A Secret Gift (24 page)

By 1917 Sam was in Chicago, briefly working for a millinery shop. On June 5 of that year he registered for the military, one of twenty-four million American men to do so. He listed his name as “Samuel J. Stone,” his date of birth as March 2, 1888, and his birthplace as Bucharest, Rumania. It was one of the last times he acknowledged that he was an alien.

Years later, Sam told me he received his military training on the fields of Gettysburg. He never went overseas but he did see death. One afternoon, while his tentmate was cleaning his rifle, he was struck by lightning and was killed instantly. The body was blackened and Sam was close enough to have his own brows singed. I have a black-and-white picture of him standing in front of a field tent holding his bolt-action rifle affixed with bayonet. Underneath, in his unmistakable pen, Sam wrote “THE UNDECIDED SOLDIER.” Doubtless he enlisted because he had to. But he must have felt considerable ambivalence, torn between his desire to serve his adopted land and his apprehension about wading into the interminable disputes of the Old World from which he had hoped to forever distance himself.

A year later, he was living in Canton, a boarder in the home of a local Jewish merchant. On January 9, 1920, he told a U.S
.
Census enumerator that he and his family had emigrated from Germany in 1900. He also claimed to have been naturalized as an American citizen. The lifelong lie was beginning to take shape. But as I later unwound the skein of lies, I came to at least understand, if not his reasons, then at least his fears.

It was no later than 1920 that he invented the story of his birth in Pittsburgh. For the next sixty years, he would hold fast to that account, risking everything. But why suddenly invent such a story? Perhaps it was because he was now beginning to establish himself in Canton as a businessman and he yearned for the social acceptance he imagined came with being native-born. He was admittedly impatient and yearned to be American in every sense of the word.

But something else was happening in the country then that had to frighten him. Across the nation, there was growing xenophobia and suspicion of leftists, anarchists, labor organizers, and Eastern European immigrants. A rash of bombings in major cities heightened tensions. Thousands of immigrants were rounded up and put in jail. Hundreds were deported in the middle of the night. Much of the suspicion centered on the foreign-born. Jewish refugees in particular came under scrutiny, linked in the minds of many to the sort of internationalism and labor activism that was behind the radical assault on America. Provoked in part by the Bolshevik Revolution, the bombings and unrest triggered a hysteria that Sam would have seen as a direct threat to him.

It reached a crescendo in January 1920 when U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his special assistant, a young firebrand named John Edgar Hoover, arrested some six thousand people and held them without trial. The discriminatory residue of the Red Scare soon found expression in the nation’s ever-more-restrictive immigration policies, which took aim at excluding refugees from those countries suspected of carrying the contagion of radicalism. Technically the quotas were set as a percentage of each of those country’s immigrants and offspring already in the United States, but the baseline was set to 1890—before the great influx of Eastern Europeans—and was designed to reduce that immigration to a trickle. A 1924 law allowed a mere 794 immigrants from Romania. In such an environment, it is easy to imagine Sam’s eagerness to conceal his origins.

The governmental crackdowns and growing public apprehension raised the specter of anti-Semitism and even deportation. There was nothing that Sam Stone and his siblings dreaded more than the prospect of losing their place in America and being forced to return to the doleful landscape of their youth. It was something they talked about among themselves and it was an insecurity that several passed along to their children. That fear, that the Old World could somehow, even after two decades, reach out and seize him, was kindled anew by America’s midnight roundups of immigrants. Once already, in Romania, he and his family had been stripped of all the rights of citizenship. To “Sam Stone, the American,” falsely claiming to be native-born may at the time have seemed to offer a safe haven. Ironically, it was precisely that action that would later put him in fear of prison or deportation.

Amid so many contradictions in Sam’s life, there was also this: as intent as he was upon concealing his past, he was always true to it. He constantly drew upon it as a reservoir of acquired wisdom and never dreamed of apologizing for the humbleness of his beginnings, the rough edges, the gaps in his education. He may have reinvented himself—by changing his name, his country of origin, his date of birth—but he never attempted to be anything other than who he was, a self-made man who had grown up in Hard Times and who, even in his most prosperous days, identified with those who struggled. In that way, as in so many others, he shared a common bond with many in Canton who straddled two very different worlds.

Sam’s documents may have been fraudulent, but he was no fraud. He never put on airs, pretended to be high-born, or said an unkind word of those who were forced to scratch out a living. To the end, they were his people. The vulnerabilities he shared with them trumped any differences of religion, race, or gender, and if he fit in with those of privilege it was because they recognized in him something authentic, and not because he pretended to be one of them. So it was with Mr. B. Virdot. It was a made-up name, a pseudonym, but one that allowed him to express his truest self. That was the only contradiction in the man, that to be himself he had first to be someone else.

