Soviet Emigres : Armenians Find Refuge in Hollywood

The Sassoon Club is a simple place, full of smoke and insults and the wasted hours of men.

In a corner of Hollywood, tucked away from the splendor and decadence, it sits like a fortress sheltering Soviet Armenian emigres against time.

Young men who arrived in America in their mid 20s--”too late for school, too early for Social Security”--sip Turkish coffee from demitasse cups and lament their idleness. Old men in camel-haired fedoras and woolen berets hover over backgammon boards and coax double sixes out of the roll of dice.

‘My Homeland’

Manuel Simonian, 31, comes to the storefront on Santa Monica Boulevard near Vermont every Monday and Tuesday, his days off from his job as a restaurant manager. Here, he says, he can keep the outside world at bay, read an Armenian newspaper, listen to Armenian folk songs and “taste the words of my homeland.”

“I left my father, mother, brothers and sisters back in Armenia. I have no family. This is my family,” he says.

“When I sit here, this is like Armenia. When I walk out that door--the outside--I’m in America. That is what I need from this place. I don’t want to forget Armenia.”

Onto a 4-square-mile chunk of east Hollywood, in the shadow of movie studios and discount sex shops, emigres from Soviet Armenia have grafted a piece of their homeland.

Bordered by the Hollywood Freeway on the west, Vermont Avenue on the east, Los Feliz Boulevard on the north and Melrose Avenue on the south, the community is the largest enclave of Soviet Armenian refugees in the world--about 40,000 who arrived chiefly in two waves, one in the 1970s and a second that began last October and has yet to peak.

This year alone, according to U.S. State Department and local resettlement officials, more than 12,000 Soviet Armenians--entire families of grandparents, parents and children--will enter the United States. As many as 10,000 of them are expected to make their home in Hollywood.

“They keep coming, but there’s very little affordable housing available,” said Roseann Emerzian Saliba, executive director of the Armenian Evangelical Social Service Center in Hollywood. “It’s seven and eight people in a one-bedroom apartment. They’re sleeping on mattresses and the kitchen floor.”

A Christian people whose homeland once stretched across eastern Turkey, the Armenians have grown accustomed to a wandering life style. A genocide in Turkey in 1915 killed two-thirds of the Armenian race, scattering survivors throughout the world.

In 1916 and 1917, thousands of Armenian refugees immigrated to the United States, building communities in Fresno, Boston and Detroit. Others exiled throughout the Middle East repatriated to a small portion of Armenia that the Soviet Union had taken over in 1920.

Peculiar Exodus

The exodus today is a peculiar one, the result of a new openness in Soviet policy that has eased emigration restrictions while bringing unprecedented freedoms to Armenia and other Soviet republics. In recent months, the Armenians have repeatedly tested the bounds of those freedoms, staging the largest demonstrations in Soviet history in an unsuccessful bid to retrieve historic lands in neighboring Azerbaijan.

It is peculiar too because they have been resettled into the United States as political refugees but retain an abiding love for their country and insist that the decision to leave had less to do with politics than with a desire to join relatives here.

For refugees such as 85-year-old Azniv Fodulyan, the decision is made more painful by the knowledge that Soviet Armenia is all that remains of the historic homeland that once took in Mt. Ararat, where Noah’s ark is said to have rested.

“For the Armenians, it has always been this way,” said Fodulyan, a survivor of the genocide. (Sunday marked the 73rd anniversary of the beginning of the massacres).

She lived in Syria and Lebanon before responding in 1946 to Joseph Stalin’s invitation for Armenians to “return” to Soviet Armenia. The move to America with her son’s family is the fourth time she has been uprooted.

“Everywhere we go, we build a house and then we move away. This head has seen many things. We have suffered always.”

Hollywood is so big and amorphous that the casual observer can easily miss the community’s transformation. Only a few commercial signs have Armenian letters.

At Ron’s Market, a converted Von’s, huge blocks of pistachio halvah compete with whole dried veal tongues that hang from poles like so many elf shoes. Hye Plaza--one of half a dozen Armenian-owned mini-malls--features a Hye Optic, Hye Meats and a Hye Art--all short for “Hyeastan,” which means “Armenia.”

Sandwiched between the commercial strips are neighborhoods of modest homes and multistory apartments made up almost entirely of Armenian emigres. Much of Armenian life is played out on the front porch, a kind of combination kitchen/living room without walls.

