American Cafes: From Russians With True Love

Greasy spoons are the kind of places often found in no-name Southern towns, on backwater highways or the pages of dime novels.

The owners are often Runyonesque characters, as round and doughy as the dumplings that serve as staples on a menu with few surprises.

By any other name, the “White Flour, Fat & Sugar Cafe” is the kind of place Americans have come to know and relish--as much as hot dogs, cheeseburgers, turkey and meat loaf.

Talk in these places often veers toward the right side of the chicken wing. President Reagan is as much a saint as a football coach with an 8-and-oh record.

Conversation, like the food, is simple, no-nonsense, to the point. Except for the laughs. And the laughs are many.

The Little Cafe on 8th Avenue in downtown San Diego is such a place. So is Texas Smokehouse (formerly Real Texas Bar-B-Q) on Miramar Road in Mira Mesa, near the Miramar Naval Air Station.

The last place you’d expect to find a resident of the Soviet Union would be in either of these joints, sitting down to bell peppers and hash browns, or barbecued ham and “tater” salad.

The Little Cafe and Texas Smokehouse are two of San Diego’s top “greasy spoons.” But the owners of both might raise a clenched fist in objection. Greasy spoon? How dare you?

Undoubtedly, they would feel privileged and prideful in being able to object.

For the owners of both were not permitted objections as citizens of the Soviet Union.

Indeed, these two diners are owned by honest-to-Gorbachev ex-Russians. They’re particularly concerned you remember the “ex.” All are American citizens who speak of freedom in ways that many in the U.S.A. would find trite, quaint or eerily nationalistic.

To these people, freedom is not an ideological concept. It was a turning point in a leave-now-or-die struggle for integrity and hope.

Walter and Gula Yakhnich don’t mean they would have been killed had they remained in Moscow, although they might have died spiritually, emotionally. As Russian Jews, they had never felt welcome in the Soviet Union, their country.

In 1977, they were granted the right to emigrate. They went to Rome and through the help of the United Jewish Federation relocated in, of all places, Mesquite, Tex.

A cowboy suburb of Dallas, Mesquite is known even in Texas for the quality of its rodeo. The clientele of its largest shopping center once was described by a Dallas newspaper as “the bouffant-and-stroller set.” In Mesquite, Dolly Parton is a heroine of godlike proportion.

The Yakhniches picked Texas, thinking it a land of ample opportunity. They worried, however, that what it held in freedom it might not hold in tolerance. They were wrong. Gula Yakhnich, 45, said Mesquite couldn’t have been friendlier to a couple of transplanted “Russkies.”

Life was hard on the work front. Walter Yakhnich, 42, worked in a Dallas dialysis center. He had been a doctor in Moscow, specializing in internal medicine, a craft that serves him well, he said, for buying and butchering meat.

In 1978, he had a chance to put money down on a barbecue cafe and start grilling brisket in Mesquite, using local mesquite wood for a spicy, tangy flavor. The novelty of the new trade was, and is, incredibly heady. Yakhnich said medicine is a dim memory.

“In Russia,” he said, “you don’t get that special feeling of being a doctor. I was glad to leave it. Or, let’s say, I was not unhappy.

“Now I give best product available in the field. My wife likes to talk and entertain. I am thoroughly independent, my own boss, setting own hours, own schedule, own style of service. I have an incentive to care.”

Yakhnich admits that people in Mesquite and Mira Mesa have in common their surprise upon learning that the barbecue being served comes from the hands of a Russian, a former member of a Communist land.

“But,” he said, with a sly Zhivago-like smile, “we love surprising people.”

The former owner who sold the Texas barbecue joint to the Yakhniches gave them a two-week crash course on the fine art of Lone Star “Q.” The work was hot, hard and tedious, but the Yakhniches were a smash success. Ultimately, the heat proved too much for the family, and for the friends who came with them, Gregory and Inessa Weintraub, also from Moscow.

The two couples decided on San Diego after a visit in 1980. It reminded them of Dallas--in size, in the cheerful personalities of its people, in its sense of tolerance and zest. Weather was the deciding factor. Having lived only in Moscow and Mesquite, they didn’t believe a city could have weather like this.

“We left our hearts in Dallas,” Gula Yakhnich said. “Dallas was our first home in America. It’s almost like we were born there, but this--this is paradise.”

The Yakhnich-Weintraub partnership has so succeeded in roasting barbecue over hickory or mesquite, for 24 hours, that Mira Mesans will soon receive an expanded, upgraded dining hall. Real Texas Bar-B-Q has bought out the business next door, overtaking its quarters and doubling its size to emerge as Texas Smokehouse. They will serve sangria and--what else?--Lone Star beer. And maybe Jerry Jeff Walker on the sound system.

They are thoroughly, uncompromisingly American. Gula Yakhnich can easily be engaged in heated political discussions. She has almost equal reproach for liberal Democrats as she does for the likes of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Inessa Weintraub, 33, and husband, Gregory, 34, talk of a new land where freedom means anything you want, having the money to do it and the chance to take it with you wherever, whenever you please.

“Freedom of choice in Moscow is nonexistent, a joke,” said Gregory, an engineer for Strang Heating and Air Conditioning (as well as a sharer of the smokehouse with the Yakhniches). “Many people there live all their years in one house, on one sad street. In Russia, you get closer to others, especially your immediate family. You can’t trust anyone else.”

Gula Yakhnich said her first years in America were accompanied by almost irrational outbursts of joy. Irrational in the sense that almost any woe was quickly overcome by the feeling that “I had gone to heaven”--heaven being Mesquite.

