I Was a Ukrainian Refugee—I’m Helping Others Stay in the U.S.

About a year into the pandemic, I became a volunteer tutor, helping older immigrants from the former Soviet Union study for their citizenship test.

After the turmoil of the pandemic and personal upheavals, here finally was something I was prepared for. I used to be a teacher, and I took that same exam as an 18-year-old—coming dangerously close to flunking on account of forgetting the first name of Francis Scott Key, the man who penned the National Anthem.

This volunteer organization had helped my family when we arrived in America three decades earlier, nearly penniless, and our lives’ possessions crammed into two suitcases per person. It felt like a personal calling.

Most of my students were women over fifty who emigrated from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova.

When I first logged on—as our meetings happened over Zoom at the height of the pandemic—they were exchanging stories about people they knew or heard about who’d recently passed the naturalization test or, alas, did not. They chatted about their anxiety-related insomnia and hair loss. They shook their heads mournfully and sighed.

These women, I quickly learned, were already experts in U.S. civics, in contrast to the two-thirds of the native-born population who’d flunk the citizenship test. They could name the original American colonies in a blink.

What threw them into a frenzy was English: The prospect of making unscripted chit-chat with a government official who might speak fast, ask trick questions, and ultimately deem them unworthy of being American.

During our drills, my students confused verb tenses. They misspelled the names of their deceased husbands and streets back home. One woman cried when she made mistakes. The fluorescent light fixtures drenched the white apartment walls around her, blank and foreign, as if trying to drown out her grief.

All I could do was cheer the students on and we kept going through the questions late into the evening.

How much do you weigh?

What is your weight?—If you think it’s awkward to ask a woman her weight, try asking it twice and make it confusing on purpose.

Have you ever been a Communist?

Have you ever been a prostitute?

The grandmas and I discussed this.

Why did you come to the U.S.?

How does one answer in one sentence?

Because I want to be safe. Because I want my grandchildren to know me. Because my birthplace as I knew it is gone.

Smile. Say: “Can you please repeat the question?” Breathe.

These women, hardy and tender with their melodious speech sprinkled with diminutives and exultations to God, reminded me of my grandparents and their siblings.

One was found in a ditch shot through the head by the Nazis—and lived. Another was thrown into the Gulag by her own people. They reminded me especially of my grandmother, who’d lived through the Holodomor famine in a Ukrainian shtetl, then the Holocaust.

As a teen, she fled from the advancing Germans on a freight train; her grandparents were slaughtered for being Jews days later in Vinnytsia. She got through World War II in exile, sewing boots in a factory and sleeping in a room with ice-covered walls.

She survived two genocides, and she wasn’t about to give up as an immigrant retiree in America. Not a chance.

In America, my grandma, hard of hearing and with chronically swollen feet, was set on wrangling a new beast: The English language.

She deployed her English at every opportunity—with bus drivers, librarians, even doctors. When I drove her to medical appointments, she’d write her symptoms out from the dictionary in neat cursive and tuck the notebook into her Ross Dress for Less purse.

“Is stomach in English STO-much or”—she adjusted her glasses—”Sto-MUCH?” she’d ask me in the clinic’s waiting room, tracing the word with her finger. “How do you say: “Doctor, may God give your family prosperity and good health?”

Some doctors interrupted her slow English speech. They’d butcher her name and look at the clock, wanting me to speak for her instead.

“Maybe I could explain it to the doctor, grandma?” I’d say, offering up a slew of her favorite activities we could do afterward: Drive to her favorite Indian grocery for vegetables, then to the Chinese supermarket for egg roll wrappers—an immigrant hack for blintzes. But she insisted on speaking for herself. She refused to put anyone else in charge of narrating her destiny.

And now, my students were just like her.

In December 2021, I got a phone call from my main student. She had passed the exam and just left the swearing-in ceremony. Her voice has taken on brilliant new undertones: She sounded like a schoolgirl after a piano recital. She was telling me about the tough questions she’d nailed, the little American flag she got, and her plans now that her daughter and grandchildren could be together.

For the first time, I heard her laughing.

But there was little time to celebrate. A few weeks later, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Since the war began, more than 13 million Ukrainians, or a third of the country, have fled their homes, though many have returned. Of these, approximately 271,000 sought refuge in the United States.

That’s when I began translating for new arrivals in California and helping connect them with free English classes and tutoring.

Many Ukrainians I spoke to would explain, apologetically, that they didn’t brush up on their English because they didn’t know war was coming. Now, they clung to these classes like a lifeline.

Not everyone had the time, of course: Some worked the night shift and had unpredictable gig schedules. One was recovering from a stroke, someone else from surgery. A mother was determined to first find an English tutor for her daughter, a straight-A student in Ukraine who now returned from her new American school in tears.

Another wanted nothing to do with English. She planned to move back as soon as the war was over. “Thank you,” she said, “but this is not for us. Our motherland is Ukraine. Hope dies last.”

I also translated work permit applications for new Ukrainian arrivals. Each application cost $410 a pop to file—an unfathomable expenditure for someone who’d just lost their livelihood and had no income.

One applicant, a middle-aged woman, forced a smile and explained to the volunteer attorney on the opposite side of the conference table that all she wanted was to find work, any type of work, and not burden her son.

“Would you like to ask the government to waive your $410 application fee?” the volunteer attorney offered.

I translated.

“Yes,” the woman nodded. “Yes, please.”

“Let’s not ask for anything,” interjected her son, also in the room. “We’ll figure out a way to pay.”

The woman looked at her son pleadingly.

He steadied his posture and finally agreed to ask for a fee waiver. He answered the attorney directly, in broken English. All he had left was dignity.

“Great.” The attorney took out a new legal form from her stack. “Let’s see now. Is your income below poverty level?”

I translated.

The son did a quick mental calculation. He clenched his hands and stared at the floor in silence.

Place of arrival, degree, alien number. All of us—volunteer attorneys and translators—stuck to the script, knowing there was so much more that nobody dared to speak of.

It was all in the hurried speech and the darting glances of the refugees, in their distant eyes suggesting they weren’t here at all. The air was thick with it, the unspoken tragedy of war.

Masha Rumer is a journalist and author of a nonfiction book about immigrant families, Parenting with an Accent: How Immigrants Honor Their Heritage, Navigate Setbacks, and Chart New Paths For Their Children (Beacon Press). She grew up in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States as a teenager.

All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Do you have a unique experience or personal story to share? Email the My Turn team at [email protected]