by Alex Wagner
My thus-far-imagined kinship with the Tribe of Israelites—the dream of disruption I’d harbored this whole time—was indeed a dream deferred. The Jewish Theory had animated a deep spelunking into my ancestry, which introduced me to other, equally compelling mysteries. I didn’t necessarily need to be Jewish to be something other than what I thought I was. There were plenty of family realities that set me apart from who I imagined the Wagners had been, among them: mining, poverty, and possibly criminal behavior.
There was (different) identity in these tribes, but they were tribes nonetheless: the laboring, the poor, the unlawful. The latter was the most disjunctive of these possible realities, going against the grain of every story I’d heard about my family so far, its godliness and goodliness (in fact, we might have been a band of thieves!), and therefore I wanted/needed more. Were the Wagners chased out of Europe for high treason? Was Henry Wagner a wanted man? Why’d we leave?
In my mind, this is how it went:
Henry Wagner, born into poverty in the coal-mining town of Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, was a bastard child who’d never known comfort. His adopted father worked several miles deep underground, swinging a pickax in the mines for much of Henry’s adolescence. The son knew nothing more of life than grime and boiled potatoes. But he had ambition (he was a Wagner!). In his early teens, he began carting goods in and around town, a trade for the unskilled but energetic. This offered Henry’s first glimpse into the finer things in life—the lace curtains and china and crystal goblets that decorated the homes of the wealthy, items that he would covet and mark down as the things he would one day—someday—buy for his own family. But how? He had nothing in this meager existence, and he was a nobody.
Then, like a gift from the emperor himself, war broke out.
The Franco-Prussian War was fought on tight battle lines, and Luxembourg stood firmly in its course. Far from a province of blood-soaked armaments, Henry’s hometown was instead bustling, chaotic, exciting, as people and things crossed its borders, headed one way or another. He loved war! And war, in the end, loved him—insofar as it gave him the blessing of opportunity. Supplies were needed—dry goods, ammunition, weapons—and Henry Wagner had a horse and wagon. In the trade itself he was unskilled maybe, but he was energetic and undeniably so.
He became a young man in demand, shuttling supplies to the French on Monday, to the Prussians on Wednesday. It was miraculous how easy it was—but he knew it wouldn’t last forever. By the end of 1870, there was already talk that the war would soon be ending. The Prussian army—to whom Henry had ingratiated himself, on days when he wasn’t ingratiating himself to the French—was filled with commanders who were less enthusiastic about the black market teamster who continued to hustle his way back and forth across enemy encampments, helping them one day, their enemies the next. It was insulting to the Prussians, and they did not like being played the fool. They saw his split allegiance, the rifle butts poking out of his wagonload headed in the opposite direction, where they would eventually be turned against the Prussians. It was an abomination! They started asking questions.
Henry, who had by now amassed a sizable savings, squirreled away underneath his hay-filled mattress (or inside his rough-hewn chest, this part was still fuzzy), began thinking about the next chapter, his escape from Esch, its grime and boiled potatoes. He considered other parts of Europe, but the Prussian empire was growing inexorably, and punishment (if it was indeed treason) could follow him across the borders. And anyway, Europe was dead. He was young, and he wasn’t ready to forsake the bustle and the chaos and the excitement—he had gotten a taste for this life. He wanted something new, something where his future could be shaped as easily as his allegiances had been during the war. He’d heard stories about America. But how to get there? He knew no one in the United States, didn’t even speak the language. He would need people, resources.
Another man on the teamster circuit, older and slower but still strong, mentioned that he intended to leave soon. He’d had enough of this place, he said: He’d heard of the American bounty, too, and he wanted a piece of it. It was too fortunate, as if God himself had decreed the plan: This other man happened to have the same name as Henry’s mother’s family! It would be easy to change the papers and make it look as if they were one family. In exchange, Henry would pay the older man a lump sum of his savings; the rest he’d hide somewhere safe. Could they leave soon? Yes, said the elder Wagner, they would leave soon. Better to get out now, while everyone is still distracted by war. (Better to get out now, thought Henry, before they find out what I did.)
