At the age of thirteen, my grandfather, Jacob Shapiro, the oldest of nine children, had to leave his poor village in Lithuania to escape conscription of Jewish children into the army. He traveled alone in steerage to South Africa where he worked as a laborer for distant cousins until he was seventeen. Then he traveled in steerage, again alone, across the Atlantic Ocean to America where my Papa worked as a bricklayer. Over many years, one by one he brought his younger brothers and sisters to safety here when they were old enough to come.
My Papa’s own parents, my beloved great grandparents Avraham and Chaya Shapiro, refused to leave until the last of their children escaped Eastern Europe. But after their last child left, Avraham and Chaya were captured by anti-semites in a pogrom in the 1920′s. They died from exposure on a train bound for Siberia. Their bodies were thrown off the train into a field. A letter from shtetl neighbors who survived the journey was sent to the family in America to tell what had happened. My mother told me that as her father heard this letter read, Papa ripped his shirt in mourning and wept.
My Papa lived to be ninety-one years old. As a little girl, it was my pride and pleasure to teach him to read and write English. Even now, as an adult with hindsight and objectivity, I can still say that he was the finest man I have ever known. He was a great teacher of “life” for me.
Years later I became a volunteer English as a Second Language teacher to a new wave of refugees. They were the Russian Jewish “refusenicks” from the former Soviet Union, as well as people of many religions from other communist controlled East European countries. I didn’t teach grammar or punctuation. That was left to their morning formal class instructors. My classes were English immersion seminars. We sat in a circle and practiced their new English skills week after week, year after year. Between 1988 and 1996, I had the privilege of teaching, and being taught by, more than eight hundred refugees.
In August 1990, I brought in candy and drinks to celebrate the first year of this endeavor. By that time more than one hundred adults and I had sat together in circles of chairs while outside the classroom the world swirled in historic events. The Berlin Wall came down, Bush and Gorbachev met on stormy seas off Malta, and Russian Jews began an exodus to Israel, America, and religious freedom in biblical numbers. The Cold War ended. Barbara Bush and Raisa Gorbachev held hands in Washington D.C. like former school chums as the last decade of the old millennium began. People in the USSR began to speak and write freely for the first time since the Russian revolution. Drug lords continued to prosper and American soldiers blasted Noriega out of hiding in Panama with rock music. The earth under San Francisco trembled in a major quake. Mickey Mouse turned sixty and Donald Duck turned fifty without a wrinkle. And the earth spun in space while mankind caused the ozone layer to get thinner and the sun’s rays stronger until protective suntan lotion became the newest health trend to follow oat bran.
But we were safe, my fellow passengers on this planet and I, in our Writing/Conversation classes. The form of each class was hard work, but the substance was love and inspiration. There was no government, but there was peace and a unique prosperity of spirit. There were no contests, yet everyone won. We were all strangers, yet we knew each other because of our human bond.
Some had difficulty speaking, but they were understood and honored for striving. And though these refugees had problems and sadness, they laughed often, and in English. Those classes were points in time during the difficult process of resettlement. Each person had a unique voice and point of view; unlike life under communism, individuality was cherished. The humanity of each was rediscovered in a new land after being hidden since birth from their former governments.
My students taught me about “life” the way my Papa had taught me about life, and I, and others, taught them more than just English; the correct word was acculturation. Learning to adapt to a new country, even to freedom, was difficult. In return, my students taught me about courage, hope, and how to go living when much is either lost or left behind. They taught me by example how to struggle with dignity and endure disappointments. And the New Americans learned that they could read, write, speak, understand, and even dream in the language of their new home.
Many had thought it would be impossible; it was not. Together we worked and took our small, but important places as footnotes in history. And I hope that they all did truly live “happily ever after.”
