My father finally came to Ellis Island. He had been waiting for us in Scranton, it seems. He looked like a stranger to me. It had been years.
We took the ferry to Battery Park and went directly to Scranton, Pennsylvania. He had found a house. A private house. He was working in the meat market. I was enrolled in school…. I used to get beaten up by the other kids because I couldn't speak English. They called me “Guinea,” “Wop,” you know. I got over that, then things began to get a little bit better.
But it was always work. Work was the main thing in my family, with my father. He was not happy here because he came here against his will. He didn't find happiness in any possible way, whether in his work or anything. And he always wanted to go back. He wanted to go back to show those people who conned him that they couldn't hurt him. Something like that.
My parents and my younger sister went back to Italy in 1930. I was twenty years old. They left me in charge of a business, a little restaurant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. We had moved there. And I kept it going for almost four years. The last year and a half things got so bad because of the Depression, I finally had to give it up.
In the years since, I traveled quite a lot. I was always looking for a Shangri-La someplace. I traveled all over Europe, South America, Central America, and I didn't find any Shangri-La. Once, when I came back from a trip, I was so happy when I saw the Empire State Building on Thirty-Fourth Street, I said to myself, “I'm home.”
The closest I've come to any Shangri-La are my children. I was married in 1941, and my wife, Mary, and I had two sons and a daughter. They're all grown up now. The oldest one is getting his master's at Harvard. The second graduated from the University of Chicago. My daughter is a senior at Cornell.
I became a teacher. In fact, I teach cooking now. But I never wear a white toque because when I was in the first grade, the teacher in Scranton called on me. She had a picture of a tree and the number “three.”
So she says, “What's this?”
Well, I knew what a tree was so I said “tree.”
“No, three,” she said.
But I didn't know about the “th” sound. I couldn't pronounce it. So I kept saying, “tree, tree.”
She got so mad. She pulled me out of my seat, put me in a corner, and put a dunce cap on me.
Now, every time I see a chef's hat, I think of that and I won't wear one—and that was seventy-five years ago.
The “Roaring Twenties” continued America's economic growth and prosperity, as the incomes of working-class people increased alongside those of middle-class and wealthier Americans. The major growth industry was car manufacturing, as Americans fell in love with the automobile, which radically changed their way of life. On the other hand, the 1920s also saw a decline in immigration as the result of new quota-law restrictions.
KEY HISTORIC EVENTS
1921:
Immigration Restriction Act sets temporary annual quotas according to nationality and emergency immigration quotas heavily favoring northern and western Europeans, all but slamming the door on southern and eastern Europeans and causing an immediate drop in immigration.
1923:
The Ku Klux Klan, virulently anti-immigrant, reaches the peak of its strength.
1924:
National Origins Act sets a ceiling on the number of immigrants and establishes discriminatory national racial quotas, ending the period of mass migration to America.
1929:
The stock market crash and resulting economic crisis pressure the Hoover administration to further reduce immigration and to order rigorous enforcement of the prohibition against admitting immigrants who are liable to be public charges.
MIGRATION FLOWS
Total legal US immigration in 1920s: 4.3 million
Top ten emigration countries in this decade: Canada and Newfoundland (949,286), Italy (528,133), Mexico (498,945), Germany (386,634), United Kingdom (341,552), Poland (223,316), Ireland (202,854), Czechoslovakia (101,182), Sweden (100,002), Norway (70,237)
(See appendix for the complete list of countries.)