Such an act of prevarication would have found an understanding audience in Depression-era Canton, and well beyond. A lie that liberated one from encumbrances past and over which one had no control and bore no responsibility was still a lie in the eyes of the law, but if it moved a man and his family closer to their dream, if it distanced him from ancient prejudices, if it merely allowed him to be judged on the merits of his work, most, I would wager, would have withheld judgment. Canton was a place that had drawn its share of immigrants from countries deemed undesirable by the town’s longer-established upper crust, those same people who used the laws to close the door behind them. Being unwanted by others was something many in Canton had in common, that and the need to be valued, if not for who they were, then at least for who they or their children might become. For them, emancipation was more than a simple matter of emigration. Back then, many did not speak of the past, and some, like Sam, chose to fictionalize it. No one thought the less of them for it. Canton had summoned them all with the promise of a second chance.

V
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F
or Sam Stone, the real and final break with the past did not come until 7:45 Sunday evening, March 14, 1926. That was when his father, Jacob Finkelstein, died at Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh’s predominately Jewish Hill District. The cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage. He was sixty-five and determined to the end to honor the old ways. He died as “Finkelstein,” not “Stone,” and in the medical care of Jacob Grekin, a Russian Jewish doctor who emigrated the same year Jacob did—1902—and whose native tongue, like Jacob’s, was Yiddish. He was laid to rest in the New Light Cemetery in Millvale, just outside Pittsburgh, across the Allegheny River.

His obituary in Pittsburgh’s
Jewish Criterion
lists his surviving children. The sons are named “Samuel J., Max, David and Albert Finkelstein, all of Canton, Ohio and one brother.” Restoring the name Finkelstein to the sons, albeit in an obituary, was perhaps a last nod and concession to the old man, for by then all four sons had long since adopted the name Stone. If the boys had come to despise the baggage that went with their birth name, their father reviled its bastardization.

But, in one final act of defiance, my grandfather signed his father’s death certificate “Sam J. Stone,” not “Sam J. Finkelstein.”

Eighty-three years later, in May 2009, I went in search of the cemetery of Sam Stone’s parents, Jacob and Hilda. I found their graves just below the summit of a steep hill in the crowded New Light Cemetery, just outside Pittsburgh. In death, as in life, the American experience seemed to have touched them little. There is no “Stone” buried here, only “Finkelstein.” Jacob’s stone is a pillar of granite with an acorn for a crown. The acorn symbolizes birth, strength, and fertility. On the stone is written, in Hebrew, “Yakov ben Moshe Shmuel Finkelstein” and the dates of his birth and death. The Hebrew side of the stone has been worn down by the wind and is hard to read. The English, on the back side, shielded from the elements, is clear:

The word
Father
at the base makes me uncomfortable, knowing what I know of him. Still, as is the Jewish custom, I placed two pebbles on the marker, one in Sam’s name and one in my own. Sam’s mother’s orthodoxy, which had smothered my grandfather in life, continued in death. Hilda died on September 17, 1939, and, in accordance with Orthodox tenets, was buried in a casket free of all metal (“earth to earth”). Her grave is not beside Jacob, nor at his feet, but catty-corner. She is buried between one Sophie Klapper and one Bessie Mandelbaum. The undertaker suggested that some Orthodox women would not risk being laid to rest beside another man, and so preferred to be placed between two women, even if not contiguous with her husband’s grave. (Her death certificate lists her maiden name as “Bacall,” and so it seems plausible that what Sam once told me was true, that he was related to the actress Lauren Bacall, whose mother was born in Romania and was Jewish.)

Hilda Stone’s obituary was itself, at best, a half-truth. It said she “was a native of Rumania and had lived in this country 50 years.” That would have meant she came to America in 1889—fourteen years earlier than her arrival as recorded by passenger lists. Doubtless it was Sam who placed the obituary in the newspaper, and, in fabricating the date, avoided any public inconsistencies with his own fictionalized account of being born in America.

JACOB HAD BEEN more than Sam’s father (or less, if affection is a requisite of fatherhood). He had been a living symbol of the duress of the past. Sam had not one picture of him. His father’s passing brought a change over Sam, who was then thirty-eight, single, successful, and something of a playboy. After that, he seemed to take stock of himself. The succession of sleek convertibles, women, and trips abroad had not filled the void within.

Not long after Jacob Finkelstein died, Sam found himself at a dance in Canton. He noticed a shy, dark-haired girl sitting in the dim light of the dance hall. He walked over and introduced himself. Her name was Minna Cecilia Adolph. He asked if she would care to join him on the dance floor. She accepted, but was a little tentative in her steps, having removed her glasses before the dance. They danced through the evening, said their good-byes, and parted. Sam came away with the address of the law office where she worked.