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Estonians in America
| Article
# : |
10333 |
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Section : |
Culture
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1986 |
4,944 Words |
| Author
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Eloise Paananen
Eloise Paananen is a food and travel writer based in
Washington, D.C. |
If democracy had a crown, the Estonians who have come to America would surely be among the most sparkling jewels. Extremely bright and attractive as a people, the relatively small number of refugees, victims of oppression and suffering in their homeland, have contributed greatly to American cultural life while preserving their own heritage.
The people of this small Baltic country have been repeatedly dominated by major powers yet have managed to produce intellectual and cultural luminaries. They are about 99.7 percent literate, which puts them abreast of the Scandinavian countries. They are voracious readers, prolific writers and poets, fine artists, and skilled in high technology as well. A number of men have found themselves in professorial positions and in the military.
Estonians are great gatherers, loving to sing and dance together. Huge choruses harmonize in Estonian and English and ancient dances are performed in homespun, colorfully embroidered costumes. They are proud of their large Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, who use jamborees to brush up on their Estonian language. The language is no easy feat, because it is Finno-Ugric, resembling Finnish. The two peoples can converse quite comfortably because they, along with the Magyars, belonged to the same tribe that migrated from the Urals. When they reached present-day Estonia, the Finns went north and settled into Finland while the Magyars moved south to present-day Hungary.
An example of the gathering and the organizational ability of Estonians was the ESTO '76 celebration in Baltimore for America's bicentennial. It was a weeklong salute with 20,000 Estonians attending. The Naval Academy band played "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the Estonian national anthem; the Stars and Stripes fluttered in the wind alongside the blue, black, and white tricolors of their national flag. Such gatherings are ongoing and require an enormous amount of volunteer work.
Seeing these people at work and play, one finds it hard to believe what so many of them have endured. But one only needs to visit the Old Country to understand the repression under the Soviet system. The people there are denied basic human rights, and most of them are not allowed to visit family members in the West. Freedom of speech and press do not exist, and many places of worship have been closed. Russians are being settled into Estonia, while young Estonians are dispersed throughout the Soviet Union. Pressured to adopt Russian language and culture, Estonians resist this systematic Soviet policy of Russification and
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