A couple of months back we got a good laugh because my wife — whose last name comes from good Ukrainian stock — got a plug in the mail for some sort of women’s health magazine that was in Russian. We figured they must have some sort of program out there matching the “-sky” and “-ski” surnames to target the large recent immigrant community in the Portland/Vancouver metro area.
Her father’s branch of the family immigrated to the US a decade before the Civil War, and the her great-grandfather moved to Oregon in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, so they’ve been here a while, there are a lot of them, and some of them have done fairly well.
But most of them — like my wife — don’t speak or read any of the languages using any variation of the Cyrillic alphabets. Needless to say, we didn’t buy or respond to the magazine solicitation. But now we’re starting to get flyers targeted to Russian speakers from organizations that we already get stuff from.
