Charlene Giannetti, reviewing this novel in Woman Around Town, says that Irma’s story allowed her to imagine her own grandmother’s immigration from Southern Italy, for her grandmother would not or could not share the specifics of her journey. I think that for many people, there was some trauma in the immigration experience, at the least the pain of leaving home. Some may have been leaving a difficult situation that pained them to recall. Others may have been simply swept up in the raw newness of America. And some invented an immigration story to fill other needs in their soul. Charlene’s generous sharing of her grandmother’s silence ironically connected with my own grandmother’s elaborate “remembering.”

I was four when my German grandmother died. I barely remember her, but my father recounted her own tale, a pure romantic tragedy. The story goes like this. A young nobleman in Heidelberg falls deeply in love with a beautiful servant girl and despite his parents’ furious objections, runs away with her to a tiny country town where they have a child, Carolina, my grandmother. The young man dies and his wealthy parents, having no other heir, gain possession of the child, forcing her mother to become her own daughter’s laundress in the grand house in Heidelberg. Bolstering this story, my grand mother recounted gorgeous ball rooms, crystal chandeliers, soldiers bedecked with gold braid. But the bereft mother can not endure this situation, hears of a family going to America and arranges a deal: they will take the child, kidnap her, essentially, and when the mother has enough funds, she’ll come to America and reclaim the child. And so, at four years old, the child comes to America. A few years later, the mother arrives but can not find the family. They have moved and left no address. They have fallen in love with the child and tell my grandmother nothing of her true past, in fact insisting that all her memories are merely dreams. The grief-stricken mother searches for her lost daughter until the end of her days, finally dying in New Jersey.

The problem is this sad, romantic story is almost certainly invented. My grandmother was indeed adopted, but the noble origins, the country idyll, the mother-turned-laundress and tragic, Evangeline-like search were embellishments, I think, of my grandmother’s longing as she lived her adulthood in a modest house on Brooklyn’s Avenue P. The distance from the Old Country, the clean break between the two worlds allowed some to conjure a new past.

I wonder if this is a unique story, if other families have immigration histories that are more accurately romantic fictions. Let me know.

Irma is horrified by Madame Helene’s report of children in the mines of Alsace. Here is an image of a girl pulling a coal wagon. In Victorian England, she was a “putter” and the wagon a “hutchie.” Child labor in the mines of Alsace was not outlawed until 1903. The image of the “little trapper” is from the American coal fields. This is a short post because there is not much to add to these pictures except to note that the unions so vilified today helped stop this practice.

My grandfather was born in Ohio of a German mother and a father whose mother was Native American. He rarely spoke of her and from the tiny bits of story he let slip, I created this portrait:

My grandfather’s grandmother was Chippewa. She wore hides. She ground Iowa corn. Dark, sticky blood of deer flowed over her hands. Black hair streamed loose behind her as she ran. I imagine this, for no letters, name or photograph remains. When I stalked my grandfather for stray words of her to braid them in a thicker tale, he said, “I’ve already told you what I know.”

I know that her people had rich, watered land, but they stayed too long, watching it fill with strangers. At first pale men came alone to hunt, drink, die or wander west to the emptiness. The Germans were different. They came in flocks, waving papers, making signs, “See?” They said, “The land is ours now.” They chased the deer away, cut high grass to black earth, ripped open the land and planted wheat. Perhaps she watched from thickets one man solemnly scratching arrow rows in dirt, perplexed by his toil. Didn’t he know how simply abundant food could be plucked from bushes, scooped from streams, whistled down from trees? Why trade grain for cloth if soft hides could easily wrap the body? Yet still she must have been uneasily drawn to his straight-arrow world and he to her wildness. They met at the fringes of his fields, found a way to speak and began to fall in love.

“Why him?” her tribe demanded.

“Traitor!” said his. “Have we come so far and worked so hard, tearing out grass to grow our food in rows that you must bring in dark disorder, hair unbound and a savage tongue to call down beasts on us?”
So he took her north to Canada where they both were strangers. He became a carpenter, working in town. She learned German, copying his sounds as once in her warm summers she copied bird songs until only the owl discerned a human accent in the highest trill. Patiently, he molded her tongue with kisses, warmed her at night with new words, waiting until his ears discerned no difference in their speech. Then he bought her dresses, ribbons, corset stays, light powder for her cheeks and pins to loop her hair in curls. They hoarded coins as her people once hoarded corn over long winters. At last he brought her down to another Iowa town where he no one knew their story and all cautiously admired his elegant, black-haired woman. He built a house for her beyond the last roads, where the grass was still uncut.

But my grandfather’s grandfather and this woman had been too long alone together. Their ears no longer caught the feather-edge of strangeness in her words.

“She’s no German,” the women whispered. “Listen to her. Look at her skin. She’s one of them.” Then my grandfather’s grandmother feared that for this feather-edge she would lose her home again. But her lover did not flinch.

“She’s Polish,” he insisted. In the way of small towns and because they needed a carpenter, they left his lie alone and did not ask again. In time they made room for “the Polack” in the land of her people. They helped her cook their stews and bread and adjusted her clothes and speech to be more like theirs. She, for her part, was careful to never make her people’s food again, speak her own language to her babe or call down birds. Only at night, holding her, did my grandfather’s grandfather hear laments he did not understand, cherishing her strangeness, familiar as no other.

Their son grew into dark, hard man with a thin, hooked nose, for which sign he hated his mother and took care to import a pure German girl who soon betrayed him, learning the English he would not speak. So he became the foreigner, never tuning his heart to the wild strangeness, the new language of any love.

When We Were Strangers is set in the early 1880’s. A few years later, rising immigration from Italy began to unleash what now seems astonishing, rabid anti-Italian prejudice of which this cartoon is, believe me, a relatively mild example.

In 1909, a Senator Henry Cabot Lodge proposed a frankly racially-based immigration restriction: “The illiteracy test will bear most heavily upon the Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and Asiatics, and very lightly, or not at all, upon English-speaking emigrants, or Germans, Scandinavians, and French. In other words, the races most affected by the illiteracy test are those whose emigration to this country has begun within the last twenty years and swelled rapidly to enormous proportions, races with which the English- speaking people have never hitherto assimilated, and who are most alien to the great body of the people of the United States.”

The idea of a merrily bubbling melting pot seems to have existed only in scattered moments of our history.