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

Preserving a bit of (family) history

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

I know I know, I’ve been remiss about blogging. Months have gone by and not a peep out of me. But how was I supposed to know that the care and feeding of a blog would be quite so demanding? During these long fallow months, my blog has kind of merged with all those chores and projects I keep MEANING to get to like filing bank statements and cleaning/rejiggering the garage. Strangely, nothing dire happens when I put these chores off aside from a few more ounces piled on the scales of the guilty conscience. But – shazam! – here I am again. Garage is still a disaster but I’m back in the blogging biz.
It has indeed been so long that I’ve put The Long Way Home behind me and embarked on an entirely new project – a history of the three branches of my mother’s family – that has become all-consuming as new projects tend to do. So consuming in fact that an incident connected with its research has inspired this post.
A bit of background. In the first decades of the last century, my mother’s family, called HaKohen in Yiddish and Kaganovich in Russian, divided into three branches – one branch that came here to the U.S., one that went to what was then Palestine and is now Israel, and the third branch that remained in two villages, Rakov and Volozhin, in what was then Russia and is now Belarus. The U.S. and the Israel branches flourished. All who remained behind perished in the Holocaust.
These three intertwined stories are the subject of my new book.
This past May, my daughter Emily and I met four of our Israeli relatives in Belarus to visit the places where our family members lived and died. It was essentially a pilgrimage to mass graves – pits into which Nazi soldiers forced Jewish men, women and children and machine-gunned them to death or empty lots which were once the sites of synagogues in which whole communities had been locked and incinerated together. This was the other Holocaust, the Holocaust of bullets and fire, not gas chambers.
In Rakov, where my grandfather and the Israelis’ mother grew up, we made a remarkable discovery. The Jewish cemetery where our common ancestor lies buried miraculously survived the war. Jewish headstones, including that of our family patriarch Shimon Dov, still stand in a grove of pine and birch trees at the edge of town. The ground is spongy with pine needles. Tall grass but no flowers grow between the graves. It is, to anyone with least bit of imagination, a haunted place.

Thanks to the persistence and foresight of my Israeli cousins, we found the grave of Shimon Dov after a brief search. Those Israel travel prepared! They had brought along steel wool, candles, Israeli flags, and copies of the mourners’ kaddish. They scrubbed the headstone, translated the Hebrew words for me, lit the candles, and together we recited the beautiful ancient prayer. We said the kaddish many times in the course of our trip – but only this once did we say it for a relative who had died a natural death.

A few weeks ago, the head of the tiny Belarussian Jewish community emailed me a request for money to use in the repair of the Rakov cemetery fence. My eyes widened when I saw the sum that was needed. But I composed an email to other family members descended from Shimon Dov telling the story I have told in this blog post and asking them to chip in. And lo and behold, enough of my relatives rallied round that we were able to raise our share of the fence repair for about the cost of a nice dinner out each.
Yes, it’s a small gesture – a footnote to a long, fascinating, often painful family story and the tumultuous, tragic period of history it belongs to. But I think it’s a gesture worth recounting. This was our own little bit of the grass roots collectivism/activism that, in my humble opinion, is the only way we’ll turn this troubled planet around (cf. how the Arab spring has morphed into Occupy Wall Street). For the price of a meal, we have helped preserve a fragment of the past that escaped the calamities of the last century. I’ve already forgotten what I ordered at that funky downtown bistro – but I’ll never forget the hands and the Hebrew letters carved on the headstone that marks my great-great-grandfather’s grave.

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In Honor of the Medal of Honor

Monday, March 14th, 2011

One hundred fifty years ago, during the bleak first  year of the Civil War, Congress created the Medal of Honor as a way of recognizing the extraordinary service of “such non-commissioned officers and privates as shall most distinguish themselves by their gallantry in action, and other soldier-like qualities.”  No mention of race, creed, color, or country of origin.  The legislators who enacted the nation’s highest military award for valor had the foresight – or maybe the desperation – to realize that when it comes to “gallantry in action,” character is all that matters.

