Tag: Czarist Russia

On a Smuggler

Ludwika (Louise) Jędrzejewicz was a most unlikely smuggler.

The daughter of a proper Polish family, Ludwika was born in 1808 in Warsaw. Her father was a Frenchman who had emigrated to Russian-controlled Poland some years earlier as a businessman and tutor in French. She and her siblings grew up being multi-lingual, and Ludwika had a relatively privileged upbringing compared to most young girls her age. Czarist Russia had control over Poland at that time, and the Polish people desperately wanted independence from their Russian overlords. At the same time, Russia worked hard to keep efforts at Polish independence and patriotic expressions among the Polish people to a minimum.

Ludwika became a musician and composer, something that was unusual for a woman in that time and place. Her music was unique and well-received; the Poles pointed to it as an example of the quality of Polish culture and creativity. She and one of her siblings, a sister, wrote anonymous pro-Polish propaganda against the Russians, too. She supported organizations that advocated Polish nationalism. In 1832, Ludwika married a lawyer, a man named Józef Jędrzejewicz. Even though the marriage produced a child, it was an unhappy pairing.

Then, in the summer of 1849, Ludwika received a letter from her younger brother, Frederic. He had moved to France to work on his own music career, and he was in poor health. He asked if his older sis could come help him, nurse him back to heath, and, maybe, help him return to Poland and the family. Ludwika agreed, much to her husband’s chagrin. Józef accused her of putting her birth family before her own child and marriage, but she ignored his complaints and went to Frederic. She nursed her brother and cared for him as best as she could, but the man had tuberculosis. He had always been thin and frail, and his body was not able to fight off the illness. He died that autumn in Paris, his loyal and loving sister at his side. However, before he died, Frederic asked his sister for a favor. He wanted her to smuggle something into Poland for him. “Take it to the church,” he said to her in one of his last sentences before his death. “Promise me,” he said. Through her tears, his devoted sister promised. Frederic was buried in Paris, and Ludwika began making her plans to return home to Poland.

By this time, Józef had left her, fed up with her loyalty to her brother. So, with literally nowhere else to go, she decided to return home to her mother’s house near Warsaw. But she still wanted to honor the departed Frederic’s wish to return “home” the item he made her promise to give to the church. And to do so, Ludwika had to smuggle the item past not only the Russian border and customs authorities, but she also had to smuggle it past the guards at the Austro-Hungarian border as well. So, she did what any decent, self-respecting woman would do. She hid the item under her dress. Surely, no customs official would search a lady’s person, even someone as rude as a Russian border guard.

And she was proved right. Her voluminous skirts proved a perfect hideout for smuggling the item back into Poland. After sitting on her mother’s fireplace mantel for a time, Frederic’s item was given to the Warsaw’s Holy Cross Church. Ludwika would mirror her brother and die young from a disease in 1855. But she felt that she had shown honor to Frederic by keeping her promise. The item she gave to the church in Warsaw is still there today, and it occupies a prominent place in the building, where it has been a national treasure ever since. It has survived revolutions, two world wars, and several occupations. And it stands as a monument not only to Frederic and his sister, but it also represents the patriotic spirit of the Polish nation. You see, Ludwika’s maiden name was Chopin. Her brother, Frederic Chopin is today one of history’s greatest composers and a Polish national hero.

And the item he had his sister smuggle into Poland, the item that is the pride of the Holy Cross Church is Frederic Chopin’s heart.

On a New American

Some of us are born to citizenship, while others of us choose the nation we come to call home. My grandfather (my father’s father) came to the United States as a teenager in 1907 from Greece. His eventual wife’s family left Denmark only a few years before that to move to New York City. My own son also chose America over a quarter of a century ago to make America his home as well. We are a nation of immigrants. I’m still gobsmacked that people can do that even though my family is rife with immigrants. Imagine emigrating in the late 1800s or early 1900s from Europe to the US, coming to a new place where you know almost no one, didn’t speak the language, and had no job or place to live; how does one do that? The fear of the unknown–as scary as that can be–has to be less than the fear of what one is leaving behind. Yet, that’s what over 12 million people did, first entering the United States through the immigration processing center known as Ellis Island in New York harbor.

One such family was the Beilins. They came from what is now the Siberian steppes of Czarist Russia in 1893. Moses, the dad, an itinerant cantor, and Lena, his wife, and the mother of eight children, came to the US like many other Jewish families did because their lives had simply become untenable in their native land. Isn’t that why many people emigrate? They were processed at Ellis Island, the children put in a pen, separated from their parents, until it could be determined that they had no infectious diseases and were deemed fit to enter. Moses managed to find a couple of rooms in a dank, moldy basement in New York for the family to live in. While Lena worked to make the dark, musty place a home, Moses found basic, honest work in a kosher butcher shop. The children were expected to contribute to the household income, even some of those who were under the age of ten. For example, young Israel, when he reached the age of 8, began selling newspapers to earn a few pennies that would buy food for the family. His sisters wrapped cigars in a factory. One of the brothers made shirts. Every evening, the family would come home deposit their meager earnings into the lap of Lena’s apron as she sat at the small kitchen table.

But in those days before antibiotics, illnesses we can fight off fairly easily today could devastate a family. When Israel (the family called him Izzy) was 13, Moses died. By that time, Izzy had decided that he wanted to be a singer. He had inherited his deceased father’s musical ear, and he managed to get a job as a singing waiter. From that humble start, he began to work with musicians to write songs that other waiters would sing as they served. In an effort to both continue to support the family and take away his mouth to feed, Izzy moved to a boarding room, a “flop house” shared with several other young, immigrant youths. He would later describe the living conditions as something out of a Dickens novel. Izzy also made some coins being an early 20th Century version of a street busker, singing to passersby for a few pennies when he wasn’t at this regular job. And, at other times, Izzy taught himself to play piano after the restaurant and bar he worked at had closed. He never took a lesson, but he learned how to put together a song that people liked. Simple songs, he would say, songs that people could relate to.

And you know those songs well. In fact, Izzy’s songbook makes up much of the modern American canon of national melodies. Songs like Alexander’s Ragtime Band (his first hit), White Christmas, Puttin’ on the Ritz, Cheek to Cheek, Easter Parade, Blue Skies, There’s No Business Like Show Business, God Bless America, and dozens more made him a household name.

Like my grandfather, grandmother, and son, Izzy changed his name when he came to America. It’s a place for a fresh start, a new beginning, and the chance that, if you work hard, you can be anything you want to be. That has been America’s genius from the beginning, to a large extent. It’s not that the Statue of Liberty, which immigrants to Ellis Island would pass as they entered New York Harbor, represents freedom–even though it does.

No, to immigrants like my grandparents, my son, and songwriter Irving “Izzy” Berlin, Lady Liberty represented something more: Opportunity.