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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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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