From This Day Forward (25 page)

It might not have been the stuff of hearts and roses, but it worked. These practical people stayed together and settled the country.

 

N
OTE
: The writings of Keturah Belknap and Mary Walker have been taken from
Women of the West,
by Cathy Luchetti and Carol Olwell (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1982). We corrected spelling and punctuation for easier reading. Elinor Pruitt Stewart's
Letters of a Woman Homesteader
was reprinted by the Mariner Books division of Houghton Mifflin in 1988.

IMMIGRANT MARRIAGES

We can both trace our origins to Europe—Cokie's family first came from England early in the seventeenth century, Steve's from Russia and Poland three hundred years later. And we both grew up with a strong interest in our foreign-born forebears and the stories of their journeys. Immigrants have generally tried to transport the customs of the “old country,” wherever that was, to their new homes, and invariably, those customs have crumbled under the pressures to be “modern” and “American.” When it came to marriage, couples quickly discovered that the old rules no longer applied. They were free to make choices and cross lines that would have been unthinkable for their parents.

In this section we focus on Steve's tribe, Eastern Europeans, and in that world, the concept of romantic love was pretty foreign. Couples were often brought together by their parents, sometimes with the help of a professional matchmaker. Reporter Lillian Wald, writing about the immigrant Jews of New York early in the century, quoted a shocked father as saying, “What? Let a girl of seventeen, with no judgment whatsoever, decide on anything so important as a husband?” Alfred Kazin, in his lovely memoir,
A Walker in the City,
says of his parents' generation: “Their marriages were neither happy nor unhappy; they were arrangements.” And he describes how stunned he was to hear his cousin and her friends talk about their romances: “They were the first grown-up people I had ever met who used the word
love
without embarrassment. ‘Libbe! Libbe!' my mother would explode whenever one of them protested that she could not, after all, marry a man she did not love. ‘What is this love you make such a stew about? You do not like the way he holds
his cigarette? Marry him first and it will all come out right in the end.'”

Similar stories run through all immigrant communities. In writing about our Greek experience, we describe Cypriot families fleeing from war who discover that in a refugee camp, the old custom of needing a dowry to get married has been destroyed, along with their home villages. Today in California, parents place ads in Indian newspapers seeking appropriate grooms for their daughters. But those traditions are struggling to survive. One of Steve's students at George Washington University describes a family of Indian immigrants with three daughters. The parents demanded that the oldest girl, a doctor, enter an arranged marriage. The second daughter, while on a longer leash, was barred from attending her senior prom with a date. By the time the third daughter hit high school, the parents allowed her to fly to Mexico on spring break with a bunch of friends. In just a few years, the new culture of California had overwhelmed the old culture of India. Every Sunday, Cokie is struck by the banns of marriage announced in the church bulletin: the couples might all be Catholics, but there are a lot of O'Hearns marrying Garcias and Nitkowskis marrying Nguyens.

For the first generation of immigrants, as Kazin points out, marriage was often an arrangement, not a romance, and in some ways that was a whole lot easier. Expectations were lower and community support was greater. But there was no escaping the change. As these immigrants and their children adapted their Old World customs to the New, one of their hardest adjustments was coping with a culture where everybody was making “such a stew” about love and marriage.

Irene Gut Opdyke: Only a Girl

In the fall of 1956, Irene Gut was having lunch in a small coffee shop on New York's East Side, near the United
Nations. The place was full, and a tall man with glasses asked politely if he could share her table. When he sat down, he looked at her more closely and said, “I know you.” The man was William Opdyke, and he did know her. They had met more than six years before, in a displaced-persons camp in Germany. She was a young Polish woman then, a refugee from the war, and he was an American working for the UN. That day in the camp she had told him her story, and he had never forgotten it. Or her.

We learned Irene's full story during several long interviews that expanded on her memoir,
In My Hands,
a book aimed at high-school students. The tale starts in September 1939. Irene was a seventeen-year-old nursing student in the city of Radom on the day the Nazis invaded Poland. Raised a strict Catholic, she had never kissed a boy and wanted to be a nun. As the German forces pushed eastward toward Radom, she and other medical personnel joined the outmanned Polish army and fled to the forests of the Ukraine. One night she and several soldiers slipped into a nearby town on a bartering mission. She was posted as a lookout when a Russian patrol came by and spotted her. “I was brutally violated, beaten and left in the snow to die,” she recalls. “But I did not die. God did have other plans for me.”

