Assimilating an American Tradition : The immigrants: Thanksgiving takes some getting used to for people from other countries, many of whom identify with its meaning but find that pumpkin pie just can’t replace favorites such as ‘seaweed Jell-O.’

It’s part of our heritage, part of our tradition, that we Americans all came from somewhere else. For most of us, the immigrant was a parent, or a grandparent or a long-ago forebear.

American traditions were adopted without too much thought. If our parents served up turkey and pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving--the holiday in remembrance of an earlier generation of new, grateful immigrants--that is what we now give our own children.

At what point, though, do the traditions of a new country become one’s own? Is it a process that takes generations, or can it occur much more quickly? And what is it that would make American customs meaningful--or not?

To find out, we talked with recent and longtime immigrants to Ventura County about their Thanksgiving experiences.

Still Homesick

German Ibarra may not be able to express himself as eloquently as he would like, but he’s willing to field any question you throw at him.

Well, almost any question.

“Please, only not to talk about chilorio ,” he said in broken English, referring to a spicy chopped steak mixture that his mother makes back home. “It makes me miss it so much to talk of it. It is really too difficult.”

Ibarra’s occasional bouts of homesickness aren’t hard to understand. The 22-year-old from Mexico City arrived in Simi Valley barely four months ago. Getting used to all the changes, he said, is not always easy.

It helps that he knows why he is here. It is not to escape a life of poverty, he said, or because there was nothing left for him at home. Nothing like that.

“I want to study communications. I want to be--how do you say it?--a movie director here,” he said. “The better schools are here, so I come.”

But he has no illusions about the ease of accomplishing his dream. First, he said, there is plenty to learn about “this very big country where there is so much happening always and everyone is talking so fast.”

To learn English as quickly as possible so he can enroll in college courses, Ibarra studies English eight hours a day with about 70 other immigrants in a packed Simi Valley Adult School classroom. The students work at different levels, with newcomers such as Ibarra often seated next to veterans who are trying to smooth their delivery, increase their vocabulary or polish their skills.

“We have a veritable United Nations. There are more than 20 countries represented here,” said Millie Hallack, who teaches the class. “They come from Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, Armenia, Afghanistan, you name it.”

English isn’t the only thing that stands between Ibarra and the culture of the new country he has chosen as his home. There also are traditions--such as the Thanksgiving holiday Hallack recently discussed with the class--that he wants to know more about.

“I need to know this, too,” he said. “I look and hear them, and I want to have them also as mine.”

Ibarra, who lives with an uncle who came from Mexico several years ago, has learned a little bit about the Thanksgiving holiday, “but I don’t know what you eat. My uncle tells me there is a special dinner and a little party. I am looking forward to this.”

From its name, he said he thinks the purpose of the day concerns gratitude “for some things God gives us--for life, for happy family and freedom.”

And already, he said, there are things for which he is grateful.

“I miss my family very much, but in Mexico there is very much people everywhere you are, in the market and the stores, everywhere. But in Simi Valley, you go to the street and you see. . . . “

His voice trails off and his hands wave excitedly in the air. “You see no people here!” he said, his voice rising. “It is wonderful. I like this country already.”

In the Land of Plenty

Each year for 15 years, Yelena Rynsky’s parents had asked to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union and emigrate to America. And each year for 15 years, they had been told no.

Then, in June of last year, the Soviet door finally opened.

“Members of the Beth Torah temple here in Ventura helped us very much,” said Yelena, 28. “They still help us, but it also is very hard. We are starting over again.”

Yelena, her 5-year-old son, Peter, and her parents, Edward and Natalie Rynsky, knew virtually no English when they first arrived. But they still remember the warm reception they received from temple members and the way friends stood by while the Rynskys soaked up the incredible differences they were seeing for the first time.

“You really cannot imagine what life is like in the Soviet Union,” Natalie said while sitting at the small kitchen table of the sparsely decorated, two-bedroom apartment the family shares in Ventura. “You wait in long lines all day for everything--for bread, for milk, for meat--and when you reach the front of the line, you are told there is nothing.

“I will never forget the first time I went into Vons,” she said. “I stood there for a long time and just smelled all the food.”

For Yelena, a professional musician who studied bass at the Moscow Conservatory, waiting in lines meant more than just waiting for food. “I was thinking I wanted to be something more, but all my life I had to stay in long lines. There was no time in Russia to be someone different.”

