Somewhere in the Sea of Faces
The picture I have posted was taken around 1907. They are European Jews fleeing the oppression of the Russian Pale. One of the girls may be my grandmother who immigrated to this nation from the rather flexible border between Poland and Russia. She may have been from an area referred to as “Kolo.” She may have lived near Lodz. So little is known.
What I do know for certain is that she was 14 when she landed here, and she came over with slightly younger sisters, Esther and Rifka. I know little of them. Esther was a decent cook and Rifka was reputed to have been nuts. They all married men in some aspect of the “needle trades.” It was a common enough area of employment for un-educated, impoverished Jews who barely made it out from under the Czar.
My grandmother spoke Yiddish and Polish and would learn to speak English. She met my grandfather on the Lower Eastside. They moved to an apartment on Hilton Street in Hempstead, New York. It was just over the border from Garden City. They could not have lived in Garden City as that town was, at that time, an Anti-Semitic, racist bastion of incredible privilege.
I Didn’t Know Her
Grandma was a hard person to get to know. She became an American citizen who never quite left Europe. She was close with other immigrants, but not so much with “Yankees.” She did not trust the government and for all her life, she was afraid the government would sweep into Hempstead and deport her. It is why she never took Social Security. She was afraid her papers weren’t in order.
Grandma could be petty and jealous. There was no one to mentor her. I will allow her the foibles she carried through life. Once she left Europe, and got processed through Ellis Island, she never saw most of her family again.
Of that extended family, I don’t know who lived and who died courtesy of Hitler. No one talked of it. After the war, she and my grandfather sponsored several relatives to America from the displaced person’s camps. Every one of them was broken and never recovered from the Holocaust. Many more than six million died in the Holocaust; millions escaped with dead souls.
Seley Greenburg Wolk raised three boys. None of them told her story. They must have known much more than they let on but they perpetuated her secrets to the end of their lives. She was a hard, often closed-down woman.
Of the sons, two of the three were WWII veterans and one tried to get in, but was declared 4-F. That son, my father, served in Civil Defense.
In Today’s Parlance
We are fast becoming a nation of islands. Media and many politicians are master manipulators at telling us how different we are. We are routinely inundated by crap storms from the Left and the Right. Why? We allow them to do so. They play on our emotions; mainly, our anger.
My grandmother’s story bears similarity to other immigrants I have met in my lifetime. She had much more in common with the man from Mexico who cuts our lawn, my wife’s Italian immigrant parents and the cop in the gym whose family is from Jamaica.
I am not quite sure why many of my acquaintances celebrate Independence Day. They can’t seem to extricate themselves from CNN, Fox or MSNBC and their inability to think for themselves. The cable news tells them how different we all are. My grandmother would have disagreed.
My grandmother bought property on Long Island before women, let alone immigrants were allowed to do so. She dabbled in the stock market. She owned her own house. She never took a handout or groveled.
She was a success. She was the embodiment of Independence Day. I wish I had known her. I wish I could meet her in real-time and talk of her life. She and my European relatives were my roots and my soul. May their memories be as a Blessing.