You could already imagine Tom Hardy playing the lead role in the movie adaptation of this life, the swelling strings of the score, the title credits rolling slowly at the end.
It was not quite what happened.
Cahill Tarr explained to me that the records about Franco-Prussian prisoners of war were not exactly in tip-top shape. If Henry had been captured by the Germans and/or accused of treasonous behavior during the war, there were few records to prove it.
But she did stumble upon information that at least pointed in the direction of salacious and possibly illegal activities that might have driven Henry, his future father-in-law Henry Wagner the Elder, and his family out of Europe and over to America.
The Wagner team traveled to America from either Liverpool (in England) or Queenstown (in Ireland). Cahill Tarr explained that this was not the norm: Most of their fellow countrymen left from Antwerp (in Belgium) or Le Havre (in France). She thought, perhaps, that leaving via England or Ireland might have been a bid to evade whatever or whoever was after them in Luxembourg.
Supporting the idea that their departure had been made in haste—and therefore perhaps not under ideal circumstances—was the fact that several weeks before their departure for America, Henry Wagner the Elder put his home up for auction. The old man was getting his affairs in order before heading west, but also, he wanted to sell his home quickly—and thus a public auction. This fact, wrote Cahill Tarr, “suggests an urgency to leave.”
And where did Henry Wagner the Younger get that money to start Wagner’s Bar and Grocery, aka the Mar-a-Lago of Lansing, Iowa? How, exactly, did he secure the financial backing to enter into the so-called merchant class? Henry Wagner the Elder’s home sale offered one clue.
This future father-in-law’s home was no hovel: It was listed as a three-story home with a slated roof, a cellar, and a stable for twelve (!) horses. The house was located near the local church, which suggested it was in a good neighborhood. And it came with a separate garden plot, also for sale.
I couldn’t compare this property to the overpriced converted yuppie loft complex that I lived in and yet simultaneously despised, but I sensed, even from my limited understanding of equine financials, that having a stable big enough for twelve horses meant that you were doing Just Fine.
Julie Cahill Tarr came to the same conclusion: “The proceeds from the [home] sale were probably more than enough for the family’s passage to America and may have been enough for them to get a head start settling in Iowa,” she wrote to me. (It also suggested a reason for Henry Wagner the Younger’s return to Luxembourg not long after his arrival in the United States: He might have been buttoning up his father-in-law’s affairs at home, following the auction.)
But all of this raised the question: How did Henry Wagner the Elder, who was listed in census records as a voiturier—French for a carter/carrier—make the cash to buy a home like this in the first place? During the period in question, mining in Esch-sur-Alzette was just beginning to be big business. There wouldn’t have been enough time for the elder Henry to cash out of a carting business affiliated with the soon-to-be-booming coal mines. Perhaps, then, Henry the Elder had been engaged in what I loosely categorized as a side hustle, aka a little of this and a little of that. And maybe some of this (or that) involved selling on the black market, or, later, hauling goods for both
the French and the Germans during wartime. Equally involved in this side hustle might have been his employees—and who was working for him at the time, but my great-grandfather: Henry Wagner.
What I hadn’t understood until this point was precisely how close Henry Wagner the Younger had been to Henry Wagner the Elder (no relation). Cahill Tarr revealed that the younger man had been in the employ of the older as far back as the Old World. Therefore, if one of them was engaged in a duplicitous and/or criminal side hustle, so might the other have been—giving both a reason to hightail it out of Esch as soon as the going got tough. But would they really have intertwined their fortunes so closely in the long-term? After all, it was one thing to work for a guy; it was another thing to start a whole new life with him (and his family) in America.
As it turns out, the bonds between the two men were even deeper than I’d thought.
