Back To The Beginning -- 72 Years After She Arrived In The U.S., A Russian Immigrant Makes A Sentimental Return To Ellis Island

I have been hearing the stories for as long as I can remember, my mother's stories, delicate shreds of childhood memory she has passed again and again to me.

They are memories of spending early years as a Jewish child in a small Russian town. Images of a curly-haired father who loved to sing. Visions of marauding armies smashing windows and looting houses. Remembrances of hiding in a cellar to escape gunfire, and cowering in a hay cart in the middle of the night.

Some of the stories are about anguish, terror, persecution - this I always knew, even when I was too young to understand.

There are happier tales too, triumphant ones: about making it to America, learning to speak and read English, being the first in the family to attend college.

It took me a long time to realize that the hardships and victories my mother spoke of were like those so many other refugees to America have shared. Yes, they were specific to my own family, and to other Ashkenazim, Eastern European Jews. Yet archetypical, too.

This year, on a brilliantly clear spring day in New York City, my mother and I set out together to excavate one of her most potent childhood memories. With a throng of eager, noisy tourists, chatting in half a dozen languages, we boarded a ferry bound for Ellis Island. That's where my mother, Minnie Perrin Berson (nee Manya Pogribitsky); and her younger sisters, Sadie and Ilene; their mother, Rosa; and their grandmother, Etta Annie, entered this country as Russian refugees in October of 1921.

Mom had longed for us to make this sentimental journey since 1990, when Ellis Island - the gateway for more than 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1954 - was transformed into a national museum and opened to the public. But it took three years for it happen. My crazy work schedule and Mom's fragile health kept getting in the way.

Now 79, my sole surviving parent (my father, Jake Berson, the son of Polish immigrants, died in 1985) continues to lead a very engaged life. Long retired from a career as a college professor and education expert in Illinois and Michigan, she now lives in California. She studies classical piano, works faithfully on an epic novel she hopes to see published, dotes on my brother's infant son and frequents plays and concerts with a wide circle of friends, many of them closer to my age than her own.

In the past few years, serious heart ailments and a broken hip have slowed Mom down. With her usual tenacity, she keeps bouncing back, zest intact. But recently she made a point of reminding me that she won't be around forever - which I interpreted as Jewish mother lingo for: "Let's take that trip to Ellis Island, now."

This year, we finally managed to do it. And on the night before our pilgrimage, I asked her to retell some of the old stories once more. As I listened, I was struck by something so obvious I had always overlooked it: The trauma and survival of Mom's early youth is at least partly responsible for her intense joie de vivre, and the tremors of sorrow and compassion behind it.

Sitting together in the spare bedroom in my father-in-law's house in Queens, my mother reminded me that she was born in 1914, in the shtetl (Jewish community) of Riesien, a rural hamlet near Kiev in the Russian Ukraine. Her father, Israel, ran a family-owned glass factory. His marriage to Rosa Ortenberg, arranged by their parents, yielded three daughters who lived - my mother was the eldest - and two others who died in infancy.

"I don't remember much about my father, except that he had a beautiful voice and loved music," Mom told me. Still vivid to her, though, is the way he died: "When I was about 5, soldiers stormed into our house and one put a gun into my father's mouth and threatened to kill him. I was watching, and I screamed and cried so hard the soldier didn't pull the trigger. But the gun had a rusty barrel, and my father got a fatal case of tetanus."

This is one of many violent memories my mother carries.

During her youth in Russia, the civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution raged around her. The White Army battled the Red Army - and both armies persecuted the Russian Jews. In a series of bloody pogroms, scores of innocent Jews were slain by soldiers, and by the "Black Hundreds," gangs of hoodlums who, wrote historian Irving Howe, were "surreptitiously (sometimes openly) helped by the government."

"Everybody we knew was trying to escape because of the civil war," Mom recalled. "There were a lot of warlords coming through, marauding and raping. After my father died, soldiers took over our house. My mother felt she had to get us out of there."

