She sighs. “Hard times. Such hard times.”
How hard? Hard enough to make Mom want to escape, no matter what the price? Hard enough to drive a wedge between her and her parents, between what they were and what she wanted to become? Hard enough to see my father—a divorced man with two children, a furniture salesman dependent on commissions for a paycheck—as her “savior?”
Growing up, I often heard Mom’s descriptions of poverty’s perniciousness. Being poor had scarred her deeply, and her fear of poverty was a prime motivator in how she raised us and why she pushed us to excel in school. “Education,” she often said, “is what matters. You can’t get anywhere without an education.”
I knew, too, that at some level, she faulted her father—not for the Depression, or their poverty, or the hardships that the family endured, but for not working harder to overcome his shortcomings, for giving up instead of going forward. “I didn’t know my father,” she had told Hazan at their first meeting in May 1995.
I didn’t know him either. I remember Mom taking care of both her parents in their last years, rushing to their apartment to deal with one health crisis or another. Her affection toward her mother seemed genuine and real, but as I think about Mom’s attitude toward her father, Millie Brodie’s words about Mom’s care of Annie resonate in my ears: “She did it more out of obligation than devotion.”
The sins of the parents are paid for through their children. I hadn’t thought about it before, but now it occurs to me: Tillie probably wasn’t just talking about Annie when she said that. She had said “children,” plural, and she had two—disabled, disturbed Annie and disappointed, discontented Bertha. If Tillie felt guilty about Annie, about giving birth to a “defective” child in the first place, about her inability to cope with Annie’s pain and suffering, wasn’t it also likely that my grandmother felt guilty about her inability to protect her older daughter from the consequences of Annie’s troubles? Perhaps sending Annie to Eloise, signing that petition calling her daughter insane, perhaps that was Tillie’s desperate attempt to save both her daughters; getting Annie the help she needed, and releasing Bertha from the nightmare that their life had become with Annie’s screams and moans.
What exactly did Tillie tell Mona Evans? She feels that if her family had money, the patient could have been made well long ago and the present mental disturbance would not have manifested.
Anger and guilt, the daughters of despair.
Where’s Mom? I ask, putting my school books down.
—She’s gone away for a rest.
When is she coming back?
—Very soon, just a few days, when she feels better.
Where did she go?
—Not far. Maybe we’ll go see her. But if not, she’ll be home soon.
When I was about eight, Mom disappeared for a few days.
She didn’t vanish. She just wasn’t home when I came back from school that day in 1961, and when I asked about her, someone—Dad? Sash?—said that she needed a rest and would be back as soon as she felt better. I was too young to spend much time reflecting on the implausibility of this story. When Mom returned four days later (I think it was four days), she followed the script—she had been exhausted and needed a break. Beyond that, my memory surrenders nothing more. I might have gone to see her at the rest home or the sanitarium, or whatever the place was called, but I don’t think so.
Daily life went back to its normal rhythms—school, play, bed—and this strange episode soon faded into obscurity, where it stayed for me until Mom’s anxiety attacks in 1995 brought it back. So when Millie Brodie mentioned that she had heard through the grapevine about Mom having “mental health problems,” I wasn’t entirely surprised—except by the idea that news of Mom’s “rest” had migrated outside the family circle and was deemed significant enough for grapevine consumption. By 1961, Millie hadn’t seen Mom for years, yet gossip about Mom’s mental health had somehow reached Millie’s ears, probably through her cousin Irene or Sylvia.
Tough town for keeping secrets.
For Sash, who was twenty at the time and old enough to understand that Mom was more than just tired, this “breakdown” was a scarring experience. Sash came home one day to find Mom in bed, more or less incapacitated, and Dad, sitting in a chair, more or less immobilized. Whatever the cause of Dad’s paralysis, she felt she had to take over. “I was twenty, and I shouldn’t have been put in that position,” she told me during those dark days in 1995 when Mom once again couldn’t function and we had to push her to seek treatment.
