Like many Americans, I may have only one generation from the citizenship that carried out its firstborn – a concept that has determined the promise of this country for many immigrants.
A complaint about American poets is that we are doing everything too complicated. If the world needs something like a simple protest song or something patriotic, we mutter varyingly about different ways to look at the thing.
For example, immigration. Is it fundamentally the same as for my grandparents, or another? Or if somewhere between them, where, exactly?
If confidence in this issue is a test, then I don’t get.
My grandfather Morris Eisenberg immigrated to the US in 1908 as part of Plan of GalvestanA charity project, which is supported by the flowering German Jewish and long-established Seford families in New York. Those slate and cardos -or who they may be -had to do anything for their siblings of Eastern Europe, who came to New York in the new 20th century: too many of them, stunning sympathy, but also embarrassment. Their names, language, their manners, appearance, clothes, their smells were strangers, peculiar, not American. How to help them without overcoming New York?
In Texas there was a rabbi who said his congregation could use more Jews, many of them, so Galvestan’s plan provided ships such as FrankfurtHappy from Bremen to Galvestan, with teen Morris Eisenberg on board, arrived on June 15, 1908. He settled in Little -Rock, Arkansas. His first child, my mother, was born there in 1916. When she studied at high school, the family moved to Long -Philal, New Jersey, where my grandparents lived on the street from me – on the door – all through childhood and my years in high school and in the Rutgers. I knew my Morris well outside the question. For years I have seen it every day.
On the official “registration map” (according to the military project, as well as citizenship) of June 5, 1917. In Konve, Arkansas, Morris age is 26. The line 10 was recorded by his marriage state as “married” and his race as “Caucasian”. The card includes in the line 4 the following question:
Are you (1) a natural citizen (2) a naturalized citizen (3) alien (4), or did you declare your intention (specify which)?
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In response, Morris – either an official Arkansas, who filled the form – wrote in line 4 words: “An intentioned intention.“
All my life, I suggested that he became an American citizen some time after this 1917 declaration. But recently I accidentally looked at another document, with the headline: “The United States: Declaration of intention” of January 24, 1939 in Frechola, New Jersey. This time, 22 years later, the entry into the Morris Eisenberg race is “Hebrew”. And in 1939 – a year before I was born, and long before my grandfather’s son, my uncle Julian Eisenberg entered the United States army – Morris Eisenberg, who is now 46 years old, again declares the intention to abandon all the loyalty and faithfulness of any other state, and (
I can no longer believe that Morris Nahman Eisenberg actually became a citizen. His wife, my Nana, was born in Brooklyn. It is possible that my grandfather completed the naturalization process some time before I was born or when Julian entered the army. Julian, my uncle Julie, fought and survived the battle of the bulging. Most likely, in the issue of legal status of the immigrant is that my grandfather never treated him.
So there is ambiguity. Like the unknown number of Hispanic, Asian, Brazilian and Irish and West -Indian people in different circumstances, times and places, Morris Ivrit -Caucasian immigrant (his official color in 1939 was “white” and his color “dark”) did not obviously consider him legal status. Ancient, bilateral survival strategy can apply here: Follow the rules. Avoid official procedures.
Did he confidently hoped for the American principle of the “proper process”? Maybe not with these two words, but yes, absolutely, my grandfather lived with confidence that in this country, if you obey the law and behave decently, you will be protected. Absolutely he loved the United States of America. Whether it is naturalized or not, it was what I would call patriotic.
Legally, Morris Eisenberg may not have not been a US citizen. Morally and practically, in his soul, he was a citizen. He and Nana, as proud and concerned by his parents (this old -fashioned term), gave uso a lot of energy, practical and emotional. (Three letters, which largely meant in my military early childhood, are advocating the United Service Services Organizations, which provided local support and entertainment to members of the armed services. My grandmother prepares USO for the third avenue in Long Avenue every week.)
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In my own professional danger, in the intrusive habits of chosen art, I believe that I press the features of the word: “natural.” Two halves are almost opposite to meaning. A significant contradiction is for me. But in terms of political arguments or editorial boards, perhaps the main point. In a new, personal number of meaning I can be removed only one generation People’s Law of Citizenship.
I appreciate my grandfather’s photo in a young man in the Little Root, where he sits on a motorcycle and in a tie. Three different people, when they saw the picture, asked me if he was a black man. No: Clean Ashkenazi, born in Steet. Maybe lighting makes photos (how too much poetry?) Ambiguous? Sometimes I allow myself to think that there is something in the expression of the face: the unfriendly, how would you seek, the affirmation of the person? I don’t know, and I don’t know how important this family story is, as an example of a change or a solid theme in the fabric of American identity.
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