FLEEING IN WINTER, BY WAGON

Rosa Pogribitsky must have been a gutsy lady, and a lucky one: Her brothers, Herman and David, had already fled to America, settled in Detroit and arranged through Jewish welfare agencies for relatives to follow. But to make it to the golden land of America, Rosa and her brood first faced a long, perilous journey to the Polish border.

"I was 6, Sadie was 3 and Ilene was just a babe in arms," my mother remembered. "My grandmother was 66, and seemed very old. I really don't know how we did it. We took little with us. It was the dead of winter, bitter cold, and my mother arranged for a wagon to bring us across the countryside by night. We melted snow to make tea over a fire. We slept in the wagon during the day, under the straw.

"It was really harrowing at times. One night a Russian peasant let us sleep in his house, which we paid him for. We heard later that the Bolsheviks found out and burned his place down."

The family finally reached the Russian-Polish border, and crossed over into the town of Rovna. "My mother must have bribed the border officials with jewelry to let us through. What surprised me about Rovna was that there were stores with unbroken windows, full of goods, and nobody was shooting at anyone. That was all new to me."

The trek wasn't over. It took the best part of a year for the little female clan to reach Antwerp, Belgium, and board a freighter for New York. They journeyed slowly across Europe by train, sleeping and eating in homes and hotel rooms arranged through Jewish refugee groups - "not so much an underground, but a network. Everyone we met was so eager to come to America, and they had nothing to live on but hope. We kept meeting people we knew en route, and it became a kind of community in transit."

As we talked, my mother struggled to recall the name of the ship they finally booked passage on. Maybe The Finland? She wasn't sure. She did know they traveled in steerage - the cheapest, lowest class, packed with fellow immigrants from all over Europe.

"A lot of people on board were sick the whole way over, but not me. Maybe I was too excited. I do remember from time to time going up into the better-class areas to have a look around. We were cute little girls, so people were nice to us.

"Some of the immigrants carried big sacks, full of family treasures. The mystery to me is how much my mother managed to take over, in just a couple of suitcases. Mine was wicker, and I had to drag it everywhere."

DAYS OF WAITING, CONFUSION

Finally the great day dawned, and the boat landed at Ellis Island. But it was not that first look at the Statue of Liberty she remembers most vividly from the long-awaited landing.

Instead, it was the sudden wrenching apart of the family, the forced separation from her mother: "As soon as we got to Ellis, some medical people examined us and saw from our eyes that we'd had typhoid. We also had colds.

"So they sent me, my grandmother and Sadie to the infirmary. My mother and the baby were whisked away - probably to New York. It was so confusing. We spoke only Yiddish and a little Russian, and didn't know what was happening. We spent days waiting there, with good accommodations and so much food we couldn't eat it all. I remember squirreling away hard-boiled eggs under a pillow.

"Finally, Mother came for us, and got us ready to make our entry. I can still see her: She had on a lovely white eyelet dress, and she brought eyelet dresses for us, too. We put them on and made this little procession into a great room where our papers were examined and our name was changed to Perrin. Then they wired Detroit, and when my uncles wired back we were on our way to Michigan."

Mom's faded blue eyes misted over when she assessed what it meant to have arrived in America. "First I thought, this is a place where you won't see any killing, and you won't be killed. Then I thought, I can go to school - I was very eager to do that, and I couldn't in Russia."

Such basic, basic things.

`YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS'

My mother and I stood anxiously on the windswept deck of a small Circle Line ferry, with the Statue of Liberty looming overhead and Ellis Island in the near distance. It's a quick, one-ticket boat ride from Manhattan's Battery Park to both attractions, with a stop first at Lady Liberty.

But Mom barely glanced at the famous statue. She kept her gaze fastened on the cluster of surprisingly elegant, French Rennaissance-style, limestone-trimmed brick buildings up ahead on Ellis Island: "Will I be able to see the infirmary? It's the place I remember best. I wonder if it's still there."

