Americans Trace E. Europe Roots via Business Route : Capitalism: Emigres and offspring back ventures in the region. They see opportunities around every corner.

It’s not that the Poles had forgotten how to make kielbasa. They were just making it inefficiently, as one would expect in state-run sausage factories, says 69-year-old Jacob Sobieraj.

So the American-born Sobieraj, steeped in the heritage of his parents’ homeland, went into the slaughterhouse and hot dog-making businesses with a cousin and friends in the Polish city of Wloclawek.

Today, after a $52,000 investment in a modern German sausage-making machine, Sobieraj declares with satisfaction that their operation is beating the government plants on price and quality. Employment has doubled to keep up with demand.

Farmers from throughout the region line up at the slaughterhouse door, eager to sell their animals to Sobieraj because he pays more than the government. So he gets the best animals. He pays his workers more, too. Yet his prices, he says, are 10% to 15% lower.

“Almost instantly we were too small,” Sobieraj says. “Now we’re starting to get competition. But that is the mother of invention.”

This, obviously, is the right man in the right place--a capitalist at the intersection of free enterprise and Eastern European history. And there are a lot more like him.

A Polish-speaking attorney and businessman with a U.S. flag in the window of his modest storefront office in Detroit, Sobieraj is part of an uncounted horde of American entrepreneurs--some emigres, some of East European stock, some not--who have swept into Eastern Europe since communism’s demise.

Foreigners, the vast majority of them small operators like Sobieraj, have entered into perhaps 15,000 commercial ventures in Eastern Europe in the last few years, according to figures from embassies and other government offices.

That is too few to suit the leaders of the new democracies. And for every success, there seems to be a failure. But the entrepreneurs see opportunities around every corner.

And to hear them tell it, they are transplanting the sort of instincts the region needs to create a market economy.

A different breed from the executives of big multinational corporations who are wined and dined by prime ministers, many are inveterate deal-makers who boast that they know how to get things done--a nearly extinct art in places such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania.

“There are no entrepreneurs like myself, no little guys who facilitate,” says David H. Lucas, a housing developer and self-described “Reagan soldier” from Charleston, S.C. “The Poles are perfectly capable of building housing for themselves, but they don’t have the capability to get small things done.”

Lucas apparently does. Last month, he persuaded the town council of Valeechka to contribute land to a joint venture to build 220 housing units. To get around the inconvenient lack of a mortgage system in Poland, the $25,000 to $35,000 houses will be pre-sold to the ample number of local residents with enough money in their mattresses to pay cash.

The money will go into a local bank escrow account and be drawn down as needed to finance the construction, described as a blend of American techniques and Polish materials. The houses will go up in 10 months rather than the three or four years it took in the days of communism when, Lucas says, “time was not money.”

Fifteen percent of the profits will go to the city. Lucas figures eventually to make a profit of $3,500 to $5,000 per unit.

“That’s not a lot, but the market is so deep,” he enthuses. “You’ve got 10 years of full-steam, hell-bent-for-leather construction before you start to make a dent in their housing shortage.”

Beyond such know-how, Americans bring outside funds that enable local start-ups to avoid domestic interest rates of 35% or higher. Sobieraj, in addition to his sausage operations, has opened a department store, lined up U.S. investors for a mega-supermarket and loaned $10,000 to another of his many Polish cousins to open a leather goods shop.

“If it weren’t for me to infuse the money, it would be very difficult,” he says.

Family and history, tragedy and reunion often run through these stories, belying an all-business manner cultivated by many emigres who have returned to invest in their homelands.

Thomas S. Scharf, a Jew, fled Poland with his family at age 10 when Hitler invaded. Of the 125 relatives they left behind, three survived. Today, Scharf is president of a housing construction and management firm in New York City and has returned to build a factory in Torun that will make prefabricated housing.

“I don’t think it was idealism. It was purely business,” Scharf says of the venture in his homeland. But there seems more to it than that. “When I left, I was a boy of 10 who was spat upon. When I returned, I received respect.”

Returning sons and daughters voice the same frustrations as other Westerners at the haplessness, deterioration and dispiritedness they encounter. And then they rub their hands at the potential.

“I underestimated what 40 years can do to attitudes,” says George Varga, a General Electric executive recently assigned to run GE’s new Budapest venture.

Varga left Hungary as a young man after the failed 1956 revolution. His return has reunited him with his two brothers, two sisters and 78-year-old mother.

“It made robots out of people. But it still pays for investors to come here,” Varga says. “If I had a lot of money, I would come in here and set up services. There is not a decent dry cleaner in the whole city. Our company has to send its cars to Vienna for service. It’s easier to buy a cow than two pounds of veal. We need a decent supermarket chain, department stores.”

But pitfalls are everywhere, and ethnic or family ties hardly guarantee success.

When businessman Michael Sumichrast of Washington, D.C., returned to his native Czechoslovakia in 1990 after 42 years away, he was greeted as a savior with deep pockets. He and his son and partner, Martin, entertained some 600 potential deals. But nearly all, they say, have stalled or fallen through.

“At first, you’re like a blindfolded dog in a butcher shop,” says Martin Sumichrast. “So your instinct is to grab everything. But you can’t do that. Of the 50 deals you get, 49 are awful. You start down this tunnel with no light at the end. And we know everybody there is to know.”

The Sumichrasts say they are owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees on unrequited deals. They blame recalcitrant bureaucrats for undermining the nation’s reform-minded leaders by demanding bribes or otherwise hamstringing foreign investors.

“It was emotional at first,” Michael Sumichrast says of his return to Czechoslovakia. “Now it’s strictly business.”

If the snags are incredibly varied, so are the opportunities.

Ben Chartier of San Bernardino, Calif., is stepping in where the KGB left off. His small engineering firm, Systems & Logistics Corp., has won a multimillion-dollar contract to install security systems in 11 museums in Krakow.

The withdrawal of the Soviet KGB left public buildings in the old East Bloc nations without routine security or with 1950s vintage mechanical systems, says Chartier. Last month, he held a security seminar in Krakow that has already led to two more overtures.

Times staff writers Joel Havemann in Warsaw and Amy Harmon in Detroit contributed to this story.