The Old World Reformed Anew – working title
My Zeyde/grandfather Chaim’s crossing to Ellis Island is shrouded in half lies and mystery, the ghosts from der alter heym (the old country) never fully put to rest. I grew up believing he’d left Russia with his young son, my Uncle Leo, after the death of his first wife in childbirth. I learn from Amriel, the self-appointed family genealogist, that Chaim listed his first wife, Chana, as his reference on the manifold of the President Lincoln, the ship he boarded in 1911 to get to Ellis Island after leaving his native town of Yavorov.
Was Chana alive when Chaim’s ship crossed the Atlantic to di goldene medine (the golden land)? Did she dream of joining him there and instead join the battalion of abandoned wives posting photos and descriptions in American Yiddish newspapers of husbands who’d been swallowed by ships carrying them toward promise? Was she, khas vekholile (God forbid), alive when Chaim married his second wife, my Grandma Rosie?