Tag Archives: Immigrants

Lia and Izaak in New Amsterdam: A Writer’s Journey Begins

 Too Much of Nothing: Notes on Feminism, Identity, and Womanhood (Mountain Ash Press, October 2024) was not the book I expected my first solo book would be. I had spent two years compiling stories about my mother’s immigrant family, my father’s eccentric past. They comprised the MFA thesis that I planned to publish.  My readers disagreed.

“Make this your second book,” they said.  “What’s most interesting in this work is the story you tell with you as the central character.  Write about you first.  Then write them.”

I revamped, reassuring myself that my next book would be the tribute to my family I felt compelled to write.  Once I got past Book #1, I would return to the compendium of family stories, the histories of my displaced and troubled forebears, to honor their memory with my carefully chosen words.

Once Too Much of Nothing was launched,  I moved into the process of preparing the next book by focusing on my immigrant mother’s trauma and her family’s survival and planning for the research that would delve more deeply into Dad’s ancestry. I began preparing to depict the layered amalgam of culture and sorrow my parents’ union created.

The journey has been fascinating . . . .   Their background is rife with drama. The forces that drove mom’s clan out of Europe in 1939, coupled with the tales of my father’s Dutch family, provide a rich tapestry of escape, survival, and the power of love. Best of all for me as a true New Yorker, their stories converge in the Catskill mountains and coalesce into one truly American chronicle.

When I read Russell Shorto’s Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America, I realized again how important the story I plan to tell really is. 

I’ve been a Shorto fan since, as a New York sightseeing guide, I read his Island in the Middle of the World, his history of New York City, which argued that everything we identify as American comes from the cultural stew that simmered in New Amsterdam/New York.  That stew, according to Shorto, contained generous portions of the Dutch, English, and Jewish traditions that bubbled in my identity. Shorto’s newer book re-examines the history even more sharply, and he plumbs the depths of tropes that any child who attended Junior High in New York State was fed as the history of our state. 

We all knew that the Dutch established a community here and called it New Netherland, that New Amsterdam, their city at the tip of the Manahatta Island, was its capital.  Then, in 1664, the English arrived on the banks of the Hudson River, seized New Netherland, and renamed it New York. Then, the Dutch slinked away to the corners of history. 

Not exactly the truth, Shorto proves.

According to documents that have only recently been translated, there is much more to the story that we did not know.  The Dutch West India Company, acting not as agents of the monarch but as agents of the world’s second international trade union (the first being the Dutch East India Company) stole New York – and what are now Delaware, New Jersey, much of western Massachusetts, and Rhode Island – from the natives and built a society that encouraged diversity.  They were not inherently more tolerant than the English or the Spanish, but they found that a multicultural world was conducive to profitable business. And business was what they were all about. They were willing to accept anyone and everyone from anywhere at all, so long as there was money to be made. What the Dutch West India Company did not do was to protect its people from the reprisals by the understandably angry natives, and they failed to create a workable government.

The British Civil War had just ended, reestablishing the English crown. King Charles II realized that his ravaged country needed to curry influence in the new world in order to replenish his coffers.  He put his brother James in charge of asserting their presence, and James sent emissary Richard Nichols to take possession of land that now constitutes most of the Northeastern United States seaboard.

After spending some time in the Massachusetts Bay Colony negotiating peace between royalists and Puritans, Nichols, well-educated and conversant with Dutch success, sailed down coast and up the Hudson River to negotiate with Peter Stuyvesant for a transfer of power.  No shots were fired; no animosity resulted. As soon as his signature was affixed to the document, Stuyvesant made a brief visit to his European homeland before returning to Manhattan and settling down on his large farm at the south end of the island. He died a very wealthy, satisfied New Yorker.  

Nichols knew that a system that worked needed no reworking, and the Dutch system worked.  He brought in military forces to protect the citizenry, to maintain loyalty to the King, and to uphold the law.  But the Dutch remained in positions of political and social prominence. The array of religions and nationalities that had thrived under the Dutch retained their status as well. 

In the story Shorto tells of my city, I see my mother and my father as central characters. My father’s paternal English roots English planted themselves in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire in the 1620s when they fled the Church of England,  around the same time as his maternal folks were landing in New Netherland. Members of the Dutch Reformed Church, Dad’s second and third great-grandparents likely originated as Walloons, Calvinists who wandered away from the perils of Catholic Belgium and France into New Amsterdam by way of Holland.

 Likewise, my mother’s people had spent generations seeking a safe homeland.  Out of the Russian Pale of Settlement, into Poland/Ukraine, to Zagreb by way of Vienna, and eventually to Kingston, NY, once a Dutch enclave called Wiltwyck.

I will write about my parents.  But I will write about them as fictional characters in a time when unions like theirs were the stuff that fueled the sensibility that built the United States.

My parents’ fictional personae will inhabit 17th-century New Netherlands.  He as the son of parents who arrived in 1624, for the purpose of establishing a future in nieuwe wereld. She as the child of a Lisbon-born Jew, whose family, dispersed by the Inquisition, had found refuge in Dutch Recife, Brazil, until the same Inquisition sent them scrambling to New Amsterdam.

My protagonists are Lia and Izaak.  Neither’s story is unique, but each has a singular voice and a profoundly individual presence.  Theirs is a timeless story shared by millions, but their details are theirs alone.

