02.21.09
The Immigrants’ Tales
I went to a prominent local museum this morning with a member of my family to see an exhibit on immigration through the Port of Galveston. There was also a movie afterwards that reminded me in part of the “Chevy Shows” they had at Six Flags back in the 1970s.
The exhibit space and objects were interesting, by and large, but the two young ladies who took us on our tour seemed bent on instructing us, through didactic observations and rhetorical questions, on all the ways America’s White Power Structure made it tough on immigrants. Well, that may be a simplification, but their whole theme was basically that immigration laws are bad and that America should be everybody’s chamber pot. I mean melting pot.
I like looking at pretty young ladies, but some may be better suited to the cosmetics counter at a department store for all their insights on the meaning of the immigrant experience.
My paternal grandfather’s father came to Texas from the militaristic culture of Germany in October 1885. The family first landed at New York City (a fact I did not know until just a year or so ago) and thence probably to Galveston. My great-grandfather’s mother actually gave birth at sea on probably the second leg of their journey to Texas, but the baby did not live long and was buried very soon thereafter in Washington County, Texas where a young uncle lived. My paternal grandfather’s mother came from what is now western Poland a few years later and found employment with the Petzolts. They were all poor dirt farmers who came by steerage and made a new home for themselves a world away from what they knew. We have no idea what wretched conditions these people endured, but we owe them everything.
My maternal grandfather himself escaped with his family from the threat of pogroms and the reality of second-class citizenship when they left Lithuania for Philadelphia (and thence to Pittsburgh) in the summer of 1901. I suspect that my Jewish ancestors, just as my German ones, were glad to be done with the instability of revolutionary Europe and czarist Russia and regarded America as a deliverance from evil. That’s something that needs to be emphasized in museum exhibits and tours on immigration history.
(As for my two grandmothers’ families, their European immigrant ancestors first began to appear in Massachusetts in the late 1620s (Grandma’s people) and in Virginia maybe a generation later (Grandmother’s people). Of course, Grandma was probably a sixteenth Cherokee, so her roots in America are pre-historic.)
