THE NEW AMERICANS : AMERICA: A CONFLICT OF IMAGES AND REALITIES : THE NADLERS OF ROMANIA

Whether through natural cataclysm, pestilence or genocide, the chronicle of history is rife with human dislocation. The Old World offered its uprooted the daunting spectre of the unknown. The new still offers America.

At 18, Dan Nadler of Romania is quietly flourishing in the heady atmosphere of free speech and other discoveries in his government and civics classes at El Rancho High School in Santa Fe Springs, and sensing as well the subtle distance his education is creating between himself and his parents, who still feel the grim constraint of Iron Curtain memories.

Marcelo Filardi, a 25-year-old Brazilian musician, is amazed at how eagerly American pop musicians jump at the chance to make a buck and re-tool their talents to the latest commercial blueprint; he claims that comparable musicians in Brazil are disdainful of get-rich-quick motives--or at least their outward show.

They are two of a number of people interviewed by Calendar who have come to the United States within the past two years and therefore still live in the anxious interregnum between two worlds--the old, with its ancestral universe of landscape, family and friends and the restorative moods of place, and the hard and fast new, whose unfamiliarity is redeemed by the promise of the future.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 625,000 immigrants showed up at our borders in 1986--at least that’s the number who registered themselves. Some came to make money or to get an education. Some got out the back door when a new dictator’s police force came through the front with guns blazing. Some left dead-ended economies, some sifted out of refugee camps.

What many fail to anticipate in their hoped-for freedom is that America is a culture as well as a polity, and that it can often assault old country values. Few know to expect the deep loneliness of being set apart by language and customs, the confusing voracity of the American tempo, the sheer enervating grind of having to make a living, and the endless traffic of media imagery.

In addition to Dan Nadler and his parents and Marcelo Filardi, we spoke to a Vietnamese refugee family whose American deliverance came through a bottled message that had drifted across the Pacific Ocean for years; an Iranian family twice removed from the pleasurable and orderly customs of the past, first by the Ayatollah Khomeini, then by the struggle to make ends meet in the United States; and a Cuban emigre to whom nothing in American culture is seriously suspect except its (to him) naive complacency toward communism--after 18 years in jail as a political prisoner, he’s just happy to be here.

How do they see our culture? Largely as a mirror of a prodigiously exuberant, outgoing, optimistic people, tinged with the portent of moral decay.

A couple of them are leery of the press--what was once a handmaiden of oppression is now impertinently, even dangerously free. All are more or less at sea in the language, whose unfamiliarity and elusiveness seals them off from the full-blown sense of having arrived, of taking part, of being here.

Almost all of them are concerned to one degree or another with the corrosive pressures the American Way puts on family life. They all come from cultures where the support systems of family are virtually sacrosanct. If family was hallowed then, it’s all they have now. Shahin Mohajer was raised in Iran’s tradition of sexual protectiveness toward women. Just what is she to make of her 6-year-old daughter’s report that a strange boy came up to her at school and said “I love you. I want to kiss you.”?

Ruben and Elena Nadler arrived in the United States in April, 1986, with their then-17-year-old son, Dan, and now live in a two-bedroom apartment on Telegraph Road in Santa Fe Springs. He has a Romainian university degree in electronic engineering, and works as an electronic engineer in Los Angeles. In Romania, she worked as a draftsperson in architectural design; she’s now employed at a nearby Foster Freeze. Both are 43 and have the demeanor of stout burghers settling into lives of stolid respectability. He sometimes pats his burgeoning pot self-reproachfully.

Their apartment is comfortably appointed. Elena is popular at work, and some of her co-workers have donated furniture, which by no means resembles hand-me-downs. Sofa, dining room set, lamps, cabinet and polished black wooden chairs are touched off by richly colored oil paintings brought from home, and Elena’s collection of cloisonne. In a corner by the sliding patio windows is Dan’s cluttered work desk. In conversation, if an unfamiliar word comes up, he moves to his desk, grabs a pad and writes the word down.

Elena puts out delicate-looking homemade confections, cookies and cups of thick coffee for a visitor (MJB copiously tamped into the coffeepot filter to simulate espresso) on fragile china. When they settle back for conversation, they speak in contrapuntal fragments which veer into excitable Romanian when the topic overheats, a musical trio rising to frequent crescendos.

“Our brain is like a salad, after French, and seven years of Russian English,” said Elena, to whom American English is still problematic--as it is to her husband and son.

“I’m surprised that in America nobody talks about politics,” Ruben said.

“American people are special. All the time they smile,” Elena said.

Ruben continued his thought. “Except during elections. In Europe they have many political parties.”

“Or only one party,” Dan interjected slyly.

Dan’s full-time schooling has moved him faster along into a light-hearted skepticism and, where his parents are concerned, a gentle, teasing iconoclasm (Ruben and Elena take English-speaking classes twice a week at El Rancho High School, but are otherwise tied into their jobs). Dan is discovering the generic class-consciousness of the Western adolescent, but his independence of mind isn’t exactly self-invented.

For Ruben sets the tone as an observant, nimble-minded man who enjoys throwing out a challenge and then sitting back and folding his hands behind his head to watch it flare into argument. He and his son sometimes catch a horrifed Elena between them.

When the topic swung to American culture, Dan said, “I don’t like jazz.”

“I like Fats Domino, Ray Charles,” Ruben said. “Modern music is not music. That Michael Jackson . . . .” He glanced at his son with subtle rebuke.

“Elvis Presley,” Elena said.

“Those people, they play real music,” Ruben said.

Dan protested.

“Wait,” Ruben said. “After 10 years, you’ll see. I like country music. Johnny Cash. Kenny Rogers. I wake up to KZLA, 93.9.”

