My mom’s mother was the quintessential American grandmother. She baked a pie every day from scratch. She made stews and blintzes, grew tomatoes and green beans in a garden bed behind the garage, and canned them each year to store in the basement. She rolled her white hair in curlers every morning while wearing her flowered housecoat before putting on her girdle, hose and dress to go out. When she did go out, she drove a massive Ford Fairlane we dubbed the “grannymobile,” one of the 1970s compact cars from her home city of Detroit, where my grandfather had worked his whole career for Ford Motor Company. Grandma’s arms were as soft as pillows, and she often laughed long and hard until tears rolled down her face.
Like so many, my grandmother also began her life in this country as an undocumented immigrant.
We knew that Grandma Pearl had been born near St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1911 and had come to the U.S. with her parents when she was two years old. Two younger sisters soon followed. She changed her name from Pasha to Pearl and spoke English like a Midwesterner, but her parents never did learn English. My mom remembers her grandparents speaking to her in Russian, although she responded in English.
I always imagined that small family coming through Ellis Island, filling out paperwork, getting tested for TB, and then heading west to Michigan. It felt like the quintessential American immigrant tale.
But when my sister did genealogy research recently, she uncovered a more complicated story. It turns out the young Vinokurov family took a ship to Canada before crossing illegally to the United States. The immigration papers they filed decades after the crossing say they arrived “afoot on highway” into Minnesota from Canada. A father, a pregnant mother, and a toddler. What logistics led them on this particular path, we can only guess at. But it is a path familiar to many immigrant families living the roller coaster of hope and fear to this day.
Is there any more American story than a young family escaping the dangers of impending revolution in their home country to pursue the American dream? Is there any more American story than immigrant parents determined to give their daughters a better life, even if that meant crossing a border “without papers”?
As our immigrant neighbors live each day with uncertainty and fear – and also with hopes and dreams for their families – I ask each of us to pause and see them with empathy and to consider what we can do to help. I still believe in an America that is kind enough to welcome the stranger, who we might find isn’t so different from us after all.
