My mother’s parents (and their families) immigrated to America in 1920, and my father came to this country over 45 years later. Their experiences differed profoundly, and paralleled closely the evolution of immigration as explicated by Nancy Foner in “From Ellis Island to JFK.”
For example, during my time as a fellow in the genealogical department of the Center for Jewish History, I unearthed a great deal about my grandfather’s journey over from Easter Europe as a young child, and much of the hardships are recounted by Foner.
“Wait days or even weeks at the port for their paperwork to be completed or ship to arrive…” In actuality, my great-grandmother and her two toddler sons lived almost two years in Amsterdam (my great-grandfather had gone over years before, so my family is a prime example of chain-migration), a country speaking a language she didn’t know and living away from her community and people because of the difficulty in achieving the papers and money necessary to leave via Amsterdam’s port.
The journey itself was so miserable that even my mother told me that all her grandmother would tell her was that those years were “terrible times.” Luckily for her, (and I don’t fully know the details) the “chain-migration” that led to her immigration allowed her through Ellis Island, as a young mother with small children and no discernible professional skills.
(On a microfilm copy of my great-grandfather’s ship manifest, among the slew of Russian Jewry’s “tailors and shoemakers,” it says simply “Rabbi.” Although that implies a level of education, there was not a professional within spitting distance of his particular family.)
My father, on the other hand, came over in 1967. On an airplane. From his hometown in Israel. Granted, he wasn’t quite wearing “designer jeans” but comparatively he had a hop-skip-jump journey to the New Land. My grandfather was well-educated, an Army vet, boutique owner and diamond merchant. He spoke many languages, including English, and upon landing in Colorado begin working immediately as a real estate dealer.
My mother’s family fled persecution, nipping out of the Ukraine when things were bad but not yet Holocaust-bad. They came to America as “the Goldene Medina” (Golden Land) or “Medina Shel Chessed” (the Kind Land) where they could be free and safe from pogroms and anti-Semitic rage.
For my father’s family, however, coming to America from Israel was considered actually a step-down, even though Israel is just as saturated with pro-America frenzy as anywhere else. However, economic and medical necessity pushed my grandparents from their comfortable life in Israel to seek a similar yet somewhat different life in America.
