Since a refugee ban is being signed on Holocaust Remembrance Day, I’m thinking about that. My ancestors were refugees. The story of many immigrants during the great European immigration period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was one of seeking better economic opportunity, but for the majority of poor Jews from “the Pale of Settlement”, that is not the story. They were, in every relevant definition of the term, refugees. If you assume that me calling my ancestors refugees amounts to some melodramatic poetic license, let me set forth some true family history and you tell me:
Israel Chaim did not emigrate from, but fled, Druya, in what was then the Russian Empire and is now Belarus, because he had been conscripted into the Russian army to be sent thousands of miles through Siberia to fight in the Russo-Japanese War. Jews conscripted into the Russian military in those days were often forcibly Christianized, assaulted or killed by their fellow soldiers, and treated as cannon fodder because they were thought of as nearly subhuman and responsible for the death of their messiah. He made it to the United States and here I am.
Yakob Shlomo/Simon did not emigrate from, but fled, Nesvizh, in what was then the Russian Empire and now Belarus, in the aftermath of the murder of his father in a field by Belorussians during what was neither the first nor last pogrom to afflict the Jews in that town. He made it to the United States and here I am.
I do not know, with the same detail, what spurred Shmuel/Samuel or Leib/Louis to leave Polonne, in what was then the Russian Empire and now Ukraine, at around the same time. Maybe there was a specific trauma or threat they were fleeing, or maybe it was the general atmosphere in Ukraine during that period. By “general atmosphere”, I mean that between the late 19th century and around 1920, there were over 1,300 separate pogroms in Ukraine that killed as many as a quarter million Jews and left double that amount without permanent homes. What’s more, on the topic of “general atmosphere”, Polonne is located in the Khmelnytskyi Oblast of Ukraine, which is named in loving honor of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi (may his name be obliterated), who was responsible for the slaughter of more Jews in one single historical period than any other apart from the Holocaust. Of course, the Holocaust would follow in the same region hundreds of years later and finish the job.
Israel, Simon and Samuel all came to the United States ahead of their wives and children, who also did not emigrate from, but fled, their homes at the same time as the adult male in the family, but could not get all the way to America until there was some way to pay for it. In tow with Shprintza/Sophie was her 6 year old daughter, Sura/Sarah, my great-grandmother, born in Polonne, and who I knew until I was 16 years old as my Bubba. They had to wait alone in cramped immigrant housing in Liverpool until that adult male could raise enough to purchase tickets to bring them across the Atlantic. Maybe that brings to mind those hilarious right wing memes of late showing pictures of youngish Syrian, Iraqi or Afghan male refugees that ask “if these are refugees, where are all the women and children?”. The same ignorant statement could be made about my own family tree. Not that a young single man doesn’t also deserve a chance to live, as was the case for Louis Jacobs, who made it to America as a bachelor at the age of 22. He deserved a chance to live. There was a large pogrom in his town 7 years before he left and 4 years after. Then another 2 years after that.
I have read the immigration records of my family and the ship manifests that brought them to America, which contain important information about the “desirability” of these refugee immigrants – what they could bring to America on Day One. Here is the amount of money each had when he or she disembarked. Israel, alone: $30; Shprintza, with two children: $10; Simon, alone: $4; Louis, alone: $3; Sarah, with four children: $3; Feige/Fannie, with three children: $0.
Shprintza, Fannie, Israel and Sarah could not read or write. Simon could read, but couldn’t write. What Louis could read and write was certainly Yiddish or maybe, if he was really educated, non-spoken biblical Hebrew, both written in the Hebrew alphabet, and which I’m sure were awfully in demand in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he wound up. Simon was a shoemaker who became a junk dealer and tried his hand at kosher catering until the rabbi opened a competing company and drove him out of business. He spent a great deal of his life in America unemployed and unemployable, as did his son Berel Yosef/Barnet. Israel was a tailor. Louis was a barber. Samuel made ceramics in a factory in Trenton, New Jersey. Not exactly people who would have been great candidates for H-1B visas today.
My stepmother’s mother was among the last trickle of Jews allowed to flee Germany and enter the United States after Kristallnacht. She was a refugee in every sense of the word. She was a child and she deserved a chance to live. Her family had been middle class in Germany but had essentially everything seized by the Nazis in the mid to late 1930s. They came over with ten dollars. As with the others, it says so right on the ship manifest.
If the doors had been closed to my ancestors, I wouldn’t be here. That’s true of the descendant of anyone created from the mix of immigrants in the United States if his or her ancestors had been denied entry, of course. But I’ll go you one further: if the doors had been closed to my ancestors, as those doors were closed to our extended family from those same places as a result of the Immigration Act of 1924, those ancestors would have been murdered. You may think that’s an aggressively certain statement – that I can say that these people would, definitely, have been slaughtered if they weren’t allowed to come here. So let me quantify the certainty:
Pre-Nazi Invasion Jewish Population of Druya, hometown of my grandfather’s mother’s family: 1,500.
Survivors of Nazi Liquidation of Druya: Approximately 50.
