A single case of tuberculosis reported at Omaha Benson High caused conservative Breitbart News to speculate if the student was one of 237 refugees at the school. School officials declined to say if the student was foreign-born or American-born, but Breitbart pointed out that many of Omaha’s refugee students came from countries “burdened by TB,” such as Myanmar/Burma, Nepal, Somalia, and Bhutan. Foreign-born residents of Nebraska accounted for 82 percent of the thirty-eight cases of TB diagnosed in the state in 2014.
Refugee services were a work in progress. Ryan Overfield, who grew up near Omaha and whose wife was Kenyan, directed a Lutheran Family Services program to extend services to refugees beyond the initial ninety-day period, as well as to secondary migrants. “We’re on track to serve four thousand people this year,” Overfield said. “We help with food stamp applications, domestic violence, homelessness, and with children who have disabilities and need help navigating the system. If someone loses their job and faces eviction, I raise money so they don’t lose their home. We also have two immigration attorneys, a full-time therapist, and interpretation services in twenty-six languages and dialects. Our goal is that refugees can walk into any service provider—health, courts, Head Start—and receive the same services.”
Basketball had been Akoy’s escape. Now it was not so much, as two of his mentors, Doluony and Hammer, pulled him in opposite directions. Doluony believed local high school and grassroots coaches had failed to prepare South Sudanese athletes—he and Akoy included—for elite college competition. He arranged for a South Sudanese prospect, Junub Char, to play at Blair Academy in New Jersey, where Luol Deng had played, and he sent another South Sudanese prospect, Ed Chang, to a shoe-sponsored grassroots team in Kansas City. Hammer, on the other hand, believed that the export of the best South Sudanese talent weakened his effort to attract grassroots shoe sponsorship, which in turn denied resources to the local base of South Sudanese players. Both Doluony and Hammer tugged on Akoy.
At Georgetown Akoy played with a torn meniscus and a swollen knee. A chronic strep throat added to his discomfort, as he averaged 15.4 minutes, 4.6 points, and 4.5 rebounds. Georgetown staggered through a 14-16 record for the season, at the end of which John Thompson III was fired. In the time it took Georgetown to hire NBA Hall of Famer and Hoya legend Patrick Ewing as its new coach, Akoy had his knee repaired and his tonsils removed. Meanwhile, to complete his degree in liberal arts he needed to fulfill a foreign language requirement. Never bashful, Akoy went to the South Sudan embassy in Washington and made an unusual request. “I can speak Dinka, but I can’t write it,” he said. “Can you teach me to write Dinka?” Embassy staffers took to Akoy and taught him to write in his native language, and that satisfied Georgetown.
News from South Sudan was hellish. “People are starving,” Akoy told me. “Organizations are trying to bring in food and water, and the government is not allowing it. They’re on the brink of genocide. My grandma and dad’s brother are still there. My grandma is moving back and forth to find a safe place. It’s sad.”
On May 20, 2017, Akoy received his diploma in front of his parents and siblings, a great-uncle, and the Hammers. “It was exciting; my parents were really proud,” Akoy said. “I was the first in my family to graduate.” The next day he returned to Omaha to prepare his future. A Georgetown degree was prestigious and could take him beyond the bouncing ball—just not yet, he decided, not while he retained two years of eligibility, not while he had fire in the belly. He would play as a graduate transfer at Southern Methodist University (SMU), in Dallas, and pursue a master’s degree in business. He chose SMU over three other schools, he told an Omaha reporter, because it offered the best “showcase” for a player to make it as a pro. Though the NBA was a reach, pro leagues in Europe, Australia, Turkey, Russia, and China called out for talent, and SMU had a network of alumni on rosters in Europe. Akoy was encouraged when his high school teammate Hollins was drafted by the Fort Wayne Mad Ants of the NBA development league.
Behrens returned to Central after a three-year hiatus; he would coach his son Roman, a senior, just as his father had coached him twenty-five years ago. Lotte took the dental entrance exam and applied to dental schools. Time moved on. It would move beyond the bouncing ball, just not yet.
