Panayotis Kalogerakos lived in Langadia, a mountainside village in Arkadia, in Peloponnesos, Greece. While it was beautiful there, Panayotis wanted to leave Greece as a young man in order to escape the fighting that was going on in the Balkans at that time. In addition, there were attractive job opportunities in the industrialized ... Read More »
The ensuing stories will follow the trajectories of two different families who immigrated to New York from Eastern Europe at different point in history. They are ultimately connected by marriage, and their legacies live on. The Weill Family Teddy Roosevelt’s doppelgänger, Nathan Glickman (née approx. 1866; Moscow, Russia) and the ever ... Read More »
Vita was a young Italian woman who was born in 1934 and grew up in a small village outside Palermo, Sicily during the second world war. As a young child, she did not understand the severity of the war as the children of the neighborhood joked around with the German soldiers. One time, three Italian ... Read More »
As Atticus Finch said in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what”. It was courage like ... Read More »
My Grandma was a spoiled brat. When she graduated high school she demanded her father to buy her a fur coat. Lester Torok, my great grandfather- who I unfortunately never had the honor to meet- immigrated from Hungary when he was a young boy. He came with his mother and two siblings. My grandma told me his story to the ... Read More »
Screaming filled the streets, as communist soldiers pushed down innocent civilians. Above the chaos was a vast dark sky that stretched high over the rolling mountain ranges of Russia. The country was distraught, Tsar Nicholas II had just lost his power and revolutions had begun. Not a single person was safe from the aggressive soldiers of the Communist Party. ... Read More »
It was the year 1920 and the 8-year-old Aly Solly ran up to the deck of the ship. She saw the huge magnificent, glowing, Statue of Liberty she was taken back in amazement. Never seeing something so huge and beautiful she looked over to her family and started to cry with joy and hope and pure happiness. She lived in ... Read More »
When he was a boy, Harry Katznelson’s father was a bible scholar and would quote the beginning of a bible verse then have Harry or his brother Zev quote the end of the verse. Harry himself was from Lublin, while his future spouse Malka Meyerson was from a village in between Minsk and Pinsk. They were “living in a place ... Read More »
(Editor’s Note: This is a bit of a departure from the usual format. It is a fascinating research paper written by Maddie Bennet, for her 11th grade US History class at Kehillah Jewish High School in Palo Alto, CA.) I am a third generation American Jew, and, like many Jews, my roots go back to Eastern Europe. My research focuses ... Read More »