The places immigrants build
Peter arrived in America when he was 17 years old. He didn’t speak a word of English, didn’t have a penny in his pocket when he got here. He traveled with some buddies, farm boys looking to escape the hopelessness and poverty of their flyspeck village, hoping for something better. There was work here, people said. There was opportunity.
Peter found work. It was dirty and it was miserable and the pay was an insult, but it was work. Not speaking English didn’t matter much: He shared a beat-down apartment with some countrymen, and everybody at the factory spoke the same language he did, had the same features he did, had the same story to tell. It was just like home, except it wasn’t home, not even a little. He worked as many hours as the foreman would let him. He was going to make something of himself.
Peter married. His bride was young, with a round, open face and guileless eyes. She was an immigrant, too, a homegirl. Like Peter, Rose had crossed the border without money and without English. She only wanted to build a better life for herself.
Children came. Peter supplemented his wages with some shadow work, selling illegal substances on the side, first to coworkers, then, as his reputation spread, to others in the little ghetto where he and Rose lived. Eventually, he bought a restaurant, a little corner place, where tired shift workers would go to get some hot food at the end of the night.
On weekends, he’d book bands. They’d play the old music, the back-home music. There’s something about the songs from your childhood, the music from your old life, your other life, that stirs the soul. People would laugh and talk and sing along, couples in mended pants and fading cotton dresses swaying in time, all soft smiles and entwined fingers. Mostly, they remembered.
Mostly, they hoped that all they had done — the leaving, the landing in this strange new place, the long hours and the backbreaking work — meant their children would have a better life, that their children would have a home that they would never have to leave.
The city where Peter and Rose lived was small, but their restaurant, their neighborhood, the church where they worshiped and the factory where most of their neighbors worked was unknown to the rest of the town. Respectable people didn’t associate with the likes of Peter. He was just another stranger, just another mystery, just another threat.
He and his wife, their friends and their neighbors, even their children, who were born here, were, in the words of one prominent politician, “of the lowest classes” with “neither skill nor energy nor … intelligence.” The canny leaders of their homelands were dumping them here, weak and shiftless and imbecilic, “disburdening themselves” of the “more hapless elements of their population.” The politician eventually apologized, sort of, admitting that some of Peter’s country- men “had strong backs and a willingness to work hard, menial jobs.” The politician ended up being elected president of the United States. Peter and his people weren’t eligible to vote.
Peter isn’t Mexican, or Guatemalan, or Colombian. Peter is Polish, from a tiny village called Wola Ociecka, near the southern city of Rzeszow. All of this happened a hundred years ago
Peter is my great-grandfather.
Perfectly American
Back before most of us can remember, back before the descendants of European immigrants began intermarrying and the old social and cultural and religious barriers started floating off like dandelion seeds, back when neighborhoods were delineated not by income level but by where your people came from, before the corner stores stopped selling newspapers in Hungarian and Polish and Italian, before all the descendants of the farflung tribes of Europe had been boiled down into a thin bland gruel called “White People,” identity meant more than skin color.
In my hometown, a sooty collection of frame houses and dying factories along the Niagara River, there was an Italian neighborhood, and a German neighborhood, and an Irish neighborhood. On the northeast side, bordered by a bolt factory, a paper mill and the river, sat The Avenues, Third Ward, the Polish part of town. That city was mostly shadows when I was growing up, the factories closed, once pristine little houses slowly going to seed.
The cultural divisions died long before my time — when my dad proposed to my mother, the impending Irish-Polish union that would have been a minor scandal a generation earlier just prompted jokes from his future father-in-law that Dad needed to change his name to “McMurski” — but in Peter’s time, being Polish or Italian or Hungarian or Greek meant no one trusted you, no one wanted you around, except your own kind. You stayed with your own people. Outside your ethnic group, you were the enemy.
In May 1889, a poorly engineered dam, commissioned by a group of millionaire businessmen who wanted to create an artificial lake for yachting excursions, burst and sent 20 million tons of water down the Little Conemugh River, wiping out the city of Johnstown, Pa. Two thousand two hundred people died.
The millionaire businessmen, Reeds and Knoxes and Carnegies, were never held accountable for their negligence, never served a day in jail or paid a dime in compensation. Within hours of the disaster, newspapers across the country published reports that crazed Hungarian immigrants were on a spree in Johnstown, ravaging defenseless women and cutting the fingers off corpses to harvest wedding rings. It was a complete fabrication, a canard cooked up to sell newspapers,
but people believed it because it seemed like the sort of thing those shifty Hungarians would do.
A decade later, when Woodrow Wilson denounced Eastern and Southern European immigrants as “sordid and hapless” in his “History of the American People,” the consensus was that the United States was at the mercy of multitudes of “hyphenated Americans,” each of them carrying “a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.” In 1913, Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated president of the United States.
In the midst of this hatred and mistrust, Peter was determined to be an American. Within weeks of passing through Ellis Island, he abandoned his old name, Piotr, and adopted the Americanized spelling and pronunciation.
There is a remarkable entry in the 1920 U.S. Census. The residents of The Avenues are all recorded in the same careful script, pages of consonantladen surnames, an endless column of “Polish” noted under the heading “Mother Tongue.” On the page where Peter’s family is entered, a less careful hand has drawn a large “X” through “Polish” on his children’s entries: Peter’s children spoke English. Peter’s children were American, perfectly American.
And if in the middle of Prohibition, Peter had to sell a few cases of bootleg beer to help his dreams along, well, there’s something perfectly American about that, too.
Peter died in 1937. He was 52. I don’t know if he ever mastered English. I don’t know if he ever felt fully accepted by his new homeland. What I do know is that his children and his grandchildren and his great- and great-great-grandchildren have lived the American dream. They are attorneys and schoolteachers, businessmen and nurses, actors and academics. One of them is a nationally recognized poet, one a professor of music composition at a large Midwestern university. Another writes essays for the Houston Chronicle.
None of us would be here, none of us would have made any contribution to American culture, to American communities, if a 17-year-old farm boy from an obscure village in southern Poland hadn’t decided to come here, to endure hardships and prejudice and lousy jobs and that strange limbo of being in America but not of America. Peter Litwin gave me my country. Peter Litwin gave me my life.
A city of dreamers and strivers
I think often about Peter. Lately, I think about him all of the time. I think about him when I hear Americans in their thousands, many of them the descendants of Peter Litwins of their own, chant “Build a wall! Build a wall!” I think about him when a presidential candidate casually dismisses 10 million men and women as “killers and rapists … bringing drugs … bringing crime.”
I think about Peter’s children when I visit my neighborhood elementary school, the classrooms filled with immigrant kids, the children of Mexicans and Nigerians and Hondurans and Vietnamese, all of them learning, many of them bursting with big dreams and big potential, and I wonder how Peter would have responded if his children had been dismissed as “the bad ones,” if billionaire dilettantes and dissembling lieutenant governors had used their political influence to let public. schools wither on the vine.
We are a city of Peter Litwins, a city of hardworking immigrants, a city of dreamers and strivers, a city of strangers who yearn to be known, to be accepted. They love their homelands, and they love America, too. Their children are the next generation of American poets and composers and essayists, of doctors and nurses, attorneys and academics, teachers and technicians. We deny them opportunity, we deny them hope, we deny them the American dream that fueled our own ancestors at our peril.
This has always been a nation of Peter Litwins. It always will be. They will come from different continents and different cultures. They will be distrusted and mistreated, and they will weather it.
And their children will take us places we never imagined, places that will make us stronger and better than we have ever been.
We must not let the madness of nativism, the nonsense of knuckleheaded populism, jeopardize that promise.