A Passage to America
Esther, Fannie and Jenny Forman - probably arrive after 1906
Sid Wallach
remembers talking to his grandmother "bubby" Esther
about how she met Jacob: "I remember she tells the story of how in
the old days they ...didn't have school systems. They used
to have someone come around once a month or so...
They would
teach the kids and they would hire him, he would go from city to
city and he would teach the kids... and they would pay him. And they
would come around and they would teach them to read and write.
This one guy took a shine to my mothers mother (Esther) .. she
was growing up in Odessa at the time and he was teaching her how to
read and write. And one day he asked her father for her hand in
marriage. You know they made these agreements with out the
[participants] Yah. . He was a scholar - bubby's husband - although I
never knew him at all. Never knew him."
The following links describing the historical background to the
Pogroms of 1903-1906 help us to appreciate the climate of escalating
fear and hatred that might have
driven Esther's
desperate journey to America. The same links fuel our speculation
about Jacob, the wandering scholar, our great-grandfather. Why did he
not accompany his wife Esther to America? What did this Jewish
intellectual think and do about the dramatic historical events
unfolding all around him at the turn of the century? 1905 is
a seminal year in Russian history, in Bessarabian history, in modern
Jewish history, and in our family history. The Russian defeat and
the end of the Russo-Japanese war leads to the widespread Russian
"Peasant" Revolution
of 1905. The same year the "Protocols
of the Elders of Zion" are published in Russia and
widely distributed in Bessarabia. Tzar Nicholas II blames the Jews for
the defeat with Japan, and denounces them as revolutionaries and
agitators.
He is forced to sign the October Manifesto
granting limited civil rights and creating the Russian Duma and the 1906 voting
rolls for the first time. Jews celebrate what they believe to be the
end of government mandated discrimination, but are then victimized in a
government sanctioned backlash of pogroms that are often focused on
Jewish intellectuals and property owners. What role might Jacob
have played in these events - victim? actor? bystander? We can only
speculate. We only know that during these events Esther leaves
for
America, and Jacob does not.
The 1903 Pogrom in Kishinev signals the dramatically increasing violence, and government sanctioned nature of the growing anti-Semitism. Kishinev is located about midway between Chotyn and Odessa. This link is a gripping contemporaneous account of the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903.
The following excerpts are from a detailed history of the Odessa Pogrom of 1905, one of the most violent in pre Nazi history. The link for the full article is at the bottom, although long, it is well worth the read.
“In the port city of Odessa alone, the police reported that at least 400 Jews and 100 non-Jews were killed and approximately 300 people, mostly Jews, were injured, with slightly over 1,600 Jewish houses, apartments, and stores incurring damage. These official figures undoubtedly underestimate the true extent of the damage, as other informed sources indicate substantially higher numbers of persons killed and injured. For example, Dmitri Neidhardt, City Governor of Odessa during the pogrom and brother-in-law of the future Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, estimated the number of casualties at 2,500, and the Jewish newspaper Voskhod reported that over 800 were killed and another several thousand were wounded. Moreover, various hospitals and clinics reported treating at least 600 persons for injuries sustained during the pogrom. Indeed, no other city in the Russian Empire in 1905 experienced a pogrom comparable in its destruction and violence to the one unleashed against the Jews of Odessa…
The storm broke on 18 October. News of the October Manifesto had reached Odessa officials the previous evening, and by the next morning, thousands of people thronged the streets to celebrate. As one university student exclaimed, "a joyous crowd appeared in the streets - people greeted each other as if it were a holiday." Jews, hoping that the concessions would lead to the end of all legal disabilities against them, were joined by non-Jews in vigorously and enthusiastically celebrating the granting of civil and political liberties...
The pogrom began in full force the next day, 19 October. In the mid-morning hundreds of Russians - children, women, and men - gathered in various parts of the city for patriotic marches to display their loyalty to the Tsar. Day laborers, especially those employed at the docks, comprised a major element of the crowd that assembled at the harbor and were joined by Russian factory and construction workers, shopkeepers, salesclerks, workshop employees, other day laborers, and vagrants.
