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

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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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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Book Tour: The Movie

Monday, April 19th, 2010

I’ve always loved the way Hollywood portrays writers – the knit brow wreathed in a cloud of cigarette smoke as the Opus lies mired in writer’s block; the Breakthrough arriving in a smoky burst of creativity; the pages flying out of a big black ash-sprinkled typewriter; the meteoric rise to fame, fortune, and smoldering co-stars.  Just another glorious tour of duty in the literary trenches.

So far as I know, Hollywood has yet to tackle Book Tour:  The Movie.  But you can just picture it.  Opening shot:  a packed auditorium full of chanting stomping readers.  A hush descends as the venerable, bespectacled, ever-so-slightly balding author (Ralph Fiennes?) takes the stage.  Zoom in on the lined but still surprisingly attractive face, the hands trembling just discernibly as they grip the side of the lectern, a glint of light reflected off the chic Italian spectacles.  Wide shot of the rapturous, mostly young female audience (Natalie Portman in front row?) staring dewy-eyed as The Talk commences:

We live not only in a nation of immigrants…but a nation of poor immigrants…

Cut to the Statue of Liberty…Ellis Island… vaguely klezmery music swells…A still of immigrants packed in steerage dissolves to a wide shot of an endless line of leggy young readers clambering to have their copies inscribed, their questions answered, their demands met.  “I know it sounds crazy,” Natalie pants, “but I just had to buy 10 copies.”  “Where on earth do you get your ideas – and such big, complicated ideas?” “I’ve never read anything like this – when’s the next one?”

The reality, I can report after legs one and two of my own book tour (hence the long silence of the blog), is a little different.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m incredibly grateful that my publisher has sent me on a book tour at all.  We writers live cloistered lives and it’s always enlivening to get out there in the real world and meet the reading public.  It’s also, frankly, a tad humbling.  The first leg of my tour took me to New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago – and I’ll confess I felt a bit like a kid with his nose pressed to the window of the candy store.  Or rather the Apple-Disney-Nike store.  To the extent I felt any cultural pulse throbbing in the veins of our big cities it was pumped out not by words between covers but by images and characters shimmering on little screens.  Even the bookstores, if you can find one, seem to be more about wifi, coffee and ephemera than the printed and bound page.

Which is not to say that book lovers are history.  I met scads of people who are passionate about books everywhere I went.  On my first night on the road, the Affatato family (descendants of Epifanio Affatato, one of the twelve men in my book) filled their Long Island house to overflowing with relatives and friends eager to hear about the service of a great Italian American.

The official launch at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum was every author’s dream come true – standing room only crowd; evocative surroundings; great questions; and great company for my book in the museum’s wonderful little book and gift shop.  The Army and Navy Club in downtown Washington, D.C., was one of the most beautiful and august places I’ve ever lectured in, and I was pleased to see three soldiers on active duty in the audience.  Warm welcome at the Polish Museum of America; fascinating post-talk tour of the National Museum of American Jewish Military History.

Yes, my book tour was brought to you by a massive Apple-Disney-Nike style corporation.  But the people who attended the events were part of a community – or rather many overlapping communities.  History buffs, sons and daughters of Italy or Poland, proud descendants of Jewish plumbers-turned-soldiers who still feel a connection to their heritage and want to see it preserved and carried forward.  It’s fitting that a book about twelve ordinary guys who got caught up in the cataclysm of the Great War should be promoted one community, one circle of readers, one family at a time.  And that the venues were museums, libraries, private clubs, social halls, family living rooms, and of course the handful of beloved, heroic independent bookstores that miraculously still survive – Elliott Bay Books, University Bookstore, and Third Place Books here in Seattle; Rainy Day Books in Kansas City; the Bookworm in Omaha; Port Books &  News in Port Angeles, Washington.

