General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How did you get here? [View all]LiberalEsto
(22,845 posts)although with a British accent.
They had an Estonian-American sponsor family in Brooklyn NY that took them in and helped them get on their feet and find jobs. Finding a sponsor wasn't easy in the late 40s; it had to be someone of the same former nationality, and there were strict quotas for how many people could immigrate from a given country. They also had my ailing grandmother with them.
My father got a job as a bookkeeper at a car dealership, and I believe my mother scrubbed floors. They were soon able to rent an apartment, and took in at least one immigrant woman as a boarder; she became my godmother. There may have been others they helped. In the late 1950s they helped an Estonian family from Sweden come to the US. The husband was a former boyfriend of my mother's. They lived with us in NJ while building a house in a neighboring town and remained lifelong friends with my family.
Estonians are fortunate because they look enough like Americans of white Anglo-Saxon origin to be unnoticeable. There were quite a few Estonian-Americans in the NY-NJ area and they organized schools to teach the kids the language, history and culture. Even though I was born in NYC, I spoke Estonian at home and went to Estonian Saturday school, scouts, folk dancing classes and summer camp, so I am still reasonably fluent in the language.