Illegal

Lars Lichtenfeld

4292 Words

I grew up in a New Jersey town that was overwhelmingly Jewish.  With a last name like Lichtenfeld, you would assume I fit right in.  And in many ways, my siblings and I did.  We went to Hebrew school twice a week.  We celebrated all the mainstream Jewish holidays.  We had dark curly hair.  There were no outward differences for anyone to discern that we were different.  Yet, in some ways, we were very different.

Grandma Lena and Grandpa Jack

My parents didn’t come from Brooklyn.  My parents were from The Bronx.  It is no exaggeration: every one of my childhood friends’ parents came from Brooklyn.  And all their grandparents were either still in Brooklyn or had made the senior migration to Florida.  Mine were still in The Bronx, in a housing project called Co-op City.  I sensed that this was somehow a lesser existence.  Brooklyn was a mythical place where good Jewish families came from.  The Bronx of the 1970’s was a scary place where Blacks and Puerto Ricans lived.

I can remember the grandparents of my childhood friends and neighbors.  They all had thick, European accents:  Polish and Russian, German and Hungarian.  They sounded funny to me-- like old Jews in movies and on TV.  And they threw around phlegmy words to one another, a secret language that only adults seemed to know.

My grandparents didn’t sound like that.  My grandparents didn’t speak with wet, throaty words.  My grandma Lena didn’t have blue hair.  My grandpa Jack didn’t know anything about baseball.  They didn’t have a car.  They rarely came out to New Jersey to visit.  Maybe once or twice a year.   And when they did come to visit—usually during the summer—my grandfather would sit in the backyard, under a tree listening to Spanish radio.  He would smoke a cigar and take in the warmth.  He was usually up early and would tend to my mother’s plants around the yard.  He was most comfortable working the land.  And he would tan.  He would get so dark.  Not anything like those pasty, pink old men from Brooklyn.

Between Hebrew School and public school, we became aware of the “shared” Jewish experience.  The exodus from Eastern Europe, out of the shtetls to Ellis Island and onward to New York City.  First the Lower East Side, and then over the Brooklyn Bridge and into the relative comfort of that borough.  Moving upward, always upward.  We were told stories.  Shown pictures.  Taken on field trips to visit museums.  Told all about how fortunate our families were for having survived the Holocaust.  I knew it was alright to look at the numbers tattooed on some of the grandparents, but don’t stare.  The narrative became familiar, and I began to accept it as a common thread that I, too, shared.

Except it wasn’t.  None of my grandparents had tattoos.  My paternal grandparents had no accent.  They spoke American English.  They didn’t use Yiddish.  My great-grandmother couldn’t tell you about going through Ellis Island, she was three months old when she was brought to America from Hull, England.  My grandfather was born here, in the United States, as well.  His family had been here for a good while.  In fact, we’d been here so long, nobody really ever talked of the “old country”.  America was the Lichtenfeld’s’ country.

Lena, my maternal grandmother, didn’t have an accent, either.  She sounded just as American as anyone I knew.  Grandpa Jack, on the other hand, did have an accent.  A different accent.  It was sort of Spanish.  It was beautiful.  Much prettier than that guttural accent I heard all around the neighborhood and synagogue.  As I grew up, I was becoming more and more aware that there were differences.  That my family did not fit the traditional Jewish-American narrative.

For my maternal grandmother, the journey was reasonably familiar.  Her family had packed up and left someplace and arrived here by boat.  Over the years, we’d get drips and drabs of the story.  Pieces to fill in the blanks.  I learned at some point before I was 13 that they had come from Türkiye.  And I began to understand that this meant we didn’t speak Yiddish, we spoke Ladino.  We didn’t eat kasha varnishkas and derma and other funky Eastern European foods.  We ate bourekas and brown eggs and Mediterranean dishes. 

As the years went on, the picture became clearer still.  We were Sephardic Jews.  Our family escaped the Spanish Inquisition by emigrating to the Ottoman Empire when Sulaimon the Wise had opened his doors to the Spanish Jews in the 1490s.  They lived in peace with their Muslim neighbors, protected by the benevolence of the Sultans for nearly five hundred years.  