If history wasn’t repeating itself, it was ricocheting, all the way back to Annie.
The envelope from the National Archives branch in Chicago had a promising bulk to it, like the coveted acceptance letter from a college admissions office. I had written away for Nathan Shlien’s immigration and naturalization records a few months earlier, on the off chance they might contain some useful information that would lead me to other family members or people from the old neighborhood.
My first thought when I look at the three documents inside the envelope: There’s some mistake. I must be reading this wrong.
Second thought: After all I’ve learned, Mom’s secrets still manage to blindside me.
The three documents, all from different time periods in the 1920s, chronicle Nathan’s efforts to obtain citizenship, a lengthy process that required several declarations over a period of years. On each form, Nathan gave his “place of residence” as 1026 Medbury Avenue—my grandparents’ address, the same address where he was staying when the census-taker came around in 1930.
I had always assumed that Nathan’s stay on Medbury was temporary. But based on these three documents alone, it’s clear that he lived with Hyman and Tillie (and Mom and Annie) for at least five years. It was suddenly getting quite crowded in my revised image of Mom’s childhood. I do a quick reinterpretation: Nathan was living there when Mom turned eight, and still living there when Mom became a teenager. To paraphrase Anna Oliwek, he was family.
Yet I had never heard Mom mention his name.
The final count for Nathan Shlien: Ten years. That’s how long he claimed a daily presence in Mom’s life, according to city directories that I could now mine with much greater precision. A full decade. Most of Mom’s childhood.
He came to live with my grandparents in 1922, as Mom was entering kindergarten, and remained until 1932 or 1933, when she was a junior in high school, approaching graduation—just about the time she would be thinking about college.
Why had he come to Detroit? The breakup of his marriage in Chicago, most likely. Anna Oliwek had told me that Nathan divorced his first wife after discovering her in bed with another man. Anna didn’t know that he left Chicago, too, as well as his wife.
Maybe Anna was right when she speculated that Nathan was the “uncle from Chicago” who had reneged on his college offer. I had been skeptical: In my mind’s eye, Mom’s mysterious benefactor/reneger was a self-made and imperious man who had reached out impulsively from his nicely appointed house in the “big” city (as we thought of Chicago) to bestow a bit of his wealth on a favored niece, but then withdrew his offer in the light of a later day, unaware of how his whims had crushed a young girl’s hopes. Nathan didn’t fit my image.
But perhaps it was Nathan, after all. He didn’t have a lot of money on his Ford Motor Company salary, but maybe he possessed something more valuable than a wealthier man in a distant city—a closeness, an affection, and an understanding of the dreams and desires of this young girl. If Tillie and Hyman had taken their fellow émigré from Radziwillow into their family when he needed a fresh start, perhaps he had wanted to return the favor by sending their older daughter to college. But then reality—Alimony? His modest income? The Depression?—caught up with him and he failed to follow through. I’ll never know for sure; for now, I’m inclined to believe that he’s the one.
Whenever Mom talked about the old neighborhood and her childhood—which wasn’t often—her stories c
arried an undertone of disappointment and resentment. Her family’s welfare status deeply embarrassed her; in high school, she skipped lunch to avoid using her government-issued free meal ticket and she walked home, telling her friends that she “needed the exercise” so that they wouldn’t know she couldn’t afford the few cents of bus fare. Then the most crushing blow of all: her dreams of going to college, of fulfilling the potential that had allowed her to graduate from Northern High School just shy of her seventeenth birthday, dashed by an uncle’s unfulfilled promise.
Plenty of immigrant Jews had landed in Detroit and Chicago early in the twentieth century and, within a generation, had made progress from penniless to prosperous. But not my grandparents. Something had gone wrong. Was that why Mom was so determined to flee?
{ TWELVE }
The Cigar Laborer
Standing room only: The S.S. Patricia, arriving in New York harbor, 1906. The following year, Hyman takes the same ship to America. (Edwin Levick photo, from Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
The casket fascinates me.
