A Secret Gift Read online

  Reading the grim history of Dorohoi, I caught my first glimpse of Sam’s early years and adolescence. The physical hardships that he and his family—and all of his faith—endured in those years could be read in the decrees of the state. But the psychological and emotional toll of such oppression on a childhood like Sam’s was only beginning to dawn on me. The notion that one’s homeland could turn on him, treat him and his family as trespassers, the subject of constant public suspicion, hostility, and harassment, made me see what Sam had been so eager to escape, why he had never spoken of it, and even why he had gone to such lengths to bury that past in the fabrication of a less nightmarish childhood.

  As a child, he was pushed to the margins of his own society. The insecurities of a more ordinary adolescence pale beside what he faced. The tensions with which he grew up—the constant threat of violence and pogroms, the shame and degradation—were the defining features of his childhood, and they go a long way in explaining the man he was to become. The bleakness of Canton during the Great Depression, the specter of so many unable to scratch out a living, the sight of immigrant families pushed to the edge with no one to come to their rescue—all this must surely have triggered in Sam Stone recollections of his own bitter youth. The letters to B. Virdot from children and teenagers must have brought back to him memories of his own escape, the crossing, and the turbulent arrival. Turning his back on them, knowing what he had endured, would have been all but impossible. I do not have the benefit of Sam’s own story, but the historical record of what befell the Romanian Jews of his time fills much of the gap and explains why he was loath to speak of it.

  For the Finkelstein family, remaining in Dorohoi was not an option. They faced what many Romanian Jews faced—extinction. U.S. Secretary of State John Hay described the plight of these Jews this way: “by the cumulative effect of successive restrictions, the Jews of Romania have become reduced to a state of wretched misery. Shut out from nearly every avenue of self-support which is open to the poor of other lands, and ground down by poverty as the natural result of their discriminatory treatment, they are rendered incapable of lifting themselves from the enforced degradation they endure.”

  Those Romanian Jews who fled the country became known as the Fusgeyers, or “foot-walkers.” It was a mass exodus. By the thousands they walked across Europe, only to be rejected by one country after another. One account of the conditions they endured appears in the Jewish Criterion of Pittsburgh, published on August 30, 1900:The Rumanian Jews possess, for the greater part, nothing but the few rags upon their bodies. The poorest among them do not travel in wagons or in ships, but drag themselves upon their wounded feet from one frontier to another. At home they leave nothing but the bones of their fathers in their graves, constituted the only ownership in the soil of their native land. They had to carry with them nothing else but the wanderer’s staff and the unendurable burden of their memories and their fears. . . .

  The Rumanian Jews have no goals, they wander planless about like a horde of Northern water-rats endeavoring to elude the grasp of the birds of prey, and who, as they pass, pounce upon and devour their victim. No one desires them, everybody sends them farther on from their own district, and when they ask in despair, “Where are we to go, what is to become of us?” the only reply they receive is a shrug of the shoulder and a turn of the hand, mercilessly pointing to the distance further on into the unknown, unto the blue away, far away.

  The suffering of Romania’s 400,000 Jews caught America’s attention. On September 17, 1902—nine days before Sam Finkelstein boarded the SS La Champagne—Secretary of State Hay protested Romania’s inhumane treatment of the Jews and pressured Romania to relent.

  Nineteen years earlier, the poet Emma Lazarus had penned her poem “The New Colossus,” but it was not until 1903, the year Sam’s mother and four younger siblings arrived in America, that the now famous lines were added to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:Give me your tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

  I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

  In America, Sam Finkelstein and his family hoped to melt into the mass of ten million foreign-born in a country of seventy-six million. But thousands of Romanian Jews had preceded the Finkelsteins and found their welcome tentative at best. Americans made no secret of their displeasure at being a dumping ground for Romanian Jews. Secretary of State Hay said as much in his appeal to European heads of state. The New York Times article about his appeal was headlined, ASKS THAT ROUMANIA STOP OPPRESSING JEWS, and the subhead under it read, “Says Present Harsh Treatment Breeds Men Who Are Not Desirable Immigrants to This Country.”

