She was born in a small border village near Bialystok, Russia (now Poland). Her family escaped the pogroms to America; her father came first, and the rest of the family joined him later. An only child from an Orthodox Jewish family, she grew up in Boston and eventually married a man who became a successful real estate developer. They would go on to have three children, six grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. They were married sixty-three years. “It's been a wonderful life,” she said. She passed away in 1994 at the age of 101.
I remember just a little of my life then. I was so young. I remember I was told that my father was in the service and my mother was, at that time, pregnant with me. However, at that time it didn't matter if he was a soldier; he had to serve whether he had a wife to support or not, and I was born while he was in the army. He was in the army three or four years, the usual time that they had to serve, and then he was supposed to be discharged, but they didn't let him go.
Well, he had a sister in New York, and he wrote to her, told her that if she didn't send him a ticket that he would surely be killed. They were close. His sister had very little money, but when the people came over from Poland and Russia in those years they always had jewelry, watches they had accumulated somehow. Well, she pawned everything to send him a ticket to come, and he paid off the guard, and that's how he escaped the army. And that's why I never knew my father. When I was born he was in America.
I was living with my mother. She had no way of supporting me, and I think she was a cook or did cooking for people, and at that time she told me that she gave me to a wet nurse. That's what they did in those days. However, one day she came and found me in a deplorable condition, not very clean and she was heartsick, so she took me with her, and I think I stayed with her. I was maybe two or three years old. I was an only child. My mother didn't have any parents. They had already passed.
But my mother had a sister, and she lived with us in one room. I remember it, one room, one great big room where there was a bed and there was an oven where they baked; a great big oven they used to bake bread or challahs, and sell them to the peasants there. They were very good cooks.
My mother was very religious, very orthodox, and very observant. She went to services. She would hire a horse and wagon and drive to the city to observe the holidays because there was no synagogue in our village. A man would drive them, a Gentile man. Mother was extremely religious. My aunt was, too. They always kept a strict kosher home and observed the holidays as best they could.
We had no running water in the house and there were no such thing as toilets, those were outside. For water we used pumps from the well. My aunt had two boys, one a little older than me, and one younger. And the younger one, I remember a cradle, and I used to rock him in the cradle. So it was me, my mother, my aunt, my aunt's two sons and my uncle.
I was very close to the two boys. They were more like my brothers as we grew up. We came to America first. Then they came, and they lived with us for quite a while. There were no handouts, no aid of any kind.
I was too young to go to school in Poland. My mother wasn't able to go to school so she couldn't read or write. But my father was very well-learned. He spoke about four languages. He knew Polish, he knew Russian, he knew Hebrew, he knew the religion very well. He was very well-learned. And my mother, they never allowed her to go to school. It was true for many women then, especially Jewish women, so you will find that many of the elderly Jewish people that came, they were illiterate. They didn't know how to read or write. But she knew how to pray because she went to shul all the time.
America. It was a custom in those years for men to come first, but sometimes they met a woman who they liked, and he just wouldn't send for his wife, or divorce his wife. My mother felt this. She felt since my father was already in America, he'd never send for her. So she had two brothers in Boston, and she wrote to them that she'd like to come to America, and they sent her a ticket. And she told me, this is one thing I remember so distinctly, “If anybody asks you your father's name, say he died.” Because she felt he wouldn't come to take her off the boat. So if he wasn't there she'd have no problem. But he did come.
I don't remember the boat or where we left from, but I remember we went steerage, way down, and I must have been very sick. Everybody was puking down there, and I contracted the measles on the boat, so when we landed at Ellis Island I was separated from my mother. They took me to the hospital where they kept those that were detained, and it was very frightening. I didn't know the language, and I didn't know what happened to my mother. They wouldn't allow her to see me for some reason. I was isolated, and she couldn't come to see me. But my father came to visit me as soon as he heard I was there, and he came every single day. And he always came with some kind of a toy or a doll or something. He was a wonderful father, very lovable. And when I got better he took us to New York, and we lived on Cherry Street. He had a little apartment for us on Cherry Street on the East Side of New York.
