The White Cross

Polka music drifts across linoleum tiles, soft murmurs lingering in the air with the scent of incense from the church above. Fluorescent bulbs cast pools of white light onto paper-clothed tables, mylar balloons standing guard over platters of lilac-frosted cupcakes. Seated in the middle of the room—surrounded by doting cousins, nieces, nephews, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—Rose, my grandmother, glows in the attention from her family. Today is our much-beloved matriarch’s ninetieth birthday, a celebration of her biographic debut in 1924: the year that saw the death of Vladimir Lenin, the deposition of the last caliph of the Ottoman Empire, and the imprisonment of Adolf Hitler for the Beer Hall Putsch.

Driving through the valley of Johnstown, Pennsylvania that morning, my parents, sister, and I pass by the remnants of a once prosperous city, dotted now with run-down steel mills and shuttered store fronts. Upon arriving at my grandmother’s Ukrainian church, its three gilt onion domes sitting on the edge of a charcoal sky, we descend to the basement banquet hall, where our extended family has already begun their revelry. Making our way through the crowd, my mother introduces me to countless third and fourth cousins, men and women whom I have never met before, yet whose eyes, noses, and brows bear a marked resemblance to my own.

Rose is my only grandparent still alive. My two grandfathers died long before my birth, and my paternal grandmother passed away when I was only nine months old. As a consequence, I know almost nothing of my father’s ancestry except what I have been able to glean from census records. His relatives had arrived in the early-nineteenth century, migrants from Ireland, Scotland, and Germany ostensibly seeking new economic opportunities. Who they were and what they felt as newly-minted Americans, though, the census taker did not note.

Ethnically, I thus identify most with my Eastern European heritage, due in no small part to conversations with my grandmother about her own upbringing in an old-world household. Despite her ninety years, my baba still radiates vivacity, inherited from her strong-willed immigrant parents.

After the party, I ask her to share with me once again the story of their arrival to America. She eagerly accedes.

Born to peasants in Galicia, the northernmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, my great-grandmother Magdalen left her family’s farm at the age of 23 to join her brother in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1909, she landed at Ellis Island, the often unwelcoming gate to a new life in America. Upon her arrival, though, an immigration officer noticed an infection (“the size of a fifty-cent piece”) growing on her upper arm at the site of a recent vaccination. She tried to explain this to the officer, but he interpreted her garbled mix of English, Polish, and Ukrainian as a sign of “mental deficiency.” On her chest, he then drew a white cross in chalk, marking her as unfit to enter the country.

Magdalen was tenacious, though. As the officer’s attention was drawn elsewhere, she spat into her hand, scoured the cross clean from her clothes, and moved to the side of the boat where the non-infected sat. Through her quick-thinking, she made it into New York, soon setting off for Pittsburgh. There, she was introduced to my great-grandfather Nicholas, a coal miner and fellow Galician immigrant. Married only two weeks into their relationship, they moved across Western Pennsylvania over the next decade in search of work, building their family along the way.

After settling in Johnstown, they found a home in a diverse neighborhood, populated by Poles, Italians, Serbs, Croats, and Slovaks. Yet, the family continued to operate within a mostly Galician social sphere, attending Ukrainian churches, making Ukrainian friends, and conversing in their Polish-inflected Ukrainian dialect.

My grandmother, the youngest of her siblings, notes that her childhood was a happy one, though money in their household was as scarce as English. She and her siblings would hunt for scrap iron along the banks of the Conemaugh River to sell for pennies, finding amusement in jacks and jump ropes. Their home, lit by a pot-belly stove, had only three beds: one for her two older brothers, one for her three older sisters, and the last for her to sleep in nestled between her parents (“which is why they didn't have any more kids”).

Magdalen and Nicholas never became citizens. My grandmother remembers having to accompany her parents every time they visited the local immigration office to translate their green card paperwork for them. And yet, America was all they were to know until they died. They had relegated their European upbringings, rarely mentioned to their children, to a forgotten, unacknowledged past.

Nearing the end of the story, I notice that an hour has already passed. It pains me to close the conversation, to delay her memories for another day, but an engineering midterm on Monday beckons me back to campus. The rest of the tale will have to wait.

Matthew M. Beck ’14 is a history and literature concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.