Akoy’s decision brought to mind a quiet vignette. In late August 2016 I had arrived at his house with pen, pad, and voice recorder. Akoy was seated on his front porch, in T-shirt and shorts. Achan, his toddler sister, came out the door with a small rubber ball in her hands. She handed it to him and backed up. He bounced her the ball and she missed. He picked it up and prepared to bounce it again. “It’s okay if you miss,” he said. “Just gotta keep at it.”
On November 23, 2017, Akoy took the floor for the Mustangs of SMU against Arizona. He became the first ever to play basketball for SMU after playing for Georgetown after playing for Louisville. Akoy averaged 5 points and 3.6 rebounds in 27 games but then soon was on the road again: in June 2018 he announced his return to Louisville for his final season of eligibility. From Sudan his nomad’s journey had wound through Egypt, Maryland, Nebraska, and three universities, destination unknown, to be continued.
Postscript
Pop
My grandfather, Benjamin Marantz, was a Russian Jewish immigrant who came to the United States in 1907 at the age of seventeen. He and two older brothers ran a small clothing store east of Pittsburgh, in Braddock, Pennsylvania, before he opened a store further west, in Weirton, West Virginia, in 1914. There was a new steel mill, and my grandfather sold work apparel to steelworkers, conversed with them in five languages, and over time expanded into Marantz’s Department Store. He married, raised two children, and retired with my grandmother Mabel to Miami Beach in the late 1940s. “Pop,” our term of endearment for him, was a soft-spoken and gentle man who died in 1961, before I knew to ask him about his youth.
Twenty years later I learned something of it from his younger sister, Fannie Block, who was in her mid-eighties and the only one of seven siblings still alive. Aunt Fannie told me her family lived in Bialystok, a city that was then in the Russian province of Belarus and now is in Poland. They worked in textiles and lived on the second floor of a three-story building. Bialystok had a large Jewish population, and like most eastern European cities of that era, plenty of gentiles who disliked Jews because they were supposed to.
One night when she was a little girl, Fannie recalled, a loud and angry mob armed with clubs and pickaxes came to their apartment building. They shouted from the street, up to the second floor windows: “Come out. Come out now. Or we will come in to get you.” Her parents and older siblings barricaded and braced for the mob as it surged toward the front door of the building. Then the door opened, and the mob stopped dead in its tracks. In the entrance stood a uniformed officer of the Russian military with a loaded rifle. “Beat it, pea brains,” he said—or the equivalent in the local dialect. “Move your dumb sorry asses away from here.” The mob wasn’t so dumb as to ignore a loaded gun, and it melted into the night. It had not known that the Russian officer who lived on the first floor was friendly with the Jewish family on the second floor.
That night the Marantz family decided to leave Russia. They thought of themselves as immigrants and were referred to as such, but they were refugees in the truest sense. What they fled was the Bialystok pogrom, which took place for three days in June 1906; in it at least eighty-one people were killed and another eighty wounded. One man described the violence: “Savages with axes and iron stakes have flung themselves, like the fiercest beasts, against the quiet villagers, whose sole crime was that they spoke another language and practiced another religion. . . . For this reason they smashed the skulls and poked out the eyes of men and women, of feeble old men and helpless infants!”
Those were the words of Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof, who, like my grandfather, was Jewish and grew up in Bialystok. They were delivered at the second international conference of Esperanto, held in Geneva in 1906. Zamenhof spoke at th
e conference because he had created Esperanto, a new language he hoped could bring about nothing less than world peace, or as he wrote, “the unity of mankind.”
Esperanto grew out of Zamenhof’s experience with anti-Semitism. A deadly wave of pogroms had swept through Russia in 1881, when Zamenhof was in his early twenties, in Bialystok. Those pogroms gave rise to Zionism, by which the Jews would return to their promised land, Palestine, and escape the next pogrom that was sure to come. Zamenhof, an eye doctor by trade, embraced Zionism for a while until he became disillusioned with it. “Every nationalism presents for humanity only the greatest unhappiness,” he wrote.