These patriotic processions had the earmarks of a rally organized by extreme, right-wing political organizations like the Black Hundreds. The main contingent of marchers assembled at Customs Square at the harbor, where the procession's organizers distributed flags, icons and portraits of the Tzar. The marchers passed around bottles of vodka, and plainclothes policemen reportedly handed out not only vodka but also money and guns.' Onlookers and passersby joined the procession as the demonstrators made their way from the port to the city center. Singing the national anthem and religious hymns and, according to some reports, shouting "Down with the Jews" and "It's necessary to beat them," they stopped at the city council building and substituted the imperial colors for the red flag that demonstrators had raised the previous day. ...
The course of events was similar in other parts of the city, as members of student and Jewish self-defense units fired on other Russians holding patriotic services and provoked similar pogromist responses. However, in Peresyp, a heavily Russian working-class district where no patriotic procession took place, the pogrom started only after pogromists from the city center arrived and began to incite local residents. By mid-afternoon a full-fledged pogrom had developed, and it raged until 22 October...
The lurid details of the pogrom can be found in several eyewitness and secondary accounts. Although the list of atrocities perpetrated against the Jews is too long to recount here, suffice it to say that pogromists brutally and indiscriminately beat, mutilated, and murdered defenseless Jewish men, women, and children. They hurled Jews out of windows, raped and cut open the stomachs of pregnant women, and slaughtered infants in front of their parents. In one particularly gruesome incident, pogromists hung a woman upside down by her legs and arranged the bodies of her six dead children on the floor below.” The Pogrom of 1905 in Odessa: A Case Study - John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza
It is possible that Esther, Fannie and Jenny witnessed these, or similar, events first hand. Family lore recounts that they entered the US via Canada. At this time we don't have any details about ships, routes, or dates. Apparently, at that time, entry through Canada was a way to avoid US immigration laws and inspectors:
“In the 1880s, as the United States began to impose more stringent immigration rules at its own ports of entry, even more immigrants from the same regions and elsewhere chose to travel via Canada to avoid the trouble and delay of U.S. immigrant inspection. By the 1890s, steamship companies began to advertise passage through Canada as a more desirable route for immigrants who wished to avoid U.S. inspectors…” - By Way of Canada: U.S. Records of Immigration Across the U.S.-Canadian Border, 1895-1954 By Marian L. Smith
“During the
mass wave of
immigration into US ports in 1891, exclusionary restrictions were
enacted,
reflecting the growing anti-immigrant sentiment. ..
According to the estimate given by the first US immigration inspector at Montreal, about 40 percent of all passengers arriving in Canada were actually bound for the US. Given that immigrants from Canada were not subject to the immigration act of 1891’s restrictive terms, this figure was not at all surprising. The Dominion of Canada encouraged immigration while Canadian steamship and railway lines offered low rates.
Four major
shipping lines
trafficked passengers between Europe and the eastern provinces. The
Beaver and
Dominion Lines sailed from Liverpool to Quebec and Montreal. The Allen
Mail
Line followed the same route with a stop in Glasgow. And the Hansa Line
carried
passengers from Antwerp, Hamburg and Liverpool. The Hansa Line, working
with
the Canadian Pacific Railway, offered passage to the US through Canada
to many
— polygamists, the poor, and the disease afflicted — who would have
been denied
access from anywhere else under the 1891 immigration law. “- If Not Through
New
York, Then Where? - Barbara Krasner-Khait
We'll conclude with one more nugget of speculation. Before
railing against the “illegal” aliens that
sneak across our
borders these day, we all may want to reflect on the possibility that
Esther and “Ma”
Fanny Forman Wallach were illegal aliens in the US… or at least for
Fannie,
until her
husband Hyman became a naturalized US citizen. Sometimes I wonder
whether it is
the immigrants, legal or not, who are the true heirs of the freedom and
opportunity – and the very idea that is America, rather that
those of us
who are born here and take our good fortune for granted.