Another Russian patrol found her and brought her to a hospital. After recovering her strength, she went back to Radom in search of her family, but she was conscripted to work in a hotel serving the German high command. The back side of the building looked down into the Jewish ghetto, and after watching from a window as a Gestapo force swept through the area, gunning down helpless victims, she decided to act. The next day she stole some food from the hotel and pushed it under the ghetto fence.

A few weeks later she saw a Nazi officer fling a Jewish baby into the air and then shoot it with his pistol as the baby's mother watched. Something cracked deep inside her. “Like
a little child, I have tantrum with my maker,” she recalled, her English still tinged with a Polish accent. “But in the morning, there was an answer in my soul, in my heart. God gives us free will, to be good or bad. I asked God at that moment for the opportunity to help.” A resistance fighter was born. Gradually she took bigger and bigger steps: from stealing food and passing secrets to hiding Jewish fugitives and raiding Nazi convoys. As her work got riskier, she realized she could be discovered and executed at any moment, but the knowledge that she “could only be killed once” kept her going. In her memoirs, Irene writes: “I only wanted not to die in too much pain, and to foil the Germans as much as I could before I went.”

Transferred by the Nazis to the Ukrainian city of Ternopol, she met a group of Jewish laborers assigned to the laundry she was running for the German officers. Through her contacts with the laborers she smuggled food and intelligence to the Jewish underground hiding in the nearby forests. But when word came that the Gestapo was planning to liquidate every Jew in the city, including the slave laborers, her friends were suddenly facing mortal danger. She promised she would help, but one of the men, older and gloomier than the others, dismissed her with a shrug: “You're only a young girl. What can you do?”

Quite a lot, it turned out, but Irene refuses to take all the credit. “I believe a miracle happened,” she says simply. The German major she was working for commandeered a large villa and put Irene in charge of the housekeeping. Designed by a Jewish architect, the basement of the villa contained a network of secret rooms and passages, and just hours before the Gestapo arrived, she hid a dozen of her friends in the major's house.

They lived there for nine months. During the day, after the major left, the Jews would emerge from the cellar and help Irene run the house. At night they would return to their
hiding place, and one frequent dinner guest was the local head of the Gestapo, who never knew he was eating meals prepared by Jews living literally beneath his feet. The scheme was working well until one of the Jewish women discovered she was pregnant. The group decided to abort the baby—any other course was too dangerous—but Irene pleaded with them. Wait, don't let Hitler have this life, too. The Russians are advancing and something could happen.

But then danger appeared from another direction. One day Irene was walking back to the villa and ran into a crowd blocking a square where a gallows had been built. A Polish couple and their two small children were being hanged for hiding a Jewish family. Irene was so upset that when she got back to the villa, she forgot to lock the front door behind her. Two Jewish girls, about her age, came up from the basement to console her, and suddenly, without warning, the German major walked in.

He did not know that ten others were in the cellar, but he was still furious. That night the Nazi officer exacted a bargain from Irene: I'll protect your friends if you become my mistress. The next morning, she writes, she fled the major's bedroom and filled a tub: “I sank into water so hot it made me cry, and my tears plinked into the water as I scrubbed myself. This was worse than rape.” And yet she kept her bargain with the major. “I had banked on his affection for me for too long, used him for too long,” she writes. “I could not be surprised now that it had come to this accounting.” And besides, she adds, her shame “was a small price to pay for so many lives.”