Then came World War One.  The Ottoman Empire had sided with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the British took up the cause of breaking up the Mediterranean power.  As depicted in the film Lawrence of Arabia, T.E. Lawrence helped unite the Saudi tribes and eventually the Ottomans lost the outlying territories of their empire.  Back in the heart of the empire, in the lands around Istanbul, a group of men called “The Young Turks” pushed to take over political control of the country.  Behind the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, they deposed the Sultanate and eventually set up a secular democracy, creating modern Türkiye.

While it would seem that a secular democracy would be an opportunity for the Sephardic Jews to live as equals in the land that had welcomed them four hundred years earlier, the earliest years of the fledgling nation were a time of great uncertainty for everyone.  It was in this time, just after the armistice, while Türkiye was finding its feet, that Jewish families were most at risk.  Would they be able to keep the land they had worked for centuries?  Would they still be considered “protected”?  Would their Muslim neighbors remain peaceful? 

The Nagies were a large farming family.  They owned their land outside the small town of Casaba, where they grew grapes.  They dried their crops in the hot, Anatolian sun and traded the raisins.  They dried other fruits, too: apricots, dates, plums.  It was hard work, and all the children were expected to pull their weight.  It was a time when you didn’t have hired hands to help cultivate the vineyard.  A family did all the work.  From the eldest grandparent to the youngest child.  An elementary education was the limit of the family’s commitment to learning in a formal sense.  The Sephardic synagogue in Casaba would fill out the rest of the male children’s education.  The boys would learn how to read and write Hebrew and Ladino and maybe Turkish.  They would study Torah and learn the traditions.  And they would farm.

But in the 1920’s it looked like staying on the farm might be a risky proposition.  The Nagies considered their options and decided to hedge their bets.  They would send their children, Maurice and John, Harry, Regina and Jack (the youngest) to America.  Their daughter, Sarita- the eldest child, would stay in Türkiye.  Should the family run into any problems in Casaba, the children would be safe in the U.S., and the family would go on.

The family saved up for the kids’ departures and applied for all the appropriate visas and documentation.  They would eventually set out from the beautiful Aegean port city of Izmir for Marseille.  The family staggered the children’s departures.  The elder children went first and found their footing.  Later, with their Turkish passports and American visas, Harry, Regina and Jack set sail for France.  The journey must have been thrilling for them.  They were young adults from the country, and they would have to spend a few days in post-war France before catching a steamer to New York City.

It was the France of “The Lost Generation”.  Literary greats and artists took up residence in the country.  Jazz had arrived and the City of Light was famously alive.  All of France was bristling with life.  The war now a memory; France was rebuilding and revitalizing.  It would have been easy enough to stop their travels and take root in France.  In fact, the Marseille Jewish community saw a large influx of post-Ottoman Jews in the years between WWI and WWII.  And though the Nagies spoke no French or Yiddish, they would be able to find their way through the community.  There were synagogues and successful Jews.  There would be work.  There would be a level of comfort and freedom.

But their older brothers, Maurice and John had already made it to New York.  And besides, their visas were for America.  No, they would only be passing through Marseille.  They would stay in a boarding house until it was time to sail.  In the meantime, they prepared for the long journey.  They purchased tickets for steerage on a steamship and then went about enjoying the time in France.

Marseille has beautiful buildings.  There is art.  There is culture.  There is the warm, blue Mediterranean Sea.  There are good people that work hard.  There are rich people that don’t work at all.  There are thieves.

Country folks that don’t speak the language are an easy mark, especially if they are spotted buying a steamship ticket to New York.  Jack was a young, naïve man in this port city—dazzled by its wonders, distracted and unaware.  A French thief made his move. What the thief had not counted on was hitting the jackpot with his quarry.  Jack had lost everything.  His money.  His passport and visa.  Everything.

