Editor’s note: This is part five in a five-part series focusing on immigrant contributions to our nation and city.
Anna Mashaljun was born and raised in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Denis Khantimirov is from Vladikavkaz, just north of Georgia (the European Georgia), and as white Europeans their immigrant story is somewhat distinct from the other stories featured in this series, but it’s just as compelling. It intersects in a number of ways with other immigrant stories and relies on one abiding constant: Many people — most young, the vast majority talented and hardworking, from every corner of the globe — are extremely eager to relocate to the United States.
Anna grew up in Estonia but is Russian on her mother’s side, and her father is of Latvian and Polish descent. She went to a Russian-language school and speaks Estonian, in addition to unaccented English. At 18 years of age, she left Europe for the United States, where she enrolled at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV) on a tennis scholarship. She studied marketing and finance, and America seemed like a big, scary place to the 18-year-old college student. “The food surprised me,” she says. “It was mostly burgers and pizza and … the portions were huge.” She remembers the warmth of the people she met in America at this time and was surprised to learn that even her professors at the university were friendly and approachable.
For Denis, the early 1990s in Russia were “turbulent years.” Both his parents were professionals (a father who worked as an engineer, his mother an architect), but people in Russia struggled mightily as society transformed from a central, planned economy to the “new era,” which Denis described as “the Wild West.”
“There was total chaos with the fall of communism,” he says, “and I was a young boy during the most difficult days, say in the early 1990s.” He remembers his first Snickers bar — which he was able to sample in 1993 as a 12-year-old. He knew when his father’s pay day was because that was when he could expect his next Snickers. “Despite the troubles, I had a relatively stress-free childhood, attended a solid school, and was a relatively privileged only child living in a transforming society.”
Thanks to a program administered by the United States government, Denis was able to attend high school for a year in East Texas, near the city of Tyler. He was given $100 a month as a stipend, and he was 15 years old during the 1996-97 school year. He remembers this experience with great fondness. East Texas was very different from his youthful expectations of an America crowded with skyscrapers, patrolled by Batman.
“I’m still in touch with my host family from that period,” says Denis, describing the setting as “very rural” and the people “extremely warm and friendly.” He also remembers being better prepared than his American counterparts in terms of “basic academic subjects like economics and mathematics.” The kids in Texas were curious; they were never hostile or unkind, even when they asked him, “Are there TVs in Russia?”
A year in Texas as a high school student generated a strong desire to return to the USA. Denis applied to universities in the U.S. but received insufficient scholarship funding. He made the decision to stay home and study at a state school in Russia, graduating in 2004 with a degree in international economics.
Denis then worked in a hospitality management program in Switzerland. From there, he went to Arizona where he worked in a management training program at a resort in Sedona. He talked his way into an MBA program at UNLV where he received a last-minute offer after another student dropped out. “I was offered a student visa, an assistantship of $900 per month, and completed the degree. I met Anna in Vegas, delivered pizzas as a side hustle in the evenings. I remember wondering how I’d pay for the $600 radiator when it exploded from overuse in the scorching Vegas heat.”
A marketing professor at UNLV encouraged Denis to apply to the Ph.D. program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Together with Anna, who studied sports management and marketing at the M.A. level, Denis completed his Ph.D. in 2015 and accepted a position as an associate professor of marketing in the business department at Rhodes College. For Denis, Memphis was and remains “real — it reminded me of Mark Twain from day one, and we all learned of the Mississippi River, and the music called the blues.” Memphis, for Denis, represents a “raw and authentic sense of America.”
Anna and Denis moved Downtown in 2015 when they first arrived in Memphis; they were conditioned to live in a walkable city center. “We noticed there weren’t many people Downtown. Most of the families at the playgrounds Downtown were immigrant families.” They moved to Germantown after the kids (Alex, 9, and Alisa, 7) arrived. The kids are “fully integrated into their community and love it here.”
Denis and Anna fought and battled to get to the United States, then worked multiple jobs while studying to get ahead. Their type of tenacity and determination may seem unusual, but it’s the essence of a very typical American immigration story.
Bryce W. Ashby is an attorney at Donati Law, PLLC. Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.