She Helps Soviet Emigres Say <i> Nyet </i> to Overeating

On a recent trip to a local Alpha Beta, 66-year-old Klara Leviant surveyed the dairy section with surprise. “You mean you can buy cottagecheese?” she marveled in her native Russian. “I’ve always made it!”

Leviant, who moved to the United States from the Ukraine about five months ago and now lives in West Hollywood, was one of several Soviet women taking a tour of the supermarket under the direction of Klava Cousin, a West Hollywood registered dietitian. It was a field trip of sorts, offered as part of the weekly nutrition classes that Cousin, herself a native of Moscow, conducts exclusively for Soviet Jewish emigres.

During the hour, Cousin, 34, led her charges up and down the aisles, showing them how to interpret product labels that can be confusing even to consumers with an excellent command of English, and making recommendations for low-fat and low-cholesterol foods.

Afterward, Leviant told Cousin that the market was “like a jungle.” She had never seen so much food in her entire life, she added--not even during 28 years working as a secretary to a Ukrainian inspector of foods and other products.

The excursion served to illustrate the twofold need that prompted Cousin to begin her classes several years ago. As a dietitian and native speaker of Russian, she was uniquely qualified to impart nutritional counsel to fellow Soviets, most of whom were referred by physicians because of such problems as obesity, hypertension and diabetes. Second, she could use the classes to provide an informal education about the American lifestyle, and to help the new immigrants adjust to their new land.

She draws her student-clients from the estimated 60,000 Soviet Jews who now make the Los Angeles area their home, with the largest concentrations found in Hollywood and West Hollywood. About 3,500 have arrived in the last two years, and 2,000 more are expected in 1991.

“Food isn’t just eating--it’s the culture,” Cousin said. “It’s how you adapt. If you don’t know what something is, you don’t touch it. The supermarket tour, for instance, goes beyond food--after they take it, there’s more understanding, they start speaking English more.”

Cousin, who came to the United States in 1975, married Los Angeles Philharmonic bass player Jack Cousin five years later and worked as an exercise instructor, hairdresser and cosmetologist before earning her degree in nutrition in 1985 from Cal State Los Angeles. At the Wednesday afternoon classes for the Soviet emigres, she draws on her own experiences.

“It took me so long before I started to work toward my degree because I had no guidance, no one to tell me what to do,” she recalled. “I had misconceptions about college--people said it was too much money. So now I tell my clients: Don’t wait, go to college or take other courses, learn. Don’t stay home with a Russian paper or radio. Go out, have activities, go to the senior citizens center. Integrate.”

In one recent class, conducted in a mixture of English and Russian, Cousin focused on the cereal food group. Another class concentrated on meats. She showed her students how to weigh and measure, cautioned them against misleading television commercials, and dispelled misconceptions, such as one woman’s belief that bathing twice daily would eliminate excess pounds.

Several clients have a common reason for attending: an almost immediate weight gain upon arriving from a country where food staples are hard to come by. “When I first came here, I gained 10 pounds because there were so many foods here, and I said, ‘I’d like this and this and this.’ When I’d go to the supermarket, I’d take everything,” recalled Marina Palov, 32, a now-svelte child psychologist from Leningrad who moved to Hollywood six months ago with her husband and daughter. Chemical engineer Adele Gordon, 65, joined the class because of her hypertension, but she experienced a similar weight gain when she left Moscow two years ago to live with her married son and his family in Los Angeles. “It was a very, very bad time in Moscow--there was no meat, cheese or sausage, and I’d stay in line for two hours for what food there was. I was amazed at the variety of foods here.” Her favorites? “Cereal with milk, turkey breast and ice cream.”

Cousin takes into account food’s strong psychological connotations when deciding upon each client’s diet. Of Palov, for instance, she said, “I wouldn’t put her on a liquid diet--she was deprived enough in Leningrad.” But she allowed 25-year-old Eren Ryaboy to take a medically supervised liquid supplement. Ryaboy, who has a word processing job in Los Angeles, endured classmates’ teasing and other feelings of displacement when she first moved to the United States from Kiev as an 11-year-old. She has since become an American citizen and considers herself thoroughly adjusted to this country’s big-city life.

Even so, Ryaboy, like most of her more recently arrived classmates, socializes mainly with fellow Soviets. “My husband and I are still connected to the Old Country,” she said.

“Maybe it’s unfair to say this,” she observed, “but the ones who came here a long time ago, we feel we are on a higher level than the people who have just come--we have houses and careers. The new ones look at us like we’re total jerks--they think it’s harder for them to adjust than it was for us, but it isn’t. They think that money in America falls from the sky, that we didn’t have to work hard for it. Even within families, people don’t understand each other about this.”

An informal poll among the class as to the highs and lows of life in Los Angeles, Soviet-style, revealed a consensus: Like most Angelenos, they all dislike the smog and crime, but they love the temperate climate and the lack of discrimination against Jews.

Even those recently arrived have lost no time picking up some American habits. Luba Popok, fresh from the Ukraine and attending her first nutrition class, had earlier shyly declined an interview because, she said, she did not speak English. But when a question about the best thing about L.A. was directed to the room at large--in English--Popok was the first to reply--also in English:

“Television,” she said.