With time left in Marseille measured in days, perhaps just hours, the siblings had to come up with a plan.  The police were virtually no help.  The theft could be reported to the American Consulate, but with no idea of what the thief looked like, or even where the theft had taken place, the Nagies wouldn’t be much help.  Jack could reapply for immigration, but that would take time and money—two commodities that were in short supply.  And would Harry and Regina be expected to stay in France and wait with Jack?  Was that reasonable? 

The decision was made.  Jack would stay in France and have to make his own way.  Harry and Regina would travel on and begin their new lives.  Jack would have to find work.  A place to stay.  People he could trust.  And he would have to do it alone, in a country where he didn’t speak the language.

Jack stood on the docks as his brother and sister steamed off into the sunset.  The ship sailed west, with all the hopes and dreams that the bountiful United States offered.  And Jack watched.  His hopes and dreams sidelined, at least temporarily.

*****

Ellis Island, a largely man-made island, sits in New York Harbor, close to the New Colossus, The Statue of Liberty.

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

“The New Colossus”, the poem that graces the statue’s pedestal, was written by Emma Lazarus, a Sephardic Jew.  A native New Yorker.  For my entire childhood, Ellis Island was closed to the public.  Abandoned in the 1950’s, no longer processing the huddled masses into Liberty’s bosom, her dilapidated buildings shackled and the grounds overgrown with Jersey weeds.  The 1970’s were a time of disrepair and degradation.  While my elementary school took us to the Statue of Liberty on field trips, Ellis Island was little more than a point the Circle Line ferry passed en route to the maiden in the bay.

But in the 1980s, as the Statue’s centennial approached, a new fascination with our shared immigrant past arose.  A movement to repair and renovate Ellis Island grew.  With the desire to rebuild the physical grounds, an idea was born.  Using computers and decades of written records, a database with every immigrant’s details could be created.  A living record of America’s Nineteenth and Twentieth Century growth into a world power.  The story of waves of cultures and people diving into the great melting pot.

It is a wonderful exercise, tracing one’s family’s adventure into America.  With more clarity than the stories we hand down, generation to generation, we now have the ability to learn a major part of our legacy.  For those friends of mine, with those proud, Brooklyn families, the stories were familiar.  And the Ellis Island database only served to answer long forgotten questions and details too minute to warrant a second thought.

But when my mother sat down to tap into the database, there was trepidation.  Certainly, her mother’s journey would be clear.  We had seen her papers.  We had them.  We could touch and feel that history.  There were pictures of my grandmother and her family on the ship.  They were grainy, sepia squares with scalloped edges.  Ancient creases.  Oily gloss finishes.  And there were official photos in passports.  Visas written in a beautiful, flowing script.  Written with fountain pens.  Thick strokes, thin flourishes.  And in the database, there they were, images of similar paperwork.  Ledger entries taken by some immigration in-take official.  We could see where Grandma’s name had gone from Reina in Türkiye to Lena in America.  And yet, amazingly, Aboulafia did not get Americanized.  It remained the same as it was in 1490, back in Iberia.

Next, she looked up Uncle Harry and Aunt Regina.  Again, no surprises.  They came to America legally.  They paid their way.  They had proper papers.  They waited on lines.  Got inspected.  Answered questions.  Passed physicals.  And here they were.  Members of my family honestly arrived upon the Americas.

She knew her father had not come through Ellis Island.  It was now our open secret.  As a family, we knew bits and pieces of the story, but not the whole tale.  We knew that Grandpa Jack had to wait in France, while his brother and sister left onboard a steamship.  So, there was no reason to investigate the database and look for him.  But curiosity is a funny thing and for some reason, my mother typed in Jack Nagie.

Somewhere in coal country, a family goes by the name Nagie.  Somewhere in West Virginia, there is a family that loved a man named Jack.  Somewhere under tons of earth and rock, a man worked his fingers raw in a mine.  He dug and hammered.  Scratched and clawed.  It was a hard-scrabble life.  Unenviable to most.  A dream that my grandfather was denied.