No, that’s not quite right, it’s not the casket itself, it’s the entire ritual—the open coffin in the tiny back room, the parade of people going there to say a prayer or say good-bye or just stare. Some people actually talk to him, but why? My grandfather is gone; only his body is here.
I want to see it, I don’t want to see it, I don’t know what I want—I’m twelve, and that’s old enough to see a dead body without getting scared, isn’t it? I watch the adults going in and out of the little room, some crying, some not, and I edge myself to the doorway, peering inside at the wooden box. Mom is somewhere with Bubbe, sitting with her, holding her, comforting her. It’s just the two of them now that Zayde has died.
I want to see, I don’t want to see.
I have to see.
He doesn’t look like Zayde, at least not the Zayde I knew. He’s smiling almost, which is weird because I don’t remember him smiling much. He doesn’t look as wrinkled as the last time I saw him. How is that possible? I think about how old he must be—born in the nineteenth century!—and it bothers me that I don’t know his exact age. Why do so many people from the old country not know their birthday? Just because you came here a long time ago, and you grew up speaking a different language, why does that make it harder to know when you were born? Mom is telling people that she thinks he was seventy-six or seventy-seven—it’s January 1964 now, which means Zayde was born around 1887.
That’s before cars or basketball were invented, that’s how ancient that is.
I can only imagine.
My grandfather first set his Eastern European feet on U.S. soil sometime in 1907. That much I knew from the 1930 census records. But for several months, I could find no hint of how he got here or where he went after making it through the immigration officer’s scrutiny. Nor could I find any documentation of Tillie’s arrival, which the census listed as 1914. An online search of Ellis Island records yielded nothing, as did an examination of the border crossing records from Canada to Detroit and the passenger manifest lists for Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other ports. I tried every spelling variant I could concoct for Hyman and Tillie and Cohen, without success. Their marriage license proved that both were living in Detroit by July 1915, but their early days in their new homeland, like so much else of my family’s history, remained beyond my grasp.
I was looking for the wrong man.
Hyman Cohen did not yet exist when my grandfather bought his ticket for America. “Chaim” was what Anna Oliwek always called him. “Chaim” was the name that David Oliwek had used when he told me that his mother was both a “Korn” and Schlein. It suddenly hit me: I should be looking for Chaim Korn, not Hyman Cohen.
Bingo.
On July 5, 1907, twenty-year-old Chaim Korn, son of Nochim Korn of Radziwillow, Russia, boarded the S.S. Patricia in Hamburg, Germany, with a berth in steerage and five U.S. dollars in his pocket. Sixteen days later, after stops in France and England, the Patricia steamed into New York’s harbor with 160 first-class passengers, 180 in second class, and 2,100 in steerage. At Ellis Island, Chaim answered “no” when asked if he were a polygamist or an anarchist, and he passed a medical examination looking for evidence that he was deformed, crippled, or insane—all conditions that merited exclusion under the immigration acts of 1882 and 1891. He hadn’t entered the country yet, but already he had learned something about his new homeland’s view of “defectives,” at least those from other lands.
After spending four of his dollars to pay the required government “head tax,” Chaim made his way to a friend’s apartment in Manhattan, disappearing from my view until he showed up in Detroit in 1915. Why had he come? What attitudes did he bring, and how did they affect his ability to handle adversity and the birth of a disabled daughter? How did he plan to make a living?
Eventually, I would assemble enough information to hazard a guess at the first two questions, but for now, I could only answer the third: The Patricia’s passenger manifests, both the one in Hamburg and the one in New York, list his occupation as “cigar labourer.”
Cigar laborer?