FAMOUS IMMIGRANTS
Immigrants who came to America in this decade (not all through Ellis Island), and who would later become famous, include:
Archibald Alexander Leach (“Cary Grant”), England, 1920, actor
James Reston, Scotland, 1920, journalist
Karl Dane, Denmark, 1920, actor
Gregory Ratoff, Russia, 1920, actor
Alan Mowbray, England, 1920, actor
Mischa Auer, Russia, 1920, actor
Arshile Gorky, Armenia, 1921, painter
Bela Lugosi, Hungary, 1921, actor
Pola Negri, Poland, 1921, actress
Vernon Duke, Russia, 1921, composer (“Autumn in New York”)
Hannah Chaplin, England, 1921, Charlie Chaplin's mother
Douglas Fraser, Scotland, 1922, union leader
John Kluge, Germany, 1922, billionaire/businessman
Simon Kuznets, Ukraine, 1922, economist
George Papashvily, Georgia (Caucasus), 1922, sculptor/writer
Isaac Asimov, Russia, 1923, writer
Greta Garbo, Sweden, 1925, actress
Willem de Kooning, Netherlands, 1926, artist/abstract expressionist
Ayn Rand, Russia, 1926, writer
H. T. Tsiang, China, 1926, actor/writer
Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, Australia, 1928, aviator
Gian Carlo Menotti, Italy, 1928, composer/librettist
Colonel Tom Parker, Netherlands, 1929, music manager (Elvis Presley)
Louise Nevelson, Russia, 1929, artist/sculptor
Her family was torn apart during World War I, then reunited for the boat trip to America. When she was ninety-five years old, she lived alone in an apartment in Franklin Square, New York, near the seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren who “are my pride and joy,” she said. “I have one great granddaughter who is twenty-one years old. So who knows? If God lets me, I can stay a little bit longer and maybe become a great-great-grandmother.”
I was born in Kolomea, Austria. Now it's the Ukraine. It was a very beautiful place, and we had a very lovely family, and I was very happy. But my mother was always sick. She had problems with her gallbladder, diabetes, different things. My father was a peddler. He had a horse and a wagon, and he bought and sold dishes, earthenware. He would go away for a whole week to make a living, stop in different places, and come home for the weekend. Saturday was family day. All the children went to shul, and it was very beautiful. In the afternoon, we had dinner, and we went for walks near a river in the woods. Saturday nights, neighbors would stop by to visit, and they would talk and plan and dream and tell stories about what's going on in America, what they would do if they ever got there. Occasionally a person came from New York for a visit to see relatives, so they knew of New York and America from these visitors. We knew because my eldest sister had already left for America and she would write us. She came to America in 1914, just before the war broke out.
I lived in Kolomea till 1916 and the Russians occupied the city. We were told to emigrate. When the Russians come in, they said, they do horrible things to girls. So we made up our minds to leave. But they had no trains, so we had to walk. For four weeks we walked by foot and slept near the waters because on the main roads soldiers marched toward battle.
You could see houses off to the side of the road that were burned down by the soldiers. And city by city, my parents, my brother, my younger sister, and me, we walked until we reached the biggest city, Stanislaw. And then we were separated. My father got drafted into the army to fight the Russians. He was fifty years old, imagine! My brother was about fifteen. He was sent to the Italian front, near the Piave River, where thousands of soldiers got slaughtered, drowned. My mother, my sister, and I became refugees. We were put on a train by the government and taken to Yugoslavia. It was a train full of mothers and their children. Yugoslavian families would then come to the train and adopt you as laborers. Of course
, they picked us because we were the cleanest, you know. [She laughs.]
I remember well a very wealthy family took us. But we didn't understand them because they spoke a different language. They had a big house with a little house behind it where we lived, and they had a gazebo with grapes and vines growing over it, and they had a farm. We would pick string beans, bushels of them. And in the evenings, even the meals, they didn't take us in their house. They served us outside—but delicious meals. We were there for several months, until we contacted my aunts in Vienna and this Yugoslavian family took us to Vienna by train. We lived there from 1916 to 1920, and I worked. I worked in a military factory, working machines that made uniforms. And we would sing. All these young Viennese girls. I was about sixteen years old then. And we got paid. I don't remember how much. They say you sing when you're hungry. Well, we sang all the time because there wasn't enough food.