An Armenian custom of eating meals and desserts in full public view was one of the reasons Central Valley communities such as Fresno adopted restrictive covenants in the 1930s and ‘40s prohibiting Armenians from living in exclusive areas of town.

In Hollywood--where the surrounding community is not Anglo but Guatemalan, Salvadoran and Thai--no one seems to mind. In fact, much of the commerce is also brought right to the front porch, in the tradition of the booming black markets of Armenia. Onik’s Produce does a brisk business from vans stocked with tomatoes, eggplants and peppers. Kevork sells slippers from the back of his station wagon.

“It’s crazy I think,” said Sonya Pogosyan, an Armenian emigre from Soviet Georgia, surveying the scene outside her Fotomat booth on Sunset Boulevard. “Sometimes I think I’m living in Yerevan (capital of Soviet Armenia), not Hollywood. Where are all the Americans?”

Manuel Simonian says his people have simply added their culture to the ethnic melange that is Los Angeles.

“The Chinese have their Chinatown and the Japanese their Little Tokyo,” he said. “This place is my ‘Little Armenia.’ ”

The emigres come with little capital and must survive, at least initially, on welfare. As a result, most of the businesses are owned by Armenians from Lebanon, Iran, Romania and Bulgaria. Over the last decade, according to Armenian leaders, the number of Armenian-owned businesses in east Hollywood has tripled to more than 250.

They are mom-and-pop operations, using the same names and serving the same fare as they did in Beirut or Bucharest. Few are large enough to employ workers outside the family. Those that are tend not to hire Soviet Armenians because of cultural tensions that often divide Armenians who lived in the Mideast from those who grew up under communism.

Business Base

“With all the recent arrivals, the (small) businesses aren’t enough to keep the community economically sound,” said Berdj Karapetian, a Hollywood resident and member of the Armenian National Committee. “We need to work on building up the business base in Hollywood.”

The paucity of jobs in the Armenian community coupled with their poor grasp of English has propelled many desperate refugees into an underground economy where they are working as baby-sitters and seamstresses for cash wages of $1.50 to $2 an hour.

Among the workers are welfare recipients who complain that their grants barely cover living expenses and $500-a-month rents. Armenian leaders say part of the welfare fraud problem stems from cultural misunderstanding.

“There is not a word in Armenian for ‘welfare,’ ” Saliba said. “What they say in Armenian is ‘tuition’ and they believe everyone is entitled to it.”

English Classes

Armenian community groups are hoping that once the refugees master English they can escape the exploitation and begin a climb up the economic ladder. At the Evangelical social service center, about 300 recent arrivals are taking English-as-a-second language classes while several hundred more await slots.

The 12 middle-age men and women in one classroom included an artist, a haberdasher, a cook, a beautician, a lathe operator, a drummer and a French horn player. All were born in Arab countries and repatriated as children to Soviet Armenia in the late 1940s. All waited eight to 10 years for Soviet officials to grant an exit permit. None said they were drawn to America because of its freedoms.

“We were scared there and we are scared here,” one woman said.

Suren Bursalyan, editor of Paros, a Soviet Armenian biweekly published in Hollywood, said many emigres become disillusioned over what they find in America. He knows of several who have returned to Armenia only to come back and return again.

“The dream is always different from the reality,” he said. “Almost all of them have been here as tourists first. But they saw only the good parts of the country. When you live here day in and day out, you see the drug addicts, the homeless, the crime. They don’t feel at home in either place.”

Fear and Ambition

The Armenian presence in East Hollywood, like most immigrant communities in Los Angeles, yields the full range of fear and ambition--from old men fighting old country wars to children seeking to shed the lost ways and start anew.

Among the new arrivals are a number of professionals--engineers and computer technicians in Armenia who now work in Hollywood as gas station attendants and security guards. Some such as Vagharshag Pilosyan, 39, a respected heart surgeon in Yerevan, refuse to give up their dream.

Since arriving in the United States a year and a half ago, Pilosyan has spent 13 hours of nearly every day learning English and studying to become licensed as a doctor in this country.

It is a long road for the surgeon who worked on a team that was among the first to implant pacemakers into Soviet patients. His privileged life has been replaced by a small, two-bedroom apartment he shares with his wife and four children and by the welfare check he receives every month.