Cahill Tarr, reader and speaker of non-English tongues, had determined that, according to the 1867 Luxembourg census, Henry Wagner, formerly Henry Muller, lived in the same house as Henry Wagner the Elder—his eventual father-in-law. On both of their (separate) census entries, the same address was listed—a fact that slipped by my eagle-eyed-yet-unfortunately-illiterate reading of the same document. This meant that for a time, Henry Wagner had lived well—or at least not in a hovel with only grime and potatoes to animate his meager existence. Perhaps this is where he got his taste for the finer things in life.
My heretofore semi-sympathetic scenario of a coal-dusted dreamer with his nose pressed to the window of the high-class homes…was probably an illusion. In fact, Henry had been inside one of those well-furnished homes himself, drinking from actual glasses, sleeping on a mattress and not a cot. Perhaps, then, it was less ambition than entitlement that drove him to do whatever he had to do to get out of Esch—he knew from a twelve-horse stable, and dammit, he wanted one of his own.
The knowledge that the two Wagner men, Elder and Younger, had once shared the same roof was, in effect, the key to the biggest mystery of them all: Why the hell had my great-grandfather ended up hitching his wagon to that of a random family, forever linking his fate and fortune with theirs? It also explained how he met my eventual great-grandmother, Eva/Anna Wagner. He’d come of age under their roof!
Anna and Michael Muller, Henry’s parents, had also lived in the Wagners’ house, and presumably sent their eldest to work with its patriarch in his carting and carrying business. While the two families didn’t live together for an extended period of time—a census three years earlier shows them living separately—they clearly forged some kind of a bond, enough of one that Henry Muller became, in effect, an adopted son.
This clarified a lot. Nearly all of the big, looming questions, in fact. But there were all kinds of subtler questions I’d never know the answer to, including: Why? Why did they live together? Did something happen to the Muller family, or the Wagner family? It amused me that we were members of a proto-kibbutz (there I was with the Judaism again), a sort of high-class Luxembourger mini-commune, but I wanted badly to know the dynamics at play inside the house. Was Michael Muller a friend of Henry Wagner the Elder’s? Had my great-grandfather always had his eye on Eva/Anna, the woman who would become his eventual wife in America? Was theirs a romance for the ages, or did Henry just marry her because it would secure his share of that Wagner money?
Or was there something more explosive happening here: Could Henry Wagner the Elder actually have been the real father of Henry Wagner the Younger? This would explain why the two men lived in such close proximity, provide a reason as to why Wagner junior had moved into Wagner senior’s home. But it would also mean that my great-grandfather…had eventually married his half sister and had thirteen children with her. I shuddered to think about this possibility. It kept me awake enough that I tried to push it to the deepest recesses of my mind. And also, most important and certainly most frustrating: I’d never know. Julie Cahill Tarr and the Luxembourger American Cultural Society Research Center couldn’t tell me what my great-grandfather had known—or connived—when he forged his bond with the Wagner clan. There were no census records that documented love affairs or friendships or intentions, either good or bad.
I’d mistakenly believed that all this sleuthing would give me an answer key, with which I could paint by numbers to get a full-color image of our family and its characters. What I got instead were fragments of pigments long since faded, from which you could hazard a guess about the original hue, but would never truly know. Too many of the papers had degraded or were lost or never even existed in the first place. The things that would have been most illuminating in the search, the conversations between people, were long since forgotten. I would have to fill in the blanks and decide for myself what I believed, which one of us was probably a bad guy and which one of us was probably a good one. Just as in Mandalay, I would have to determine my end point; there was no finish line to cross.
Still, I had enough information about what we’d done and how we’d lived, the choices we’d made along the way and (most probably) why we’d made them, to conclude that we were not who I’d been told we were, paragons of virtue, defenders of the faith, as American as peppermint ice cream. We lied and cheated and did our best to survive. We told one another stories that made us seem somehow of better character than most other arrivals in our United States. And so, this is what it meant to be an American, as far as my family was concerned: a neat homily about tenacity and piety, iconoclasm and grit. We could exfoliate the rest. But the “rest” was a seriously determinative part of who we were, and what our true community was.
