Elizabeth Reis' INTRODUCTION

For many years I have assigned my grandmother's story, Dear Lizzie, to my undergraduate classes in United States Women's History at the University of Oregon.  Few students know before they read it that Leona Tamarkin is my grandmother, and most are surprised when I tell them that this is my family's story.  Students cannot believe that, despite overwhelming adversity, the girl in the narrative grew up, had five children, that those children had children, and that I, one of those grandchildren, am standing in front of them, a living embodiment of family--and Jewish--preservation.

My grandmother's story moved them to tears but more important for students of history, it gave immediacy and humanity to distant historical events.  The European events of the First World War seem as ancient as the Peloponnesian War to my students, so far removed are they from this tragedy. Dear Lizzie draws them in and enables them to enter this distant world.  Through Leona Tamarkin's memory, readers glimpse Europe's devastation during the First World War and gain an understanding of what it meant to emigrate to the United States in those postwar years.  Leona's story sounds like many of my students' own family immigrant stories (no matter where they are from).  She is self-educated, as so many immigrants of that period were, and the narrative's simplicity and naivete reveals the universality of a certain kind of childhood experience that was and is  shared by many immigrants.  Her writing has an easy spontaneity about it that suggests nature rather than artifice, the recounting of memory rather than the crafting of a story.

Leona Tamarkin was fifteen years old when she came with her older  sister to America.  Her memoir begins when she was just a small girl in Brest-Litovsk, in Russian-occupied Poland.  Born in 1905, Tamarkin relates her experiences as a Jewish refugee, as the German and, later, the Russian armies entered village after village, forcing inhabitants to flee their brief havens and seek sanctuary elsewhere.  Tamarkin's story chronicles the hardships her family endured: her parents' divorce on the eve of her father's emigration to America before the war (decreed by the rabbi just in case her father failed to reunite the family in the New World), her mother's early death, her own and her older sister's and brother's near starvation as refugees.  The reader rejoices when, finally, her father finds their names on a Jewish social service agency's list and sends them money and tickets to America.    

  Tamarkin's memoir highlights one important truth about twentieth-century Jewish history in Europe: that it was not confined to Europe.  The dislocation of European Jewry during the First World War and its later devastation in the Holocaust is fundamentally part of American Jewish history as well.  In reading this powerful story, we are reminded  that "immigration" cannot be appreciated without an understanding of European events.  To challenge the adage on the nature of history, the past is not a foreign country; indeed, as William Faulkner wrote, "It's not even past."

As a child, Tamarkin was aware of the seismic changes she faced, and her writing transports readers back to those frightening ordeals.  What makes her story exceptional is that she recollects the child's point of view so vividly.   The child's perspective and voice guides the narrative, carrying readers not only to the historical time and place, but to that time in our own lives when we were small children.  After Leona's  father divorces her mother and leaves for America, the small girl is embarrassed when her classmates tease her about not having a father.  Similarly, the agony she feels when made to wear a dress her mother fashions out of a red silk man's shirt parallels comparable self-conscious moments we all have faced.   Tamarkin's writing style allows readers to empathize with the protagonists.   It is not that we feel sorrow for the author as a grown-up woman; we feel sorry for that little girl, suffering pain and living daily with fear and hunger.  

As modern readers, and as Americans who, thankfully, have not experienced war in our own country, our hearts go out to this girl, not only because of the gnawing hunger, which most of us have never endured, but because we can identify with her as a child, which we have all been; we can share her confusion about her world and how to act in it properly, and her fears of the uncertain consequences she faces from parents and others, for her misdeeds.   She conveys her sense that the rules for acceptable conduct have been altered during wartime, and she struggles to negotiate the new terrain.  Previously punishable acts are now ignored; seemingly innocuous activity now brings down wrath, inexplicably to a child's mind.  In the tumult she tries to determine how she might maintain some sense of the rules that govern her unsettled world.

The memoir depicts the horrendous social chaos that accompanies war.  Leona recounts the shocked incredulity of Brest-Litovsk's residents when instructed simply to vacate their homes in 1915.  Anticipating that the enemy would make use of the nearby ammunitions dump, government officials told all citizens to leave--to where, nobody knew.  The turmoil, the packing, the heartbreak of leaving one's home and life, the uncertainty of refugee status, being blindly marched about or shuttled by railcars: all is succinctly and lucidly reported.   As a piece of Jewish history, this narrative helps us to understand how individuals reconciled their Jewish identity with the hard facts of anti-Semitism. Pre-war anti-Semitic legislation forced many Jewish workers, including Leona's father, to leave the country to look for work.  As refugees, the Jews of Poland found themselves without a home.