$1,200 Course

He spends most of his day at the Stanley Kaplan Educational Center in Encino, where he listens to tapes and takes practice exams. The course, which runs a minimum of one year, costs $1,200. Seven physicians who worked with Piloysan in Yerevan and who now live in the United States have chipped in to cover the expense.

“It is a shame to continue to take welfare. But I have to appreciate that with it my children won’t go hungry,” he says. “I cannot give up. I have to get back what I have lost. I have to do it for myself.”

For Shagen Arutyunyan, 51, a famous Soviet dissident who spent eight years in a prison camp for advocating Armenian independence, life has changed very little since he arrived in Hollywood in 1985.

The one-bedroom apartment where he lives with his wife and two sons is cluttered with the instruments of protest: posters, political leaflets, written appeals to congressmen and senators and copies of the Soviet newspaper Isvestia and Russian and Jewish-Russian newspapers.

New Monthly Newspaper

Three months ago, Arutyunyan, his wife, Asia, and four fellow dissidents founded “Yerkoonk” or “Birthpains”--a monthly newspaper that they write, edit and paste up in the living room of Arutyunyan’s apartment.

“This is our office, our club and Asia puts up with all of the (cigarette) smoke,” laughs Grigor Egian, a former Armenian monk who was jailed for his activism in 1963. He has lived in Hollywood since 1976 and teaches English to refugees. “Our wives are always complaining that we are wasting our time, that we are not making money with all of this. Asia, though, has sacrificed herself for the cause.”

Besides cooking meals and preparing endless cups of coffee, Asia Arutyunyan proofreads every story that appears in the 16-page paper.

Armenia Viewpoint

“The Armenian papers in America are all expressing the view of official Soviet Armenia,” she said. “We want to express the views of the population of Armenia.”

The paper is bitterly anti-Soviet, dismissing much of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policies as a ruse. And it is equally critical of Armenian-Americans who worry from a distance that the continuing exodus is weakening Soviet Armenia.

“None of us wanted to leave our homeland. We put our lives on the line and we suffered as a result,” Egian said. “Those who have been sitting on the sidelines don’t have the moral right to call us traitors and themselves patriots.”

Unlike the elders who can hide behind the wall of an insular ethnic community, the children are being thrust into the mainstream almost immediately. Overcrowding at Hollywood-area schools has been so severe during the last eight years that hundreds of students--including recent arrivals from Soviet Armenia--are being bused to North Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.

‘Fear in My Heart’

Parents accompanying their children to a bus stop outside Grant Elementary School each morning at 7 say they are confused. “They come, they go, I don’t know where,” said one Armenian mother who admonished her twins to sit in the front of the bus, “where it is safe. . . . There’s fear in my heart.”

At Hollywood High School, where more than 100 Soviet Armenian students have enrolled since October, Armenian girls arrive at school with freshly scrubbed faces only to run into the bathroom and frantically put on red lipstick, dark eyeliner and large earrings before the bell for first period rings.

The teen-agers complain that their parents are too strict and spend all of their free time listening to Armenian music or reading Armenian newspapers.

“They hate it when I go to American places because they think it’s too wild and they’re afraid,” said Roxanne Xhamkochyan, 17, a 10th-grader at Hollywood High. “They don’t even trust other Armenians.”

Strict Upbringing

Teachers and administrators say the strict upbringing and solid education in Soviet Armenia have helped produce several top students. Of the 10 honor students listed in a hallway showcase at Hollywood High recently, six were Armenian.

“The first year was kind of scary, but now I just love it here,” said Anna Darbinyan, a 17-year-old senior who came from Soviet Armenia in 1983. She is editor of the school newspaper, an A student and active in student government. “When I came, I couldn’t make up sentences. That made me shy. . . . But now it’s different.”

Many parents express concern that their children will slowly lose their Armenian language and heritage--a fear that has pushed up enrollment at two private Armenian schools in Hollywood.

Suren Bursalyan pays $1,600 a year to send his 9-year-old daughter to the Arshag Dickranian grammar school and high school in Hollywood.

“I want her to have Armenian culture, to stay Armenian as long as possible, and I am paying for that,” he said.

But he acknowledged the ambivalence, the pain of straddling two worlds and feeling a part of neither.

“I have been here eight years, but I am still sad. I have this homesickness that never leaves me. It’s a feeling, a great feeling. I want to miss. I don’t want to stop missing because it is the one thing that keeps me Armenian.”