Annie's Ghosts

by Steve Luxenberg

  The vicious Russian pogroms of 1881—and harsh new restrictions that went into effect the following year on Russian Jews’ right to learn a trade, enter university, or own land outside the so-called Pale of Settlement—triggered an exodus to America rivaled only by that of the Irish and Italians, a mass migration that gained momentum over the next three decades. Between 1881 and 1914, more than two million Jews came to the United States, most of them from the Russian Empire. Between 1903 and 1914, when three of my four grandparents made separate journeys across the Atlantic, an average of 76,000 Jews presented themselves annually to U.S. immigration authorities, more than double the average of 36,000 in the ten years before that.

  Some of them returned within a few years, but the vast majority arrived with no intention of ever going back. One of those was Chaim Korn of Radziwillow, Russia.

  Barry Moreno spends many days living in the last century. He’s a librarian and historian at the Immigration Museum on Ellis Island, which served as a gateway to the future for more than ten million newcomers during its sixty-two years of operation, and I’ve asked him to help serve as my entree to the past. I want to learn more about the specific factors that might have led Chaim Korn to say farewell to Radziwillow in the summer of 1907.

  But first, I can tell Moreno something about the place that Chaim was forsaking: Radziwillow, in 1907, was no sleepy shtetl, no village of the Fiddler on the Roof variety. Its location on the border of Russia and Austria had made it a prime spot for the shipment of goods between those two empires since the end of the eighteenth century (and for smuggling operations as well); its inclusion on a major railway line, completed in 1873, guaranteed its development as a bustling town with a flourishing economy.

  Radziwillow reaped enormous benefits from its accidental geography. At the time of Chaim’s birth in the late 1880s, the town’s population had grown to more than seven thousand, including more than four thousand Jews, and signs of affluence were everywhere. The weekly market boasted more than 160 merchants, two two-story hotels played host to traders and travelers, and the nearby farms profited from supplies brought by rail. By the early twentieth century, “the prosperity was felt and seen—doormen in uniforms at important buildings, carriages and majestic horses driven by drivers dressed in an array of shiny uniforms,” according to a 1966 memorial book by survivors of Radziwillow’s Nazi massacres.

  The train station hummed with activity. The railway gauge was a different size on the Austrian side of the border, requiring extra workers to take the Russian goods arriving from Kiev and points further east, and transfer them to cars that could run on the Austrian tracks. Similarly, the crews had to unload and repack imports coming from Vienna and points west. The volume of freight moving through the station led the tsar’s government to expand the century-old Radziwillow customs house, one of six such offices then operating in the Russian empire, and to expand the border-crossing brigade already stationed there. Strategically and economically, Radziwillow enjoyed a prominence altogether disproportionate to its small population.

  So when some of the town’s workers threw themselves into the revolutionary fervor spreading throughout the country in 1905—the year of the failed “first” Russian revolution—54 local businessmen formally requested help, and the government sent additional troops to forestall trouble. Undaunted by the heightened military presence (or perhaps just undeterred), a contingent of Radziwillow’s workers—led by tailors and wool hat makers—went on strike in the fall of 1905, demanding a shorter work day, a bigger paycheck, and greater respect from their employers, according to a 2004 history of Radziwillow published in Ukraine. As a town with a Jewish majority, Radziwillow probably attracted additional suspicion; the tsar had publicly described the revolutionaries as a Jewish-led gang, fanning anti-Semitic feelings that had culminated periodically since 1881 in pogroms—attacks on Jewish communities, families, and property.

  Pogroms had become a staple of Russian life since the imposition of the anti-Jewish laws in 1881, but there’s no documented account of any specific violence against the Jews of Radziwillow during this period before Chaim’s departure. News of pogroms elsewhere in Russia during 1905—well reported in Jewish newspapers such as the Chronicle in London—would have reached a railway town like Radziwillow at some point, adding to the air of uncertainty and apprehension that already existed. The 1966 memorial book by Radziwillow’s Holocaust survivors, like many accounts, points to pogroms as the major cause of Jewish emigration during this period. “Many Jews fled to America because their homes and small businesses were destroyed, they were attacked, injured and killed, and continued to be persecuted,” according to a summary that a translator wrote for me.