Then, as now, the nation’s armed forces were a patchwork of backgrounds and nationalities.  You didn’t have to be born in America or even be a citizen to fight – and die – bravely for this country.  If your character impelled you to gallantry, then America wanted to honor you, no matter what you looked like or where you came from.  And indeed in the century and half since the MOH was established,  recipients have borne names like Blair and Levy, Basilone and Sakato, Red Cloud and Murphy, Wiedorfer and Hernandez, Modrzejewski and Fleetwood.  It’s an elite but truly democratic club.

On Long Island, a member of that club is being singled out on March 25.  Michael Valente was one of our own in every sense – a poor immigrant kid from Italy who came to this country nearly a century ago in search of opportunity and freedom and who went on to receive the MOH for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity” in the First World War.

This March 25, which happens to be National Medal of Honor Day, Valente’s heroism is being commemorated with the rechristening of the Long Beach Bridge as the Michael Valente Memorial Bridge. It’s an occasion worth marking not only because Valente, a long-time Long Beach resident, was a local hero and a terrific guy – but because his life story reflects so much about what was and remains great about America.

Born in the southern Italian village of Sant’ Apollinare in 1895, Valente emigrated to the U.S. in 1913 because, as one fellow immigrant put it, in Italy “we plant and we reap wheat but never do we eat white bread.”  Strapping, ruddy-skinned, blue-eyed and affable, Valente wanted to do something bigger and nobler than the hospital orderly job he held in the upstate town of Ogdensburg. And so, three years after his arrival at Ellis Island, he enlisted in the New York National Guard.  When the U.S. entered the Great War in the spring of 1917, Valente’s unit was reactivated – and a year later Private Valente shipped out to France with Company D, 107th Infantry, 27th Division.

His moment of glory came on September 29, 1918, the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel.  The 107th  had been rotated into Picardy and assigned the task of breaking the supposedly impregnable snarl of concrete, barbed wire and machine gun nests known as the Hindenburg Line.  The American assault had stalled late in the morning, casualties were horrific, and Valente’s company, pinned down on the side of a grassy hill, was being picked off  by “murderous fire full in their faces.”  When a German bullet hit a buddy, Valente “blew his stack,” as one comrade put it.  Grabbing his rifle and a bunch of grenades, the son of Italy charged.  Bellowing rage, Valente took out two German machine gun nests – the first with bullets, the second with the grenades – and went on to capture twenty-one prisoners. The 107th infantry lost more men in action that day than any other regiment in the war – a record of suffering that still stands.  There is no question it would have lost more had Michael Valente not blown his stack.

It took eleven years for the MOH to go through – whether the long delay was due to some bureaucratic foul-up or because of prejudice against Italians never became clear.  After President Hoover hung the five-pointed gold star around his neck at the award ceremony, Valente told a reporter from an Italian-language newspaper, “I did not forget that the president had decorated an American of Italian origin.”  He was the only soldier born in Italy to receive the MOH in the Great War.
With the passing last month of 110- year-old Frank Buckles, the last of the Doughboys, we have lost our living connection to the Great War – all the more reason to commemorate the service and sacrifice of this great generation.

When Valente served in the American Expeditionary Forces in France, nearly 20 percent of our military service personnel were foreign-born; today that number stands at 5 percent.  Different names, different faces, different countries of origin – Filipinos and Mexicans are the largest groups today –  but the pride in fighting for a country of choice rather than birth remains the same.   Thanks to the efforts of Private Valente’s grandson Ralph Madalena of Rockville Centre, that pride and that choice are being recognized today at the Long Beach City Hall – and will continue to be recognized by all who cross the newly named Michael Valente Memorial Bridge.

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What’s In a Name?

