Immigrants

From the time I was fourteen, I dreamed of leaving my home in Scotland and starting a new life in America. I saved every penny so I could pay for plane fare and have some money in my pocket when I arrived.

In 1958, at eighteen, I got off the plane in New York City. All the American passengers proceeded to customs, but I was directed to meet with an immigration officer. I sat down across from a rather intimidating man and handed him the sealed envelope of papers that I had been given by the U.S. consulate in Scotland. He opened the envelope and looked through the documents, one of which must have told how much money I had brought with me.

“Is four hundred dollars all you have?” he asked. “How long do you think you can live here on that?”

Terrified that he was going to send me back, I blurted out, in a thick Scottish brogue, “Och, I came tae America tae make a fortune, not tae spend one.”

“Welcome to the United States, young man,” he said with a grin, “and good luck to you.”

Norman Nicolson
Honolulu, Hawaii

I was twenty-three when I decided to leave my native North Carolina for a one-year stint in AmeriCorps, the domestic Peace Corps. I was assigned to the San Antonio, Texas, office of a national nonprofit, where I would recruit, train, and manage student volunteers. Most of our clients lived in the housing project next door to the office. They came to us in search of better places to live, child care, and higher-paying jobs. More often than not, we could offer them only a sympathetic ear and a referral to yet another agency. Some of the clients spoke only Spanish and preferred to interact with a volunteer who spoke it too. Their clear favorite was Maria.

Maria was the first to arrive for the afternoon shift and the last to leave in the evening. For a college freshman, she possessed a preternatural sense of authority and responsibility. Though she belonged to several college clubs, helped tend to her younger brothers and sisters, worked part time waiting tables, and carried a heavy course load, she never missed a meeting or let down a client.

At the end of the semester, the organization’s national office invited me to bring my two best volunteers to New York City for a convention and training summit. Naturally I chose Maria as one of the two. She had never left Texas, much less been to New York, and I was excited to show her more of the world. To my surprise, though, Maria didn’t seem eager to attend the convention. At the day’s close, she asked to speak to me privately.

“You know I’m Mexican, right?” she said with a nervous giggle. I nodded. “Well, I’ve been in this country for ten years, but I’ve only ever lived here legally for a couple of months . . . on a tourist visa when we first arrived.”

I was touched that she would trust me with her secret, but I didn’t see the connection to the convention until she said, “Since I’m not legal, I don’t have a government-issued id, so I can’t board a plane.”

Dumbfounded, I pledged to figure out a way around the id requirement. After some research we decided Maria’s best bet was to show her university id and say she didn’t have a driver’s license yet, which was true.

Our ploy worked. Maria made the trip, saw New York, and gave an outstanding presentation at the convention. At the end of my year of service, I told her how much I admired her. She graduated with honors but couldn’t afford to go on to medical school, as she had wanted. As an undocumented immigrant, she couldn’t legally work in the U.S. The last I heard from her, she was a waitress at the same restaurant where she’d worked during college, still getting paid under the table.

Jodie Briggs
New York, New York

My great-grandmother Faigl and her ten-year-old daughter, Rukhl, immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1900. Yiddish was their first language, and Faigl, who was not happy in her adopted homeland, refused to learn a word of English. She supported herself and her young daughter by taking in boarders from the old country. Rukhl, who became known as “Ruth,” attended school for a few years and then went to work as a seamstress in a lace factory. She married at twenty-seven and had three children, including my mother.

My grandmother Ruth learned English but never had much confidence in her ability to speak it. She sometimes mispronounced words and used Yiddish syntax. (“You want I should make you a bowl of soup?”) Though no one had any problem understanding her, she insisted that she didn’t “talk English too good.”

When my widowed grandmother was ninety-eight years old and could no longer live on her own, she moved from her tiny Brooklyn apartment into a Jewish nursing home. One day I went there to visit and found her surrounded by a group of women who were listening to a story she was telling. My grandmother waved her hands with great enthusiasm, shrugged her shoulders, and threw back her head and laughed. She was so animated and alive, completely different from the woman I had known all my life.

As I came closer, I realized my grandmother was speaking Yiddish, and her audience was all European immigrants like her.

The great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz said, “Language is the only homeland.” After having been away for almost ninety years, my grandmother had finally come home.

Lesléa Newman
Northampton, Massachusetts

I was eleven years old on April 1, 1933, when my parents, my brother Konrad, and I crossed the border from Germany into Switzerland. The new Nazi government in Germany had declared a boycott against Jewish businesses beginning at 1 p.m. that day. We left at 12:50.

Three months later we were in the south of France, where my father was trying to negotiate a lease on a house and vineyard. Though the negotiations were not yet complete, we moved into the home owned by our new landlord, M. Rothstein.

The French public education system included boarding school, so my parents sent Konrad and me away while they wrestled with the problems posed by the Nazis’ refusal to release the money we had in German bank accounts. Desperate to pay his own way, my father began to work in our landlord’s vineyard, but his training as a lawyer had hardly prepared him for such heavy labor.

At boarding school I lived in a dormitory with children whose language I hardly spoke and whose customs were, to say the least, different. The other students were intrigued by Konrad and me and would gather around and try to play tricks on us. Pointing to their eyes, they’d say, “These are called ‘balls.’ Say that to the teacher. He’ll like it,” but we knew they were trying to get us in trouble and didn’t fall for the prank.

After we’d been at school a few weeks, our mother called and told us our father was in the hospital. His right arm had become infected from an injury at work in the vineyards. We came back from school and found him pale and heavily sedated. A few days later he died.

My mother’s family in Germany managed to send her money so that we could stay in France. I learned to speak enough French to follow my courses in school. Though our schoolmates accepted Konrad and me, some of the kids would still refer to us using slurs for Germans. But we no longer felt German. We were refugees from the Germans. We were immigrants.

Oliver French
Ithaca, New York

In my experience, immigrants help each other whenever we can. We have all learned the hard way that, as Diogenes said, there is no greater loss than the loss of one’s homeland.

For my first visit to the U.S., I accidentally packed my visa in my checked luggage instead of in my carry-on briefcase. When I changed planes in Paris, the French authorities told me that I could not board the flight to the U.S. without the visa. Luckily the gendarme was a Senegalese immigrant. He led me to the baggage room, and I retrieved the precious document.

Another time I flew to attend a close friend’s wedding in a small town near Berlin, but on arrival I found there was no room at the only hotel in town. The only option was an expensive hotel miles away. A Bangladeshi bellboy was willing to listen to my woes and told me to have a drink in the bar. Ten minutes later he returned with the key to a top-floor room.

Last month my cousin died in Minneapolis, Minnesota. On my way there, my connecting flight to Rochester, New York, was canceled because of bad weather, and I couldn’t get another. As I told my sob story to an airline official, a Salvadoran overheard and offered to give me a lift to Rochester. He drove through bad weather and went out of his way to get me to my destination. He wouldn’t even accept a cent for gas. He said he was “glad to help a brother.”

Manish Nandy
Reston, Virginia

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