Here is a story to celebrate the American project’s 250 years, one certainly not unique but profound nonetheless.
My tale is the reason I take the current administration’s war on immigrants personally. There is no way to convey the pathos of this history in sound bites or fizzy social media posts. I offer a sincere narrative, an emblem of our national experiment. No doubt you carry one too.
My paternal grandparents came to America as children on boats from Europe at the turn of the 20th century. My family was escaping Kaiser Wilhelm’s “Germanization Plan” for Polish people, which made our language illegal, restricted the freedoms of Polish priests, whom the government feared fomented nationalism, seized Polish land to give to Germans, and took other actions meant to erase my family’s culture.
My grandparents, Franciszek Jedrusik and Franciszka Kujawa, were married in Baltimore in 1904, the city where their boats landed. That’s their wedding-day photo above. They settled in a house not far from the harbor and launched a family; my two uncles, my aunt, and my father were born in less than a decade.
Back then, my family didn’t live in America. They inhabited a place called “Polonia,” Little Poland, a cluster of Baltimore neighborhoods built on Polish traditions, social norms, and language.
“If you think about immigrant life in America in 1930, all of this makes sense. America’s booming industrial landscape was being built on the backs of immigrants with no social standing, health, labor, or legal protections. My grandparents had to ‘make up’ an American story to survive. ”
Michael Andrews
They didn’t so much integrate into America’s emerging scheme as determine how to survive within it. A key part of that survival strategy was adopting a non-alien identity. The phonetics of the Polish name Jedrusik sound like YEN-DROOS-IK — Franciszek Jedrusik – became Frank Andrews, my grandfather and father, too.
For many years, there was a prevailing mystery among us Andrews’s. Grandfather Frank mysteriously disappeared from the official scene in the late 1920s. In the 1930 US Census, my grandmother, now Francis Andrews, appears living at home in Baltimore with her three sons. Her marital status is marked as “widow.” From my genealogical research, I know that Grandfather Frank died in Carney’s Point, New Jersey, on March 7, 1932.
How could Grandmother be a widow in 1930?
It is here that the torturous realities of life as an immigrant begin to be revealed. My. Grandmother was a “social widow.” Sometime in the late 1920s, to support his burgeoning family during the looming Great Depression, my grandfather made the 70-mile train ride north to work at the Carney’s Point DuPont Dye Plant. My grandmother’s report to the census taker was a respectable and legal cover story to conceal her husband’s work life, her reason for being alone.
I know that because the 1930 US Census in Carney’s Point shows my grandfather living as a lodger in the home of his boss, a foreman at the dye plant.
Several inaccuracies in my grandfather’s record reveal the complexities of immigrant life. He is listed as being born in Maryland, despite his Polish lineage, and as unemployed, though certainly pulling shifts in the dye plant and sending money home to support his family.
If you think about immigrant life in America in 1930, all of this makes sense. America’s booming industrial landscape was being built on the backs of immigrants with no social standing, health, labor, or legal protections. My grandparents had to “make up” an American story to survive.
Because Germany had revoked my grandfather’s citizenship and the new Polish republic had not granted him a passport, he was literally a man without a country. The prospects were worse for my grandmother. Because she had married an immigrant ‘alien’, she had been stripped of any path to citizenship.
Only my aunt, uncles, and father gained citizenship by the 14th Amendment, the protection that our government is trying to strip away today.
The final chapter of this story is as tragic as it is life-affirming. When my grandfather died in 1932 at the age of 43, my grandmother gave him a grand burial in a chestnut casket lowered into a brick-lined vault, a huge extravagance during those days of the Depression. She paid for the $230 funeral two years later with a $500 check, more than $12,000 in today’s money.
How was that act of love and respect possible, and why did the funeral home wait two years to get paid?
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Carney’s Point, New Jersey, was a DuPont company town. In the 1930’s, DuPont’s plant was the epicenter of a medical disaster. Chemical workers there died of bladder cancer at an astounding rate while the corporation labored to respond. It is not hard to imagine where the “check” listed on the burial receipt came from and why the town’s funeral home was confident of waiting for payment.
When my grandmother died in 1957, her obituary read, “beloved wife of the late Frank Andrews.”
Beloved indeed.
Both my grandparents confronted incredible challenges and vulnerabilities to raise an American family. As a nation, we should celebrate and protect that kind of heroism, not deride and deny it.