I had never heard anything like that. Evans’s Routine History, in its mincingly sparse account of my grandparents’ background, reported only that Hyman hailed from “a family of farmers” and had “very little education,” completing just two years in a Jewish school. Was there a thriving tobacco industry in Radziwillow or its environs? Is that how Chaim (not yet Hyman) had learned the craft of cigar making, assuming that he had told the truth about his job skills to the immigration officer? It was common enough for arriving immigrants to say whatever they thought necessary to get themselves into the country, and having a means of supporting yourself was one of those necessary items.
Arriving without money, destination, or job prospects risked rejection as an “LPC”—a Likely Public Charge—followed by a return trip across the ocean. But calling yourself a cigar laborer strikes me as an esoteric choice for a lie; if you had to tell the authorities something, why not just choose tailor or butcher or the more generic “farm laborer,” as so many other passengers on the S.S. Patricia did, and be done with it?
Another way to think about it: Perhaps Chaim wasn’t describing his past, but his future. Perhaps he had come to the United States with the expectation of finding work at a cigar-making company, perhaps a notion planted either by one of the several thousand steamship company agents actively promoting the benefits of immigration, or by a fellow Radziwiller who had preceded him and written home to say, come, come to America, land of opportunity and cigar making.
Cigar laborer? Is that what brought Chaim to the city where I would be born? It’s certainly possible. Detroit, known to me only as the Motor City, turns out to have been the Cigar City at the turn of the twentieth century, the result of good rail connections to the tobacco-growing regions of Kentucky and further south. No fewer than 189 cigar manufacturers were operating in Detroit in 1907, according to the city directory for that year, employing more than 10,000 workers—many of them women—who produced more than 200 million cigars annually. One news article traced Detroit’s tobacco prominence to the pre–Civil War arrival of the first German and Jewish immigrants, “who brought with them the skills and techniques of cigar making from their European homelands.”
There’s not a shred of evidence that Chaim ever rolled a cigar in Detroit or anywhere else. Reconstructing his work history from various documents, I can describe him as a junk peddler and a janitor, but not a cigar maker. He did get his shot, though, in the brand-new industry that eventually earned many immigrant Detroiters—but not my grandfather—a piston-driven ride out of poverty and into the middle class.
Of all the American cities where my grandparents and other Jewish immigrants could hope to end up in the first two decades of the twentieth century, perhaps none offered more promise than Detroit. Unlike New York, where so many Jews had crammed into the Lower East Side by 1910 that it w
as home to the densest square mile in the country and perhaps the world, Detroit offered plenty of room for its expanding immigrant neighborhoods. Fueled by the spectacular rise of the auto industry and its related businesses, Detroit saw its population swell more than 60 percent in a single decade, from 286,000 in 1900 to 465,000 in 1910, and then topped that by doubling during the next decade, passing the magic million mark sometime in the fall of 1920. In just twenty years, Detroit had vaulted from the country’s thirteenth largest city to the fourth, trailing only New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
The transformation happened so fast that it was almost bewildering to long-time residents, not to mention the newly arrived immigrants. The streets, built for the previous generation’s horse and buggy, could not handle the polyglot of pedestrians, bicyclists, and junk peddlers with their grimy pushcarts competing for space with the gleaming new automobiles rolling off the assembly lines. No system of traffic signals yet existed; at a dozen major intersections, where traffic engineers counted up to 21,000 cars in a ten-hour period in 1916, the congestion became so bad at peak times that it was “quite impracticable to traverse these streets at all,” wrote one historian of the era.
No other U.S. city could claim such a rate of growth during this period. Immigrants from all over Europe—English and Irish, Swedes and Scots, Austrians and Italians, Poles and Germans, Russians and Romanians—flooded into neighborhoods unaccustomed to such a press of humanity. One of those neighborhoods, around the Eastern Market, became a magnet for the thousands of Eastern European Jews streaming into the city—including both my grandfathers, who lived within blocks of each other without ever meeting. Detroit, which had 1,000 Jews in 1880, counted 34,000 by the time Tillie arrived in 1914, many of Russian or Polish descent.
Annie's Ghosts Page 20