Yelena T.

Yelena is a friend from here at Brooklyn College. She's an English major and also a talented writer. Having lived in Brooklyn for the majority of her life, she considers herself fairly "Americanized," although she is trying to re-establish her fluency in Russian and hopes to one day travel back to the Ukraine and travel the rest of the world as well.

I’m from a city in Ukraine called Nikolaev and I’ve lived here for fourteen years. When we left it was Ukraine, when I was born it was the USSR. I have some family here but most of my family’s in Israel or Germany…I don’t have barely anybody back home. We came to the US on a refugee visa because my family is Jewish and most of my extended family died in WWII and since then, things haven’t improved much for Jewish people there so most of my family is left because—I mean most of my family worked really hard and they ended up in menial jobs because they were Jewish, so…I didn’t really know much when I was younger I guess; I was just excited to go somewhere new, “Oh, maybe it’ll be better.” I never really asked [why]; they were just really excited about it; I mean, things are really hard there and they were working on it for years; ever since I could remember; it took like five—six years to get a visa. Now it takes even longer after 9/11. It was very, like small, very like, just humble: get along, like, do whatever you have to do and just. I don’t know, it was nice. It sucked though. There was a whole lot of things that seemed awful now but at the time it wasn’t a big deal. like having toilet paper was a big deal, having…a lot of food was a big deal. You know, things like that. Simple.

There was something that I always wanted and I didn’t know what it was really, but it was, like, to have my own life and make my own decisions and be able to just do what I do. I mean, even growing up I know that I wouldn’t have had that, at home, I would have had expectations. It wouldn’t be like this. I really—I have a really, like, decent life by my standards. I would probably be married by now. With kids. It’s a different world [here]. I’m uncomfortable that I can’t speak Russian the way I would like to. I’m practicing the alphabet in Russian right now [in a class]. It’s a bunch of kids around my age who came here when they were younger, a little younger, a little older than me, and they just—most of them are like super bright in Russian, so they speak Russian. My whole lifestyle is very Americanized, very American. I lost a lot of the values that I used to have. Education was always a really big part. like, just hard work. Just do what you're doing and work as hard as you can and put everything you can into it. I don’t have that anymore. I’m a lazy American. When I left the Ukraine I had been halfway through second grade and the math that I learned there halfway through second grade kept me going through my first year of high school in America. I was in honors programs and I went to a special high school and I already knew it. It’s that different. It’s just in your blood: they raise you, like, just study: that’s what you do. I don’t know. We just did it. We didn’t ask questions. We tried the hardest that we could. It was just, like, a different level of discipline. There was one kid that was always getting in trouble and he had a serious mental disability, he physically couldn’t sit there. Because it was uniforms, it was sitting like this, you raise your hand like this. You stand up when the teacher comes in. It’s just like a military but it’s effective. It was a joke [in America], but I didn’t speak English when I came here. At all. They put me in ESL class with mostly Spanish people. And I pretty much just learned on my own. The people who were in my ESL class with me stayed there for three or four years and I came here, they put me in third grade halfway through the year so I spent a half a school year in ESL. And then I went to regular class and then I went to honors in fifth grade. but because that’s—that’s what I did. I sat home and I read the Goosebumps. I learned English from the Goosebumps. After that I moved up to something…grown up. Actually, Stephen King. That’s why I’m so morbid. I was already writing and stuff so—I was just speaking English. I had to, like, get Americanized, too, because people—people make fun of immigrants. And we were so poor. I had one skirt and one pair of jeans and, like, three tops. That’s what I wore. In third and fourth grade kids are cruel. It was in the same neighborhood I live now. I went to PS 99. It’s on Coney Island, it’s like two blocks down. I feel like I got a chance to live the way I want to and I like to live a little easy. I don’t know, just immigrant kids, there was a lot of Spanish immigrants who weren’t supposed to be here, that was mostly my school because most of the people in my neighborhood go to yeshivas and the ones who were left over go to public school.

My family’s Jewish but we’re not religious at all. We came here, there were four of us, my parents, my grandpa and I and we had 70 dollars. We had three suitcases. We actually had a layover in Paris [on the way over], that was really cool. We stayed for a night. We had fun at the buffet. I mean, what did we eat at home... Mashed potatoes, grains. A buffet in Paris? That’s serious business. We flew here, in 1995, there was that crazy snowstorm that lasted like three weeks. That’s when we flew in. We fly here and there’s like six feet of snow. We lived by the sea, our whole area was...We were all built on the ship building industry, it was warm, it was nice, it was like New York in a good year. I hate when people say that “oh, you must be used to the cold.” No.