Zamenhof believed the source of international and interethnic conflict was language, with its Old Testament antecedent in Babel. A common language, he believed, would enhance empathy and brotherhood. In 1887 he self-published his first book on Esperanto, a primer, with explanations in Russian, and in 1888 he came out with his second book. His new language had an alphabet of twenty-eight letters, with most of the words derived from the Romance languages, and sixteen rules of grammar. Within two years his book was republished in German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Swedish, Latvian, Danish, Bulgarian, Italian, Spanish, French, Czech, and English. In 1905 the first international conference of Esperanto was held in France.
It was then that Zamenhof’s vision of Esperanto as an agent for brotherhood met reality. Many viewed Esperanto only as a linguistic novelty and wanted no part of Zamenhof’s moral crusade. The fact that Zamenhof was Jewish at a time of virulent anti-Semitism did not help his case. The conference committee asked him to delete from his keynote address a prayer to the spirit of brotherhood that, in the name of Esperantism, would unite humankind. The committee also issued a declaration that moral commitments had no bearing on Esperanto.
Zamenhof’s description of the Bialystok pogrom at the second conference in 1906 was his effort to sustain his vision of Esperanto. “Break down, break down, the walls between the peoples,” he said. “Give them the possibility of meeting and communication on a neutral basis, and only then those atrocities which we now see in various places will come to an end.” When my grandfather fled Bialystok in 1907, he was a refugee of the hatred Zamenhof hoped to dispel. Zamenhof still clung to his idealistic vision when he died in 1917.
Esperanto spread through Europe and to Argentina, Algeria, Australia, and French Indochina, and an effort was made to establish it as the official language of the proceedings of the League of Nations. Esperanto was taught as a first language to children, among them the son of a Hungarian Jewish attorney who founded an Esperantist literary journal in Budapest. George Soros was born in 1930 and lived through the Nazi occupation of 1944–45 in which more than five hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were murdered and in which his family secured false identity papers to survive. When he and his father left Hungary in 1947, their first stop was at an Esperanto convention in Bern, Switzerland, and later that year Soros made speeches about world peace from the Esperanto speakers’ stand in London’s Hyde Park.
Soros studied at the London School of Economics, came to America in 1956, and amassed a multi-billion-dollar fortune in finance. Esperanto never became the global movement Zamenhof envisioned; indeed the spread of English rendered it a quaint hobby for a million or so practitioners. But Soros kept alive the initial spirit of Esperanto with his philanthropic Open Society Foundations. Out of the foundations came the International Migration Initiative to support refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers. The initiative supports legal action “aimed at ensuring governments meet their obligations under international law to treat all migrants with dignity, and offer them asylum when circumstances dictate.”
Soros turned his attention to Sudan and South Sudan in 2012. After South Sudan had separated from Sudan, an estimated five hundred thousand people of South Sudanese origin who resided in Sudan were stripped of Sudanese citizenship. They had no legal status in Sudan and were exposed to arrest and detention and the threat of expulsion to South Sudan, their children were refused entry to schools and denied treatment at medical clinics, and they faced loss of livelihood and rights to their property. Affected groups included people with one parent from Sudan and one from South Sudan, people of complex mixed ancestry, and members of cross-border ethnic groups, among others. The affected groups were not guaranteed citizenship in South Sudan unless they could prove a link to the new country.
A Soros-funded group, the Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa, published a series of recommendations: Sudan should not revoke citizenship unless an individual could acquire citizenship in South Sudan; citizenship should not be discriminatory and should be based on the norms set down in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights; individuals had the right to due process regarding nationality status; the right to dual citizenship should be respected; and children’s rights needed to be protected.
