Written for Descendants of Sonia and Joseph Green

This is a picture of my maternal grandparents, my mother's parents, Sonia and Joseph Green. I imagine that it was the work of a professional photographer. I guess that the image dates from when he was about thirty years old and she twenty-five -- so 1910 or thereabouts. I have no idea why the photograph has faded to blue-purple; it used to be ordinary black-and-white. I believe that the costumes that the formal young couple wear were hired for the occasion, as was the habit in those days; I doubt that their wallets would have permitted such fashionable dress.

They're a handsome young couple, are they not?  She very feminine, even delicate, prominently displaying her wedding ring; he sporting a slightly rakish mustache and a full head of youthful hair. When I knew him, forty years later, his hair was white and very sparse.

Sonia Chafetz and Joseph Usilewski arrived at Ellis Island in August of 1904, traveling steerage from Rotterdam. I've written about my grandmother Sonia here. 

I know very little about my grandfather, Joseph Usilewski, later Green. I was thirteen when he died, in 1952, from the last of his five heart attacks. Although my grandparents lived just around the corner on Coney Island Avenue, and I found myself in their presence very often, we had little to say to each other -- mostly because I spoke only English and his English was halting at best. We sometimes played 500 rummy and fan-tan, and I can remember him saying, "Now I'm in a predicament" before discarding, but that's about the most intimate we became. He was aloof and unsmiling --not in any sense "fun." But why should he be? His life had not been easy. He was from Minsk in present-day Belarus and was trained to be a pharmacist, but he had been drafted into the Russian army for the usual twenty-year term. His pay, he told me, was "a ruble every other month, when we got it." So he did the sensible thing -- deserted and ran off to America with Sonia. The family story, which I heard from my mother, was that both Joseph and Sonia were engaged to other people when they met and eloped. My mother also said that when they arrived New York they had just one pair of shoes between them and that Sonia would wait at home until Joseph came home from work before she could leave the house. My mother also told me that when she herself was born (June 14, 1905), her father was not allowed to visit Sonia in the hospital because he could not prove that he was her husband (no ring, no papers). Whether my grandparents were ever legally married, I do not know; nor does it matter.  

My grandfather was a strict father; my mother said that he raised his children "with the belt." There was a two-year period when he wouldn't speak to my then young-adult mother because he disapproved of her male friendships.

I don't think his was a happy marriage; he was frequently absent and it has been supposed that there were "other women" in his life. Nor was he a great success in the new continent; he never found a home in the world of business although as far as I know he was always employed and never in debt. In his last years he worked as a messenger carrying papers and money from one downtown business to another. When I knew him, he and Sonia lived in a very modest two-room apartment (in a third-floor "walkup").  

I suppose I should mention that although born Jewish, neither Joseph nor Sonia practiced their religion. Neither of them ever attended a synagogue or even honored Rosh Hashanah or Pesach at home. Joseph was a socialist and an active member of the Workmen's Circle, in his day a mutual aid society for recent immigrants. I know nothing of his political commitments except that he had a deep loathing for the communist government of Russia. "Worse than the czars."

Joseph had a brother, Nahum, and a sister whose name I have forgotten. Neither of his siblings had children.

If I had been more enterprising, I might have learned from Joseph and his family what life was like in White Russia in the nineteenth century. But I was too young, too self-centered. Too bad.

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

Your grandfather may have known my paternal grandfather, whose name became Hy Block when he was processed through Ellis Island; he, too, was from Minsk. I share your regret about not finding a way to ask him what life was like in 19th century White Russia. Deserting was probably a capital crime, so you owe your existence to someone who risked his life to get out of the Russian army.