The Long Way Home
An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War
David Laskin

Ethnic Studies

Monday, May 31st, 2010

(Note: this post is adapted from an op-ed that ran in the Seattle Times on Memorial Day, 2010)

A few days ago, Richard, one of my Facebook friends, sent me a message suggesting I fly the American flag on my Facebook profile — a nice touch for Memorial Day. A couple of days later Richard emailed again to thank me for including a soldier of Kashubian heritage in The Long Way Home. Kashubians, as I learned in the course of my research, are a Slavic ethnic group closely related to Poles but with their own language, culture, history and folk traditions. Richard has a particular interest in Kashubian soldiers because his uncle Alex was a Kashubian immigrant who came to the United States as a small boy in 1891 and died on November 1, 1918, fighting with the 354th Infantry in the Argonne Forest in France.

Since Richard is a Facebook friend rather than an actual friend, I don’t know what his politics are – and I don’t feel comfortable asking – but these two messages coming back to back give me some idea. My hunch is that he is a proud American patriot, fierce in his devotion to everything his country stands for; and at the same time he is a proud son of Kashubia, determined to keep the history, customs, beliefs, and contributions of his ancestors alive. “Every Memorial Day my dad flew both the American and Polish flags on our front porch,” Mary, the daughter of another Great War immigrant veteran, told me – and it wouldn’t surprise me if Richard did the same with the black and yellow Kashubian flag.

Richard and Mary are lucky that they don’t live in Arizona. With the signing into law earlier this month of HB 2281, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has made it illegal in her state for public schools to offer courses that “advocate ethnic solidarity.” The bill, of course, targets Hispanic and Native Americans – but it also delivers a stinging slap at anyone who is proud of his or her ethnic heritage. What, after all, is “ethnic solidarity” if not devotion to the culture of one’s ancestors and the desire to celebrate this unique heritage and pass it on to future generations?

Richard’s Kashubian family came here, like millions of immigrants before and after them, in search of freedom and opportunity. They settled in Chicago’s large Slavic community, but their life was tough. When Alex was eleven his father died and, as the oldest son, he took over as head of the family. He was hardly more than a boy when he went to work in the wood finishing business. Then as now, immigrants faced prejudice, and in the land of opportunity many doors were slammed and threats muttered. Nonetheless, when Alex’s adoptive country called on him to go to war, he went without protest – the same as half a million other immigrants who fought with American forces in the Great War.

I’ve often pondered why these immigrants were so willing to fight for a country not yet their own. On the streets of New York, Chicago, Buffalo and Detroit they were wops, kikes, hunkies and Polacks; they did dangerous back-breaking jobs for barely adequate wages. The nation’s leaders and intellectuals disparaged them as “a dark subspecies” lacking the “splendid fighting and moral qualities” of old stock Anglo-Saxons. And yet when Uncle Sam called them up, they went without a murmur. Why? The answer, I think, boils down to freedom. The freedom to worship, speak, write, vote as their liked – and yes, the freedom to advocate the solidarity of their ethnic group.

For those who hoist two flags this Memorial Day – who bring piroshki or lasagna to their family picnics, who lay a wreath on the grave of an immigrant veteran – these freedoms remain alive and flourishing. But they will only to continue to flourish if we who are proud to be ethnic Americans raise our voices against what is happening in Arizona. Ethnic studies are American studies.

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Multilingual

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

I’ve been struck by a couple of recent articles in the New York Times dealing with the amazing multiplicity of languages in New York City.  Sam Roberts reported on April 28 that languages and dialects that are dying out in their places of origin (Vlaski, Chaldic and Kashubian to name a few) remain alive and well in New York City.   With an estimated 800 languages spoken in the five boroughs, New York is, writes Roberts, “the most linguistically diverse city in the world.”  This week the Times ran another story about a collaborative play called “167 Tongues” that dramatizes the linguistic (and human) diversity of Jackson Heights, a Queens neighborhood that is home to 100 different nationalities (and evidently some world class characters).

To me such reports are very welcome in the face of the police-state crackdown on immigrants just enacted in Arizona.  The crackdown is directed at illegal aliens, but of course it extends well beyond. If Russell Pearce, the Arizona state senator who sponsored the bill, and his ilk had their way, the nation’s linguistic palette would be “cleansed” and nothing but American English would be heard from sea to shining sea.  Immigrants’ “refusal” to learn English, the current crop of know-nothing xenophobes contend, is a sign of a larger refusal to assimilate, to surrender allegiance to their countries and cultures of origin and join the mainstream.   This strain of venom is not new.  “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country,” Teddy Roosevelt thundered a century ago. “There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.  We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language.”

Nonsense then and nonsense now.  When the nation went to war in 1917, there was widespread fear that the “foreign element,” then nearly one-third of the population, would be unable to fight, unwilling to serve, and incapable of following (or understanding) orders.  As one native-born recruit wrote from boot camp, “Slavs, Poles, Italians, Greeks, a sprinkling of Chinese and Japs – Jews with expressionless faces, and what not, are all about me.  I’m in a barracks with 270 of them, and so far I’ve found a half dozen men who can speak English without an accent.  Is it possible to make soldiers of these fellows?”

I spoke to scores of descendants of these Slavs, Poles, Italians and expressionless Jews – and two things hit me forcibly: the immigrants in fact made excellent soldiers who served loyally and proudly; and with very few exceptions their children and grandchildren have only the most rudimentary knowledge of their ancestors’ language.  Poles seem to have done a better job than others in preserving their linguistic heritage; the Italian-Americans I interviewed are stuck at “ciao” and “grazie” and the Jews (myself included) have lost all Yiddish aside from schlep and oy.  How many of us now attend language class, pore over census records, and sign up for heritage trips back to the Old Country to keep some shred of our ethnicity alive?  Are we disloyal, suspect “fifty-fifty” Americans because we still make our Neapolitan grandmother’s recipe for struffoli, cherish the Hebrew scroll our grandfather hand-lettered, or hang the Polish flag next to the American flag on the Fourth of July?

Linguistic diversity should be cherished and preserved, not only in New York but everywhere.  I’ll wager that in the course of a generation or two, English will filter into and eventually dominate today’s most entrenched immigrant communities just as it did in the past.  And if it doesn’t – if there remain pockets of our great country where Spanish or Chinese or Vlaski are spoken by stubborn, proud immigrant families, so what?  This is a big country – we’ve got room for “i pluribus.”  But what if, in the nightmare scenario of the xenophobic right, America became officially bi-lingual, like Canada?  Frankly, I’d be proud as hell to live in a country where my grandkids could read both Shakespeare and Cervantes in the original.

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