  Barry Moreno doesn’t subscribe to a one-size-fits-all theory of Jewish immigration. “I think it’s a mistake to attribute all Russian emigration to the pogroms or to say that Jews had ‘escaped’ them,” he tells me. “There’s no question the pogroms were important. But they were isolated, scattered incidents. Most émigrés had never witnessed a pogrom. I think it’s more accurate to say that pogroms contributed to the more generalized sense of fear that had spread across the Pale.”

  This much I know for sure: Chaim and Tillie followed a well-trod path out of Radziwillow. Before calling Moreno, I did a year-by-year analysis of how many Radziwillers made it to Ellis Island, based on recently digitized passenger manifests searchable by town name. Between 1900 and 1914, at least 282 passengers listed Radziwillow as their hometown; almost one-third left in the two years before my grandfather’s departure. This matched the trend in the rest of Russia. Many young Jewish men, after examining their options, were voting with their feet.

  Why did the peak come in those years and not earlier? A kind of perfect storm: In the Russia of 1905 and 1906, Chaim and other young Jewish men found themselves caught in a vortex of political turmoil, economic deprivations, religious persecution, and military conscription for an unpopular and ultimately unsuccessful war with Japan. Add the threat of pogroms to this swirling mix, along with the tension of living in a border town with a large military presence—a military with a reputation for promoting and sometimes participating in the pogroms—and it’s not hard to see why Chaim and his Radziwillow neighbors might have turned their eyes toward America.

  The Russian Jews weren’t the only ones hungering to leave their country. From Italy, from Germany, from Romania, from Hungary, from Austria, from most of southern and eastern Europe, emigrants crossed the Atlantic in record numbers, peaking at nearly 1.3 million in 1907, the year of Chaim’s journey. The steamship companies were not just passive players in this ongoing drama; their network of agents and subagents operated throughout Europe, promising cheap transportation to the promised land. Their tactics drew the scrutiny of Philip Cowen, a U.S. immigration inspector sent to Russia in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt to investigate the causes of the mass migration. Cowen described how a minority of agents went beyond propaganda, employing the sort of unscrupulous tactics that might be expected in an unregulated sellers’ market—peddling fraudulent tickets, extorting bribes to arrange passage, luring customers with the promise of nonexistent jobs.

  Immigration was the talk—pro and con—of Washington in 1907; as Chaim Korn made his arrangements to leave Radziwillow, a presidential-congressional commission opened the first official U.S. investigation of the migration phenomenon, an effort that lasted three years and included the placement of investigators disguised as steerage passengers on twelve ships crossing the Atlantic. The panel, chaired by U.S. Senator William Dillingham of Vermont, reflected the divided politics of the time. Some members wanted to use the commission as a weapon to restrict immigration, both Asian and European, which they viewed as a threat to the country’s stability. Other members, and many more on the staff, pursued a social reformer’s agenda, seeking broader evidence of the kind of exploitation that Cowen had found in his travels to Russia—recruiters prowling Europe for cheap labor, steamship companies transporting t
heir passengers in inhuman conditions, employers taking advantage of the newcomers upon arrival.

  As part of the commission’s investigation, two U.S. immigration inspectors visited southern and eastern Europe and found that poor villages and towns had a surprisingly rich source of information about life in America. Letters from émigrés arrived regularly, often containing money, and these letters had a powerful effect in encouraging more immigration. “The cottage of the recipient becomes at once a place to which the entire male population proceeds, and the letters are read and re-read until the contents can be repeated word for word,” wrote an investigator who had gone to Italy. “When instances of this kind have been multiplied by thousands, it is not difficult to understand what impels poor people to leave their homes. The word comes again and again that ‘work is abundant and wages princely in America.’”

  Their lines of communication to America gave them some idea of the risks that awaited them at sea and upon arrival. The commission’s investigators found that the emigrants had a basic grasp of U.S. immigration law; most were aware that they stood a better chance at admission if they had money, a skill, a place to go, and no obvious physical or mental problems. The rigors of the journey itself tended to weed out many of those who might not pass muster. In the commission’s words, “emigrating to a strange and distant country, although less of an undertaking than formerly, is still a serious and relatively difficult matter, requiring a degree of courage and resourcefulness not possessed by weaklings in any class.”

