My grandmother just turned 98. I’ve put together some of what she’s told me from our recent conversations.
Her dark complexion made her strikingly beautiful, but it bothered her. She was young—seventeen, wrapped in a wool coat on the deck of the ocean liner Isle de France. She’d been seasick for three days, unable to keep anything down. She found the smell of food from the ship’s kitchen unbearable, and had avoided the dining room since they left port. The lack of nourishment made her wobbly on deck, but the nausea was less keen in the cold salt air, so she endured. She had to eat soon, she knew, but couldn’t imagine how or when she would. Her name was Antonia.She was born in Sleme, a small Slovenian mountain village, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Later this became part of Yugoslavia, after the Great War. By 1920, only six families called it home. Hers owned a small farm and roadside tavern which gave them their living. Her father was hard working, hard-drinking, stubborn, and occasionally mean. He had committed his life to relocating his family to the United States, a task which he accomplished in stages. First he went alone, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves. He settled in Cleveland, where he worked and saved as much as he could. There followed three intervals, the first two ending with his arrival back at the farm, unannounced and unpredicted. Each time, after a brief stay, he took the oldest child left and made the return crossing. Antonia’s presence on the French steamer was the final act in her father’s exodus drama. This time, he had not returned to collect anyone, but instead sent money and instructions for his wife Jenny. Sell everything, buy passage for yourself and the children, and come. The children included her son Pepe (in his twenties), Antonia, and four year old Sophie, fruit of one of father’s abbreviated homecomings. Antonia adored Pepe. As part of an inseparable troika with another boy from the village, they spent their free time hiking the alpine hills, poaching fish from the river at night (alert for wardens and darting for the cover of the nearby hay fields when the official’s telltale torches worked their way up the riverside). They made their own skis and used them. Once, as kids, when the villagers had been distilling brandy from the summer’s surplus plums, they got drunk together. The distillers had been dutifully sampling the product all morning and needed to lie down. When the children came on the scene, the men asked them to watch over the operation while they went home and took their nap. Of course the three obliged, and of course when alone they dared each other to try the sweet liquor, and of course they liked it, drank too much, got tipsy, then sick in turn.
Over the years they were welded by their adventures in a deep and permanent love. Antonia’s tomboy nature, her easy friendship with older boys and her somewhat olive skin had prompted some in the village to call her Rom–Gypsy—a mean-spirited nickname. This was still an epithet in Old Europe, where the Romany were feared and disliked. Antonia hated when they called her that, not least because it offended an inborn sense of equity. She knew that even if she did look like a Gypsy, so what? They were no better or worse than anybody else. Still, knowing its intent, the name bothered her, and she became sensitive about this aspect of her appearance. Otherwise she was lithe, muscular, bright and busty. A beauty, but she never thought so, or perhaps she was just unimpressed.The emigration route she took with her mother and two siblings wound first from the village to the main train depot in Ljubljana. From there it was the train to Le Havre, the great Atlantic seaport in northern France; then by steamer to Ellis Island, New York, where her father would meet them. Ljubljana would break their hearts.
The Great War was nearly 10 years past, but it had left Europe unstable, under a steady, perceptibly increasing sense of dread. The violence of 1914-18 had gone to ground, but was still felt seismically as if through the soles of the feet. In 1928 it was already clear to many that another war was inevitable. At the train station, they presented their paperwork to a government official, who, unknown to them, was there to deny passage to all men who might serve in the anticipated conflict. The mother and girls could go, but Yugoslavia was claiming Pepe for the Army. There was little choice, having already sold everything to make the journey. Antonia’s mother wept, cried in anger, begged the official to let her son come with her. When that failed, she offered the remainder of their money if he would relent. Furious, the official denounced the bribe, and told her she would be put in prison if she did not stop. In grief, the three boarded the train to Le Havre, leaving 20 year old Pepe under guard behind them. It became Antonia’s most painful memory.On the steamer deck, Antonia was approached by a young man of the ship’s company. He was on the lookout for passengers made ill by the trip. In his hand was an orange. He held it out to her. In the circumstances she was too shy to take it. She had never seen one before; did not know what it was; had no idea what he expected her to do with it. Recognizing the look of confusion, he peeled the orange deliberately so she would understand how to do it herself, separated the segments, and held one up. The fresh scent of the fruit had grown strong, and to her surprise this amplified her hunger instead of her nausea. He mimed eating motions. She took the segment and tasted it. Perhaps due to its unfamiliar flavor, the acidic sweetness was a near ecstasy that pushed her illness aside. She ate the remainder under his watch. He laughed and said something in language foreign to her and walked away. Later he delivered a paper bag that held over a dozen like fruits, which she lived on till she reached New York.
At Ellis Island, where harried immigration clerks had long stopped asking people to pronounce their names more than once, Antonia was granted entry into the United States as Antoinette. Her friends came to call her Toni. In America, more than anything else she wanted to go to school. She asked her father’s permission for just one year of the free public education available to immigrants, but he refused, insisting she go to work immediately. One of her first jobs was as a live-in housekeeper for a wealthy family but the situation was bad. They mistreated her, made her work excessively, and did not provide adequate rest or food. She lost weight and grew haggard. When her cousin came for a surprise visit she was so horrified by Toni’s condition she berated the wife of the family, and threatened them with the police. She packed Toni immediately back home. Too soon the world plunged into the Great Depression, and then the foreseen second Great War. Against the Fascists, Pepe became a partisan under Josef Broz Tito. Almost nothing was learned of his military service except that he died in an American air raid.
-John Jesberger
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