Natalie Schuman. The Peopling of New York City. Professor Rosenblum. Due: Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Assignment 1: Profile of a story of immigration.
Note: I was absent on the first day of class so I did my interview with a friend, not a classmate.
Charlotte Kohlmann’s Immigrant Story
“Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
-From “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus. 1883.
Despite the often-unfair laws regarding immigration today, these words engraved in the base of the Statue of Liberty epitomize the journey of Charlotte Kohlmann’s grandparents to New York City.
Charlotte Kohlmann was born in Riverdale in the Bronx on February 12th, 1994. She lives in a red house in a residential area filled with people from all different countries. She identifies herself as American but has roots in Germany and Italy, among other places.
Charlotte’s mother’s father’s name is Feliche Perrela. He was born in a town called Macchiagodena in Italy. Macchiagodena is a town in the province of Isernia in South Central Italy. It is located in the Appennines Mountains in the region of Molise. Macchiagodena was a farm town and there was little work other than farming. In the early to mid 20th century, many residents of Macchiagodena emigrated to other parts of the world including the United States to find better jobs and earn more money. At 19 years old, Charlotte’s grandfather, Feliche was one of those people. Feliche waited until after the 3rd Sunday in May to leave his town. On this day, a huge fair was held to celebrate the patron saint of the town, San Nicola. He feasted and celebrated with his family and friends as he would any other year. Though there was a feeling of sadness around the celebration as they all knew that Feliche was to leave the next day, along with a dozen other men in the town.
Feliche and the men he traveled to New York with were not the first men from Macchiagodena to start a life here. Feliche went to live with his people in Little Italy in the Bronx. Living in this neighborhood sometimes even felt like being back home. He knew people from his old town and the same sense of community in Italy existed in this small pocket of home in this new, scary city. Feliche got a job as a construction worker. When he got his first paycheck, he sent exactly half of it back to his family in Macchiagodena. Feliche continued to send exactly half of his paycheck back to Macchiagodena until he died in 2005.
As more and more men from Macchiagodena traveled to the Bronx, women started feeling comfortable coming too. That brings us to Jesualda. Jesualda was born in Macchiagodena and at 18 years old, her mother took her and her two sisters to the Bronx. Jesualda grew up in a small apartment in the Bronx. Her neighbors in New York were her neighbors back in the hills of Macchiagodena. She and her neighbors in Little Italy shared a thin wall and a communal bathroom while they used to be separated by acres of farmlands.
It was in Little Italy that Jesualda met Feliche. He courted her for a year and eventually they got married and had two children, one of whom was Charlotte’s mother, Emma. For Feliche and Jesualda, New York City offered a new life that may have been hard at first, but it allowed their ability to put food on the table not be at the whim of the weather and how well their crops did. Jesualda and Feliche never went hungry again, and neither did their children or grandchildren.
“We’re leaving now. I don’t know where Papa is.” These were the first words written in a leather bound journal with no name. The journal goes on to tell the story, in French, of Ursula Kohlmann’s journey from Germany to New York City. Ursula is Charlotte’s father’s mother, Charlotte calls her “Opa”. She was a Jew in Germany in 1940 and New York City offered her asylum from Hitler’s hell. She was 14 when she started the journal. It described traveling through Spain, Czechoslovakia, France, all together 15 countries with her mother, until they finally arrived in New York City. Ursula had learned French in school but her mother tongue was German. She wrote the journal in French, left out her name and any clue that she was Jewish to protect herself in case the diary fell into the wrong hands. They took a boat called the “Sepa Pinto” from Portugal to New York City. She still remembers the ride, how frightened she was of both being in a new place, and being caught by the leader of her old country. She remembers her mother threw up on the Sepa Pinto from motion sickness and anxiety.
When she arrived in New York and settled in, her mother enrolled her into a public high school on 153rd street. Ursula was one of the only non-African American students there. She missed her home and felt out of place in her new environment. She eventually found other Jews who had come to New York City to escape the Nazis. They formed a group and jokingly called themselves “The Elite”.
Paul Kohlmann was also a member of this group. He came to New York from Germany at 19 years old. Paul was the only one in his family healthy enough to flee so he had to leave them all behind in Europe. Paul and Ursula dated for a few months and eventually got married. Paul wanted to fight in the war, on the side of the Americans. But when he got to the recruitment office, he was told he could not fight Germany because he was not an American citizen. They sent him instead to the Army base in the Phillipines.
For Paul, Ursula, Feliche and Jesualda, New York City took them in and protected them, offered them a new life. Charlotte understands the importance of her grandparents’ stories and has taken it upon herself to record and preserve their history. This year, Charlotte helped her grandma translate the diary she kept during her journey to New York City from French to English. She put together a scrapbook of her grandmothers’ photographs. Pictures of “The Elite” on the beach forming pyramids with their bodies fill the pages of the scrapbook.