That man in West Virginia probably spoke no Turkish, no Ladino.  Maybe he never spoke French around his children.  Maybe he let his thieving past die with his identity, somewhere on a dock in France.  Maybe his family accepted that Nagy was a French name that got butchered upon entry on Ellis Island.  Or maybe they knew the truth.  Maybe they accept that France was a hard place to be a streetwise tough in the twenties.  That having survived World War One was reason enough to steal everything from some poor slob.  To steal their life and then steal away to the new world.

That family exists, to this day under false pretenses.  It is the original identity theft.  They are the prodigy of the man that stole my grandfather’s future.  He stole his money, and his name and lived out his years as a Jack Nagie I would never know. 

My grandfather worked harder than any man I’ve ever known.  And for many years, I never understood why it was that he never reaped the rewards of hard work the way my friends’ grandparents had.  I knew Jack Nagie to be an intelligent man.  A man that spoke many languages.  A family man.  He and my grandmother had only one child, my mother and they loved her infinitely.  He was a man that basked in the glow of his four grandchildren.  But all his hard work, all his devotion and dedication never paid off the way it had for those Brooklyn immigrant families.

Why?  What was so different?

It was shortly after my Jack Nagie passed away that mother would begin to speak openly about her father.  My grandfather was an illegal alien.  Never naturalized.  Never officially a citizen of the United States.  The man that had stolen his identity had stolen his opportunity.  Had stolen his freedom.  My Jack Nagie could never fully actualize his American Dream.  He wouldn’t ever be “on the books”.  He would live in the margins for a lifetime.  My mother would be an anchor baby before anyone used the term.  My grandparents would have to work three times as hard to make one third the money that their peers would.  And yet, they did.  They did and they thrived, despite the challenges that never being an American citizen created for my grandfather.

*****

The real Jack Nagie found himself alone in a strange land.  His siblings left him with some money, but not nearly enough to last terribly long in France.  He would return to the boarding house after watching his brother and sister leave and assess his options.  He would go out first thing the next morning and find work.  He was strong, young and willing.   But he was a country boy that didn’t speak the language, and regular work was proving hard to find.

In 1912, the government of Cuba granted enormous, American produce conglomerates like United Fruit Company special permission to import workers to farm the sugar cane fields.  The imported workers would be paid far less than their Cuban counterparts, both white and Afro-Cubano.  They would live in company housing camps—the concentrados.  They would be paid a fraction of the prevailing wages and oftentimes found themselves indebted to the company store, the only place they could spend the company script they were paid in.  It was not unlike the company towns of early Twentieth Century America; Pittsburgh, Hershey, and Charleston, West Virginia—without the benefit of monopoly-busting politicians or the protections of the emerging labor unions.

Still, it was familiar work for a young farmer in a foreign land.  And a familiar language, not to mention it was just ninety miles off the coast of the United States.    The appeal was great, so Jack signed on and sailed off to the Cuban central provinces.  He would toil under the Caribbean sun, cutting cane and earning his keep.  All the while, he maintained contact with his family, hearing of their success.  He would take advantage of the time, learning to speak the English that the American masters spoke.

It would be seven long years cutting cane.  Seven long years an outsider, an immigrant worker.  He would never be accepted by the Americans or the whites, nor would he find acceptance with the Cubanos.  He was never given the chance to assimilate, his interaction with the natives would be limited.  Immigrant workers rarely, if ever left Cuba.  They often settled in this land, with its puppet regime and foreign ownership.  Jack would do his best to save his money and find a way to finally reach the coveted United States.

Jack would buy passage to the United States with his meager savings.  He would buy passage on an open-hull cargo ship.  He would be smuggled into the United States with crates of bananas and sacks of sugar.  No visa.  No papers.  He would enter America at Galveston, Texas—not Ellis Island.  He had no idea where he was or that he was 1700 miles from The Bronx.  All he did know was he was finally on American soil.

He would have to hit the ground running.  He was quick to learn, and a robust man despite his body being riddled with the early stages of Psoriatic Arthritis.  He would earn money as a day laborer, doing whatever tasks were asked of him, despite having no training, no experience in anything other than agriculture.  He managed to stay in contact with his siblings, all of whom had gotten themselves established in the United States.  They owned businesses and farms and would help as best as they could.  For the most part, they had settled in Northern New Jersey.