I may not have been Jewish, but I could already see a new kind of identity forming. From these harebrained trips to Esch and Rangoon, these cities of lost blood, I understood that my people were flawed—in some cases, deeply. They elided their own histories. My mother’s family held the past closer—the Old World was very much still with her in custom and in language and on stove top—while my father’s side had become more generically American. But both sides had crafted an identity that buried the uncomfortable truths of the past: My great-grandfather U Myint Kaung played a role in Burma’s economic calamities; my grandmother Mya Mya Gyi harbored racist sentiments that underpinned the dark side of Burmese nationalism. Henry Wagner buried the truth in Esch-sur-Alzette: his struggle, his possible crimes, the debts he owed to others.
Even the land on which we’d grown food, that had instilled in us a certain pride with its American bounty, had once belonged to someone else. The soil wasn’t really ours; its fruits were the rightful property of another tribe. The success we’d had in later years had been lopsided: We’d won because others had been forced to lose. We’d flourished in a country that excluded black and brown people from the very same possibilities. What sort of honor was there in that?
I was not Jewish, I didn’t feel particularly Burmese, and Luxembourg might as well have been Pluto. But in all these places, all these cities, I saw glimpses of who my real people might have been. Carved out from the negative space of my family history, I saw who we actually were. We were storytellers, revisionists, liars. We built our future selves on deceit and half-truths, we plastered our cracks with omissions—as well as genuine courage and smarts and will. In this act of re-creation, we became Americans. And, I guess, there was some kind of belonging in that.
*1 There was one young woman who spoke English, but her teeth were jagged and sharp, as if they had been chipped away in a terrible fight. These teeth proved such a distraction that I was unable to concentrate on anything she was saying, therefore rendering her English language skills moot.
*2 It was a place that reminded me of the sort travelers might stop at in Sleepy Hollow. Actually, a lot of Luxembourg reminded me of what I imagine Sleepy Hollow to be like: the genteel patterns and stuffy Old World airs and surplus of white folk.
*3 Were “Anne” and “Henry” the only names in Luxembourg, or was
this a cruel intergenerational joke meant to throw me off the scent?
I belonged in the crosshairs. This realization struck me—forcefully—when I found myself in London, doing some ancillary research on my Burmese family history. (The Rangoon archives had proved so fruitless that I’d gone west, just to see what the colonial powers had preserved of Britannia’s time in Burma.)
I was focused in on the United Kingdom’s National Archives in London: This was the storehouse for records of the conquered Burmese. The British loved books, after all! Maybe there would be journals or photos that could shed light on my great-grandmother Daw Thet Kywe’s era, the heyday of British rule. (The irony of this was not lost on me—that the British might have more records about the Burmese than the actual Burmese.)
But I was also drawn to the fact that Europe was the place where both of my (unlikely) bloodlines intersected: It was the proverbial nexus of the crosshairs. I’d long since assumed that nothing, other than me, connected Rangoon and Esch-sur-Alzette. After all, if you stretched a wire from one of the cities to the other, it would span more than half the globe. Seventy years separated Henry Wagner’s decision to leave the Old World and Mya Mya Gyi’s to become a Westerner.
Inside the archives, I found yellowing manuscripts: numerous accounts of imperial Burma from the mid-1800s, written with various levels of curiosity, disgust, unvarnished racism, and distinctly British humor. Many were compiled by British officers stationed in the country, some tasked with official diplomatic duties. Of the information I could gather from this brazenly Occidental point of view, during his reign, from 1853 until his death in 1878, Mindon Min, the last great, non-fratricidal*1 king of Burma, the second-to-last ruler of the Konbaung dynasty, was understood by the British to be both effective and apparently enlightened. Among other things, Mindon Min created the world’s largest book, a canon of Theravada Buddhist teachings known as the Tipitaka, and published a newspaper, the Mandalay Gazette, which first rolled off the presses in March 1874. He also—perhaps more important—believed in freedom of speech.