Giving Up On America

Last year, Scott Spolin got the opportunity to repay an old debt. The chance came in the slim, 25-year-old form of Valery Itzkevitch, who walked into Spolin’s law office one sunny afternoon. What Spolin saw in the young man from Eastern Europe was a chance to share his own family’s immigrant success story.

The two men sat together in Spolin’s spare office--the guest neat and formal, with a black suit and elegant, creaky English; the host compact, casual and blunt. The older man was struck by Itzkevitch’s story: He was a Jew from Riga, the capital of Latvia, a lawyer who wanted to learn American law, and a father who wanted to bring his wife and son to America.

Spolin, 56, is a partner in the small, prosperous business law practice of Spolin, Silverman, Cohen & Bartlett. He was born in Los Angeles, and his parents were born in Chicago. His favorite grandfather was Morris Spolin, a Jewish sheet-metal worker who came to Chicago from what is now Latvia in 1908. The Spolin family’s trek from East to West and from working class to professional is a familiar one to American Jews. “Maybe this kid’s grandparents lived next door to my grandparents’ parents,” Spolin marveled to himself.

Half an hour into their conversation, he offered Itzkevitch a job. For Spolin, it was a privilege. Ninety years after his Latvian grandfather struggled in a new land, the grandson had a chance to ameliorate the suffering of another immigrant family from Latvia. “It’s the same country, it’s the same immigration, it’s the same America,” Spolin said to himself.

More than 3 million Jews have come to the United States in the last two centuries. They arrived in waves, the most recent being the flood of Soviet Jews that started as a trickle in the 1960s. More than 45,000 Soviet Jews came to America in 1992 alone, according to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Since the early ‘70s, about 120,000 Soviet Jews came to Southern California, many to West Hollywood. But the wave was cut short in the ‘90s as the former Soviet Union turned into a set of more or less democratic societies, and American immigration authorities no longer assumed that Jews automatically met the asylum criterion of a “well-founded fear of persecution.”

“In the days of the communists, it was hard to get out but easy to get refugee status,” says Jonathan D. Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “After the Communists fell, it was easier to get out but harder to get refugee status.”

All Morris Spolin had needed to come to America was a one-way ticket and a strong back. Soviet-era refugees needed only the will to start from scratch. But if Valery Itzkevitch wanted to come to America, he had to find a job and keep it. His future would depend on fulfilling Scott Spolin’s expectations.

I met Valery Itzkevitch the day he formed his secret plan to come to America. We were both living in Riga, and on that evening in February 2000, we had each driven out to a dreary suburb to attend the birthday party of a prosperous young Russian-Jewish banker. About 20 boisterous young men and mostly silent young women toasted the guest of honor around a long table laid with cold meat and syrupy cranberry vodka.

The couple across the table from me seemed different from their friends. Itzkevitch was slightly built and reserved. His wife, Maya, looked and acted as if she came from a sunnier place; she had olive skin, glittering dark eyes and a loud, biting sense of humor.

Halfway through dinner, Itzkevitch told me he had done something whimsical: British Airways was offering tickets from Riga to Los Angeles for just $299, and he had bought one for a two-week vacation. What Itzkevitch didn’t tell me, or his friends, or even his wife that evening, was that he saw the trip to America as a chance to escape.

At first glance, the 25-year-old lawyer seemed an unlikely emigre. He wasn’t a beleaguered shtetl Jew who had to settle for manual labor, like Spolin’s grandfather. His story hardly matched the pathos of famous tales of the Jewish emigre, an archetype that reached its peak in Abraham Cahan’s 1917 novel “The Rise of David Levinsky,” before its reduction to an animated mouse in Steven Spielberg’s “An American Tail.” In Cahan’s classic book, the hero leaves Russia broke and hungry. His mother has just been killed in a pogrom. He arrives speaking only Yiddish, and rises from street peddler to textile magnate.