  His language reflected a deep antagonism toward these refugees. “The pauper, the criminal, the contagiously or incurably diseased are excluded from the benefits of immigration only when they are likely to become a source of danger or a burden upon the community,” declared Hay.

  Immigrants like my grandfather and his family were seen as defective and future wards of the state. “Removal under such conditions,” warned Secretary Hay, “is not and cannot be the healthy intelligent emigration of a free and self-reliant being. It must be, in most cases, the mere transplantation of an artificially produced diseased growth to a new place.”

  “Diseased growth” was a far cry from the “golden door” Emma Lazarus had envisioned. Even many American Jews looked down upon the Romanians. In the pecking order of new immigrants, they were considered, especially by some of German descent, an embarrassment, impoverished, uncultured, and barely literate. Fifteen-year-old Sam and his family were used to no better.

  Though he carried almost nothing when he stepped off the La Champagne, Sam was determined to rid himself of all baggage and begin anew. Reviled in the Old World, a pariah in the New, he wasted no time reinventing himself. But escaping the past, its sorrows and shame, would prove more difficult than he imagined. He could leave his Yiddish on the boat and master English; he could cast off the Orthodox Jewish rituals and embrace a secular America; he could erase his childhood and fabricate an American birth. But whether he uttered the word or not, the tsuris would remain a part of him. And it was that which helped give birth to Mr. B. Virdot.

  The Canton to which Sam Stone eventually found his way was a city of well-established pioneer stock that faced a swelling population of foreigners, each of whom, like Sam, wanted nothing more than to blend in and become whatever it meant to be an American. Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Slavs, Spaniards, Italians, Syrians, Croats, Danes, and Jews had all found their way to this midwestern town, drawn by the promise of work and the vision of a life free of the Old World’s political and religious persecution, the endless wars, the decaying monarchies, and the grinding poverty. In those early years it made for an uneasy and watchful peace. The New York Times in July 1926 wrote: “Half of Canton’s population are either foreign born or negro. The other half accuses this foreign and negro group of being the source of all their troubles; but, when pressed, admit that most of the foreigners and negroes are honest and decent.”

  Like Sam, many among this wave of newcomers to Canton had endured their own exoduses. And like him, they yearned for nothing more than the chance to fit in. That was all Sam really wanted—to be accepted, to find a home, to feel that he belonged. For Sam, and for many who reached out to B. Virdot, Canton was such a place, even in the most dire of times.

  SO COMPLETE WAS Sam’s break from his youth in Dorohoi that it seemed no link remained. He virtually erased all traces of his first fifteen years, concealed the circumstances of his escape and arrival—perhaps the defining experience of his life—and then filled the void with a new story, supported by bogus documents, dates, signatures, and elliptical references to his childhood in Pittsburgh. He simply inserted himself into a seamless narrative of his own design, drawing together real people and places to lend credence to his fic
tion.

  Having interviewed hundreds of former covert officers of the Central Intelligence Agency for my first book, I knew how exhausting it must have been for him to maintain that cover story for an entire lifetime. Like a spy, he could never risk letting his guard down or letting slip a word or reference that might betray him. Family, friends, and community had all come to know him by the fictitious life story he had woven. The threat of exposure and the temptation to come clean were all around him. In 1933, a neighbor who lived two doors away was a Romanian immigrant, and yet, it appears he never reached out to him as a fellow countryman. How many times, I wondered, did he yearn to confide in someone, to open up and reveal himself? And was he still emotionally attached to the land of his birth? Again and again, I sorted through his stories, the papers in the suitcase, and the meager possessions he left to us, hoping to stumble upon a clue some twenty-five years after his death.

