My greatgrandparents

I wrote this story (still unfinished) a few years ago, describing what little we know, pieced together from the few documents we have and my mom's memories.

This story is dedicated to my ancestors, who fled poverty in Poland to find even greater poverty in America. They fled Poland, seeking the “American Dream”, to a country that despised and demonized immigrants (and continues to do so). I don’t have their entire stories. I have a couple of baptismal records, thanks to a very kind priest in Brooklyn. I have some names and then my mom’s memories of Helen and Chiotka Maruska. Her father said very little of his early days, and so I’ve recreated their story.

She was 17 years old, yes old... with her second child, Wanda, in a country whose language she did not speak and without a place of her own to call home. She lived in a tenement, like so many other Polish immigrants, like so many other immigrants. Her child, had just been baptized at St. Stanislaus Kosta Church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the only place in this crowded, stinking city that felt like home. Wanda slept silently on the bed she shared with John, when he was home, and with the young John, who had recently turned 3. There was no birthday party for little John. There was no money to afford a celebration and little to celebrate.

Helena, or Regina as she as called to close friends who knew her back in Poland, was distraught. It was December and fresh snow lay on the ground. Wanda and little John were cold and hungry. Helen thought to herself, “how would she pay the exorbitant rents demanded from the crooked landlords who crammed the penniless immigrants into substandard housing? How would she pay for the coal to heat the room?”.

And so she prayed. She prayed to Maryja, who had also been an immigrant: Please keep my children safe from harm and illness. She prayed to St. Józef, patron saint of workers: Please let John find employment. It has been so very hard. New Yorkers seem to hate us, our language, our futile attempts to learn to speak like them. There is no work for him here in the City so he’s gone west to find his brother William with the hope of finding work in the coal mines of Pennsylvania.

Little John awoke and cried out that his tummy hurt. His head hurt. His mother thought, please dear God don’t let him be sick. There are so many here that are dying. They feel fine one day and then the next they have a terrible bout of the runs and they can’t keep down anything. John begged for woda, water, but Helen would have to go out to the well down the street to get water. John was not there to get water and her sister Marusha was tolling away in the stifling hot, suffocating confines of a sewing shop.

to be continued....