Sixteen lives in all, plus the baby conceived in the basement of the villa. With Russian forces approaching Ternopol, the Nazis fled and Irene smuggled her charges into the forest, to join the Jewish underground, and that's where the baby was born a few months later. The German major took Irene with him on the retreat westward, but she managed to evade him in the city of Kielce and join a band of Polish partisans who
were harassing any target they could find, German or Russian. She took the
nom de guerre
“Mala,” Polish for “little,” and fell in love with the group's leader, Janek. They were planning to marry and settled on May 5, 1944, as their wedding day. Three days before, she was at the home of Janek's parents, trying on her wedding dress, when her groom burst in the door, surprising her. “It's bad luck to see the bride in her dress before the wedding,” his mother scolded, but he had news. A German transport was moving through the area that night and he would lead a raid against it. Irene pleaded with him not to go. “But, sweetheart,” he teased, “I'm the fearless leader.” Janek was killed in the ambush and buried in the forest.

With her love lost and her heart shattered, Irene made contact with some of the Jews she'd helped to save. The Germans were gone, and the Jews felt free to emerge from hiding, but the Russian occupation weighed heavily. Irene was particularly anxious to see the baby, Roman Haller, who'd been born in the forest, and her eagerness dulled her survival instincts. Just blocks from the Hallers' house, she was arrested by Russian police and interrogated for days about her partisan comrades. Again she escaped, but there was nothing left for her in Poland. If she looked for her family, she would place them in grave danger. In a final irony, her Jewish friends found her a forged transit pass with a Jewish alias, Sonia Sofierstein. With her blond hair dyed black, she took a train to Germany, and in May of 1946, she settled into life at a DP camp near the city of Hessich-Lichtenau. She'd been in the camp more than three years on the day, in the summer of 1949, that William Opdyke arrived to interview the residents.

It was a rabbi in the camp who introduced them. As she remembers: “We had six languages between us but not one in common—except the language of laughter. We could not help chuckling at the predicament we were in. He called across the room to a colleague, and in a few moments we had
another American with us, one who spoke German.” Opdyke asked a few questions but mainly let her talk. As she writes in her memoir: “I left nothing out. I think I wanted to shock him, to tell this well-fed American what a simple Polish girl was capable of. Opdyke had been taking notes, but he finally just put his pen down and stared at me. For a moment, I feared that he did not believe what I had told him. He said something to the interpreter in a gruff voice. ‘Mr. Opdyke says he feels honored to have met you, and that the United States would be proud to have you as a citizen.'” In our conversations with her, Irene embellished the story: “I liked him very much, a man with black hair with lots of silver in it. Tall, very distinguished, that reminded me of my father.” But she says sternly, “there was no romance” at the time. He was married, and he left without giving her an address or a telephone number in America.

Later that year she arrived in New York aboard the troopship
John Muir,
which was carrying refugees from Europe. The Jewish Resettlement Organization found her a place to live in Brooklyn and a job in a corset factory, but they could not replace what she had lost: “I was alone without money, or family, or marketable skills.” After getting her first wages from the factory, she remembers: “I was so proud of myself—I could earn money!” But she lived quietly, still nursing her emotional wounds. When we asked if she had any social life in those years, Irene replied: “No, no. I was scared of men. I didn't want to have anything to do with men.” She deliberately dressed to hide her beauty, in drab dark clothes, without any makeup. Still, one day when she was heading for work, a group of young men whistled at her. “In Poland, they do that for prostitutes, and when I came to the factory, I was so upset,” she says. “I asked the other girls, ‘Why did they do that to me?'” But she got a quick, amused reply: “In America, when they
stop
doing that you're in trouble.”

After several years in the corset factory, Irene met Ruth
Altman, a Jewish dressmaker originally from Poland. Ruth hired Irene for her business and the two women became friends and roommates. They went to movies and plays together, and the chill that had gripped Irene's heart for so long began to thaw. “I was already six years in the United States and I quieted down,” she remembers. “I started having dreams. I wanted a normal life.” Then one day Ruth sent her on an errand, and Bill Opdyke sat down at her table. During lunch, he explained to her that his wife had died, and as they were finishing, he asked, “May I call you?” Irene's English was still so poor she had trouble explaining to him where she lived, but he figured it out. On their first date they went to a nightclub and everybody else was laughing at the jokes. Irene didn't get most of them, but apparently it didn't matter. They danced instead—“he was a wonderful dancer and played the piano beautifully”—and she went home and prayed that he would call her again. He did, and when he proposed six weeks later, Irene remembers: “I was ready to accept. I was a woman, I wanted a child.”