  Among the objects of my renewed attention was the bronze sculpture The Jumper, which had followed him from home to home. I examined it in greater detail and for the first time noticed the name of the sculptor inscribed on the base: “D. H. Chiparus.” The full name was “Demetre Haralamb Chiparus.” He was one of the foremost Art Deco sculptors. His studio was in Paris and his work is highly prized today. A sculpture expert at Sotheby’s auction house found the exact piece listed among the sculptor’s works. Some of Chiparus’s pieces, especially those of dancers with ivory inlays, fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. Sam’s piece was an original. In all likelihood, he was the first and only owner, dating back to the 1920s. Perhaps he bought it in Paris during one of his trips abroad. But why had this piece meant so much to him?

  Something about Sam’s attachment to the sculpture drew me to it. I began to research the sculptor. I discovered that, like Sam, Chiparus was Romanian by birth. Indeed, he and Chiparus were both born in the same tiny town of Dorohoi—Chiparus in 1886, Sam in 1888. It was entirely possible that the two boys might have known each other, even been childhood friends. At the very least, my grandfather felt an obvious kinship to him, one that he secretly could take pleasure in without compromising the American identity he had so carefully forged. Here, at last, I’d found a link to his past, perhaps the only one with which he had felt safe. How and when he acquired it I will likely never know, but why he so treasured it was no longer such a mystery.

  IN DECEMBER 1933, less than two weeks after Sam Stone made his offer as B. Virdot, Ion Duca, the newly appointed prime minister of Romania and a liberal who opposed fascism and that country’s virulently anti-Semitic Iron Guard movement, was assassinated. For the Jews of Dorohoi and Romania at large it was but one more sign of trouble to come. Today Dorohoi no longer has a single functioning temple. The last Jews left a decade ago. Anti-Semitism, Nazism, communism, relentless poverty, and the allure of Israel all fed the Diaspora. Over the years, Sam Stone returned to Romania several times, always alone. On one such trip he took pictures. Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was still in power. When Sam returned to the United States he discovered that the film had been removed from his camera. He had nothing to document his visit—which, in its way, mirrored how he had lived.

  For Sam, the escape from Dorohoi was never complete. The town would remain a part of him. It was that way too with those who endured the depths of the Depression, defining their needs and aspirations, even giving rise to its own brand of dark humor, as trauma often does. One of Sam’s favorite jokes was about two men traveling on a train across Europe. One was Russian, the other Jewish.

  “We have no Jews in our village,” boasted the Russian.

  “That’s why it’s just a village,” responded the Jew.

  In the edgy way Sam said it, it was less a joke than a verdict of history. More than a century ago the Jews of Dorohoi shared with the other citizens of Dorohoi a modest but decent standard of living. Today the town of forty thousand—half the size of Canton—is one of the poorest in one of Europe’s poorest countries. Several charities that provide relief to Dorohoi report an unemployment rate in excess of 50 percent. It is a town in the depths of its own relentless Hard Times.

  IV.

  If I Would Accept Charity

  Oppression

  Even before the Finkelstein family boarded the ship to America, they knew their new home would be Pittsburgh. There, Jacob

  Finkelstein had a brother-in-law. The family also knew Samuel Sheffler, the most prominent of Pittsburgh’s Romanian Jews. Sheffler was head of a cigar factory and active in relief organizations that helped bring Romanian Jews to the city and watched over them once they arrived. By 1902, thanks to Sheffler and others like him, Pittsburgh had become a haven for thousands of Romanian Jews. Already the city boasted two Romanian synagogues and a thriving Jewish life in what was known as the Hill District, where Jews from across Europe had settled. In 1905 there were fifteen thousand Jews in Pittsburgh. Seven years later the number was thirty-five thousand.

  It was much the same in Canton, where early immigrants paved the way for their countrymen and extended families to follow, and assisted them with housing and jobs. Others, like John Jacob, whose family would later purchase Bender’s tavern, set up a profitable travel business arranging for the passage of immigrants—Germans, Italians, and Hungarians among them—chartering railroad cars that brought them from Ellis Island directly to Canton, their tickets prepaid by relatives. Many, if not most, were illiterate. By 1890, Canton’s illiteracy rate ranked fourth from the bottom among cities of twenty-five thousand or more. Several of the city’s wards were enclaves of the Old World—the Germans concentrated in the second and the fifth, the Greeks and Italians in the fourth.