  Courage. Resourcefulness. Not for weaklings.

  I would never have associated these words with my discouraged, defeated grandfather, the rail-thin man who had left so little an impression on me that I can remember nothing of significance that he said from six years of weekly Saturday visits to his apartment. But that beaten man barely resembled the twenty-year-old who surmounted Russia’s bureaucratic obstacles to emigration and procured the necessary papers to leave, who then scraped together the money (about $30) for a ticket on the S.S. Patricia and negotiated his way to the Hamburg-America line’s Auswandererhallen, a vast complex of dormitories and dining halls that housed and fed as many as four thousand emigrants awaiting inspection before boarding their ship. He then protected his few belongings in the chaos of steerage, which the commission described as an ordeal that leaves the traveler “with a mind unfit for healthy, wholesome impressions and with a body weakened and unfit for the hardships that are involved in the beginning of life in a new land.”

  What conditions did Chaim confront on his sixteen days in steerage on the S.S. Patricia? I don’t have to imagine it, thanks to the detailed report of commission investigator Anna Herkner. The summer after Chaim’s journey on the S.S. Patricia, Herkner disguised herself as a steerage passenger on another Hamburg-America vessel of the same vintage. Her final report, on that voyage and two others, offered first-hand confirmation of “the disgusting and demoralizing conditions which have generally prevailed in the steerage of immigrant ships.”

  A one-person backpacking tent has nearly twice as much room as the space allotted Chaim and Herkner in steerage. They slept in iron bunks six feet long and two feet wide, with just thirty inches separating the upper and lower berths. At over six feet tall, Chaim would have consumed most of those thirty cubic feet just by putting himself to bed. With no hooks for clothing or bin for luggage, his thirty cubic feet would have served as bed, closet, kitchen cabinet, towel rack, table, chair, and storage compartment for whatever possessions he had brought from Radziwillow. Most likely, he would have slept in his clothes, not only to conserve space but also because the ship-supplied blanket was too small and too thin to keep him warm. His pillow, if he were lucky enough to get one, would have been stuffed with dried seaweed or perhaps straw, just like his mattress.

  If the cramped quarters were bad, the smell was worse. The steamship companies considered their immigrant passengers to be little more than freight, Herkner wrote, and they crammed as many beds as possible in the steerage compartments, row upon row, tier upon tier, hundreds of people breathing the same poorly ventilated air. “The vomitings of the sick are often permitted to remain a long time before being removed,” Herkner wrote. “The floors, when iron, are continually damp, and when of wood they reek with foul odor because they are not washed…When to this very limited space and much filth and stench is added inadequate means of ventilation, the result is almost unendurable.”

  An earlier outcry about steerage conditions and the competition for passengers had led some steamship lines to make improvements, but only a small percentage of ships had converted or built “new” steerage by the time Chaim and Herkner went on their trans-Atlantic journeys. Twice Herkner traveled in old-style steerage, and once in new, where the berths had amenities comparable to second class—storage space for hand luggage, hooks for clothing, warmer blankets, a drop shelf for a table, and stewards assigned to clean up seasickness.

  Unfortunately, most immigrants never saw new steerage, which was not available on most ships in 1907 and 1908. Rebuilding the steerage quarters meant taking the ship out of service, at least for a few months, and as far as I can tell from available records, the S.S. Patricia had no significant interruption in operation between its maiden voyage in 1899 and the 1907 crossing that brought Chaim to America. So it seems likely that Chaim would have seen a version of what Herkner wrote of seeing on her first voyage from Bremen to Baltimore: “During these twelve days in the steerage I lived in a disorder and in surroundings that offended every sense. Only the fresh breeze from the sea overcame the sickening odors, the vile language of the men, the screams of the women defending themselves, the crying of children, wretched because of their surroundings, and practically every sound that reached the ear, irritated beyond endurance. There was no sight before which the eye did not prefer to close.”