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

I’ve long known my family name is not Laskin – not originally anyway.  A couple of clicks on the Ellis Island website reveals that my father’s father was called Szmul Hersz Lonckewicz (pronounced lonSKEvitch) and that he emigrated from the Polish town of Ostrow on board the Aquitania on April 9, 1921.  So how did we get to be Laskin?

From some schnook on Ellis Island – how else?  When Szmul Lonckewicz’s turn came in the great echoing chamber of the Ellis Island Registry Room,  the clerk took one look at this tongue-twisting, consonant-rich, Polish-Jewish surname and muttered, “That ain’t American – from now on you’re Samuel Laskin.”

Or so I had always been told.  But it turns out, this cherished family story is wrong – our own little sliver of an urban legend that has been perpetuated in many an immigrant family.  As I discovered in American Passage, Vincent J. Cannato’s fascinating book about the history of Ellis Island, the inspectors who processed arriving immigrants on Ellis Island were not in the name changing business.  “Names were not changed at Ellis Island,” Cannato states baldy. “Inspectors never wrote down the names of incoming immigrants.  The only list of names came from the manifests of steamships, filled out by ship official in Europe.”  Name changes either happened in Europe, when steamship company clerks recorded immigrants’ names on the manifests, or post- Ellis Island, when the new arrivals rechristened themselves on their naturalization papers or other official documents.

Since my grandfather’s name was clearly Szmul Hersz Lonckewicz on the manifest of the Aquitania, Sam Laskin emerged at some point in the Bronx.  Other Lonckewiczs became Lasker and Lasky – and to make matters more genealogically muddled, Laskin (unaltered) turns out to be a fairly common surname among Russian Jews (my daughter Emily tells me it means ferret).  So Laskins who never changed their names are not related (sadly, Canadian supreme court chief justice Bora Laskin is not part of my family tree), while some (but not all) Laskys and Laskers are.

I have to say this name-changing revelation is something of a blow.  Not only does it mean that I can no longer resent some boorish culturally insensitive clerk – but at a stroke Cannato has pulled the rug out from under a whole genre of great jokes and anecdotes.  The classic is about the Jewish immigrant who ended up with the distinctly Celtic name of Sean Ferguson.  The story goes that this gent had cooked up a new name for himself before he set sail, but he became so nervous when the Ellis Island inspector asked for his name that he replied in Yiddish “shoen vergessen” – I forgot.  In the same vein, a Chinese laundry guy supposedly became Moishe Pipik because on Ellis Island he was standing in line behind a Jew by that name, and when the clerk asked for his name he replied “Sam Ting.”

So if my grandfather changed his own name, presumably to make it more American-sounding and easier to pronounce, the question is why didn’t he change it to something like Jones or Eliot or even Larkin?  My sense – and I regret that it’s now far too late to ask him – is that he chose Laskin not to “pass” (i.e. as a gentile) but to hasten the process of assimilation for his kids.  Szmul Lonckewicz was a wise, canny, hard-headed realist.  He figured, correctly, that his family was here to stay so why not make it easy for future generations in their encounters with schools, motor vehicle bureaus, army recruiters, and credit card companies?  I’m sure he was also aware that Lonckewicz was no family heirloom etched in gold on a coat of arms – but a hasty invention coined to satisfy some Russian bureaucratic requirement that all residents of the Pale have a surname, no doubt to make it easier to induct them into the army – something Szmul avoided, in his stoic hard-headed way, by chopping off his right-hand index finger – the trigger finger.  The Ellis Island clerk may not have cared about Szmul’s name, but he did take note of the disfigured hand, scrawling on the typed Aquitania manifest “partial loss r index finger which may aff” – shorthand, I’m guessing, for affect ability to work.

The clerk need not have worried.  Sam Laskin worked hard all his life as a carpenter, providing for his family through the Depression, and after he retired he worked hard building himself and his wife a tiny summer house out on Eastern Long Island and knocking together a luxury insulated house for our dog that put Snoopy’s abode to shame.  But this is a subject for another blog.

