Photo by TREVOR KAPRALOS For the Ruznic family of Utica, adapting to life in America presents different challenges for each generation. Front row, from left: grandchildren Sanel 10, Sanela 5 and their grandmother Zuhra. Back row, from left: Samir, his wife Nermina and Samir's father Osman. They are shown in the Ruznic Market & Restaurant. The Ruznics came to Utica from Bosnia six years ago.

Memories of homeland still vivid, newcomers adapt to Mohawk Valley

By ELIZABETH COOPER and TOM LAMBERT
Observer-Dispatch

When Edin Karajic came to Utica in 1996 with his wife and 3-year-old son, he only had $40 in his pocket and felt like he didn’t belong. “(The) first couple of months we were just crying in the back yard looking at aircraft going east,” he recalled, as he sat in Cafe Domenico coffee bar in South Utica, a comfortable distance from those difficult years in Bosnia. “It was scary for us.”

In the years since, he has taken on two jobs and three successful real estate ventures and witnessed the birth of a daughter. Slowly, the city that once felt so new and so strange had come to feel like home — so much so that the 33-year-old said he wants to be buried here.

His sentimental attachment to Utica came into sharp focus when on a recent trip to Chicago he saw a truck bearing the Utica name. “I said ‘Hey, look at that!’” he remembered excitedly. “I feel like that’s my home place... that’s how now I feel like that place is mine, that’s where I belong.”

For Karajic, and many other local Bosnians, the transition into a new culture has been, for the most part, a successful one. They’ve moved into higher paying jobs, bought homes and businesses and developed a deeper connection to their new surroundings. But others, particularly the older generation, still struggle to adjust.

“The older you are, the harder this is,” said Hamilton College professor Judith Owens-Manley, who along with SUNY-Empire State college professor Reed Coughlan, has studied how local Bosnians have adapted to life in Utica. “It’s the idea that everything you build got washed away.”

Many Bosnians have said they miss loved ones who are still in Bosnia and worry about them. And some are dealing with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder because of experiences suffered during the war in Bosnia.

Age, language skills, gender, education and work experience all influence one’s ability to segue from one culture to another.

But many refugees and those who work with them agree that innate personality can be the most important element in the equation.

“Any time you look at acculturating there are so many different dynamics,” said Peter Vogelaar, the executive director of the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, which helps the newcomers get their footing. “It would be hard to label any one group for having a problem.”

As with most immigrant groups, the younger Bosnians are in some ways best equipped to make the cultural transition.

The children’s nimble young minds quickly sponge up the language and norms of their new land.

And they find themselves able to slip back and forth between the world of their immigrant families and that of their American friends as easily as changing into different pairs of shoes.

Ten-year-old Sanel Ruznic exemplifies this.

On a recent sunny afternoon, he sauntered into his family’s shop on Albany Street gripping a soft vanilla ice cream cone, and greeted his father, Samir Ruznic, with a cheery “Hey dad!”

Sanel, whose family has been in the United States for six years, says he’s aware that his life is split between two worlds, but he doesn’t mind.

“It’s so different,” he said. “It’s hard to explain. (In school) people talk a different language and you have to act different, be all cool. At home you can act like yourself and relax.”

Though most American kids are aware of differences between family life and school culture, the differences are inevitably more pronounced in an immigrant home.

Ten people, representing four generations of the Ruznic family, all live under the same roof. They watch Bosnian television via satellite and listen to Bosnian music. And they all are adjusting differently to life here.

For Samir’s 82-year-old grandmother Hada, who speaks no English, the transition has been difficult, he said.

“She’s like most old people from Bosnia,” he said. “Sometimes she thinks it is good here, and other times she misses family members of friends back in Bosnia.

Sanel knows things are harder for his great-grandmother.

“She has her own ways,” he said. “But I communicate with her every day. I ask her how she is feeling. I think it’s tough for her being here.”

For him, though, adjusting has been easier. He was a toddler when he left Bosnia, and when he started school here, he was able to quickly adapt.

Being Bosnian isn’t an issue in school, and though there are two other Bosnian boys in his class, they travel in different social groups. Still, he considers them friends, and the three speak Bosnian when they are together.

Though there have been a couple of times when he was teased because of his background. But generally, the other students don’t pay much attention to his nationality, and he has plenty of friends. And when they try the Bosnian-style lunches his mother packs for him, “Everybody’s like ‘that’s mad good!’”

Language can be a problem even for the relatively young.

Abdijana Rekic, 20, a student at Mohawk Valley Community College, said when she arrived here three years ago she was afraid to open her mouth out of worry she would say something wrong.

“At first I was confused and embarrassed and I didn’t speak a lot,” she said. “But each month, I feel more comfortable.”

For a teenager, it’s important to be able to express yourself so you can make friends, and Rekic said as she learned more English, she was better able to be herself among her American peers.

And she says she has a lot in common with them, though she thinks young Americans are more open than their Bosnian contemporaries, and attributes that to the freer environment here.

Ultimately, it’s the younger Bosnian generation that will adapt best, and they will stay in Utica and prosper, said Alena and Sulejman Serdarevic, who live in a modest house on Jefferson Avenue with their two young sons.

“Bosnians are very family oriented and hospitable,” Alena Serdarevic said. “They are very determined. Young Bosnians are trying to establish their roots here.”

She said she knows of many families who have attracted friends living in Atlanta, Ga. and Chicago, Ill. to Utica.

And Alena Serdarevic points out that it’s not just Bosnians who are working so hard to adapt to life in Utica.

“It’s not just us. There are many people out there who are trying just as hard, but are unknown,” she said. “There are people who have the drive who are from all different cultures.”

Her husband Sulejman Serdarevic said some members of the older generation will eventually move back to Europe.

“Those who are older than 50 years old don’t know the (English) language as well. They don’t understand the customs,” he said. “You see them, just looking for a place to have coffee and gossip. They’re living in the past.”

Hamilton economics professor Paul Hagstrom, who has studied the local Bosnian community, sees a return to Bosnia as part of the refugee success story.

“I think it’s an equal success when refugees go back because it means things have settled down and they can go home,” Hagstrom said.

Those who don’t return to Bosnia, Alena Serdarevic muses, will someday be seen as simply Americans. Instead of opening Bosnian stores, living in Bosnian neighborhoods, and struggling through the refugee new American experience, they will be Americans, Serdarevic said.

The progress Bosnians have made in adjusting is clear, said Predrag Lukovac, who worked as an interpreter at the Refugee Center before recently moving back to Bosnia. But more work lies ahead before they are truly part of the larger community, he said.

“What we have to do is build a community here,” he said. “We have too many individuals here, and that has to change.”

Coughlan said that change might come as refugees increasingly define themselves by their new lives instead of their old ones.

“They’re now American citizens, they finished college degrees, they’re getting on with their lives and doing well for themselves,” he said of the progress already made by many Utica Bosnians.

“Refugee carries a negative, victim connotation, but my guess is that we might find they are not victims any longer,” he said. “They’ve bought homes, gotten an education, established themselves as Americans.”

Lukovac says Bosnians lack self-confidence in their new environment and that often hinders them from adapting.

“Maybe in the next 10 years, that will change, hopefully,” he said. “Then they can enhance their lives more than they already have.”

And he said the opportunity is theirs for the taking.

“In this country, it’s an open race,” he said. “They can run as far as they want.”

Contributing: Melissa Chadwick, O-D.