Pre-Nazi Invasion Jewish Population of Nesvizh, hometown of my grandfather’s father’s family: 4,500.
Survivors of Nazi Liquidation of Nesvizh: Under 100.
Pre-Nazi Invasion Jewish Population of Polonne, hometown of both my grandmother’s parents: 5,500.
Survivors of Nazi Liquidation of Polonne: Under 100.
Among the names of the Holocaust dead in Druya and Nesvizh are the not-very-common names of my family: Yosef Yalov, Volf Yalov, Tzira Yalov, Shmuel Yalov and Rokha Yalov, all murdered by Nazis and their collaborators in Druya – remembered, barely, by an acquaintance who escaped and whose account was memorialized by the Yad Vashem Museum. Yosef and his six children – Tzipora, Esther, Shlomo, Mordecai, Prakhia and Miriam – in Nesvizh, remembered by a neighbor, and also memorialized with Yad Vashem. I do not know a thing about these people other than that they were murdered. They were poor, peasant minorities, the utter garbage of history no one gives a shit about when they're faceless. My people.
In Druya the Nazis and their Latvian and Belorussian collaborators surrounded the ghetto they had forced the Jews to live in, shot those who tried to escape and then set fire to the fenced-in ghetto. Those trapped inside either burned to death or were shot if they breached the walls. In Nesvizh, the Nazis and their Belorussian collaborators upon their first arrival immediately executed the majority of Jews in the town by shooting them over a mass grave. The few who survived pretended to be dead with the corpses of their families above them and below them in the pit. Those not taken to the pit were forced into a ghetto, which was later liquidated and the majority of survivors shot. In Polonne, on September 2, 1941, 1,275 Jews were taken into the forest and shot by Nazis and their Ukrainian accomplices. The rest were forced into a ghetto, had the yellow stars stitched to their clothing, and as the ghetto became more and more overcrowded, with Jews from other surrounding towns as well, many starved to death or died of typhus. Those with the luck to survive all this were shot to death on June 25, 1942, near the Poninka train station.
Not everything is the Holocaust – almost nothing is, in fact – but a bullet or knife headed for a civilian adult or child doesn’t need to be “the Holocaust” to be intolerable and for the lessons of that history to move us to action.
If my immediate ancestors had been on the wrong side of the Immigration Act of 1924, those who lived to see 1941 would have been killed, because there are two kinds of Holocaust stories. Those who were there and who died, or suffered, or barely escaped. And those who would have been there if the US, mostly, (but also the UK, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Australia to varying and lesser degrees), had not let them in, and who would have met the same fate.
The 1924 Act was geared to keep out racial, ethnic and religiously undesirable people from changing the character of the United States. Some of that was aimed at people who had no money. Who had no particular skills. Who couldn’t read. Who couldn’t write. The people in my family tree. I don't assume. I know.
Some, of the urge to keep people out, of course, was a fear of terrorism, such as it manifested itself at that time. How could the United States let in this mass of destitute Jews, practicing a strange and repugnantly backward religion at odds with Anglo-Saxon Protestant values, speaking a strange language and refusing to assimilate, when among them are anarchist terrorists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman? How can you possibly tell the innocent from the Berkmans, after all? They all look the same. And even the ones who aren't Alexander Berkman – how do we know they don’t secretly sympathize? What percent are political radicals willing to commit violence, or amoral thugs willing to join the Jewish organized crime world of New York, Chicago, Boston, Las Vegas and Los Angeles? Better keep them all out.
We have closed the door before – this, alone, is not “unprecedented”. Remind yourself of (or acquaint yourself with) the story of the M.S. Saint Louis in 1939, turned away after actually having reached the United States, back to Europe, where nearly 270 of its Jewish passengers later died in concentration camps. That was the sainted FDR, by the way. It very clearly has precedent, and we know the consequences – moral, ethical, or merely practical – of those choices.
In terms of a refugee story, I do not come from the best and brightest. I come from humble, poor, uneducated, unskilled people. I do not assume. I know. People who would have been butchered if this country wasn’t open to them. Many of that first generation died poor, uneducated, and unskilled. I don’t know if that means they “contributed” anything to this country or not, supposing professional achievement is the entire metric of human worth. I do know they were loved, I do know their lives had value to someone, at least, and I do know, if that professional achievement thing is so important, that among their living American descendants are three teachers, two lawyers, a social worker, an investment professional, a CFO and an engineer. We can all read, we all speak English, and we all have more than zero dollars.
There are many people trying to get out the countries listed on that executive order for which this same story is true. If the United States offers refuge, a granddaughter or great-grandson of one of those people may have the occasion to write what I’m writing now. And if they aren’t allowed in, that granddaughter will never exist. A supposed beacon of multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious democracy cannot close the doors to refugees and keep its soul, not least of all for refugees seeking escape from Iraq and Syria, currently in chaos largely resulting from our disastrous 2003 war.
He signed a refugee ban on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Never is supposed to mean never. Or don't bother saying it all.
