Anna: An Immigrant Story Kindle Edition

by Rhoda Orme-Johnson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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A warm and moving story of a woman's life, told in her voice (as imagined by her granddaughter). Born in Ukraine in 1885 as Chant'che Grossman, she marries and is pregnant with her fifth child (the author's mother) by 1913 when her husband Aron Belfer and his brother Avram decide to emigrate to the US, leaving their families behind, but hoping they will join them the next year. Avram's wife and two children make it out of Moldava in the spring of 1914 and settle in Ft. Dodge, Iowa.

Instead of traveling the spring or summer of 1914, as hoped, Chant'che spent the next ten years raising her five children alone in their shtetl near Odessa. Life was poor and difficult for Jews in Ukraine in the early 1900s, under the constant threat of famine, deadly pogroms, the Spanish Flu, a Cholera epidemic, and the Russian revolutions and civil wars. Not until 1923 could she and four of her children cross Eastern Europe and Russia, travel steerage from Latvia to Ellis Island, and finally join Aron in Cleveland, Ohio. Her oldest boy had to escape separately to avoid being drafted into the Russian army.

Now known as Anna Belfer, she and her family navigated the trials and joys of neighborhood life in the twentieth century against a background of the growing horror of events leading up to World War II and beyond. From their kitchen in Cleveland, Anna and her family listened to the Yiddish radio broadcasts and followed the news of the greater world. In this memoir/novel set one day in 1951, Anna tells her tale of immigrant life in America, a tale of mothers, daughters, and granddaughters, family, and fortunes in a new land—laced with memories of life in the Old World. As she sits in her daughter's house she enjoys the comings and goings of her large family and sits quietly out of the way musing and remembering the old life.

This tale is based on the true story of the Belfer family, with particulars and numerous photos, even of the ship they crossed on, but with all of its details it is yet the universal story of immigrants in the US in the twentieth century and is relevant to current events and attitudes. We are a nation of immigrants. Even many of the First Nations traveled across the Bering Straits and settled in the Americas. The story ends with the last of Anna's sweet memories of her traditional marriage and her new life as a bride.
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