If I were making a movie of my tour, I’d open in the big drab hall of the Rocky Point, Long Island, Sons of Italy chapter.  A handful of tables of mostly elderly Italian-Americans, some speaking Italian, gathered for a relaxing night of cards and pizza.  The grizzled author sidles in, hands trembling, with his laptop and speech.  Suspicious stares, mutters of Who the hell is this guy? Close up of now sweating author launching into his talk:

We live not only in a nation of immigrants, but a nation of poor immigrants…

Cut to author shaking hands with stout gray-haired Italian gent.  “You know, your talk was actually kinda interesting,” the gent remarks as he pumps and pumps author’s hand. “Reminded me of something I haven’t thought of in years.  My uncle Nick – he served with the 77th Division.  Was gassed and everything….We’ve got his discharge papers somewhere. And hey, thanks for writing your book.”

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Pub

Monday, March 15th, 2010

They say publishing a book is like giving birth to a baby but I’m not so sure. Having watched three babies come into the world and grow to radiant maturity (yes, dear daughters, this means YOU), I would say that literary and human birth are about as different as two milestone events can be. With a baby, “the man after his turbulent minute or two/Is expendable,” as the poet Robert Pinsky puts it. Turbulence over, it pretty much comes down to an increasingly agonized waiting game until – bam! – out comes this red-faced squalling demanding confusing bundle of needs. And that’s just the beginning. Expendable or not, I’ve loved nudging those bundles along the bumpy road from mewling and puking to reading Walter Benjamin, Checkov and Marguerite Duras, skiing circles around me, writing essays I envy for their elegance and depth.

But here is my book, with its own bright red new-born face, staring at me blankly, utterly and eternally silent. No needs at all. About the only pleasure I’m getting out of this baby right now is the memory of its turbulent generation – years not minutes. All those interviews, those neck-cramping days in archives, those stacks of library books and photocopies that kept mounting and merging around my office. The first hundred words (but who was counting?) tapped onto the screen. The cold sweat night after night at 3 AM as I woke wondering, Can I really pull this off? Where am I going to find Polish stories? What is phosgene gas anyway?

Lots of angst, many nails bitten – but I wouldn’t trade this protracted turbulence for the world. Indeed, for me, this IS the world, at least the corner of it I most want to live in. To wake up every day with a book to push a few inches forward is about as close as I’m going to come to a mission, a calling. And how utterly inspiring and consuming that calling became in the last months of writing, when all the characters were in place, the tone and voice long since habitual, the structure fixed and seemingly inevitable – and I threw myself into the mad gallop to bring it all to completion. That is the part of writing I always find most rewarding, most invigorating – though even then, at the height of authorial ecstasy, as one sweats it out at the computer day and night, skipping meals, neglecting dogs and garden and wife (sorry about the order there, sweetie), at the end of the tunnel one sees not the white light of bliss but the shadow of emptiness.

The book must be finished. The writing done. But all that looms as “The End” approaches is the “publication process” – the editing, the galleys, the review copies, the blogs. The daily (hourly?) temptation to check the Amazon rankings. The good part is long since over.

Tomorrow is my book’s birthday and there it sits all shiny and new with its pale bold letters popping out of its antique red background and its stirring ship-board photo and its naked secret spine under the cover, embossed in gold like a Medieval Bible. I still remember wrestling with that verb, that strained transition, the title of that chapter, but it’s only a memory. This baby has ceased to be mine.

The phone rings – one of my daughters. We talk about her paper on The Portrait of a Lady. The health of our dear old dogs. The wild weather in New York. My awakening garden. And while we chat my book stares at me from my desk, silent and remote.

All I can say in return is: I’m sorry our passionate engagement is over. I miss your youth, when you were unformed and full of possibility. I miss shaping and pouring myself into you. My real children bring me joy (okay, some angst too – and lots of bills) – but what do you bring? You never call, you never write – all you crave is the caress of others’ eyes. I can’t bear to look at you anymore. Go. Crawl into bed with someone else – preferably legions. Immolate your physical self on Kindle. Leap off the shelves of Barnes and Noble. Claw your way up the slippery sales ranking ladder at Amazon. Find another home – there’s no more room for you here. Don’t expect any more love from me. Get out. I’m already involved in another – even better than you.

Book, it may be your birthday, but you and I are history.

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