I became a [us citizen] because my parents did. I’m a New Yorker [laughs]. I’m sorry--I can’t--I can’t say that I’m an American, because this country— It just depends, for some people it goes well, for some people it doesn’t. we came here so poor but my parents, like, figured it out. They got a handle on it. My mom was cleaning Jewish women’s houses and my dad was building kitchen cabinets. I didn’t see them. All they did was work. They both went to learn English in different places. my mom actually went to Brooklyn college and my dad-- She almost got her bachelor’s. My dad told her to go work. So she did. I mean, I’m sure she was hoping I’d take it up a notch, but--I will! My dad actually taught himself Autocad, it’s like a design program and now he works for Chanel and he makes a decent buck and my mom is a manager at a big like financial […] thing. they did really well for themselves here. A lot of people don’t. My parents have some friends who are still struggling that they’ve known from then. And a lot of people that I know, like, they came here and they were just—a lot of, like, single mothers who come here. They’re still poor, they’re still struggling, a lot of people who don’t want to learn English. And look at Brighton Beach—people buy Benzes and Jaguars and sleep in the backseat. It’s a culture thing. What they both did was like really high level stuff [in Russia]. My mom was a librarian. She was a head librarian in the one library in my city. It was called “The City”; it was like a thousand people. We were like, “Yeah, we’re City!” Yeah. And my father was trained as an engineer, so.

We went to a little place in the summer, like, by the water. And then we went to Moscow to get our visas. That was nice. It was so overwhelming. It’s like half of New York but it was like—just looking around like, oh, everything’s moving! It’s a beautiful city though, my grandpa used to travel a lot, but he’s been around a really long time. He lives with my parents, he takes care of them. He pretty much raised me, I guess. I see him, he’s just my grandpa. He’s like my role model. But it’s hard for me to even communicate with him, he has a really bad hearing problem, so. He knows English on paper but his hearing was gone when we came here. Because he used to have TB and the medications for the TB killed his hearing. He still claims to be a communist. He was a member of the Communist Party. The only good thing he got out of anything except his own hard work was the apartment we had, it was a one-bedroom apartment. It was big back then, though. My grandpa’s more of a philosopher. The way it actually worked out [communism], it wasn’t cool.

We have a couple of graves that I’d like to visit and clean up. That’s all we have. My grandpa’s wife, she was an incredible woman. She was like—she died when I was younger, like, five, maybe, five or six. My other grandma ran the family ‘cos my grandpa’s just, like, wishy-washy. He’s sweet and he’s, like, old. He married when he was fifty and she was younger. She was beautiful. She taught at the university. She taught German, and literature. She raised my mom. She was just beautiful. I mean, I have places I’d love to visit but no people. I could be afraid of getting, like, robbed in the airport, ‘cos I look American, but. I had a beautiful childhood there. The parks, the forests, the monuments. There’s a big bridge on the water; it’s a beautiful place to visit. It was really poor; I had the one doll. It was like that. I was the only Jewish person in my school and everyone had uniforms that you have to buy and I went to kindergarten, first, and part of second grade there and the whole time they couldn’t afford to buy my uniform so this women sewed me a skirt and two blouses. In kindergarten it was up to here, up to below my knees, and then by second grade it was somewhere about mid-thigh and I just wore it. So it was like, like, you stick out. You just do. That’s how it was. People would call me names, the teacher would make comments. It was like, it was—because we were Jewish it was something like: "Look at the Jew." I had one girl that I was friends with who always had lice, so her hair was always cut short and people made fun of her. And we were friends.

I would love for my children to speak Russian or speak Hebrew. I feel like Israel is my home country even though I was born in Ukraine. All of our family’s been there for years and that’s where we wanted to go before we decided to go to America when I was younger. My mom told me about this. And they would only let my dad go and he wanted to go. He had to get permission from his father who then lived in Ukraine also and his father wouldn’t let him. So he had to stay and then he figured out a way for all of us to come to America together. But Israel is where, I mean, I’m Russian, Ukrainian, but I’m Jewish and I look at "Where’s our place?" and I feel like Israel is it. And New York [laughs]. We’re just Jews. I mean my family started with a guy in a village in the Ukraine who’s first name was Tsodik. And just our family name started from him, we don’t know where he came from, but he came from somewhere. Nobody knew he was, he didn’t have a family there, but Jews have just been traveling forever and they can’t stay. They stay for a little while and they realize they’re not welcome. That’s changing [now], definitely.

Right now I have my parents but I’m pretty much on my own, so, whatever family I might have in ten years will either be a family that I’ve started or a group of close friends. I’ve always wanted to travel but I’ve always thought that if I see someplace, that’s just like “this is me, this is it,” I’ll stay there. That’s why I wanna go look around. And that’s what, actually, instead of that work ethic that I’m supposed to have, being an eastern European Jew, I have just like the motivation to get out of America. See the world.