Years later I went to Ellis Island through the hospital where people that got sick stayed, and where the parents stayed, and I said to my daughter, “Can you imagine what they did to me?” I says, “They might have told me that I was sick, I was going to stay there, but I wouldn't understand. I didn't speak anything but Yiddish.”
In America, my father was a sheet-metal worker, and he worked on roofs. He was jack of all trades and master of none. He was a very handy man; he could do anything. He got any kind of a job he could, and he struggled; it was very rough, but he made it on his own. I remember we always had somebody living with us. One person brought over somebody else; it was an uncle or a cousin, they had no place to go. Everybody at that time had a boarder, if you know what I mean. Most were relatives. My father had a young brother and he had no place to go. Well, he came with us. There was always room somehow, even if it was on the floor.
We were close with our neighbors. If anybody was sick, they would bring chicken soup. And as I said, we always had somebody stay with us. Everybody had boarders, either to help pay the rent or give somebody a chance to get on their feet.
My mother's sister and my cousins stayed with my aunt. The sister who sent a ticket to my father pawned all her jewelry, everything she ever had, and to add to her plight, she had five children. She lived on Ludlow Street: five flights walk-up, three rooms, five children. And when my father came to America, she was so delighted to see him, and he saw her plight, he says, “I'm going to get myself a room.”
She says, “No, you're not. We'll move.”
They all slept on the floor. They all had these feather comforters they took with them, and he stayed there one night and he got himself a room because he realized that she was in bad circumstances, that she pawned everything she had to send for him. All his life, he said, “My sister-in-law saved my life.”
And he did pay her back for the ticket so she could get her jewelry back, and my mother used to say, “You paid her back.” He says, “I could never pay her back.” There was such love, and I loved her so dearly. She was my favorite aunt.
For school they put everybody in one class. Most of the children in the school were immigrants. I learned English right away. You know, you pick up those things. The children came from everywhere, not just Poland. But they were mostly Jewish immigrants.
My father was quite a smoker. He smoked a real Russian cigar, and I said to him one day, “Papa, why do you smoke so much?”
He said, “Well, I had a rabbi who said if we learn this passage, the one that learns the passage first will get a cigarette.”
And that's how he got sick: he got hooked on cigarettes in those days. He said, “I got more cigarettes than anybody else.” And unfortunately he died of lung cancer….
My mother said, you know, there's an expression in Europe: “America, the golden land.” She comes here and says, “Where's the gold?” She saw people struggling, you know, and it was a letdown for her. But as soon as he was able to, my father became a citizen and he would go and vote.
He would drag me along. Women didn't vote then, and there were suffragettes and I remember saying to him, “Pa, please vote for the women to vote.” He said, “Yes, I certainly will.” Well, I remember when the women got the vote and we were all elated. And I was glad that he voted for the women, because I begged him to, and he said he would.
So he was very broad-minded, and he was so very proud of his citizenship papers that he had them framed and he always looked up at it. My daughter has it framed today as an heirloom. She kept it. It was falling apart, and she had paid eighty-five dollars to have it put together because she wanted that as a remembrance of her grandfather.
My mother was a good soul, very honest, very devoted to my father. She was a wonderful wife. She always did things that would please him. In those days the man or the husband was the head of the household, the king. I remember never eating until Papa came home. We all ate together as a family to show respect.
She always begged him to become more religious, and she always begged him not to work on the Sabbath, and she always said to him, “No matter how much you make, I'll manage. I don't care. I don't want you to work on the Sabbath.” My father wasn't as religious as my mother. He was more liberal, more Americanized. But as they got older he became active in the temple and served in the capacity of a president. And he was very capable as a leader, I would say. He was either the president or the secretary or head of something.
