other Russian children living in that neighborhood and we became the best of friends, effectively segregating ourselves from our American counterparts for years to come.

Two of these friends have accompanied me to Dartmouth. Every weekend we played tackle football on the lawns of the apartments, never failing to receive rebuke from the landlords for tearing up the grass. Eventually our families went their own ways, but in those early years, the Russian community served as a safety barrier against America, which was still relatively foreign.