Itzkevitch had never seen “An American Tail” or read anything from that particularly American genre, the immigration narrative. He was trying to change his life, and he knew only dimly that he was stepping into the treacherous waters of a Great American Story. In contrast to Spolin’s ancestors, and most immigrants of the 40-year Great Wave, which started in the 1880s, Itzkevitch was already materially comfortable, professionally successful, proficient in English. To his peers in Latvia, in fact, he seemed a rising star, a young man who had made all the right choices since his generation’s defining moment, the fall of the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union began to totter, Russian speakers in Latvia, including most of the country’s Jews, faced a difficult decision. As anti-Soviet as many were, they still feared the rising tide of ethnic Latvian nationalism that was bound up in the country’s independence movement. Some chose to stand with the losing Soviet side, while others worked to learn the Latvian language and integrate themselves into the new nation. Itzkevitch learned Latvian. He was a talented piano player, but he also realized that there would be little place for musicians in the tough new economy. He dropped out of the conservatory and switched to law school.

By the beginning of 2000, he had risen to be head of the legal department in the leasing arm of the Latvian branch of the Baltics’ largest financial group. He had married Maya Fisherman, a pianist who worked processing the insurance claims of Holocaust survivors. They were raising a 2-year-old son, Phillip.

Scott Spolin heard some of this from Itzkevitch in their first meeting. But Spolin was more impressed by Itzkevitch’s reasons for leaving than for staying. Those reasons were disturbingly familiar to Spolin, the descendant of Jewish immigrants: Itzkevitch was a Jew, and his wife and child were Jewish. At work, he heard the word “yid” tossed around by colleagues, who knew well that he was the only Jew in the company. Though he tried to ignore it, one co-worker remembers him returning from a meeting stunned by an anti-Semitic remark. “He said he forgot, but I think it hurt in his heart,” said Indra Lipnicka.

The private slurs were matched by occasional public images. A reminder of why Itzkevitch wanted to leave came in August 2000, a few months after he returned from America, when Kapitals, a glossy Latvian version of Forbes, featured on its cover a hook-nosed, black-hatted Jew clutching the globe between bejeweled claws. The headline: “Jews Rule the World.”

Itzkevitch and his wife worried most about their son. While Valery has pale skin, high cheekbones and straight hair from his Russian father, Phillip resembles Maya. He has curly brown hair and brown skin that turns chocolate when they vacation with Maya’s family in Israel. In Latvia, they are usually the darkest people in the room, and Valery winces when he sees passers-by pull their children away from Phillip or whisper “monkey.” “They treat us like zoo animals here,” Maya says.

And so Itzkevitch set off for America on March 25, 2000, with the vaguest of plans. He had searched the Internet for Los Angeles lawyers, at one point coming across Sara Caplan, a member of the O.J. Simpson defense team. He had quietly inquired after friends of friends. He left with a short list of prospects. But he had little hope of finding a job in two weeks; it was more a reconnaissance mission.

When Itzkevitch arrived, his problems multiplied. He was staying in Orange County with a former piano teacher, who had left Latvia earlier, and he was dependent on her to drive him to interviews. Housebound, he missed his meeting with Caplan. An acquaintance e-mailed him the name of another Los Angeles lawyer. She was retired, but she passed on the names of three more Los Angeles lawyers. He called two of them and one, Scott Spolin, returned his call.

Spolin’s simple willingness to meet in the middle of Itzkevitch’s first week came as a surprise. And his spontaneous generosity seemed too good to be true. Itzkevitch had already fallen in love with Los Angeles--with the unexpected “sense of freedom.” At first he tried to imagine an ulterior motive, and found none. “I didn’t expect such sincerity. I didn’t know that people like [Spolin] existed in America,” Itzkevitch said.

I assured him that such people do, indeed, exist. And I saw in him a way to tell the story of the Jewish immigrant experience: superficially modified by a century of technology, but basically unchanged. And--it goes without saying--inevitably successful.