My parents were extremely honest. If a bill was due on the first, it was paid on or before. We were never allowed to buy anything paying out [on credit]. We always had to have the money before we bought. Those are the values, I would say, that I have always held to this day.
Since I was an only child, my cousins were almost like brothers. We lived together for years when they came. Then when we all accumulated a little money and we did, we bought a house together on Grove Street in Boston. We couldn't afford a house by ourselves. It was a three-family house, so we had one apartment, they had one apartment, and there was a store downstairs, and my father had the store. He was a plumber, did all kinds of fixing, a handyman. And that's how he went into business for himself. He didn't work for anybody when he came to Boston.
I met my husband one summer. In my day we didn't go away for the summer; we couldn't afford to. So what we did as young girls, we ran a dance and made money and we rented a cottage. We made about $300 selling tickets, and we rented a cottage for the summer near the beach in Winthrop, north of Boston. We went there weekends, and boys did the same thing. And that's how I met my husband. They had cottages nearby, and we'd meet on Saturday nights and have dances with a Victrola, and we had a lot of fun. [She pauses, nostalgic.] He was very attentive to me and he was very much in love with me and he said, “You'll never be sorry if you marry me because I'll always adore you.” Something like that—and we got married.
He went into the real estate business here in Boston. He was born in America. He was born in Chelsea, a suburb of Boston. And he went into business for himself. His father died when he was four years old, but he had an uncle that he was very close to, so he got a lot of advice from his uncle, and he became very successful in buying property and sort of followed in his uncle's footsteps.
My husband and I had three children, six grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. We were married sixty-three years!
I remember we had planned to go to Florida for a month, and I had gone into town to get a new jacket and I came back and he had a stroke.
He was rushed to the hospital and I nursed him for about five years. Near the end, my children wanted me to send him to a nursing home because they felt it was way too much for me, but I thought about it: his mind was clear, very sharp, and I could never in a million years do that, and so I handled him. It wasn't easy, but I did. So I say life has its ups and downs; we have to make the best of the situation.
I feel very grateful and blessed to have three wonderful children, and they're very caring and very interested in me. And I'm concerned about every day because my health is failing and I recognize it and I sometimes see the writing on the wall that I may go into a nursing home, but they say, “No way,” so I'm holding my own. I'm living one day at a time. What else can you do?
After the depression of the 1890s, immigration to the United States more than doubled in the first decade of the new century with an unprecedented wave of immigration, mainly from eastern and southern European countries. Swedes and Norwegians escaping poverty and religious oppression settled in the Midwest, especially Minnesota and the Dakotas, while many Danish immigrants who were Mormon converts moved to Utah.
KEY HISTORIC EVENTS
1900:
The new “fireproof” Main Building on Ellis Island is opened, and 2,251 immigrants are received that day as immigrant processing resumes there.
1900:
US population nears seventy-six million.
1903:
As a result of President William McKinley's assassination in Buffalo, New York, by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, immigration law denies entry to anarchists or persons believing in the overthrow by force or violence of the US government.
1905:
Japanese and Korean Exclusion Movement formed on the West Coast by organized labor in protest against the influx of cheap “coolie” labor and the perception that they are taking jobs from American workingmen.
1906:
Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization established.
1907:
Immigration peaks, with more than 1.3 million immigrants arriving this year alone.
MIGRATION FLOWS
Total legal US immigration in 1900s: 8.2 million
Top ten emigration countries in this decade: Italy (1,930,475), Russia (1,501,301), Hungary (685,567), Austria (532,416), United Kingdom (469,518), Ireland (344,940), Germany (328,722), Sweden (244,439), Norway (182,542), Greece (145,402)
(See appendix for the complete list of countries.)