They would give out ration tickets. My mother got up, as sick as she was, at four o'clock in the morning to stand in front of a dairy store where the government sold milk and butter and eggs. She would stand in line, and the line was long with poor people, and sometimes the food was sold out, so you got nothing. But most of the time she came home with a little food. When the war was over, we got in touch with my sister in America. She made affidavits and got us visas to come here; otherwise, we would have had to go back to Kolomea.
A few weeks before we were going to leave Vienna and go to America, I met William, my husband. He also came from Kolomea. We met through my brother, who was back from the war in Italy; my father was back, too. But William—we fell in love. So I promised him when I'd come to America I'd send for him, and I did.
I remember the day I left William and left for America. I was crying the whole night on the train. We went on the train through the different countries to the ship. We stopped in Innsbruck, Paris, a night here, two nights there, until we came to Le Havre in France. I even remember the dress I wore. I kept it for years. It was a nice flared skirt that I made myself. It went below the knee, and a blouse with a navy blue sailor collar and bow. I have pictures of it.
The voyage was hell. They gave us food, if you want to call it that [laughs], but we were so seasick we couldn't eat. We were not in first class. We were with the luggage in steerage. I remember the rats climbing over our limbs, and I would cover myself from fright…but we survived. We slept in bunk beds. There were a lot of different people. Lots of Italians. And they sang. I sang. We made the best of it.
I was very happy when we arrived in New York. I don't know how long the voyage took, maybe fourteen days. When you're on the ocean, you think you'll never see land. We passed the eye examination, all the tests, and a day or two later, my sister came to pick us up at Ellis Island. We were very happy to see her.
She brought us to a three-room apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She had a husband and two little children by then, plus us: my mother, father, sister, brother, and me, five people. Of course, we brought few belongings with us, clothing and bedding mostly. In Europe, bedding was important, and we would spread it out on the floor to sleep. It was crowded, but at least our whole family was together…and we managed. My younger sister started work in a millinery. I worked in a clothing factory. My brother worked in pocketbooks. So we made a little money.
We started to look for a place to rent for ourselves. So many people could not live in three rooms. And we found one a few blocks away. In the front was a cleaning store and in the back were two rooms with a kitchen, so we rented it. And then my mother found a better place and we could afford a little bit more rent, like eighteen dollars a month from fifteen [dollars]. And we kept moving up until the time William, my boyfriend from Vienna, was supposed to come.
He was twenty-two when he came here, a year after me. And we got married. Got an apartment. He learned a trade. He became a furrier, and had ambition, and always reached higher and higher to become, from the machine, a cutter, you know, to make more money. When we got married, he was already making sixty-five dollars a week, which was a lot of money in 1923. I remember Saturday used to be payday. So he would come home with the envelope and let me open it if he knew there was a raise in it. And he was always getting raises. William was the type who always tried to learn. Long after everybody went home, he would help clean up and sweep the floor. Ambitious. Years later he went into the furrier business for himself, did very well, and we raised three beautiful girls together. [She pauses.] I'm tired now. I need to rest. [She smiles and closes her eyes.]
Born in Glasgow, he immigrated to America with his mother, brothers, and sisters when he was nine years old. He served in the tank battalion during the invasion of Normandy and was part of General George Patton's Third Army, which helped liberate Europe from the Nazis.
We lived at 184 Main Street, Glasgow. It was an apartment house. I remember Queens Park, where we went as children. We were six children. I was the youngest. Of course, I went to school. I remember getting lost in Glasgow as a youngster, just wandering off, not knowing where I was or how to get home, but I got there.
My father owned a wholesale lumberyard. By trade, he was a carpenter. He always suffered from asthma, and it was very damp there. He was thinking about coming to the United States or going to South Africa. He preferred South Africa, but my mother had relatives in the New York area, so we came to the United States, for which I'm glad. He continued as a carpenter after he came here. He had a fair amount of money. He built a couple of small apartment houses in Staten Island. Actually, he built three of them, and then during the Depression of the 1930s, he went broke completely.
My father came with my older sister as a visitor to see how he would like it, and he stayed with relatives in Staten Island. Later, we followed, my mother with the other five children, including me.
