My anti-immigration friends are always telling me that the new immigrants aren’t like the “good old” immigrants who assimilated to life in the USA.
So I’m thinking about my granddad, who we called Pop Pop, a tough little Polack who arrived at Ellis Island from a farm near Warsaw in 1905. He was 17 years old and he found his way to a Polish enclave in Chester, Pennsylvania, a factory town next to Philadelphia.
Technically, Stanley Sarnocinski was a draft dodger. The Poles were rising up against the umpteenth Russian occupation of their nation in 1905 and young men were expected to fight – either for the liberation of their homeland or for the occupiers.
That prospect didn’t thrill my great-grandparents so they booked passage for their three teenage sons on a ship to America, where the borders were open to feed our nation’s hunger for low-paid factory workers.
“They all hung together because they were all in the same boat. They didn’t know the language that well. They weren’t skilled laborers. They came here willing to do anything that was necessary just so they and their children could be brought up in freedom,” my mother Jean Sarnocinski, told me.
Pop Pop hustled. He worked in the Ford auto plant in Chester. He bought a second home and rented it out. Later in life, he tended bar at the Polish-American Club. He never learned to drive a car but he raised seven children in a three-bedroom row house mostly as a single dad. (His wife died shortly after giving birth to their seventh child.)
Later in life, Pop Pop took great pleasure in his Lazy Boy chair and color TV but as a young father he sent all his children across the street to Saint Hedwig’s School, where students were required to learn Polish language and grammar through fourth grade. And he worshiped at Saint Hedwig’s Church, a grand cathedral in South Chester built by Polish immigrants and dedicated to a Polish saint.
(When my mom married my non-Catholic dad at Saint Hedwig’s in 1954, Catholics were still a suspect minority and some invited guests refused to attend, mom told me.)
Pop Pop only ever spoke broken English. He enjoyed Polish music and Polish food and the company of the Poles who were his pals. On Sunday afternoons they’d sit together on his front porch and sip vodka.
Pop Pop never returned to Poland. By my mom’s description, he was a forward-looking man who was glad for America and the opportunities it provided him and loyal to his family and to his class. He voted Adlai Stevenson for president – not for the war hero Eisenhower.
There is no record that Pop Pop was a great patriot. My guess is that he got his fill of jingoism in the tumult of his native Poland and that was enough. He aspired to live as he liked, to be free and to enjoy the company of people that he knew, who were very much like him.
For our immigrants, that should be enough. They come here to live in freedom in the nation that invented freedom and defends freedom. They shouldn’t have to assimilate or live up to some cockeyed definition of American or Americanism because that’s not what America is about.
It’s about being free to do whatever the hell you like.
Our message to immigrants should be: Congratulations, you made it here. Take a breather. You’re safe here. If you want to assimilate, assimilate. If you want to polka, polka. If you want to whirl like a dervish, that’s fine, too.
Just pay your taxes and remember to vote. Enjoy yourselves and this great country.