FAMOUS IMMIGRANTS
Immigrants who came to America in this decade, and who would later become famous, include:
Pauline Newman, Lithuania, 1901, labor organizer
Anzia Yezierska, Russia, 1901, writer
Vincent Impellitteri, Italy, 1901, politician
Philip Murray, Scotland, 1902, union leader
Joe Hill, Sweden, 1902, activist/writer
Antonio Moreno, Spain, 1902, actor
Edward G. Robinson, Romania, 1903, actor
Ricardo Cortez, Austria, 1903, actor
Frank Capra, Italy, 1903, film director (It's a Wonderful Life)
Angelo Siciliano (“Charles Atlas”), Italy, 1903, bodybuilder
Max Factor, Russia, 1904, cosmetician
Hyman G. Rickover, Poland, 1904, admiral
Enrico Caruso, Italy, 1904, opera singer
Edward “Father” Flanagan, Ireland, 1904, priest
James Wong Howe, China, 1904, cinematographer
Louis Nizer, England, 1905, lawyer
Johann “Johnny” Weissmuller, Romania, 1905, Olympian/actor (Tarzan)
Leopold Stokowski, England, 1905, conductor
Golda Meir, Russia, 1906, fourth prime minister of Israel
Mary Pickford, Canada, 1906, actress
Lily Chauchoin (“Claudette Colbert”), France, 1906, actress
Henny Youngman, England, 1906, comedian
Abraham Beame, England, 1906, politician
Sol Hurok, Ukraine, 1906, producer
Charles Luciano, Italy, 1906, gangster
Ben Shahn, Lithuania, 1906, painter
Arthur Tracy (“The Street Singer”), Russia, 1906, singer/actor
Giacomo Puccini, Italy, 1907, opera composer
Sidney Hillman, Lithuania, 1907, labor leader
Frances Winwar, Italy, 1907, biographer
Irène Bordoni, France, 1907, singer/Broadway performer
Bob (Leslie Townes) Hope, England, 1908, actor/comedian
Gustav Mahler, Germany, 1908, composer
F
rank Puglia, Italy, 1908, actor
Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, Italy, 1908, anarchists
Lee Strasberg, Austria, 1909, director
Donald Crisp, Scotland, 1909, actor (How Green Was My Valley)
Erich von Stroheim, Austria, 1909, actor/director
One of eight children, she came to America with her older brother when she was thirteen. They lived with relatives who had already settled in Rhode Island in the wake of the Great Famine of 1845–1852, which sent more than one million Irish to America's shores. Like many Irish women of her day, she found work as a domestic. Good-natured with a sweet disposition, she eventually married and raised a large family of her own. She passed away peacefully at the age of ninety-nine.
I was born in central Ireland in a small village south of Tullamore. We lived in a cottage, no upstairs, and there were two big bedrooms and a kitchen and parlor. Fireplaces heated the house. There were three of them, one in each room, and one in the kitchen, of course. The kitchen had two big windows in it.
There were six windows in the cottage, three in the back and three in the front, and visitors would walk up to the house from the road down below. There was a large table in front of the window where we ate.
For water, there was a pump outside not far from the door. We'd bring water in from the pump. We had a farm with cows and chickens and turkeys, but not for selling anything, just to live. My father was a gamekeeper, you see. He used to shoot different things—pheasants, birds mostly. There was a large family that lived next door to us and he worked for them. They had a big farm. They had money, they were well off, and so my father was a gamekeeper for them. And he was a happy man with his family and my mother. He was a good-looking man, medium height, dark brown hair.
In this cottage it was me, my mother and father, one brother, and six sisters. That's a lot of people for such a small space. Each of us had chores to do. I had to wash the dishes and sweep the floor and maybe sometimes help pick potatoes. We had our own little plot of potatoes. We also grew turnips, cabbage, and onions, not to sell but to eat. My mother used to make good sturdy bread. She'd mix some bread in a pan, put it in there, pat it all around and bake it, bake it over the hangers, you know, in the kitchen. And there was a hanger down with a hook in it, and that's where she put it, there. She boiled potatoes and cabbage and turnips. We didn't store any kind of food for winter, just the potatoes. Occasionally we did canning.
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