Neither side had the “political will” to implement the recommendations, according to their author, Bronwen Manby. But at the very least they had a blueprint in the event of democratic traction. A little more than one hundred years earlier, when my grandfather was made a refugee in Russia, there was no Open Society Initiative or George Soros to define his rights, only a fair-minded officer with a rifle. The Russian pogroms that drove him out also fueled Ludovik Zamenhof’s creation of Esperanto and his vision of world brotherhood. In Soros, whose first language was Esperanto, intolerance found its logical extension and nemesis. Standing with Soros, and behind the UNHCR, is a growing movement to speak up for refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers. Which, I’m sure Pop would agree, is a start.
If my grandfather and Zamenhof were alive today, they might look around and conclude that the closest thing to a common language is sport. When nations convene at the Olympics, or World Cup for soccer, or World Baseball Classic, they get along in the language of sweat and competition, which is, in principle, democratic. Refugees and naturalized citizens gravitate to sport so that they can be seen and heard and valued in their adopted homelands. Sport invites them into the conversation. Some become fluent, and select others, such as Akoy Agau, become eloquent.
Notes
Because South Sudan became an autonomous region in 2005 and achieved formal independence in July 2011, pre-autonomy references are lowercase “south,” while post-autonomy references are uppercase “South.” Pre-autonomy references may be capitalized for rules of punctuation.
Introduction
twenty million refugees: UNHCR, 2001 Statistical Yearbook, http://www.unhcr.org/3dcb7f666.html.
“great survivors of our time”: Kofi Annan, UN Press Release, June 18, 2001, http://www.un.org/press/en/2001/sgsm7848.doc.htm.
“a worldwide tragedy”: Colin Powell, U.S. Department of State archives, https://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2001/3694.htm.
“eyes of a heroine”: Colin Powell, U.S. Department of State archives, https://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2002/11310.htm.
44 million: UNHCR, 2011 Statistical Yearbook, http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/statistics/country/516282cf5/unhcr-statistical-yearbook-2011-11th-edition.html.
68.5 million: UNHCR, “Forced Displacement at Record 68.5 Million,” http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/stories/2018/6/5b222c494/forced-displacement-record-685-million.html.
1. Adaw
All quotations from Adaw Makier in this chapter are taken from author interviews.
unity and dignity: Francis Mading Deng, The Dinka of Sudan (Long Grove IL: Waveland Press, 1984).
division and conflict: Machar Wek Aleu-Baak, “Perceptions and Voices of South Sudanese about the North-South Sudan Conflict,” Portland State University Library, January 2011, https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/184/.
imposed Arab customs: Dalal Mohamed Daoud, “Factors of Secession: The Case of South Sudan” (master’s thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 2012).
peril of Sudanese non-Muslims: Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, U.S. Department of State, Bure
au of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 1999, https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/1999/273.htm.
refugee admissions dropped: Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics, https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/yearbook/2002/Yearbook2002.pdf.
2. First Thanksgiving
All quotations from Adaw Makier in this chapter are taken from author interviews.
refugee resettlement offices in twenty-one states: Church World Service history and background, https://cwsglobal.org/.
rented a house from a member: Liz F. Kay, “A Refugee Couple Finds Much to Be Thankful For,” Baltimore Sun, November 28, 2002, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2002-11-28/news/0211280289_1_southern-sudan-refugee-first-thanksgiving.
heard Manute Bol speak: “McDaniel Announces Diversity Week Events,” Baltimore Sun, April 13, 2003.
“If I were in Sudan right now”: Quoted in Leigh Montville, Manute (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 214.
invited by the Sudanese government: Matt Schudel, “Manute Bol, a Former Washington Bullet and One of the NBA’s Tallest Players, Dies at 47,” Washington Post, June 20, 2010.
“led the way”: Nicholas Kristof, “Most Valuable Helper,” New York Times, June 23, 2010.
“the harsh reality of displacement”: Ruud Lubbers, UNHCR press release, June 20, 2003, http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/admin/hcspeeches/3eeddda94/message-mr-ruud-lubbers-united-nations-high-commissioner-refugees-world.html.
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