immigrants

Friday Jan 4

by

After working hours
Spent entire eve. at home enjoying
the radio The part played by the
N.Y. Symphony Orch, Beethovens 5th Sy.
was most impressive. –

It touched my heart to read the
story of a Jewish girl of Romania arriving
in this country, was sentenced to be sent
back because the quota for that country was full.
She being a violinist took a chance
to try as an artiste, as such are
exempted from the draft quota, and in
the presence of the immigration
authorities she played Shuberts
Serenade while tears were streaming
from her eyes, this won her the
freedom of these shores.

What a dramatic climax for
a Jewish girl after years of suffering
finally winning the freedom of a
new Land with renewed hopes
for a better future.

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Geez.

As melodramatic as this story is, I get choked up when I view it through my grandfather’s eyes. His own emigration was only eleven years prior, and the sensations of the experience — from leaving his family and home of 18 years to the sea voyage itself to the stresses of his arrival at Ellis Island — must have remained as fresh in his mind as when he first felt them.

And so, aided by Papa’s capacity for empathy (so pronounced that I picked up on it when I was four and he was 75) his deep belief in the promise of his own American life, and his attachment to classical music, this tear-jerker about a Jewish girl winning her freedom with a sentimental classical tune earns immortality in his diary.

Updates

The more I think about it, the more I feel like I’ve seen something about a girl earning entry to America with a tearful violin solo in an old movie. Am I just mixing it up with the image of the violinist on the deck of the Titanic?

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Update 3/19

Here’s another way to listen to Schubert’s Serenade:

Sunday Jan 13

by


Visited Freides children at
Claras house, and then
visited Herman at home to comfort them
Did not work today

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Matt’s Notes

I assume Papa is comforting Herman over the death of cousin Freida Kurtzberg, but I haven’t been able to learn yet who Herman or Freida were or what their relationship was.

The Clara referred to here is not Papa’s cousin Clara mentioned in a previous post, but Papa’s younger sister Clara, known to me (not surprisingly) as “Aunt Clara.”

I don’t remember Clara as much more than a wizened, friendly woman with a thick accent. My last memory of her is at my Bar Mitzvah in 1979, at which point she had shrunk to just about the size of a walnut and was confined to a wheelchair. Sensitive to her condition and respectful of her elder status, I thereafter referred to her as “Disco Clara.”

But as I write this now and react to the first mention of Clara in Papa’s diary, I’m flooded suddenly with a feeling I can’t name, flooded with a sense of the voluminous connection between two such lives, so many stories between them: of a younger brother taking his sister’s hand in the crush of her arrival at Ellis Island; of the room they shared while penniless; of the precious steadiness they nurtured together against the maddening whirl of tenement life; of the suspenseful illnesses; of the optimism glimpsed through her marriage, his work; of the aid he gave her when her luck turned; of the sheer volumes of words spoken, dinners attended, celebrations and vigils; of the gifts he bought her children; of his own long-awaited marriage, and, at last, the birth of his own child; of the times she stopped and wondered how she had such a brother, how he had so much charity left for so many others when what he did for her alone would have been enough; of his illness and death, an unimaginable loss dealt so many years before she would, frail and at the end of her own life, watch his grandson at the lectern.

My sister and I live around the corner from each other, just like Papa and Clara did in 1924.

—————-

Updates

1/14 – I made some slight modifications to the above passage to correct a few errant details since I published it yesterday.

And here’s Aunt Clara at my Bar Mitzvah:

Tuesday July 15

by


Went with Jack Z. to arrange
with a lawyer about the
camp credit union.

I am alarmed not having
received any call yet
about my naturalization.

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Matt’s Notes

“Jack Z.” is, as we’ve noted before, the august Jack Zichlinsky, one of Papa’s best friends and a brother in the Zionist fraternal organization Order Sons of Zion (B’nai Zion). Immigrants like Papa were used to getting a number of financial, medical and legal services through private, dues-supported organizations like B’nai Zion, which was already a burial society and a reseller of life insurance for its members. As an officer of his local chapter Papa was obviously responsible for organizing its credit union as well.

Though he’s discussed B’nai Zion many times before, this entry has the first mention of Papa’s naturalization status. According to The National Archives and Ancestry.com Web sites, naturalization would have been a two-step process for Papa: after living in the U.S. for at least two years, he would have filed a Declaration of Intention to naturalize (a.k.a. “First Papers”) and after a waiting period of another three to five years he would have filed a Petition for Naturalization.

Ancestry.com’s New York County Supreme Court Naturalization Petition Index shows that Papa probably filed his petition in June of 1920. He’d been waiting a while for his naturalization, but I wonder why he picked July 15th, 1924 to feel especially worried about it. Maybe Jack Z.’s own naturalization has just come through and he’d discussed it with Papa while they were out and about, or maybe naturalization chatter had increased in the local community, in the newspapers, or on the radio for some reason. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, a bill that imposed heavy immigration restrictions on Eastern Europeans (among other groups) had also become law couple of months earlier — maybe Papa had just gotten around to worrying about it now since it happened around the time of his father’s death. In any event, I have to look into this more.

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Additional References