“I like Power 106, or KIIS,” Dan said.

Elena persisted. “I like Elvis Presley. And I like to dance to rock ‘n’ roll. My husband is a good dancer.”

“Was,” he said, tapping his burgeoning belly.

Discussion turned toward Presley’s ignominious decline. “We can forgive the vices of great artists,” Elena said.

“I can’t,” Dan said. “It’s not right. Drugs are bad for the body. You die faster.”

“It’s a bad example,” said Ruben.

“I speak only of the great artist,” Elena said.

“You can forgive Elvis but not me? “ Ruben asked.

“If we make a study of all great artists, they die before they get old,” Elena said. “Like Mozart. Or Michael Imenescu, the Romanian poet. He was like Baudelaire, or Byron.”

The topic shifted to the impressions they had of the United States before arriving. “We visited a lot of countries,” Ruben said. “People are subjective, not objective. One people say one thing, another another. In Greece we were told America was a dirty place. We were made a little afraid about guns. In Romania, 40 years after the war, some old people are still waiting for America to come.”

“Don’t say that!” Elena warned.

“Everybody knows America is the land of opportunity,” Dan said.

“When I was little, in Romania there were dry years,” Elena said. “There was no food. Then America sent a lot of food. I ate American chocolate and corn. I think we got a wrong image because we saw a lot of American police movies. But here, I haven’t heard one shot or seen one drug addict. I can walk the street and nobody says anything.”

“There’s nobody in the street walking,” Ruben said wrily. “All people are driving.”

Ruben looks at the American free press with pleasant surprise. “In this country, with the newspapers, nobody can hide anything. In other countries, nobody can say anything.” As for the fallout from the sexual revolution of the ‘60s, he said, “There’s more pornography in Europe. Here at least you don’t see Playboy or Penthouse in the street, and in the advertisements, at least people keep their clothes on.”

“Sometimes my classmates call me ‘commie’ to make me mad,” Dan said with an embarrassed smile. “But my teacher complimented me for being here.” He looked pensive for a moment. The American experience was coming at him from several angles.

One afternoon Ruben padded out in stocking feet and Elena sent him to their bedroom to put on his shoes. “It’s not proper,” she said.

While he was gone she said, “In Los Angeles I am impressed by all the lights at night. Much much light. Much color. And I am impressed by the quiet. For us, this is a society without stress. Or stress of a different kind. Here, it’s making money. I watch television for entertainment. It’s interesting to hear Oprah Winfrey discuss social problems.”

Ruben returned and pulled up one of the dining room chairs. “Too much violence,” he said.

“We don’t see,” Dan said. “But it’s there. Crime is everywhere. It’s a government problem. In class they ask, ‘Why isn’t crime declining?’ The teacher said that the school, parents, courts, police aren’t tough enough. I look at my classmates. The parents let them go out every night, drink. They don’t care if they get good grades.

“School was hard for me at first because I couldn’t understand the language, the slang. I had a really bad time. I understood the words, but not the ideas.

“Dumas is my favorite writer. I’m shocked that Americans don’t read. They don’t have the basic knowledge they should have. The teacher asked kids, ‘Where’s Beirut?’ Some said, ‘Northern Ireland.’ They think Marx is one of the Marx brothers. We watch ’60 Minutes’ each week. Or ‘20/20,’ and do a magazine report. He’s a very good teacher.”

“We had ‘Dallas’ in Romania,” Elena said. “We don’t watch it here. It’s syrup.”

Dan mentioned how much he enjoyed the movie “Soul Man,” which led to the topic of race. “Most of the criminals are black, right?” he said. “Sixty, 70%. The fact that people are prejudiced makes them like that.”

Elena exploded. “How can you say that!”

Their rising voices accelerated into heated Romanian and lowered back into English. “I didn’t teach my son yellow, red or white!”

“I’m not saying I’m prejudiced,” Dan protested, his face darkening with anger and indignation over being misunderstood. He was trying to describe the double helix of misperception and emnity, where each feeds the other. “Because of that statistic, people resent blacks. But in L.A. because of all the immigration, I don’t think people are as prejudiced.”

Ruben defused the situation by changing the subject to local residential architecture and interior appointments. He was surprised to see buildings built so low (he hadn’t yet seen Los Angeles’ downtown condos or the high-rise apartment buildings in the west Wilshire District) and didn’t at first approve of wall-to-wall carpeting (“Too hot”).

“The rent is very expensive,” he said. “When I make the check, my heart speeds up. But the food is cheap.”

Once again the subject of sexual imagery in the media came up, centering on the mounting news alarms about AIDS. “I think homosexuals should be outlawed by law,” Ruben said. “They’ll have time to think about it in jail.”

“No they won’t,” said Dan. “They’ll have time to do it in jail.” He was rounding back into form.

“Can’t they put them alone?” Ruben asked.

“Don’t you hear of prison overpopulation?” Dan replied. “Since I study sociology, I learn a lot about jail.”

“They can approach children,” Ruben said. “This is bad. In Europe, the sexual freedom leads to big problems. Women dressing as men.”

Dan will enter his freshman year at UCLA next semester. “Be careful,” Ruben warned him. “Don’t go with men. Or try drugs. If you have trouble, come home. Don’t go to police. They can’t prove anything.”

Earlier in the afternoon, Ruben had asked why soccer, the most popular sport in the world outside of the United States, was so lightly regarded here. Later, walking his visitor to a waiting car, he said, “I think I know. Football, basketball, baseball, boxing--they all have intervals, no? Soccer is continuous. Forty-five minutes a half. There’s no place to put the TV commercial.”

His small triumphal smile was that of a man who discovers that he’s onto something.