Open Writing

I have referred several times, in previous columns, to the USA being, in large part, a country of immigrants; no disrespect intended to the indigenous peoples. Most citizens were either born outside the USA, or are children or descendents of foreign nationals. Their decisions to leave their home country are many and diverse: flight from political or religious persecution, relief from poverty and famine, or a lack of prospects, or simply to make a fresh start.

For those who fled oppression, there was often no opportunity to bring along family records, and the remembered history faded or was corrupted with time, or was lost through the deaths of the custodians. Much reliance was and is placed on family lore, which frequently is misleading due to the unwillingness of previous generations to recount facts and events that they considered to be scurrilous or embarrassing.

Divorce, bigamy and criminal conduct were among all the reasons, in their mind, to be close-mouthed about their relatives. To complicate matters further, entrance into the US was through Ellis Island in New York harbor. From 1892, until it was closed in 1954, 12 million people had been processed through the 76 acre facility, where they were checked for disease, identity and suitability for admission into the country.

Those who didn’t pass muster were either detained on the Island pending reclassification, or were returned to their country of origin. The officials who carried out the interviews and determined the classification of each immigrant were seemingly not linguists, nor sometimes well educated, and many of the supplicants spoke little or no English.

The immigration officials relied on ships’ manifests, which were not always accurate, or on what information they could extract from each immigrant. Many immigrants lied about personal details out of fear, or fabricated their age so they would be allowed to work. It isn’t hard to imagine the potential for errors and confusion in the documentation of those citizens-to-be, making it all the more difficult for their progeny later to reconstruct any kind of family history.

A family I know came from Germany before World War II and were given the name Verker. They know that this is not their real family name, and assume that their father, when asked for his name, mistakenly thought he was being asked for his occupation, and replied “worker,” but with a German accent. The task of getting this type of error corrected later was often beyond the resources of such people, and their gratitude for being allowed to remain in the USA outweighed any family pride in their name.

Jewish families made up a significant proportion of the immigrants, and some have tried to retrace their family’s past by visiting their country of origin. More often than not they find that gravestones have been recycled as paving stones, and even whole cemeteries have been dismantled, along with the records, particularly in Poland and Russia. Though my wife has never visited the places in Eastern Europe where her parents and their families came from in the 1920’s, she has for many years tried to piece together their history.

Family gatherings could have provided opportunities to unravel the family lore, but unless all the members were present, there was no way to authenticate the often disparate versions of events. Recollections were generally dimmed by the passage of time, and since the surviving members were children or babies when they left Europe, what they claimed to remember was often distorted, inaccurate or even imagined.

My wife’s mother, who was six years old when she left Russia with her mother and two brothers, was not able to remember her place of birth except that it was near Kiev. She was approaching eighty when one day she turned away from watching television and said, “That was where I was born!” The TV was reporting the melt-down of the reactor at Chernobyl, near Kiev!

There was no way to verify this at the time, and it seemed unlikely that her memory of events some seventy plus years earlier would suddenly have surfaced, but my wife left it at that. Since then, more pieces of the family’s history have been added to the jig saw, repositioned and in some cases discarded. Up to a few weeks ago, two important pieces of the picture were still elusive – the whereabouts of the graves of my wife’s grand Aunt Stella and Great Grandmother Fanny.

It was known that they had settled in Charleston, South Carolina, unlike other family members who clustered in New York, and that at some point in the forties or fifties, Stella had returned to New York under mysterious circumstances. The circumstances were only mysterious because those in the know were not telling. She died in New York in 1953, and her body was taken back to Charleston for burial.

In September 2007, my wife and I visited Charleston in the hope of locating the graves, but without knowing where to begin. Purely by chance, a friend, who had cremated his aunt just two weeks before, suggested that we contact the funeral director who handled his aunt’s funeral. Amazingly, the gentleman knew the family and suggested we contact a synagogue where the records were held.

The lady who answered the phone, upon hearing our request, turned to the record book and was somewhat shocked when it fell open at the page where my wife’s relatives were listed. She said the hairs on her neck stood up at the realization. She directed us to two cemeteries, both in rather dingy parts of the city, and was able to give us directions to Stella’s grave site, but not Fanny’s.

We soon located Stella’s grave, and my wife stood in silence for some time, moved by the reality of an encounter with a past she barely knew. Leaving a pebble on the headstone, as is the Jewish custom of remembrance, we went in search of the second cemetery. The first had shown indications of neglect, but the second appeared to be completely abandoned.

It is located in what has become an industrial area, close to the railroad tracks, and is surrounded by a rusting iron fence. The grass around the small gate was so high that it was difficult to get it open. It is only a small cemetery with perhaps 250 graves at most, so my wife and I and two friends quickly checked out most of it without finding what we were looking for.

Many of the graves dated from the 1800’s, and the marble headstones had weathered to the point of being unreadable. We were about to give up our search when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the word “Chernobil” on one of the stones, spelled with an “I” not a “Y.” Almost immediately afterwards I saw the name “Fanny Olasov,” among the Hebrew words.

Aside for the triumph of successfully ending the search, here was confirmation that my wife’s maternal family was truly from that place so far away in time and distance. I was inexplicably moved by the experience, and realized for the first time the importance of identity to those who were uprooted by tribulation.

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