Leona's story belongs to women's history as well as to Jewish or immigration history.  The genre of women's autobiography is growing, and these accounts occupy a literary niche as well as a historical one.  Jewish women's autobiographies like Rose Cohen's Out of the Shadow, Rose Pesotta's Bread Upon the Waters, or Emma Goldman's Living My Life feature the lives of autonomous and rebellious women, and introduce us to a relatively neglected aspect of Jewish culture: the charismatic activities of  Jewish immigrant women in public life.  Tamarkin offers a somewhat different perspective.  She is not remembered for her labor or political activism.  She never became famous.  Her story exemplifies the experiences of the majority of women immigrants, remembered only among their families and friends, whose lives are nonetheless important as historical testimony.  

Writing one's autobiography, in and of itself, is an unconventional act.  Traditionally, women have written their lives far less frequently than have men.  Leona wrote not for fame, but so that her story would not be forgotten.  When, as a fifteen year old girl, I asked my grandmother to tell me about the time when she was my age, she started to speak but began to cry instead.  On several occasions she wanted to tell me, but the pain was still close to her heart, even after over sixty years.  My mother suggested she write it down for me, and this writing became an important part of my grandmother's life.  She showed it to someone at the community college she attended in New Haven, Connecticut, and he passed it along to a man who had received a grant to build ties between the community's elderly and youth.  Her story was scripted and performed in area high schools for several years.  My grandmother played the lead--she would have it no other way--while another senior

Elizabeth Reis' INTRODUCTION

For many years I have assigned my grandmother's story, Dear Lizzie, to my undergraduate classes in United States Women's History at the University of Oregon.  Few students know before they read it that Leona Tamarkin is my grandmother, and most are surprised when I tell them that this is my family's story.  Students cannot believe that, despite overwhelming adversity, the girl in the narrative grew up, had five children, that those children had children, and that I, one of those grandchildren, am standing in front of them, a living embodiment of family--and Jewish--preservation.

My grandmother's story moved them to tears but more important for students of history, it gave immediacy and humanity to distant historical events.  The European events of the First World War seem as ancient as the Peloponnesian War to my students, so far removed are they from this tragedy. Dear Lizzie draws them in and enables them to enter this distant world.  Through Leona Tamarkin's memory, readers glimpse Europe's devastation during the First World War and gain an understanding of what it meant to emigrate to the United States in those postwar years.  Leona's story sounds like many of my students' own family immigrant stories (no matter where they are from).  She is self-educated, as so many immigrants of that period were, and the narrative's simplicity and naivete reveals the universality of a certain kind of childhood experience that was and is  shared by many immigrants.  Her writing has an easy spontaneity about it that suggests nature rather than artifice, the recounting of memory rather than the crafting of a story.

Leona Tamarkin was fifteen years old when she came with her older  sister to America.  Her memoir begins when she was just a small girl in Brest-Litovsk, in Russian-occupied Poland.  Born in 1905, Tamarkin relates her experiences as a Jewish refugee, as the German and, later, the Russian armies entered village after village, forcing inhabitants to flee their brief havens and seek sanctuary elsewhere.  Tamarkin's story chronicles the hardships her family endured: her parents' divorce on the eve of her father's emigration to America before the war (decreed by the rabbi just in case her father failed to reunite the family in the New World), her mother's early death, her own and her older sister's and brother's near starvation as refugees.  The reader rejoices when, finally, her father finds their names on a Jewish social service agency's list and sends them money and tickets to America.    

  Tamarkin's memoir highlights one important truth about twentieth-century Jewish history in Europe: that it was not confined to Europe.  The dislocation of European Jewry during the First World War and its later devastation in the Holocaust is fundamentally part of American Jewish history as well.  In reading this powerful story, we are reminded  that "immigration" cannot be appreciated without an understanding of European events.  To challenge the adage on the nature of history, the past is not a foreign country; indeed, as William Faulkner wrote, "It's not even past."

As a child, Tamarkin was aware of the seismic changes she faced, and her writing transports readers back to those frightening ordeals.  What makes her story exceptional is that she recollects the child's point of view so vividly.   The child's perspective and voice guides the narrative, carrying readers not only to the historical time and place, but to that time in our own lives when we were small children.  After Leona's  father divorces her mother and leaves for America, the small girl is embarrassed when her classmates tease her about not having a father.  Similarly, the agony she feels when made to wear a dress her mother fashions out of a red silk man's shirt parallels comparable self-conscious moments we all have faced.   Tamarkin's writing style allows readers to empathize with the protagonists.   It is not that we feel sorrow for the author as a grown-up woman; we feel sorry for that little girl, suffering pain and living daily with fear and hunger.  