We took the TSS Cameronia, sailing from Glasgow to New York. It was my mother and five children. She bundled all of us, and off we went. It was very ordinary accommodations, and that's about all I can remember. It certainly wasn't in first class. My father was here about nine months when he sent for us. He decided this was the place where he would settle. It was with my mother's relatives in Staten Island.
Of course, when we got to Ellis Island it was very, very crowded—I mean, the Great Hall. A lot of hustle and bustle and luggage and people milling about. I don't know how long we stayed. I'm sure it was a couple of days. I thought Ellis Island was horrible, and I couldn't wait to get out of there. I remember that. Then somehow or other my father came and got us and brought us to Staten Island. That's where I stayed and went to school.
I recall my father had sort of run away from the military service in Russia. I say Russia because he was born in Brestlatovsk and so was my mother. I say Russia because that was the area between Poland and Russia as the map changed over the years. But they were all trying to escape military service. There was also an awful lot of antisemitism in Russia and a lot of persecution, and I'm sure that had a lot to do with it also. Why he settled in Scotland I don't know, except that I heard many stories of people who came over, went on a boat and it seemed forever, and the first port that the boat stopped, they thought it was the United States [immigrant profiteers told them Scotland was America]. My father had come with my mother because my oldest sister was born around 1902 in Russia. So they had to come together. They had the one child. They were in Scotland for about eighteen or nineteen years. So the trip to the United States was really a second resettling for my father and mother. I don't think they came because of antisemitism. As far as I knew, there was none. The reasons were mainly economic.
My parents hated anything military, and when I wanted to join the Boy Scouts and put on a Boy Scout uniform, they didn't like it a bit. They called that military, and they were very much against it. But I still stayed as a Boy Scout in Staten Island and grew up there.
They did talk Yiddish a lot, and then, of course, they learned English. My father read the Jewish paper called the Jewish Daily Forward. That was
his main newspaper. But when we were in Scotland, we learned English and spoke it with a Scotch accent. They did talk Yiddish at home, but I did not.
When he came over here, besides doing this building, my father was quite a cabinetmaker, a little more on the refined side, a little more on the artistic side. He worked on the Staten Island ferries when they were building those in Staten Island. He had his own business.
Financially, we were comfortable at the beginning, especially after my father started building those small apartment houses when he came in 1921. I went to elementary school, PS 16 on Staten Island, and graduated Curtis High School. Then I went to City College, CCNY, for a couple of years. Then came the Depression, and it got the best of me, and I had to go out to work. It was very difficult finding a job. I managed to get odd jobs. My first job was as a messenger for Western Union on Staten Island. I went back to CCNY for another year and then left it again, and that was the end of it.
My father had a partner, and he lost it all [his business]. He also suffered from asthma quite severely. He started a grocery store. That was his livelihood—not great by any means, but that's what he did.
I finally joined a publishing company in 1940. I left them to go into the service in May 1941 and, of course, left the service at the end of 1945. I was in the European theater. My mother died in 1928, and my father died in the 1930s. He was not alive when I went into the service.
On December 7, 1941, I went to Jacksonville, Florida, to buy a return ticket on the train home. The radios were blasting away about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When I heard that, I knew this was the day that I had been long waiting, expecting, and I turned around, didn't buy a ticket, and went right back to camp and just waited. I did the right thing because the MPs [military police] were rounding up all soldiers in the town and sending them back to camp, and everybody who was over twenty-eight was sent right back to the unit promptly.
Immediately after that, they started an officer candidate review board, and I went on the first group from the artillery brigade and was examined, graded, and so forth. Rather peculiarly, I was not in the first group. I was not in the second group. I was not in the third group. By April 1942, I was getting a little restless, and I went to my commanding officer, regimental commander Colonel Barnes, and asked him why I had not gotten a call to leave. He took out the lists of the brigade's three artillery regiments, and he looked up and down the list, and I was number ten on a list of 150.
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