I’ll close by noting that according to  a recent New York Times article, name-changing has “all but disappeared” among immigrants today.  Times reporter Sam Roberts (whose immigrant grandfather was named Rabinowitz) says that the reasons are varied – everything from growing multi-cultural tolerance to the fact that Asian, Latino and African immigrants know that even with an American-sounding surname they couldn’t “pass.”  Whatever the causes, I applaud the end of immigrant name-changing.  So from now on, call me Duvid Lonckewicz.

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Nunzio Donze’s Story

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Richard Donze writes about his Sicilian-born grandfather:

I just finished reading The Long Way Home and enjoyed it very much. I am a second generation American-born grandson of an Italian-born WWI veteran (actually Sicilian, Nunzio, my paternal grandfather). Between the words and images in your book and those in the movie The Golden Door I have a better visual (and visceral) appreciation of what my grandfather endured coming over in the early 20th Century, and what he might have experienced when he went back to Europe in the war.

Sadly, my father and all his siblings have died, so the only recollections at hand are two that my 92 year-old mother recalls hearing about Nunzio’s war-time experience:

1. That he once told a buddy in the trench to keep his head down or else he’d get it blown off; the buddy didn’t listen and met that exact fate.
2. That he never fired his rifle because “They [the enemy] never did anything to me.” (When I first saw that you had a chapter titled “Why should I shoot them?” I wondered if my grandpop was articulating a common sensibility.)

Whether factual or apocryphal, these stories reinforced a recurring message in your book about the war being very immediate and personal for many of the troops, and less about ideology or grand designs.

After reading The Long Way Home I am inspired to do some research: to find out whether or not my grandfather was drafted; his unit; where he served; in which battles he fought; and whether or not he took advantage of the fast track to citizenship by virtue of his military service.

Just as the Great War made your Meyer and Sam and Tony and Epifanio and my Nunzio Americans, your book has made me and my family more connected to American history. Actually, (to paraphrase Ziggy Marley), it’s now American MY-story, not American HIS-tory.

Thank you for writing this book.

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Conrad August Westerberg’s Story

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

Seattle resident Donald Lorentz writes:

My maternal grandfather, Conrad August Westerberg, was an immigrant member of the World War I generation. He immigrated from Lannas, Sweden (Orobro Province) to Sioux City, Iowa, in 1912. He had an elder brother in that city. In 1917, soon after the US entered the War, he enlisted in the Army at age 29 1/2. In 1918 he became a US citizen, just prior to his deployment to France. Thanks to your research, we now know why he was able to obtain citizenship at that time. Once in France he served in combat, though we do not know the details of where exactly he fought.

Once he returned to Iowa in 1919, he joined with his brother to purchase and operate a Mobile service station, and became an active member of the American Legion, as well as Rotary and all sorts of American organizations. Ultimately he moved to Everett, Washington, where he ultimately became a member of the School Board, and remained active in so many organizations. He died in 1972 after a most productive life.

I often wondered why it was that he became such a vibrant American citizen, while my fraternal grandfather, also a Swedish immigrant, remained tied to the Swedish immigrant community throughout his life. We suspected that World War I participation had a role in their different perspectives. After reading your book we are absolutely assured that such was indeed the case.

I am now in the process of trying to learn more specifically the Army units in which he participated, and where exactly he served. We have numerous photos he brought back from the war, but have no other specific information.

Another interesting family sidelight on Conrad A. Westerberg. He was always proud of his Army service but never spoke much about it. After he passed away at age 84, we found his photo book from the Great War. He commented many times that the people from his unit in various photos had been killed in battle – a high percentage. Later, I learned that while my mother was pregnant with me in 1942 my grandfather (and her Dad) clearly hoped I would be a girl, no a boy, so I would not have to go to war. He always hoped each grandkid would be a girl. He clearly knew the cost, but was proud of his service.

Best wishes to you, and thank you again for completing such a meaningful work.

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