As soon as we pulled into the tiny harbor, she spotted it. Ellis Island is shaped like a narrow horseshoe: directly across the water from the imposing main building, where we landed, stood a cluster of smaller structures that had made up the hospital.

We never did visit that complex, nor hunt for the dormitory where my mother was quarantined 72 years ago. Mom wanted to conserve her energy for perusing the main building, now handsomely renovated into a splendid museum that pays homage to the nation's immigrant multitudes and to Ellis Island itself.

Like all visitors, we were immediately confronted with a bevy of options. We could wander through 14 rooms of historical exhibits, catch a half-hour documentary film, roam around a vast library and oral-history studio, or stroll outside for a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline and a look at the American Immigrant Wall of Honor, where the names of nearly 200,000 Americans have been inscribed so far. Guided tours around the island were also available.

This was my mother's special day, and she gets around slowly, so I let her lead the way. She enjoyed the historical displays about the island (it was designated an immigration station in 1890), and the phases of building construction that continued through the early 1900s. Of special interest were interior photos of - yes - the hospital/infirmary, which looked a lot like she remembered it.

Elsewhere we found exhibits of native costumes worn by newcomers from various cultures (the vast majority who entered at Ellis Island hailed from Eastern and Western Europe), passport photos, family memorabilia. We picked up telephone receivers and heard old-timers recounting their own migratory sagas.

I found it all fascinating. But my mother did not get the jolt of recognition she needed until we entered a room lined with postcards of all the boats that brought immigrants to Ellis Island before 1924, when mass immigration was curtailed by Congress.

"Can we find The Finland?" she asked hopefully. It took us a while to see that all the postcards were arranged alphabetically. Once we did, we looked through scores of them until - eureka! There it was. A fuzzy black-and-white image of a sturdy, no-frills ship, The Finland. And the information that it had, indeed, made a passage from Antwerp in 1921.

Tears sprang to my mother's eyes. "You don't know what this means," she whispered, staring at that faded little card. "It's like everything I remember really did happen."

We stood quietly there for a while. Then we found our way into the Registry Hall, an almost-elegant room of grand dimensions (220 feet long and 100 feet wide, with 56-foot-high ceilings) and graceful arched windows looking out onto the cobalt-blue water of the harbor and the gleaming Manhattan cityscape.

"It's empty now, but when we came it was lined with benches and full of people waiting their turn to be registered," Mom told me. "We walked right up here" - she gestured to a podium-like wooden desk at one end of the hall - "and showed our documents. And that's when we knew we were home safe."

SEEING THROUGH IMMIGRANT EYES

By then, my mother had seen what she had come to see. As we headed back to the dock to meet my husband and in-laws, I noticed that Mom was one of the few visitors in sight old enough to have immigrated via Ellis Island. After 1924, the facility was used intermittently as a processing center (for far fewer immigrants than the 1921 tally of 561,000), a Coast Guard station, and a detention facility for "enemy aliens." The government closed it down entirely in 1954, and the $160 million restoration effort didn't begin until 1984.

We were quiet on the way back to Manhattan, but it was a peaceful and satisfied kind of quiet. My mother had spiritually completed a journey she started so many years ago, and I felt fortunate to have shared the last leg of it.

But I couldn't help thinking about something she had said the evening before. I don't see America through her eyes. I'm a native, and sometimes America's inequities, its hypocrisies, the promises it doesn't keep, blot out its attributes and amenities.

So I asked Mom what coming to this country had, ultimately, meant to her.

"First of all, it was a miracle that such a big thing could even happen to me," she answered. "This was the greatest, the most eventful experience of my life. And then I, like so many others, had this great thirst for learning, and this hunger to become Americanized."

Did she think it was the same for newcomers today? She shook her head. "It's so much harder now to get in. There's more crime to deal with, more congestion, gangs, economic competition.

"Immigrants still, like in my day, do the work nobody else wants to do. They start at the bottom and where they go from there depends on a lot of things. But look at the boat people from China, from Haiti, from Vietnam, risking their lives to get here. For them, America is still what it was for me. It gave me my life."