Ancestry Magazine

Gary Mokotoff doesn’t take paying clients. As an author, editor, lecturer, and leading figure in the field of Jewish American genealogy, Gary has spent years immersed in the discovery of his own family history and prefers to encourage others to do the same. But occasionally, a request for assistance comes along pertaining to the Holocaust. It’s at those times that Gary is compelled to help the researcher. Always pro bono—free of charge.

 

Two years ago, such a case arrived on Gary’s desk. A Belgian woman, Evelyne Haendel, had contacted the Hidden Child Foundation in New York City for assistance in locating a relative who was reported to have lived in the city 50 years earlier. Evelyne was seeking the relative—any relative, really—as part of her quest to regain her identity and her heritage, both of which were, in essence, taken from her when she was hidden by her parents with a Christian family in Belgium. At the time, Evelyne’s parents were on the verge of being deported to Auschwitz—she never saw them again. Evelyne was just two years old.

 

Evelyne’s situation, says Gary, is not completely unique in Holocaust research. “The tragedy is that there are many, many people in Evelyne’s position,” he says. “They were left on a doorstep, given as very young children to Christian neighbors. Some of them don’t know their [birth] names. They’re all trying to find their families and their identities.”

 

Arrivals and Departure

Searching for an identity is one of the driving factors behind the popularity of family history in America today (as hobbies go, it’s second only to gardening). Some searches, like Eveylne’s, are extreme—places, families, names, memories, and connections gone. Others start as simple attempts to learn an ancestor’s occupation, lifestyle, or raison de etre, but eventually become, for the researcher, a chance to open the door to a heritage previously shelved.

 

So how, exactly, did our ethnic heritages escape us? In a situation like Evelyne’s—where who she was became a matter of life or death—it’s understandable that a heritage would get discarded. But for the millions of immigrants and descendants of those immigrants in America, people who didn’t escape but who crossed the threshold into the land of opportunity willingly, why was their ethnicity checked at the door?

 

Unfamiliar Faces

“In the 19th century,” says Barry Moreno, historian of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, “particularly in the cities, people were coming in contact with real hostility. There was a lot of pressure associated with being a greenhorn. That was something that [immigrants] feared,” he says. “There was considerable prejudice against manifestations of foreign culture.” Assuaging these fears, for most immigrants to America, meant assimilating into the culture—quickly. To do this, they often shucked aspects of the ethnic identities they arrived with in order to blend.

 

Sometimes assimilation was the adoption of Americanized name. “There’s the myth of name changing at Ellis Island,” says Barry, indicating this wasn’t how name changes occurred. “It was more likely an Anglo school teacher, the school principal, the job foreman or employer, even your friends in the saloon who would insist you change your name,” he says. Giacomo or Jacomo would become Jim or Jack to sound less Italian; Dimitri would become James, foregoing any semblance of Greek origin. Surnames weren’t spared alterations either. During World War I and World War II, when anti-German sentiment was high, German Americans, who, as America’s largest ethnic groups, hadn’t felt the need to relinquish their ethnic ties, found themselves changing the spellings and pronunciations of their surnames—Schmidt, Rauh, Schwartz, and Oachs, for example, were Anglicized to Smith, Rowe, Black, and Oaks, respectively.

 

Language was also a way to seem American. “[Ethnic] language was lost, often because immigrants refused to let their kids learn it,” says Barry. At times, this led to interesting consequences: “In a first generation immigrant, you might hear [an old country] language filled with American English slang. Unfortunately, that meant no one in the old country could understand them, and no one here could understand them, either.”

 

There were social conventions also lost to assimilation. While an immigrant may have continued to eat an ethnic cuisine or go to a traditional church festival, “other things,” says Barry, “they had to give up.”

 

Socially, the family unit itself became Americanized in the 1920s with the breakdown of the traditional family hierarchy. “Parents weren’t in the position of power, particularly if they lived in cities where their children could go out and get jobs,” says Barry. By and large, younger members of families weren’t financially dependent on their parents; oftentimes, the teens and 20-year-olds were the breadwinners. And with financial power came the presumed right to forge an identity separate from their parents. “The children didn’t have to take orders,” says Barry. “They were learning how to become Americans.”

 

Looking the Part

“When you’re a kid, the last thing you want to do is stand out,” says Doug Kim, a second generation Korean American whose family immigrated to America in the late 1940s. “In school, I got a lot of reinforcement from my white friends that looking different was a bad thing,” says Doug. “Being different just wasn’t good.”

 

Looking different was a problem for ethnic groups on both America’s east and west coasts. European immigrants, particularly Eastern European women, arrived in peasant dresses sans makeup. Upon arrival in America, these women would often discard their old world clothes in favor of American styles. (“For years,” says Barry, “you’d find immigrant costumes scattered in Battery Park.”) Men changed their appearance by shaving off facial hair, opting instead for a clean-cut, American look.