It is no secret that immigrant communities tended to be quite tight knit.  This was equally true for the Sephardic Jews that emigrated to the New York Metropolitan Area.  But the Sephardi emigrated in much smaller numbers than their European counterparts.  This meant that their community had to stretch over a greater geographic area for mutual support.  Whereas an Ashkenazi could count on a synagogue being located in their town or the next town over, in the New York Metro area, a Sephardi would almost definitely have to travel into one of the New York boroughs to worship, commune and feel attached.  There were a scarce few Sephardic hamlets.

The Nagie children had each other and had the greater community to support them, though there was a fair amount of physical distance between them.  As their roots began to take hold, they began to make connections within and without the Sephardic community.  They found pockets of Turkish Jews in places like The Bronx and began practicing their faith at synagogues in that borough.

Lena Abolafia had come to the United States around the same time as Harry and Regina Nagie.  She entered the country legally, with the proper visas and travel papers.  She was a child and had traveled to America with her parents from the Turkish port city of Izmir. 

Izmir had had a flourishing Jewish community as far back as the 16^th Century, when it was known as Smyrna.  It was an important port, and its geographic location made it a crossroad for spice and silk trades in early years and an economic center in more recent times.  The Jews of Izmir, like their agrarian cousins lived in peace with their Ottoman neighbors.  They were taxed at reasonable rates and subsequently allowed to have their own social, judicial and economic system.  But the First World War took a heavy toll on the Ottoman Empire, and the following period of Turkish nationalism fueled uncertainty in the Jewish community.  A thriving population of more than 55,000 Jews at the end of the 19^th Century dwindled down to 15,000 by the start of World War Two.

Having arrived in The Bronx, Lena was an active member of the community, with her family.  As she grew into womanhood, it became important to find her a suitable, Sephardic husband.  Through the network of clubs and organizations, and possibly friends or relatives, the Nagies and the Aboulafias were introduced.  It wasn’t long before arrangements were made and a marriage was planned.

It took two years for Jack to work his way up from East Texas to New York.  All the while Lena was incorporating herself into American life.  Like so many Jewish immigrants, she was a seamstress in the New York garment district.  Hard work, at times quite dangerous.  With miserable conditions and miniscule wages.  But honest work.  Steady work.  That would be very important after she and Jack were married and began a life together.

The life of an undocumented, illegal worker in America is uncertain.  Work is always temporary, always at risk of being shut down or stolen away.  And during the Depression, with millions of legitimate people out of work, the prospects could be nonexistent.  But somehow Jack would do his best and eke out something.  There was food on the table and heat in the home.  And eventually, there would be another mouth to feed.  My mother would be born towards the end of the Depression, on the eve of World War II.

Never would my grandfather become a naturalized citizen.  Never would he collect a Social Security check.  Never would he have health insurance.  I share the debilitating form of arthritis that mutilated my grandfather’s hands into virtually useless clumps of bone and flesh.  I understand with chilling intimacy the physical pain he must have endured while physically working into his sixties.  And I am amazed at the grace and solitude with which he suffered. 

My grandfather would die a poor man at age 92.  All that was left to each of his four grandchildren were a handful of Morgan silver dollars that he had saved from before my mother’s birth.  He lived quietly.  Simply.  And he was a friend to everyone, with no regard for race, religion or stature.  And he was illegal.  He lived an existence that many would say was criminal, though he caused no one any harm or discomfort.  He chose to live this way with the hopes that someday his efforts would be rewarded and his family might have access to the opportunities and freedom this country affords us.  And for that, Jack Nagie was the most American person I have known.

And what of his descendants? What did this family bear of illegality? His grandchildren, my siblings and I; a lawyer, a doctor, a professor, and a nurse.  One generation removed from his smuggled emigration.  A man that left a nation, a refugee of regime change to provide his family a chance at the American Dream, did just that.