Ironically, although many struggling U.”. musicians are desperate to play professionally, Yelena, who works as a substitute with the Ventura County Symphony, wants to be a paralegal. She attends paralegal classes at Ventura College and Oxnard College.

And what, since her arrival, has she learned of American traditions? So far, she said, not very much. “Your Halloween, I do not understand it. People dress up as dead people, which is very strange.

“But my son did tell me about one of your traditions, your jog-a-thons,” she said. “That’s where someone runs around in circles 20 times and you give them money to do it.”

On Thanksgiving last year, she was invited to dinner with a family. “I think they are very rich, because they have lots and lots of food,” Yelena said. “There was a turkey, and everyone was eating so much and laughing.”

Did anyone explain to her the reason for the dinner, or tell her about the Pilgrims?

“Oh, yes! Now I remember! They came from Texas,” Yelena said. “Oh, maybe not. The Pilgrims. I did know the story, but a lot of things happens to me this year. Pilgrims is not so important.”

Natalie, whose husband has been unable to find work as a mechanical engineer in Ventura and lives during the week in Downey, seems to think otherwise. Leaning toward a visitor, she recited what she knew of the first Thanksgiving.

“These people came to America with nothing, but they were welcomed as friends by the people who were already here,” she said. “And as a symbol of this friendship, they planted seeds and reaped the harvest, and they eat together to thank God for everything they were given.

“I feel like these Pilgrims every day,” she said softly. “When we sit down for this dinner this year, I will feel this from the bottom of my heart.”

A Bird for the Children

Marry Akhundzada didn’t exactly come to America because it was the land of opportunity.

“A bomb drops on my house and kills my husband. I was very hurt,” said Akhundzada, 46, who arrived from Afghanistan with her 10 children in 1985. “We cannot stay there.”

Akhundzada, who now lives in Simi Valley, didn’t expect that things would go easily in America. But she also said she didn’t think things would be quite so hard after five years.

She said she lives on a meager welfare check, pays rent that is too high and has no job. And despite her efforts to learn English at daily classes, she finds the language particularly difficult.

“This bomb that drops, it hurt my head. America is problem. No job. No money. No husband. No clothes. No shopping.”

Akhundzada said she has had little opportunity to learn about American traditions because she has had virtually no close contact with American families. But she also said that customs of this country are not particularly important to her.

“I would go back to Afghanistan if fighting stops,” she said.

But her children, the youngest of whom is 8, have heard all about traditions such as trick-or-treating and Thanksgiving turkeys at school.

And the peer pressure, she said, has hit home.

“The children want the turkey. They say at everybody’s houses are turkeys. No want to be only ones with no turkey. I cook the turkey.”

But Akhundzada, a devout Muslim who still wears her native country’s flowing clothes and a dark shawl wrapped around her head, added that getting a bird her family can eat isn’t so easy.

“In my country, you special kill the bird. Only men kill the turkey. They must say ‘Allah’ when they cut the throat. If we not certain he said ‘Allah,’ we would not eat it.”

Luckily, Akhundzada said, her brother-in-law found a Muslim meat market in Los Angeles. So this year, she said, she will prepare the traditional American bird, but Afghan-style: stuffed with a mixture of onions, garlic, oil, red pepper and spices, and served with cabbage and potatoes.

“The children,” she said, nodding her head, “will like.”

Expressing Gratitude

My-Linh Le had never seen a turkey when she arrived from Vietnam 15 years ago, much less ever cooked one. But when a local charity organization saw the dilapidated, cramped house the Le family occupied in Moorpark and delivered a large bird to their doorstep, the mother of six felt compelled to give American cuisine a try.

“It maybe would have been good, except that we did not know you couldn’t leave the turkey out or it would spoil,” Le recalled of her first Thanksgiving. “All of us had to be rushed to the emergency hospital because we all got so sick.”

Luckily, she said, her culinary skills have improved. And so has her lifestyle. Today, Le is a social worker for the county and lives in a house she and her husband own in Simi Valley. Several of her children, now grown, have gone to college and become mechanical and electrical engineers. And just this year, she and her husband purchased “Tea Sympathy,” a Vietnamese/Chinese restaurant staffed entirely by family members.