Itzkevitch left for Latvia on april 8, and Spolin sponsored his application for an H-1B visa, a category reserved for workers with higher education, who routinely convert it after six years into permanent residency. Under the conditions of the visa, Spolin was also required to pay his new employee the “prevailing wage”--$55,000-- for the legal work he intended to assign him, along with some processing fees. Spolin paid the fees gladly, but as the arrival of his new employee approached, he found himself with a new concern. Sure, he had hired Itzkevitch for sentimental reasons, but the young man was “a trained lawyer and a smart cookie.” He didn’t consider him a charity case, and didn’t want his partners and employees to treat him like one. So Spolin didn’t tell anyone why he had hired a lawyer trained in Latvia, with no knowledge of American legal jargon and no experience in an American workplace. Spolin believed Itzkevitch would “hit the floor running” and didn’t worry too much about the details.

“This is how America is supposed to work,” he said.

Itzkevitch arrived in the United States for the second time Feb. 16, 2001, during an unexpectedly cold, damp spell. He found that his good job and high salary didn’t protect him from the loneliness of any immigrant. “I had never been so alone in my life,” he said at the time.

Itzkevitch took an airy two-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, but he didn’t feel at home with the Soviet Jewish refugees who populate the neighborhood. A young professional, he was more comfortable in the gay-oriented cafes that make up West Hollywood’s other face. He shopped at a Ralphs supermarket on Sunset and across the boulevard at a Russian-Jewish shop called Shalom. He prepared his apartment for Maya and Phillip’s arrival in May. He borrowed money from his former piano teacher’s husband to put down a deposit on a used Mitsubishi.

The trouble at work came first in the form of little slights. Itzkevitch’s salary was generous, but he wasn’t given health insurance like other employees. Everyone else parked in the basement of the Water Garden, but Itzkevitch had to leave his car every morning by the Santa Monica dump, a 10-minute walk away.

Benefits “were not part of the deal,” Spolin said.

Soon, Itzkevitch had a more pressing worry: He had nothing to do. On his first visit, he said, he had asked Spolin repeatedly if he could really find a place in the firm, and the American lawyer had told him not to worry. But once Itzkevitch was firmly planted in his shared, windowless white office, he often found himself idle. In Latvia, he had written contracts and negotiated deals. Now, he filed, made photocopies and studied American law. He typed a 14-page legal dictionary.

“The main thing is to become useful for Scott,” he wrote in an e-mail in early March. “I strive for it but I already see that it will take a long time.”

Within weeks of his new employee’s arrival, Spolin began to worry. Itzkevitch didn’t seem “plugged in” to the small, fast-moving office. He didn’t file as well as the file clerk, and didn’t copy as well as the secretary. He had to be taught how to use the legal databases. He was, Spolin worried, “tremendously unproductive.”

Spolin was eager to help Itzkevitch, but he wanted to help him work. Underemployed, Itzkevitch turned to studying, in the hope that he could pass the California bar examination in 2003.

“He got involved in some fantasy that he was going to get a law degree and his focus was there,” Spolin said. What Itzkevitch didn’t do was live up to Spolin’s ideal of the tough, hungry immigrant who fights to make a place for himself.

“I expected him to do what my grandparents did,” Spolin said. “I expected him to scrabble and scuffle and do what he needed to do.”

On May 18, Spolin called his newest employee into his office. Itzkevitch waited while his boss spoke on the phone; he was happy to have been summoned and hoped that Spolin would finally give him the kind of challenging assignment--writing contracts, for example--that he’d been waiting for. Instead, Spolin told him he had three months to find a new job. He offered the young lawyer his best wishes and a glowing recommendation. He said he thought Itzkevitch could find a place in another firm and succeed in American law.

Itzkevitch had been with Spolin, Silverman, Cohen & Bartlett for two months and two weeks. He was devastated. He was angry at Spolin, who, he said, had assured him repeatedly that there would be enough work for him. He regretted quitting his job in Riga. Maya had already quit her job and planned to join him in late May. Now her trip would be a long vacation.

Itzkevitch was required to leave or find a new sponsor. (He sent out more resumes but heard back from no one; head hunters told him they didn’t deal with foreign lawyers.) The Immigration and Naturalization Service rarely deports H-1B holders, but Itzkevitch wanted to toe the legal line; he didn’t want to hurt his chances of getting an American visa in the future. And so he and Maya had to leave the country, change his visa status or apply for asylum. Maya’s dark skin and work for Jewish organizations made her a good candidate.

