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.

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.

My father told me that upon discharge he appeared before a judge who told that it was an honor to bestow citizenship upon him. That was a source of great pride to him. Your book made me regret not having pressed him more about his wartime experiences. It also instilled great pride in him for what he did but never talked about. Thank you for your fine book.

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.

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?

Struffoli, a Neapolitan Christmas tradition

Poland's flag

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.

Miguel de Cervantes