We stayed in a hotel in Rome for a couple of weeks while my parents got their papers processed. They went over to the American Embassy three blocks away. I remember walking into the building, and this time no beefy guards in gray uniforms hassled us.
Most of the time Natalie and I went sightseeing, just like in Moscow. We`d take a bus here, there, get off, get lost. We went to the Vatican and walked around. It was crowded but peaceful. We didn`t see the Pope, but there were plenty of priests around.
We got sick of eating spaghetti all the time at the hotel, so we`d find markets to buy vegetables and fruit we had seldom seen, like bananas. We ate a lot of bananas those first few weeks! We also tried out pizza. Pretty good food. Something different from Sambir.
The hotel room was very small, and we were crammed in with hardly space to turn around. The bathroom and shower were down the hall, shared with others on the floor. Just like a communal apartment in the Soyuz, where you might have six families living in six rooms, with just one bathroom for everybody at the end of the apartment hall.
The weeks in Italy were the longest continuous time we were ever together as a family. It turned out this was as close as we`d ever be. My parents didn`t have jobs, and we spent a lot of time with each other. You could get on each other`s nerves pretty easily, but it was a foreign country, and that drew us closer, regardless of who was annoyed or upset at someone else.
Toward the end everyone seemed to be getting angry with everyone else, sometimes for no reason at all. We`d just argue and fight because we weren`t used to being together that much. It was something you had to work at, and we had never done it before. The way life went for us, we never found enough time together to learn, either.
My father said he was expecting that America would be better than Italy.
”Wait till you see it there,” he said, but he was quiet a lot of the time in Italy, almost as though the foreign language and foreign ways scared him.
After three weeks in Rome, we got our papers for America.
The plane was a Pan Am 747, a giant filled with hundreds of people. Scared, we were shown to our seats. They made announcements in English and Italian. Everyone was laughing and talking and seemed to know what was going on, except the Polovchaks.
We quickly discovered we could get Pepsis for the seven-hour flight ahead. We kept going to the galley area or drink carts and drinking Pepsi, 7- Up, whatever there was-drinking and drinking.
I had a little pair of Russian binoculars and kept looking out the window to see what we were flying over. But we were up so high and there were so many clouds I didn`t see much. Some of the time I watched a movie, which I didn`t understand, and the rest of the time I just slept.
When we landed in New York, we called Aunt Maria in Chicago to tell her when we`d be arriving there. I was getting real excited. The journey was almost over.
And like a miracle, a few hours later we were in Chicago, surrounded at last by all our family!
Cousin Walter was there, and Uncle George, Aunt Anastasia from California, Aunt Maria and her husband, a cousin named Emily, the daughter of the brother of my California aunt . . . it seemed like the whole place was filled with real relatives. We hugged each other, sitting and talking, waiting for the baggage to come through.
My father hadn`t seen Anastasia, who now lived out in California, since 1976, nor his other sister, Maria, since 1968. We`d never met their husbands, and my cousin Walter was another person I never knew about. They all spoke good Ukrainian, including my cousin. I was surprised at this because I thought they were Americans. I watched them all, and the family resemblance was there- they were all short and dark-haired, talking fast, very excitable.
We piled into cars and headed for the city. Before I knew it, we were stopped at a booth of some sort. I thought, damn! I need a passport! That`s where I got my first lesson in what America was all about.
It was a toll booth for the parking lot. No passports needed. Just money! Somebody paid the toll, and off we went. I thought, you can go anywhere you want here, nobody cares.
Driving into the city, there were solid streams of cars and trucks whizzing all around us, thousands of streetlights everywhere. I could see row after row of small houses sitting on quiet streets beside this big road.
My aunt asked, ”Can you read the signs?”
I stared out at the big signs hanging over the road, trying to put two or three letters of the English alphabet together. ”I can,” I said in Ukrainian, ”but you`re going too fast!” We all laughed.
I couldn`t really read any of the signs, but I could recognize Coca-Cola and Pepsi signs. It was only common sense, since I`d seen them in Italy and on the plane to America. That`s the way my mind worked.
When we got off the main highway, the city seemed to stretch everywhere, and cars were parked all over the place. My father was silent during the ride into Chicago. He never said a word that I can remember.
When we got to my aunt`s apartment, everyone crowded in. They had four mattresses on the floor for us. Not much, but a good start. I crawled in. We were all so tired it didn`t make any difference what kind of beds there were. Then I heard something that chilled me. I lay very still in the darkness. My father was talking to my mother. Through my sleep, I could hear some of it. ”I`m bored . . . I`m depressed here . . . I want to go back. I can`t handle it here. I just can`t.”
I was stunned.
”How can you say that?” my mother asked. She sounded tired and confused. ”You haven`t seen anything. We only drove from the airport to the house. We haven`t been anywhere. You haven`t been anywhere. It`s dark out there. You haven`t seen anything, maybe two or three roads around here.”
