A friend’s recent inquiry about my origins had me revisiting the family history.
My father’s last name was shortened from ‘Kazekevitch-Rabinovitch’ to ‘Cavitch’ upon their entry to the U.S. at Ellis Island, in 1923, In Russia, they had lived in the region where the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia intersect—in other words, on the edge of Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone, maybe 100 miles from the Nuclear Power Plant disaster of 1986.
After an arranged marriage in Russia immediately followed by a lengthy journey to Southampton, England – almost 1600 miles—my grandparents, Bessie and Sol Cavitch, emigrated on The Mauritania with Bessie’s mother, Tzipa.
Bessie had no idea that The Mauritania was a luxury liner. To her, it was just a grubby, terrible place. They joined her much-older brother, Max Rabinovitch, in Traverse City, Michigan. Local merchants convinced Max to settle there and open his own small cigar factory. (At that time, cigars would stale quickly, necessitating the need for countless small, local factories.) Once the cigar industry revolutionized, Max went into the grocery business and did well. Sol first started working for Max and in the later 1920’s, Sol opened his own small grocery store. The family lived above the store. Bessie was gone before I was old enough to know what questions to ask and died a few months shy of 70. Man, I loved her.
The Kazekevitch-Rabinovitch emigration story was pretty much the norm for Jewish Russian immigrants. Also pretty much the norm?
The discrimination they faced: The U.S. government passed various laws to restrict immigration such as the 1907 Immigration Act, a law whose highly discriminating report led to further stringent immigration restrictions. It had a damning effect on Russian immigration to America. The report stated that the “New Immigrants” from southeastern areas of Europe, including Russia, were inferior, unskilled, and uneducated workers who failed to integrate with Americans and that immigration posed a serious threat to American society and should therefore be significantly reduced.
Sound familiar?
As I questioned: Will we ever learn?