  Eyes shut might have been the preferred mode of travel at sea, but those same eyes grew wide upon entering New York’s harbor. A photo of the S.S. Patricia, taken just six months before Chaim traveled on that same ship to America, shows the main deck jammed to overflowing with smiling immigrants eager to get a glimpse of their new homeland. They had plenty of time to gawk; so many ships were arriving in New York during this period that the Ellis Island inspectors were overwhelmed, requiring steerage passengers to remain on their ships or crowd onto ferries while awaiting their turn for processing. Ellis Island’s inspectors could handle between two thousand and four thousand steerage passengers on a typical day; the nine ships that appeared on July 21, 1907—the day of Chaim’s arrival—carried three or four times that many.

  Chaim had made it to America. Now the question was: Would he be able to make it in America?

  “What did your grandfather do in the Mo-tor City?” my friend Dan Swanson asks soon after we meet at the college newspaper in 1971. Dan likes to play with words, so he alters the syllable stress, making it “Mo-tor” to resonate with Motown, Detroit’s newest nickname in those days.

  “He was a junk peddler, mostly,” I remember saying, or something like that. Dan wants details, but I don’t have any—I tell him that Mom never talked much about him, and that we aren’t a family that dwells much on the past.

  Dan and I are both city boys who went to public high schools and then became beneficiaries of Harvard’s long-running effort to assemble a student body with a geographic and economic mix. (I wasn’t aware until much later that “geographical distribution” began in the 1920s as part of the university president’s effort to counteract the rising percentage of Jewish kids who were qualifying for admission, many from immigrant families in New York and other urban centers of the Northeast.) I’m also the cliché: two generations after my grandfather left Russia, where the tsar’s laws discriminated against Jews and their educational opportunities, I’m admitted to Harvard.

  Dan is a product of Chicago’s South Side, and proud of it. He also has a historian’s curiosity about the social forces that shape people and their cities, so g
etting to know him is akin to submitting to an interrogation—he quizzes me relentlessly about my background, my family, and Detroit, which he regards as Chicago’s little brother.

  “How come he never worked for the aut-o companies?” Dan says. “That scumbag Henry Ford wouldn’t give him a job?” Dan’s patter is usually colorful and always anticorporate; he comes from a union town, and he calls himself a union man.

  “I don’t know,” I say, a little embarrassed. Dan knows a lot about his family and his city, and his questions make me feel like I should know more about mine. “I may be from the Motor City”—like many Detroit natives, I disliked the nickname, and rarely used it—“but I don’t live anywhere near the auto plants, and no one from my family ever worked there. It’s a part of Detroit that I just don’t know much about.”

  What happened to Detroit’s economy between 1910 and 1920—the decade when Hyman and Tillie married, set down roots in the city, and started their family—is staggering to contemplate.

  When the decade dawned, General Motors employed 15,000 workers; 10 years later, 50,000 toiled in its plants. Henry Ford’s workforce grew at an even faster rate, going from 10,000 in 1910, to 32,000 in 1916, to 48,000 in 1919. Altogether, 181 auto companies opened shop in Detroit between 1903 and 1926, and their insatiable demand for parts spawned hundreds of machine shops and suppliers, who in turn hired thousands of workers. In the early days of the industry, the suppliers—not Ford or Olds or GM—were king. The brand names that eventually came to dominate the industry were mostly assemblers, dependent on the engines and transmissions of people such as the Dodge Brothers, whose Hamtramck factory rivaled Ford’s plant in size and numbers.

  Ford and the Dodge Brothers formed an exclusive alliance in 1903 that made all three men—and several other investors—into multimillionaires in less than a decade. Ford and his partners, desperate for cash at the time, gave the Dodges a share of their nearly bankrupt company; as a result, the Dodges secured the dual role of investors as well as suppliers. This profitable arrangement continued until 1914, when Ford declared that he no longer wanted to pay the Dodges twice (referring to dividends and supplies). The Dodges, owners of perhaps the most trusted name in the industry because of their first-rate engines and other parts, struck out on their own. Before the first Dodge Brothers Touring Car came off the assembly line in November 1914, the company found itself inundated with orders, as well as an astounding 22,000 applicants for Dodge dealerships.