Immigrant hits wall in his search for an opportunity

America, we are taught and told, is the land of opportunity.

Then you hear a story like the one Leonid Bergoltsev tells. According to this man, moving to the land of the free and home of the brave has meant a series of rejections, unanswered mail and broken promises.

"In Spokane I have had seven or eight interviews with absolutely same results. They look at my photographs with highest appreciation and so on and so on," Bergoltsev says, leaning back in his chair.

"They tell me, `Unfortunately, you are very overqualified for us. We'll call you in week.'"

Bergoltsev laughs bitterly. He shrugs his shoulders.

"The last one was three years ago. Nobody called, of course. Nobody needs an old foreigner with bad English. Nobody needs additional problems."

It is Friday afternoon. I am sitting behind my host's desk in his cluttered office that he jokingly calls "the best place in the house."

That house is a modest but immaculate home that stands on a residential South Hill block between Cuba and Havana streets. This is where Bergoltsev and his wife, Nina, settled after immigrating to Spokane from Moscow, Russia, about five years ago.

The irony of his locale does not escape a Russian with a sense of humor. "Between Cuba and Havana," he says with delight. "Is like being guest of Fidel Castro."

Bergoltsev, 69, is a short, barrel-chested man with white hair and penetrating gray eyes. He speaks slowly, choosing his words deliberately while smoking a seemingly endless succession of Pall Malls.

Bergoltsev is a photographer by trade, but that's like calling Martha Stewart a mere homemaker.

In Russia, Bergoltsev was at the top of his profession. From 1958 to 1972, he was a staff photographer for the Soviet Union magazine. He next worked as free-lance photographer and then taught photojournalism at Moscow State University. He is a past president of the Moscow Photographers Union.

He hands me a copy of his resume. It tells me he has won 50 awards and contributed to 300 exhibitions throughout the world. He has had 14 one-man shows. Five books containing Bergoltsev photographs have been published.

An editor of the magazine Viewfinder summed up a series of Bergoltsev images in one word: "Stunning."

Bergoltsev is a master of his craft. The black-and-white images that hang on the walls of his den do what all great photographs do: They stir the soul.

They also reveal a glimpse of life behind the Iron Curtain that, during the Cold War, was the dark side of the moon to Americans.

One photograph, taken in 1964, shows a Moscow thoroughfare lined with people as a motorcade carrying Soviet cosmonauts rolls by. Another that Bergoltsev shot the same year captured Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev a few days before his political peers pushed him out to pasture.

One photograph Bergoltsev took in 1965 appeared in the March, 13, 1970, issue of Life magazine. It is a comical shot of two men, a Soviet police officer and a civilian. They stand in the middle of a street. The civilian points one way. The officer points the opposite way.

Their bodies appear to form a human cross. Bergoltsev calls the work "Origins of Truth."

"To be in the right place at the right moment," says Bergoltsev, letting the sentence dangle in the cigarette haze. "I believe, I definitely believe that when I got my 20 or 30 best pictures, that I did not push on shutter."

His voice rises. "God did that. I absolutely believe that."

A far-fetched series of events brought Bergoltsev and his family to Spokane.

Bergoltsev met Spokane photographer Don Hamilton in Beijing in 1987. They became friends, and Hamilton invited the Russian to visit his hometown.

He did just that. Bergoltsev brought his wife and daughter, Olga, here in 1989. He showed a bit of his work in Hamilton's studio.

Then fate intervened. Olga fell for a Spokane man. She decided to get married and stay here. The Bergoltsevs returned to Moscow, but Olga and Nina began pressuring Leonid to move to Spokane.

"It was like bomb," he says. "I've never been going to leave Russia. Never." Bergoltsev laughs again. "She and my wife destroyed me."

Behind the joke are more than a few grains of truth. The transition for this proud and accomplished man has not been easy. There is the language barrier. Bergoltsev sometimes struggles for the right words although classes he has taken have improved his English a great deal.

Perhaps a bigger problem is cultural. Bergoltsev has that overpowering Russian self-assuredness that strikes many Americans as pompous. That could explain some of the aloof reactions he has encountered in the job market.

Bergoltsev taps his head with a finger. "My computer is very old and very slow," he says. But the old man, he adds, still has dreams.

He dreams of publishing a book of his best images. One wall of Bergoltsev's den is stacked with thousands of slides he took while on assignment all over the world.

He dreams of exhibiting his work here in a major exhibit of some form. That would be a wonderful thing. People here need to see this work.

"When I asked what it would cost to do such things," adds Bergoltsev, "my dream almost died."

Over the years, Bergoltsev says he befriended many rich American businessmen who were touring Moscow and needed help. Bergoltsev always obliged. But since coming here, he says, most of his contacts have ignored him. Some don't even return his Christmas cards. And so Bergoltsev finds himself often longing for Moscow and the apartment he called home for most of his life.

"A big part of my soul I left there," he says, adding, "I think it's too late to become an American."

Yet outside the Bergoltsev home, Old Glory hangs from a pole.

"For solidarity," explains my Russian host. "Nonetheless, God bless America."

Copyright 2001 Cowles Publishing Company
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.