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June 13, 2010

Much of our trip has focused on immigrants landing, entering, and surviving in New York City.  Today, I think it is about the next generation and immigrants as Americans.

Our bus driver is an immigrant from Moscow, Russia. Vitaly earned a degree in engineering, but could not make enough money to support a family, so he took up driving a truck, which is a profitable occupation in Russia.  However, there is a tremendous amount of crime on the roads in Russia, and it was a stressful occupation.  Crime was rampant with the changes in the government, and Vitaly worried for the safety of his two daughters.  He said you do anything for your kids, no matter how difficult; surely a truism in any culture.  Twelve years ago, Vitaly moved his family to the United States.

Manhattan was too crowded and busy, with too many people everywhere, Vitaly prefers where he lives now, outside of Philadelphia where he can see some trees and is not surrounded by people.  His first profession was driving tractor-trailer trucks from “ocean to ocean” getting to know the United States quite well.  After six years, Vitaly began driving buses and compared to the large cross-country semis, he describes his current occupation as “like being retired.”  He has been in most areas of the northeast, and likes Boston the best of all the cities, though the small, tight streets are challenging when he drives school groups there.

Vitaly arrived when he was forty-two years old, and assimilating into America was hard for him because the entire culture was confusing.  His daughters had an easier time understanding America since they came as adolescents.  His older daughter married an “American guy,” and Vitaly now has two grandchildren.  He has a ticket for Cooperstown that Matt gave him, but he doesn’t understand baseball.  His grandchildren do, but the game is too slow and confounds him, and he prefers hockey.

In a lot of ways, Vitaly’s story is evident of any immigrant to our shores.  They left impossible conditions.  They had no exposure to language and customs.  Many (like Vitaly) were trained as skilled workers and had to take less skilled positions.  Today at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, we were exposed to major accomplishments of the sons of immigrants- through baseball.

If you need nine kids to field a baseball team, you don’t care that their parents were born somewhere else.  Baseball has paved the way for children of immigrants to meet on an equal par with other American kids.  The sandlot is the great equalizer in the neighborhood.  After learning baseball, other parts of the culture soon came into focus.

Joe and Dom Dimaggio, Moe Berg, Lou Gehrig, Tommy Lasorda, as well as hundreds more major league players, grew up with immigrant parents and went on to assimilate themselves and their ethnic group into the American psyche.  After Joe DiMaggio, it was no longer a surprise to hear an Italian-American in the major leagues.  In the previous generation, Lou Gherig helped make German-Americans recognizable in our culture.

Now, more than 25% of players on Major League teams were born outside of the United States and many of them have become U.S. citizens.  From Roberto Clemente to current day players like Manny Ramirez, Mariano Rivera, and David Ortiz, baseball is now a way to emigrate into our country.

So Vitaly can take heart in the fact that he made the right choice.  His children and grand children are living better than where they would be in Russia.  He has reached for and achieved the American Dream, and maybe someday will learn all about baseball from those grandkids.

We’ll end with a song from the grandson of Russian and German Jewish immigrants:

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