  All of them were drawn by the promise of America. But if fifteen-year-old Sam Finkelstein imagined after arriving in Pittsburgh that he too was now free to participate in that new life, he was mistaken. He had traded a shtetl for a ghetto. Sam spoke no English, and the prospect of going to school, first denied him by the laws of Romania, was now denied him by his own father, who hid his shoes so that he could not attend. Instead he was forced to spend his days rolling cigars along with his brothers and sisters. (Even so, there were days when Sam Stone went to school barefoot—even in the snow—he later told his niece Shirley.) Their cramped white frame house at 51 Rowley Street became as much a sweatshop as a home. Cut off by language, physically isolated by the ghetto, and marooned in his own home, Sam’s first taste of America was anything but liberating. What he saw of America in 1902 as a fifteen-year-old boy stayed with him. And when, years later, in the depths of the Depression, he became B. Virdot to many, he could not help but remember what it was like growing up in such circumstances.

  So often the parents put B. Virdot’s gift toward buying shoes for their children so they could go to school. How close to home, literally, that must have struck my grandfather, who, more than anything else, wanted to go to school in this new land but could not because his shoes were denied him. And for many of those who wrote to B. Virdot, more than a lack of shoes stood in the way of going to school. Lottie Allen wrote on behalf of her daughters, Louise and Isabel: “They do not ask for anything but clothes, so that they can go to school.” Three years earlier her husband, James, an Irish immigrant and out-of-work stonecutter, had died after a long illness. His last vision of America, so stark and impoverished, was not the one that had drawn him to this new land, any more than that which greeted Sam Stone upon his arrival in Pittsburgh.

  Up and down Pittsburgh’s Hill District were home-based cigar “factories,” mostly mothers and fathers and children in attics working over benches and rolling tables, with poor ventilation, terrible hours, and a dulling tedium that in some smothered ambition and in others kindled it. The air was thick with tobacco, and young backs, stooped for hours over benches, ached like those of old men. Pittsburgh had a hundred such cigar factories. It became the nation’s leading maker of stogies, or “tobies,” as they were called. They were the cheaper, smaller version of the cigar. Such
readily available work was a way to survive, but also an economic trap that held many in its grip for a lifetime.

  For some few, it was a ticket to wealth. William Marsh became the millionaire “Stogie King.” Before Oscar Hammerstein—grandfather of the famed lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II—was a theatrical producer, he was a cigar maker whose invention of a device on which cigar wrappers were cut helped make Pittsburgh’s Standard Cigar Factory the largest stogie maker in the world. (In reaction to abuses, the labor movement found fertile ground in the industry. Samuel Gompers, a Jewish immigrant and cigar maker, would become a dominant figure in the upstart labor movement.)

  In 1913, cigar workers went on strike against the larger manufacturers. One of the Pittsburgh brands struck was Dry Slitz, in whose factories child workers were forbidden from speaking. The union slogan was “You smoke the blood of children if you smoke Dry Slitz.”

  Sam and his siblings hated the work, Sam enough to declare himself a socialist, a stand he repudiated years later. One of Sam’s brothers, Al, would recall feeling so confined by the routine of rolling cigars that he could not even stretch his legs. He would nervously rub the ball of one shoe against the other until he had worn clean through the leather. But the cigar business provided one advantage to the Finkelsteins and other Jews: it allowed them to set their own hours of work, enabling them to honor the Sabbath.

  There was little laughter in the Finkelstein home, and fewer expressions of affection. In her Jewish faith and keeping kosher, Sam’s mother, Hinde (she later went by the name “Hilda”), was more than strict. She was fanatical. She was also the consummate nag. But with age, she apparently mellowed. My mother only remembers sitting on her lap while she sang the 1907 song “School Days.” My aunt Dorothy recalls passing her room and being frightened at the sight of her swaying and mumbling as she davened (the Yiddish word for praying while rocking slowly forward and back).