By Beverly Roitman, October 13, 2016 — My mother was five years old, and had a brother 18 months younger, when they fled the pogroms in Russia in 1905 in a tiny wagon. At the time, my grandmother Mary was eight months pregnant with yet another boy. He was later born in the steerage of the ship they sailed on to America.
They arrived at Ellis Island, and my grandfather Abe had a sister living in the tenements of New York. She insisted they stay there in their tiny apartment before going on to the originally-planned destination, where my grandmother had a first cousin and family with a job for my grandfather.
All went very well. Now, fast-forward 45 years to when my uncle Ben – the baby born in steerage – had grown up, become very successful, and wanted a passport to enable him and his second wife to travel. (The first wife had died of leukemia at the age of 42; that’s another story.) However, the naturalization papers that had been given to all when they’d first arrived in the U.S. would not allow Ben to get a passport. Rather, Ben was told that he had to bring a witness to testify in a court in Downtown Chicago that he [Ben] had been on that ship to America.
Ben’s older brother, who had been on that ship, was in Southern California – so it was my mother who “did the honors” [testified]. However, there’s always a problem. In this case, my mother had fallen four weeks earlier and broken her left ankle – big time. Even after the judge had learned this, he insisted that she appear before him. (She could not use a notarized statement, instead).
The judge in this case was Otto Kerner. Later, when he was running for Governor of Illinois, my mother called everyone to tell them not to vote for Kerner, because “he had no heart!” Years later, when Governor Kerner was indicted and sent to jail, my mother laughed and laughed. “See, I told you he had no heart!” she exclaimed.