She and husband Walter have found that living in America means some negatives, meaning the more you make, the more you want, the more you lust for. But they are hardly wont to leap on a soapbox of anti-Americanism.

Despite their rightist views, both are strong advocates of detente , disarmament and any moves to prevent nuclear holocaust.

Inessa has a brother living in Moscow. She’s hoping, with the thaw from the summit, that he too might be able to emigrate. She realizes it’s barely a hope.

Gula Yakhnich’s only sense of homesickness comes in missing Russian ballet. To her, homesickness mainly means “missing Mesquite.”

Walter and Gregory miss the walks in Moscow, where 24 hours a day people walk the streets with little fear of being attacked. Gregory’s biggest adjustment was seeing almost no one walking the streets in Dallas or San Diego.

Walter welcomes most adjustments. He’s a fanatic about American football, recently switching allegiance from the “moribund” Dallas Cowboys to the “flashy” San Diego Chargers. Charger players Sam Claphan and Dennis McKnight are rib-chomping regulars in the Texas Smokehouse.

Walter’s wish for the future? That he go on making delicious barbecue, delicious amounts of money and that the Chargers get a defense better than Star Wars.

“Who knows?” said Inessa Weintraub. “After the revolution in Russia, maybe we’ll all sell barbecue on the streets of Moscow.”

Rya Dolores Groodski (her maiden name, later shortened to Grood) was born in Milwaukee. At the age of 2, she was kidnaped by her father and raised in Moscow, believing her stepmother was her mother and knowing nothing of the kidnaping for 15 years.

Today, Dolores Miller (her preferred name) is the matriarch of The Little Cafe, which she and husband Mike Miller have owned and operated since 1969. The Millers moved to El Cajon from Buffalo, N.Y., in 1967.

“If you have one life to live,” she said, “why not live it in San Diego?”

Dolores Miller’s sweet drawl shows nothing of a Russian accent, and most of her eager patrons would be surprised, even astonished, to learn the background of a woman whose past translates like the pages of a Ludlum thriller.

Her father was born in the Ukraine, in a town called Ekatevinoslavl, a name as complicated-sounding as her father’s life. He married in Russia, had a son and moved to Buffalo. He fathered another son in Buffalo, moved to Milwaukee and met Miller’s real mother. Not long after Rya was born, he headed to Moscow for a visit, where he promptly fell in love. Back in the United States, he arranged to have the real mother (a happily sane German woman) committed to a mental hospital. He kidnaped Rya and took her to Moscow, marrying the woman she believed for 15 years was her mother and who treated her like a daughter.

In 1945, at age 15, she was given the news. Her stepmother had fallen in love with someone else and lived in angry silence, separated by a cardboard partition from the man who was Rya’s father. Unknown to young Rya, her real mother had been writing her letters for years. Finally, the stepmother plucked one out of the mail and read it to her. She was stunned.

“Out of hatred for my father,” she said, “she told me the truth.”

Efforts were made to send her back to her real mother in Wisconsin. Her father, troubled by the lagging standards of Russian life, eagerly agreed. Surprisingly, so did the government. Her trip to America was, however, far different from that of the Yakhniches and Weintraubs. Because her father was Jewish, she encountered waves of anti-Semitism from her mother in Milwaukee, who had since married a Syrian.

She left home at 18 and at 22 met and married Mike Miller, whose Polish name had been shortened by several vowels and consonants. Mostly consonants. They have been married 33 years and have two children, one of whom, Gail Barclay, is a member of The Little Cafe’s first-string team.

Rya Dolores Groodski (Grood) Miller is, in the words of her adoring daughter, “As American as the apple pie she makes.”

The only hint that Dolores Miller was ever a Rya Groodski, learning in school of the bravery of Bolsheviks, comes in a solitary menu item. Pirozki , a “ground beef, onion and spice turnover,” is a specialty brought back from Moscow, but given her special twists.

The Little Cafe specializes in home-cooked American food--turkey and dressing, chicken and dumplings, meat loaf and wonderful pie (which also includes banana, chocolate and coconut cream). Miller and husband share the cooking--and many of their views on Russia.

They went to Moscow in 1979. She was aghast at how little had changed.

“Everything was so much the same,” she said sadly. “There were those huge horrible apartment buildings, but pretty much everything . . . was the same. People are so afraid. We met people who would talk but didn’t want anyone to know they had.

“They’re all so miserably misinformed. They live as though World War II happened yesterday. They don’t even know how America helped them. There’s so much they haven’t been shown, haven’t been taught.”

Capsulizing her feelings, she said, “The government I hate; the people I love.”

She was thrilled in ’79 to meet many old cousins and friends, who despite what she’d heard and feared, had not died but were alive and remembered her well. (They included her stepmother, who has since died.) She still corresponds with most of those folks, but addresses the letters, “Dear Ones.” None of the missives she receives carries a signature or return address, though she always knows the sender.

None of her relatives would allow her to take their photographs for fear of being linked to Americans. None believed that her garage is attached to her house in El Cajon. They have trouble believing stories of American opportunity, American wealth, because, she said, they so exceed the boundaries of a Russian’s imagination. They find it hard to believe that anyone would have the incentive to work as hard as Dolores Miller or Walter Yakhnich.

They fail to see, she said, what could possibly be gained.

“If I had it to do over,” she said, “I would have to become a public speaker. Just to tell everyone what a wonderful country we have here. No one knows like I do. Believe me, no one does.”