As modern readers, and as Americans who, thankfully, have not experienced war in our own country, our hearts go out to this girl, not only because of the gnawing hunger, which most of us have never endured, but because we can identify with her as a child, which we have all been; we can share her confusion about her world and how to act in it properly, and her fears of the uncertain consequences she faces from parents and others, for her misdeeds.   She conveys her sense that the rules for acceptable conduct have been altered during wartime, and she struggles to negotiate the new terrain.  Previously punishable acts are now ignored; seemingly innocuous activity now brings down wrath, inexplicably to a child's mind.  In the tumult she tries to determine how she might maintain some sense of the rules that govern her unsettled world.

The memoir depicts the horrendous social chaos that accompanies war.  Leona recounts the shocked incredulity of Brest-Litovsk's residents when instructed simply to vacate their homes in 1915.  Anticipating that the enemy would make use of the nearby ammunitions dump, government officials told all citizens to leave--to where, nobody knew.  The turmoil, the packing, the heartbreak of leaving one's home and life, the uncertainty of refugee status, being blindly marched about or shuttled by railcars: all is succinctly and lucidly reported.   As a piece of Jewish history, this narrative helps us to understand how individuals reconciled their Jewish identity with the hard facts of anti-Semitism. Pre-war anti-Semitic legislation forced many Jewish workers, including Leona's father, to leave the country to look for work.  As refugees, the Jews of Poland found themselves without a home.

Leona's story belongs to women's history as well as to Jewish or immigration history.  The genre of women's autobiography is growing, and these accounts occupy a literary niche as well as a historical one.  Jewish women's autobiographies like Rose Cohen's Out of the Shadow, Rose Pesotta's Bread Upon the Waters, or Emma Goldman's Living My Life feature the lives of autonomous and rebellious women, and introduce us to a relatively neglected aspect of Jewish culture: the charismatic activities of  Jewish immigrant women in public life.  Tamarkin offers a somewhat different perspective.  She is not remembered for her labor or political activism.  She never became famous.  Her story exemplifies the experiences of the majority of women immigrants, remembered only among their families and friends, whose lives are nonetheless important as historical testimony.  

Writing one's autobiography, in and of itself, is an unconventional act.  Traditionally, women have written their lives far less frequently than have men.  Leona wrote not for fame, but so that her story would not be forgotten.  When, as a fifteen year old girl, I asked my grandmother to tell me about the time when she was my age, she started to speak but began to cry instead.  On several occasions she wanted to tell me, but the pain was still close to her heart, even after over sixty years.  My mother suggested she write it down for me, and this writing became an important part of my grandmother's life.  She showed it to someone at the community college she attended in New Haven, Connecticut, and he passed it along to a man who had received a grant to build ties between the community's elderly and youth.  Her story was scripted and performed in area high schools for several years.  My grandmother played the lead--she would have it no other way--while another senior

Jewish Combatants in the Wars of Early America

In this book each Chapter describes and discusses a different Jewish man who volunteered for duty in the American Armed Forces of the Revolutionary War and later in the forces of the United States of America. The book is in chronological order starting with men who fought in the Revolutionary War and ending with those who fought in the Civil War. However, the Jewish presence in North America was present earlier, in the Colonial Period. Whether it is coincidence or not, the year 1492 was the year that Columbus sailed from Spain to discover the American continent and was also the year the Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain started the infamous Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition decried that all heretics: Jews, Moslems, and Protestant Christians were to be burnt at the stake. Although many Jews left Spain to avoid conversion, many accepted Christianity and were labeled by the Spaniards, Marrenos, or New Christians.

There is much speculation that some of the crew of Columbus were Jews or Marranos. At any rate the New World attracted many Jews and Marranos in an effort to escape the Inquisition. So many of them settled in the Islands of the Caribbean Sea and the surrounding Continental countries that they called themselves The Nation.

When the Dutch obtained their freedom from Spain, religious tolerance was proclaimed. Many Jews migrated there and prospered. What they looked like can be seen in the paintings by Rembrant. One family, the Salvadors, were among the founders of the Dutch West India Company and later forced the Governor of New Amsterdam, now New York, Peter Styuvsant, to admit three Jewish families from the Caribbean to settle in New Amsterdam. The first chapter of this book is devoted to a descendent of the Salvadors, named Francis, who was scalped in line of duty during the Revolutionary War.