 

On the West Coast, however, for America’s Asian immigrants, simply changing costume wasn’t enough. “If you’re Polish, Irish, or German, you can jump right into the melting pot,” says Doug, who has taught classes at San Francisco State University on the Korean experience in America. “If you’re Asian, blending in isn’t so simple. You look different. I can’t change my name to Grinwald and think no one will question it.”

 

Southeast Asian immigrants began arriving in America in the latter-half of the 1800s when a shortage of workers in the United States brought men from China to work on the railroads and in other manual labor jobs. But the gates didn’t open wide for Asian immigrants until immigration reforms were passed in 1965. It was after that time that the majority of Asians in America arrived.

 

Unlike their European counterparts, Asian immigrants had different reasons for coming to America. Initially immigrants from China, Japan, Korea, or Vietnam came with the intent of staying only temporarily, usually while pursuing their education, and then returning home. The quest to conform, then, lay in the hands of the second generation Asian American. “Our families came here with more money and resources [than earlier European immigrants],” says Doug. “But children of [the Asian immigrants]—children like me—had a lot of pressure to assimilate. Our parents were here and working. They didn’t have the time to give us a sense of cultural identity, and they didn’t always have the means.”

 

Finding Today

Today, the situation is different. “Diversity is the rule in American culture,” says Doug, who contrasts the physical appearances of residents of his hometown, San Francisco, where it’s not uncommon to see hair color traversing the spectrum, from blond to black and even rainbow striped, to the standard in Korea—black hair and brown eyes. “If you grow up in a homogenous society you think black hair and brown eyes is the only normal thing,” he says; Americans are more accustomed now to a smorgasbord of looks, and that makes seeming like an American simpler. It may also be why the trend today is to reach back to the heritage of birthright.

 

John Streamas, assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University, points to the media as one of the mobilizers in the trend. “When African Americans got inspired in the 1960s by Black Nationalism and in the 1970s by the book and movie Roots to rediscover their own heritages, many whites in the United States rediscovered theirs.”

 

Yet, says John, even as the media today attempts to flatten the diversity of America—television shows and films regularly blend people of all ethnic backgrounds without discussion—the sheer numbers of ethnicities swirled together in America’s melting pot makes people curious about where they’re from. “As long as people migrate across different parts of the world,” he says, “there will be efforts to hold on to, or to reclaim, cultural heritages.”

 

Generation eX-Immigrant

Both John and Barry point to the third generation—the grandchildren of immigrants—as the generation that starts the identity reclamation process. The reason is as follows: the first generation “clings to the home culture,” says John, while the second generation strives to succeed in the new culture. That leaves the third generation, already entrenched in the American lifestyle, to “hearken back to the home culture.”

 

Barry brings this to a more personal level: “Suddenly the [immigrant’s] kids and grandkids grow up and they want to find out who they are, what it was like in the old country. But now Grandma is dead. So where do they turn?”

 

The natural start is through researching family history, looking for artifacts in the attic, learning more about a hometown or a culture, going beyond history to discover the quirks of a small group of people—a church congregation, a social group, the teens of a single small town. Manifestations of the reclaimed heritage can surface to almost any degree and in almost any manner.

 

In the 1970s, when the movement to reclaim a cultural identity began to take off, says Barry, younger generations took a number of routes to proclaim their heritage. Names were changed, traditional ethnic costumes were worn—a seeming reversal of the actions their immigrant ancestors took. “They even started going to ethnic churches,” says Barry, “and they started going to Hebrew school. In the 80s and 90s, this movement got more and more attention. Now people are trying to learn their [ancestors’ native] languages—even kids are learning German, Swedish, and Norwegian.”

 

Conditionally One

Still, not everyone is striving to regain a heritage. “The strongest ‘hearkening’ [back to their roots] seems to be among groups that experienced prejudice in the times of the heaviest immigrations,” says John.

 

Doug notes that Korean Americans are driven similarly. Historically, Korea was occupied by a number of other nations, each of which attempted to strip the country of its own personality. “The only way for our people to survive was to retain strict identity to our heritage,” says Doug. Because of such, Korean Americans may still have strong opinions about marrying outside of their heritage. “For many Koreans, even in America, [the heritage survival instinct] is still very strong. We try to maintain our identity because so many people have tried to destroy it.”

 

Nothing could ring truer to Gary Mokotoff in his work to bring back heritage and identity to Holocaust survivors, particularly Evelyne, whose story, says Gary, is unique in that she’s spent years trying to reconnect with her heritage. While her struggle continues to this day, Gary indicates that Evelyne has made a number of advances. First, she legally changed the name she used most of her life—Colette—back to Evelyne. Second, she has started celebrating Jewish holidays. And third, earlier this year, she made a trip to Israel. Her response, says Gary. “I feel like I am home.”

 

 

Jeanie Croasmun can be reached at jcroasmun@tgn.com.