This was the strangest conversation I`d ever heard, and a strange way to begin our new life in the United States. I never thought my father would back out of anything. Maybe he was tired or just doing a number on my mother. I fell asleep. I was looking forward to tomorrow.
The next day my Aunt Anastasia took my father to a bank and gave him $2,000 to open an account. Aunt Maria gave him almost the same amount, so before he even began to work, he was already up in the world.
In a few days he got a job with relatives of Cousin Walter`s stepfather, Mr. Gusiev. The men, all Ukrainians, worked in a factory, the Henry Valve Co., out in the suburbs. The relatives worked in the machine shop with lathes and drill presses, making ship`s valves and other equipment.
My father couldn`t speak a word of English and was earning $6 an hour right off the bat, cleaning up factory waste and debris and oiling and cleaning the machines. The Polish and Ukrainian guys in the plant wanted to groom him as a skilled worker. One relative was a foreman, and he backed the idea. Even though he had never been a machinist, my father said he had been trained in high school as a specialist.
He was surprised at how few people worked-and how hard they worked. ”In the Soyuz, there would have been 10 men doing the same work I do,” he said.
”Over here, money doesn`t grow on trees!”
The other men lived in the neighborhood and took him to work in the morning and brought him home at night. They looked after him and tried to show him the ropes. Even though they knew English, they spoke Ukrainian or Polish with him to help him feel more at home.
My mother started working at St. Elizabeth`s Hospital as a night janitor, at about $4.50 an hour. So from the start, they weren`t doing as badly as a lot of immigrants.
While this was going on, Natalie, Mikey and I were going to school. Natalie was in high school, but Cousin Walter took us boys to the Monroe Elementary School, where we were put into classes where no one spoke Ukrainian. This was hard, but it got me started trying to understand English. In a few days I had some words, and my father didn`t.
I loved television and everything looked good at first, but the Three Stooges were my favorites. I`d even turn the radio on, sit there and listen to some kind of hot music-drums, guitars, trumpets. It sounded fine to me. Then my cousin would come by. ”What the heck are you listening to? That`s Mexican! Find something American!”
My first favorite food in America was Jell-O. I had never seen anything like it-bright colors in the bowl and so many different kinds! That`s what I survived on in the first few months in Chicago. I wouldn`t eat anything else. I ate it morning, noon and night.
Then came bananas. Bananas are a real rarity in Sambir. You might see a line five blocks long waiting to get bananas in Sambir, and here they were everywhere. I ate them morning, noon and night, too. Delicious!
Then came hot dogs, McDonald`s, Wendy`s, everything. In Ukraine we had sausage, but we never had a bun for it. There you eat them with bread. We had mustard and we had catsup, but without the hot-dog bun, it`s not a hot dog.
I was anxious to get out and around, even though I was just like a lost kid in space. I needed something to get around the neighborhood, so Walter said, ”Well, there`s a bike down there-if you clean it up.” That was the Bozo the Clown bike. He bought cleaning stuff to remove the rust, and I scrubbed for about a month until it looked as shiny as new. It even had a little speedometer to tell how many miles you put on it. I started taking it around the home block, then another one, and every ride kept extending a block or two at a time.
I wanted to go farther, so my cousin drew me a map, down Fullerton, Diversey, Belmont, Addison, Irving Park, Milwaukee, and he showed me how they all run. I followed this map all over. I learned more about how America works by just riding and watching.
One place I knew was a factory over on Pulaski and Fullerton. One day I saw a lot of the workers parading around with signs. I thought they were doing some advertising, like a commercial. I didn`t understand what was going on, so I asked my cousin about it. He explained that this was a strike-they wanted more pay or didn`t like how they were being treated by the owners. I`d never seen anything like this in the Soyuz, and neither had my father. That was one way I caught on to how people had freedom to do this, do that, speak out against the employer or the government.
There were a lot of Mexican and Puerto Rican kids in my neighborhood. Half of them didn`t speak English, either, so I fit in there. Monroe Elementary School was just a normal Chicago public school: black, white, Hispanic, Vietnamese. You name it, they were there. This was something new for me. In the Soviet Union the only black I`d ever seen was a guy who showed up one day in the illegal market, speaking Russian. Everybody was staring at him, and I joined right in. It was interesting to see a person so different, just sitting there talking to somebody in Russian. But the Monroe kids thought I was Polish, not Ukrainian.
”Polack! Polack! Polack! Commie Polack!”
If you don`t know how to speak English, you`re a Polack. Life was real simple at Monroe.
You want to say, ”Hey, I ain`t no Polack.” Something. Anything. But you don`t know how. It was just aggravating. You feel like, turn around, and I`ll say something real good. With my fists.
