Interviews >> Ilya Talman                                                                         

Ilya Talman

(USA via the Ukraine)

Interview by: Cristina Lucas (Email)
March 1st, 2005

Mr. Ilya Talman is the founder and president of the Chicago-based company “Roy Talman & Associates”, a recruiting firm that specializes in information technology. I came across his name through an article in “Business Week’ that talked about immigrant entrepreneurs. Mr. Talman is a very successful one.

His story started in the former Soviet Union in the Republic of Ukraine. In 1978, at the age of 24, he boarded a train with his mother and his aunt, headed for Vienna and did not know, at the time, if he would ever get to see his place of birth ever again. Not that he is the nostalgic type… during the course of our fifteen minutes phone conversation, Mr. Talman came across as a rugged survivalist. He does, actually, practice fully what he preaches.

After a six months wait for their application to be approved by the Soviet authorities as well as the American embassy the small family, following a fairly common route for the Soviet immigrants of those days, spent a week in Vienna, then about three months in Italy, in a suburb of Rome.

I asked Mr. Talman what were his first impressions outside the country:

Ilya Talman: “I remember my train crossing the border of the Soviet Union and having this feeling of liberation. I felt free. It happened quite a few years ago but the memory is still very vivid.”

They lived modestly in Italy, while Mr. Talman spent the time to deepen his knowledge of the English language which he says he had studied in school in the former Soviet Union. He does have a memory of early discouragement which, of course, he proved wrong.

I.T.: “In the Soviet Union the curriculum included English as a foreign language. My teacher told my parents I was a hopeless case because I had no talent. When I made the decision to leave the Soviet Union and I applied for a visa, there was a six months waiting period. During that time I got some records of English lessons and I would listen to them over and over. So by the time I came to the United States I kind of spoke English. Years later I had people tell me about my English back in those days and they said that sometimes they could not tell for sure if I was speaking English or Russian.”

He says all this with a chuckle.

The family landed in Chicago where, luckily, they had some relatives. But, as he says, the secret to his success was "burning the bridges" with the old culture. Mr. Talman says it took him about two years to become proficient with the new language and this is how he did it:

I.T.: “One of the critical things was that I did not live with my parents, living in the Russian culture. I moved out and was surrounded by people who spoke no Russian. That helped. The other thing I did was that I ended up getting a job fairly quickly. Nobody around me spoke Russian. And finally I went to school… it was a complete immersion.”

He has a few words of advice, drawn from his own experiences as a student and new immigrant:

I.T.: “I would describe to people that I would sit down and start reading and about an hour into reading in English with a dictionary I would get a bit of a headache but I kept reading for another hour. Two years later my English was pretty good.”

Mr. Talman does not think there is such a thing as shortcuts. Just do the work. Even when you watch TV, as an immigrant in the early stages of trying to get integrated and assimilated, you should watch it as work, not entertainment. Watch it with the dictionary. It will most definitely pay off.

I.T.: “I talk to a lot of people who immigrate to this country and the ones who really put an effort into coming as fluent English speakers are the ones who succeed. The biggest stumbling block is that although people will speak English maybe an hour or two a day, at work, they go home and they don’t speak English at all. That makes it very difficult to lose a heavy accent. As time goes on… I’ve met people who have been in this country for fifteen years and it is still hard to understand them. It’s almost a guarantee that that is because they don’t speak English at home.”

Mastering the language is the first and arguably the most important step in adjusting. I asked Mr. Talman if he agrees with me on that and what are some of the other major issues determining success in adjusting to a new culture.

I.T.: “If I were to rate issues I would say the language is critical. The other thing is credentials. For example if someone is coming from India and studied at the Indian Institute of Technology,  where he or she spoke English, it is much easier than for those who went to a school that is not as well known. Very few people had heard of the school that I went to in the former Soviet Union. So I went to school in the United States. That allowed me to validate my higher education.

The other thing that I find to be an issue is that, to put it bluntly, it is much harder to learn a new culture as you get older. I use as a very lose rule of thumb an age around thirty-five. If you are over that age and you grew up with a different language, it is going to be an uphill struggle. On the other hand, if you have kids who come here when they are twelve or younger, by the time they are fifteen you can’t tell where they grew up.”

We touched briefly – and agreed – on the different layers that creating a new life entails. There are multiple cultural issues in various arenas: interpersonal relationships, the social environment, the culture in the work place. I asked Mr. Talman to give me an example in each area.

I.T.: “The English language has one million words and there are very many gradations in between. Every word implies other things. In a different language or culture the same word, perfectly translated, will not have the same meaning. For example, the word “capitalist” in Russian is very similar in sound to the English version, but they have completely different meanings. In the Soviet Union “capitalist” meant a greedy, money grabbing, heartless son-of-a-gun that has control over the people who work for him. In the U.S. a capitalist is somebody who runs an enterprise or a business. Very different connotations.

Interpersonal relationships: in the culture that I grew up in the family was much more important. Those were the only people you could trust. And there was no trust in the society because of all the corrupt people around and having a jail sentence hanging over you at any moment for any reason.

Culture in the work place: in the former Soviet Union people don’t talk as much to each other and various work teams. You talked to maybe one or two people but you didn’t need to talk to as many people as you need to connect to here. The notion of picking up the phone and calling people you don’t know to talk to them about something foreign to them was very strange in the old country.”

I asked Mr. Talman for a piece of advice for immigrant entrepreneurs.

I.T.: “America is the place, from what I gather, to build big dreams but you must be willing to work very hard. Take risks. And realize that whatever you think it’s going to happen, if it does happen, it will happen much later than you planned. And it will take much more effort. From my own experience… it took me five years to break even with the business when I first started.”

I commented on how nerve-wracking it must have been, living for five years in the red. And his answer was…

I.T.: “But see, if you know how to live with burnt bridges you will be able to deal with that. It was really that I had no choice. I had to make it work and so I was going to do whatever it took. I think it worked.”

I think the biggest lesson I learned from this conversation was having confirmed my own suspicion that burning bridges, sometimes radically, might not be a bad thing. Many people, out of carefully-planned (and wise, mind you!) caution, try to keep as many paths open as they can. Which is a wise thing to do. However, cutting all the bridges gives you something you never counted on and that you could not fake: a quality of determination and commitment that can accomplish anything. It gets diluted by having multiple choices.

It is said that one of the first Spanish ship captains to land on the new continent after Columbus’s discovery ordered all his men to get off the ships, then proceeded to burn them all to the ground… well, water. It’s “make it or perish”. This is the hard-line version.

The softer one is, in Mr. Talman’s words, “The less baggage one brings, the better it’s going to be… but that is a no-brainer.”

Visit Mr. Ilya Talman online at Roy Talman & Associates Inc. For feedback on this interview contact the editor@sentimentalrefugee.com.

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