Our Little King

When I was very young, my father was afflicted with a strange kind of wanderlust that impelled him to move his growing family often.  We lived in eleven homes before I was nine.  Fortunately for me, in those early postwar years, as they adjusted to their American lifestyle and learned to trust their safety, my mother and her sisters were virtually inseparable.  My grandparents bought a large faux Tudor house in Bayside, Queens, which had a revolving door for the three sisters and their children. My first first cousins and I were treated as near-siblings, and we lived in that house at various intervals, and for several years, we all but breathed in unison. Each of the sisters had married a man from a different culture, and we navigated a polyglot world, overseen by our Pater familias Henri Robinson, whom we all called Papa.

Papa was short and round.  In those days, over breakfast, we’d read the Sunday comics together, and I especially liked “The Little King,” a cartoon by Otto Soglow.

“He looks like Papa when Papa wears his long red bathrobe,” I told my mother.

“Oh, dear, please don’t say that to Papa.  You’ll hurt his feelings.”

I did tell him, but instead of being hurt, he was amused. He looked at me with a rare twinkle in his eye and laughed a deep, belly laugh that I don’t think I had ever heard from him before.  He hugged me, showing me an affection that was rare for the Old World man that he was.

Papa was a flawed man.  We all knew that, and instead of judging him, his wife and daughters laughed at behaviors that were anything but funny.  We admired him and understood that he meant well even when he did terrible things. I was, however, perplexed at times. It especially confused me that they all — including my mother — thought it was hilarious that he ran away from home when my mother, his third daughter, was born. 

It was one of the many stories Grandma loved to tell.

“He was so upset that I didn’t give him a son, he ran away, and I did not see him till six months later!”  She’d laugh until an emphysema-hacking fit interceded.  “I punished him, though.  I had the last word. He got Ruthi before he finally got our Johnny.”

Some of the stories were more understandably funny.  My favorite was what we called “The Accord Story,” another one that Grandma loved to tell.

“You know. We came in 1939, when we escaped from Europe. My brother Joe was our first sponsor. You’d think he was the one who saved us. He did get us our first place. A two-bedroom apartment like the one we had in Vienna. Only this one was in Wadley Heights, Harlem.

“Papa was in Cuba. His passport from Poland, where he was born, and the Polish quota was filled. So what else could he do? He traveled to Cuba.”

“That lovely Harlem flat was too small for all us.”

At the time, the family included my grandmother, my mother, age 16, her sister Ruth, age 13, John, age 10, and Herma, her oldest sister, who was in the second trimester of pregnancy.  Herma’s husband Borislav, a Serbian painter, was with Papa in Cuba; the two of them would join the others as soon as their visas were approved.

“You couldn’t argue with the facts. We had to move.” 

Papa’s brothers offered a rescue plan. 

“Those two — the scheisters! Your papa saw what was happening all around us. He had some money in American banks, and those two found out a way to swindle us. They got a quarry in Accord, NY. A quarry!! That they put in Papa’s name. They told us they got us a big new house, and we believed them. When Papa and Borislav arrived in the States, they had us settled in the quarry farmhouse.

“I knew that when Papa would see what they did, he would go . . . there’s no good word in English.  Zornig. Deadly. He could murder those two.  A quarry was the last thing my Henri would want. Furthermore, everyone hated the farmhouse.

It was a true country homestead.  No electricity, no indoor plumbing, no privacy.  Large and looming, the house had no bedroom doors and no place to take baths without open exposure. Not a suitable home in any way.

“I told them, ‘As soon as Henri gets here, you better make this right.'”

The brothers were never put to the test.  When Papa was back for less than a week, a fire broke out.

Grandma and the sisters were all in various parts of the first floor. Papa was upstairs in the room where he and Grandma slept.  John was outside. It was he who saw the flames shooting from the house and screamed at my grandmother, who screamed at the others.

“My china,” yelled Grandma.

“Henri!!  Get what you can from the bedroom.  And get outside!”

“The baby things,” screamed Herma. 

“MY cello,” wailed my mother.

“Oh, no, the cat!”  howled Ruth.

John joined the frenzy to get out as much of what mattered as possible. The kids carried linens, dishware, jewelry, clothing. Borislav saved his easel and canvases. But Papa was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s your father?”  called my grandmother.

“Last I saw, he went back to get things from the bedroom.” 

“Get out, Herma,” scolded Grandma.  “The smoke is getting thick.  Protect your baby.”

“Mama,” cried John.  “I keep calling Papa, and he doesn’t answer.”

“Get out, John.  Your father will find his way.”

Having saved as much as they could, the members of the family converged on the front lawn.  

Ruth worried. “I still don’t know where Papa went,” she whined.

My mother, who had walked around the house to assess the extent of the fire, said, “I won’t miss this house, that’s for sure.”  Then she looked up. “Omigod, Mama, look, up on the roof.”

There was Papa. Standing on the sloped roof of the house.  Calmly looking for a place to slide down.

“Henri,” called my grandmother.  “What are you doing up there?”

“I went back to the bedroom,” he called, “And when I started down the stairs, I saw that there were flames in the center of the house, so I came up here.”

“What have you rescued, Henry?” asked my grandmother. 

At this point of her narration, Grandma always stopped and looked us in the eye. 

“There he stood,” she would say.  “My brilliant bald husband.  Holding his hairbrush and his hand mirror.”  If we failed to laugh, she was crestfallen.  We made it a point to laugh.

The house was damaged beyond repair.  The family moved to Kingston in time for my cousin to be born there. And the story remains a moment of levity for a family that was otherwise plagued by tragedy.

But that’s not what this story is about.