Envoy Without a Country Still Flies the Flag for Estonia

Jaak Treiman pronounces his first name yak . And if he didn’t, you’d probably never suspect that the Canoga Park lawyer leads a double life--the other being that of diplomat for a foreign state.

Raised in Sun Valley, educated in public schools and wedded to life in the San Fernando Valley, the boyish, 42-year-old managing partner of the Treiman, Schiffman & Curry law firm retains a sense of duty to a fatherland that exists today more in theory than it does in fact.

Treiman is the West Coast consul of Estonia, one of the tiny Baltic states that, for all practical purposes, expired with the Russian occupation of 1940 and its designation as the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The purpose of his non-paying office is to keep alive the form and protocol of Estonian government in readiness for the day when, he and other Estonians hope, the nation of barely 1.3 million people will regain its independence.

That is not likely to happen right away, as Treiman good-naturedly concedes. Estonia is firmly in place as a state of the Soviet system. There is no active independence movement.

‘There Are No Guerrillas’

“As far as I know, there are no guerrillas,” Treiman said. “But there certainly are dissidents. From what I gather, there certainly is a strong desire to get rid of Soviet rule.”

Treiman doesn’t consider himself part of a government in exile. The world’s estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Estonian expatriates have no parliament building or members of parliament to sit in one.

Nor does Treiman dream of his return as a liberator.

More realistically, he said, his new position will probably foreclose any chance of his revisiting the land he left when he was just a baby.

“I think I’ve become persona non grata ,” he said.

He sees nothing in the future to change his tranquil life as a business and real estate lawyer with a Valley-oriented practice. Treiman is married to an American who teaches education at California Lutheran University and has a daughter, 14. They live in Bell Canyon, where they intend to stay.

Feels He Has Job to Do

Still, regarding the homeland, Treiman believes he has a job to do.

“I think it’s a matter of showing the public that the government is not dead,” he said.

Primarily that consists of keeping contact with the Los Angeles diplomatic corps.

At his own expense, Treiman attends gatherings of the Los Angeles consular corps, always checking that the Estonian flag continues to fly beside the roughly 70 other nations with consulates in Los Angeles.

He is accepted in this role because most of the countries of the Western world have continued to recognize Estonia as a sovereign state, refusing to acknowledge the validity of Soviet government there.

Non-recognition of Soviet rule over Estonia and the other Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania remains a cornerstone of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union.

“We do not take lightly this policy of non-recognition, although what occurred happened 45 years ago,” a U.S. State Department spokesman was quoted as saying in a Times article last January. “The Soviet Union took over by force of arms three independent countries and wiped them off the map.”

A Variety of Outsiders

Estonians have long known domination from outside. For much of modern history, the tiny country on the coast of the Baltic Sea has been ruled by Russia, Germany, Sweden or Denmark. It gained independence after World War I but fell into Soviet hands with the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact of 1940.

During successive occupations by the Russians, then the German army and finally the Soviets in the postwar annexation, tens of thousands of Estonians fled their homeland to avoid persecution and exile to Siberia.

Treiman, 6 months old and in his mother’s arms, escaped on a boat during the Nazi occupation in 1943.

Joined later by his father, who had stayed to help in the exodus, the family lived 3 1/2 years in Sweden, then 4 1/2 years in Australia before obtaining resident visas to enter the United States.

In 1951 they caught a freighter to San Francisco, but decided to get off early when it landed in Los Angeles.

The family quickly made its way to Sun Valley, where Treiman’s father started the business he still runs, manufacturing honeycombed paper balls and bells for party decorations.

Becomes U.S. Citizen

Treiman became an American citizen while attending Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley. He attracted some renown in 1957 as the Valley’s nominee for Explorer Scout of the Nation.

Later, he earned bachelor’s and law degrees from USC and a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Chicago.

Treiman said he never was a “social climber” in the Estonian community. During his student years and a two-year stint in the Army, he drifted away from the Estonian organizations his parents belonged to.

Yet he guarded his Estonian identity. Although his English betrays no foreign accent, Treiman still speaks his native tongue.

Several years ago he joined the Baltic American Freedom League, a Los Angeles-based organization that seeks the liberation of the Baltic states. The league pursues that goal by distributing literature and holding demonstrations to dramatize the Soviet domination of the Baltic.

Previous Consul Dies

Having served two years as a board member and legal counsel for the league, Treiman was catapulted into diplomacy by surprise when Ernst Laur, Estonian consul for the West Coast for the previous 15 years, died last summer.

The leading candidate for Laur’s successor was his American son-in-law, Paul Johnson, who was Laur’s information officer.

Treiman said he applied for the job at the urging of several friends and his family.

In March, Ernst Jaakson, Estonian consul general in New York, appointed Treiman, causing some grumbling, Treiman believes, among more ardent Estonian activists. Treiman said he thinks he was chosen because he is a native and still speaks Estonian.

Naturally, the role of diplomat for a phantom country is designed to cast pressure and embarrassment on the Soviet Union.

A provocateur, however, Treiman is not.

Consistent with his laconic manner and the self-effacing laugh that punctuates his speech, Treiman applied a soft touch in tackling his first assignment--an appeal to the California Department of Education for recognition of Estonia’s plight in the treatment of human rights violations and genocide in state textbooks.

Wrote Curriculum Committee

He wrote a polite letter to a Curriculum Review Committee on Human Rights and Genocide. The committee wrote back that it would consider his suggestion and let him review the new textbook.

Someday, Treiman knows, the job will bring him face to face with the Soviet West Coast consul, whose office is in San Francisco.

He doesn’t expect a confrontation.

“I imagine any conflict that would take place would be by accident and it would be a play-it-by-ear situation,” Treiman said. “My instinct would be to treat it in a low-key fashion.”

He can not imagine himself denouncing his counterpart as the interloper he believes him to be.

“I don’t think Estonia is in a strong enough bargaining position to do that,” he said.

“Estonia has been used to being occupied and this is a little more relative than it might be in another situation,” he said.

Besides, things will even out. Someday, he knows, the Soviet diplomat will have to return to the Soviet Union, and Treiman gets to stay in America.