Like Scott Spolin, i had a clear image of how immigrants are supposed to behave. I expected Itzkevitch to go to any lengths to stay in America, including the weeks, and potentially months, of uncertainty and unemployment that come with applying for asylum. But Itzkevitch didn’t know how the story was supposed to go; he had a family to support, and concrete choices to make. Maya was bored in Los Angeles, with little English, no friends and no driver’s license. Itzkevitch had an attractive job offer from Latvia’s biggest bank. Sitting on his West Hollywood balcony, looking down over Los Angeles, he said, “You see that I absolutely don’t want to go back.”

Then he gave up his lease, put his wife and son on a plane, and spent his last few days in America at Simona Shuel’s house in Woodland Hills, surrounded by what he could have had.

Shuel, 29, is also a Jew from Riga; her parents know Itzkevitch’s mother. But her family had gotten out while the getting was good, in 1991. A plain-spoken computer programmer with short blond hair, she personifies the immigrant success story. A decade ago, she was an asylum seeker, working at Astroburger in West Hollywood. Now she’s a citizen and vice president at Countrywide Home Loans, married, with a son and a Lexus. Her ranch house in the Valley is what Itzkevitch’s stuccoed apartment in West Hollywood wasn’t: solid.

Lounging by her pool on his last day in Los Angeles, Itzkevitch’s big eyes had a defeated look. He considered one last time tearing up his return ticket, attempting to follow the path Shuel’s family had a decade earlier and applying for asylum. But the risk was too great. There was the job in Riga. And what would Maya and Phillip live on while he waited for months for an answer from the INS?

“Where will I live?” he asked. “What will I do? And if I am denied, I will never be able to visit the U.S. again.” He paused. “It’s a risk. I don’t know what to do.”

In the end, neither the charms of Los Angeles nor the fears for his son’s future were enough to persuade Itzkevitch to drop everything. On July 11, he was in Los Angeles International Airport, shaking his head in wonder as a group of Southern California high schoolers surreptitiously filmed a Chasidic Jew at prayer. He stepped onto the plane, braced for the “shower of questions” that would inevitably meet his return to Riga.

The awkward questions have come and gone. Within weeks of his return, Itzkevitch was more prosperous than he had ever been. His salary is comparable to what he was earning in Los Angeles and goes a lot further. But he still worries about his son, and he still dreams of returning to L.A.

It is comforting to believe that he will return. After all, immigrants persevere and succeed. Jewish grandfathers are sheet-metal workers, their grandsons are lawyers. That optimistic narrative is part of the American religion, and it is particularly embedded for Jews and other groups who arrived in the first half of the 20th century.

In the American Old Testament, the optimistic narrative comes right after Exodus, and it always has a happy ending. Indeed, Itzkevitch is confident he can make it here, and has considered flying back someday to take the California bar examination.

Scott Spolin still wonders where exactly Itzkevitch’s story got off track. “I was trying to help him do what he wanted to do. Maybe I made it too easy for him,” he speculated after Itzkevitch left last summer. “It cost me a couple of bucks and he’s unhappy and it’s dislocated his life, but there’s nothing that I would have done differently.”

Valery Itzkevitch fell in with immigrants’ descendants who pinned their high hopes to him. But this is not 1900s America, and while immigration continues to drive the United States forward, Jewish immigration is now basically over. Itzkevitch and other European Jews are neither as welcome, nor as desperate, as they once were.

What remains to Jews, as to many other Americans, is the powerful myth of the young person from the Old Country. Spolin was attending to that tradition when he offered Itzkevitch a job. I was observing the same faith when I imagined Itzkevitch’s success as inevitable. But for all the power of that belief, immigration is always new to the immigrant. Neither the animated mouse of “An American Tail” nor Spolin’s grandfather offered Itzkevitch much comfort when he sat on his balcony in West Hollywood, deciding what to do with his life.