In the first few years, Le said, Thanksgiving dinners were an American tradition that the family more or less went through the motions of observing. Now, she added, there is a certain gusto to their celebration. The family gathers “just like other American families” around the table, heaping their plates with traditional American fare such as turkey, mashed potatoes and salad.

Only the bird and dessert might give a hint of the cook’s origins. “We make the turkey with Vietnamese seasonings and fish sauce, and we still have never made pumpkin pie,” Le said. “We don’t like it. We like our seaweed Jell-O for dessert better.”

But the greatest change, Le said, has nothing to do with the menu.

“Thanksgiving has changed in meaning for us,” she said. “Americans sit down and thank God for their blessings. We sit down to eat and thank the Americans for ours.”

Le said her family’s gratitude today is as strong as her memory of the Army helicopter that lifted off, giving her the last vision of Saigon and everything she was leaving behind.

There was her husband of 12 years, a lieutenant in the French army, who was killed on her youngest daughter’s first birthday. There was the overnight poverty and years of barely being able to buy enough rice to feed her family.

But America, she said, seemed to hold promise from the start. In the Sacramento refugee camp where she and her family first lived, she met Khai Le, whom she had known years before in Saigon. Thirty days later, in a nearby Protestant church, My-Linh and Khai, both Buddhists, were married.

They moved to Southern California when Khai, a French teacher by trade, was offered a minimum-wage job at an egg farm in Moorpark.

Le, who cheerfully waitresses in her restaurant at night after putting in a full day as a social worker, acknowledged that hard work and a close-knit family has had a lot to do with the life her family has built. But she also hasn’t forgotten the many charity groups that helped her family in the first few years, when things weren’t quite so prosperous.

That is why, she said, her family has done something slightly different this year.

“Since we have the restaurant now, we went to senior citizen centers and invited them for free lunches the day before Thanksgiving,” she said. “Fifteen years ago, some of those people may have helped us. It is our way of giving back a little bit of what we have received.”

A Gourmet Affair

Hans and Toni Muhlinghaus would probably make just about any Thanksgiving hostess nervous.

It has to do with their taste buds, their highly educated taste buds, to be more exact.

Before coming to America in 1964, Hans, now 49, worked his way up to master-chef status in hotels and resorts in his native Germany as well as in Switzerland and England. At a hotel in Sussex, he met Toni, also from Germany, who was then the hotel’s assistant manager.

As with many German children whose concepts of America are limited to the hugely popular Western books by author Karl May, Hans grew up with a vivid picture of American life.

“When there was an opening with a hotel in Houston, I decided I wanted to go and see the prairie and the cowboys,” he said, seated at a table in the Old Vienna restaurant he and his wife now own in Ventura.

The seemingly endless days of Texas sunshine--incomprehensible to many Germans--gave Toni a glimpse at a new way of life. “There was just so much you could do, so much freedom,” she said. “That was the best thing.”

In retrospect, she said, Texas also gave her an introduction to American life on a somewhat larger-than-life scale. That was particularly evident on their first Thanksgiving.

“We didn’t really celebrate it because we were both working at the hotel and we did whatever they told us to do. But it was a very big thing,” she said. “Then again, everything in Texas is big.”

The holiday wasn’t altogether foreign to either of them. Although there is no particular day set aside in Germany, Hans said different cities pick their own day in November to celebrate an “Ernte Dankfest,” in which locals give thanks for the town’s harvest. The traditional meal on that day is roast goose, a dish the Muhlinghauses still serve at their restaurant.

In many ways, the Muhlinghauses’ first Thanksgiving is one that, with little variation, has been repeated annually for the last 25 years.

“We have always worked this day,” Hans said. “Since we never had the day at home, we have never really missed it.”

As has become their tradition over the years, Hans and Toni sit down to their own version of Thanksgiving dinner a few hours before guests arrive at the restaurant. Hans cooks a turkey, along with roast stuffed goose, Wienerschnitzel and sauerbraten. For dessert, it’s Apfelstrudel , Black Forest cake, hazelnut torte and cheesecake.

“Believe me,” Toni said, “a lot of people are very glad not to have pumpkin pie.”

The menu may not be traditional American cuisine, but that doesn’t mean the Muhlinghauses still hunger for Europe.

“With just our food, our strings are definitely still tied to the homeland,” he said, glancing at the Bavarian castle mural on the wall beside him. “But we are not the kind of immigrants who say they will go back home one day.

“We have made this our home now,” he said. “We will definitely stay.”