Despite much discrimination, one of the men discussed, Captain Uriah Phillips Levy, influenced American history in two ways. Primarily, he was a leader in the successful effort to stop flogging of sailors in the United States Navy. The other was that Captain Levy bought Monticello, the home of President Thomas Jefferson, after the President had died and Monticello had fallen in ruins. The mother of Captain Levy is buried in Monticello.

As already mentioned, the earliest Jewish migration to what is now the United States was from the Caribbean area. These Sephardic Jews settled in the Southern areas, the Colonies of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia. Centuries later, when the Civil War began in the United States these Jewish families were Confederates. Their lives and their relationship to the post-Civil War Reconstruction period is discussed.

As the records of all of these individuals and their families are not available, this book is not an encyclopedia of all the Jewish men who fought for their country in it’s early Wars. I’m sure many important men were omitted. Perhaps as data becomes available others will be described. At the present, it is hoped that this volume will bring attention to the sacrifices that Jewish men made to the beginnings of the United States of America.

Jewish Combatants in the Wars of Early America

In this book each Chapter describes and discusses a different Jewish man who volunteered for duty in the American Armed Forces of the Revolutionary War and later in the forces of the United States of America. The book is in chronological order starting with men who fought in the Revolutionary War and ending with those who fought in the Civil War. However, the Jewish presence in North America was present earlier, in the Colonial Period. Whether it is coincidence or not, the year 1492 was the year that Columbus sailed from Spain to discover the American continent and was also the year the Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain started the infamous Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition decried that all heretics: Jews, Moslems, and Protestant Christians were to be burnt at the stake. Although many Jews left Spain to avoid conversion, many accepted Christianity and were labeled by the Spaniards, Marrenos, or New Christians.

There is much speculation that some of the crew of Columbus were Jews or Marranos. At any rate the New World attracted many Jews and Marranos in an effort to escape the Inquisition. So many of them settled in the Islands of the Caribbean Sea and the surrounding Continental countries that they called themselves The Nation.

When the Dutch obtained their freedom from Spain, religious tolerance was proclaimed. Many Jews migrated there and prospered. What they looked like can be seen in the paintings by Rembrant. One family, the Salvadors, were among the founders of the Dutch West India Company and later forced the Governor of New Amsterdam, now New York, Peter Styuvsant, to admit three Jewish families from the Caribbean to settle in New Amsterdam. The first chapter of this book is devoted to a descendent of the Salvadors, named Francis, who was scalped in line of duty during the Revolutionary War.

Despite much discrimination, one of the men discussed, Captain Uriah Phillips Levy, influenced American history in two ways. Primarily, he was a leader in the successful effort to stop flogging of sailors in the United States Navy. The other was that Captain Levy bought Monticello, the home of President Thomas Jefferson, after the President had died and Monticello had fallen in ruins. The mother of Captain Levy is buried in Monticello.

As already mentioned, the earliest Jewish migration to what is now the United States was from the Caribbean area. These Sephardic Jews settled in the Southern areas, the Colonies of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia. Centuries later, when the Civil War began in the United States these Jewish families were Confederates. Their lives and their relationship to the post-Civil War Reconstruction period is discussed.

As the records of all of these individuals and their families are not available, this book is not an encyclopedia of all the Jewish men who fought for their country in it’s early Wars. I’m sure many important men were omitted. Perhaps as data becomes available others will be described. At the present, it is hoped that this volume will bring attention to the sacrifices that Jewish men made to the beginnings of the United States of America.

There is a legend that some Jews, after the Babylonian conquest of Israel, were taken as slaves to Spain. Ultimately, they allegedly founded Toledoth - the City of Generations - now Toledo. On the expulsion of Jews from Spain, ghostly testimonials remained, testifying to the long time Jewish presence.

One monument is the synagogue (whose eastern wall appears on the cover) built by Samuel Levi Abulafia, Castile’s treasurer. With his fall from grace, the community atrophied. But while history marches on, private lives continue - and this is the tale of why Saúl Abandana had two wives and how the three survived the events of their times.

There is a legend that some Jews, after the Babylonian conquest of Israel, were taken as slaves to Spain. Ultimately, they allegedly founded Toledoth - the City of Generations - now Toledo. On the expulsion of Jews from Spain, ghostly testimonials remained, testifying to the long time Jewish presence.

One monument is the synagogue (whose eastern wall appears on the cover) built by Samuel Levi Abulafia, Castile’s treasurer. With his fall from grace, the community atrophied. But while history marches on, private lives continue - and this is the tale of why Saúl Abandana had two wives and how the three survived the events of their times.