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My father’s side of the family were Polish Jews who lived confined to a proscribed Jewish area. His original name was Sklarek, but I was told that the immigration officers changed it to Clarke because Sklarek was too hard to pronounce. My ancestor fled Poland to avoid being conscripted into the army—but when he arrived in North Carolina he was conscripted into the Confederate side of the Civil War. What an irony!
I am a 4th generation American on my maternal side. There are six different stories about how my great parents came to America, depending on which family member you ask. Here is one of them. The family name in Latvia was Winick. My great-grandfather Heyman was drafted into the Tsar’s army (Latvia was part of Russia then). Hayman’s family were brewers, so Heyman made beer for the officers. When they asked how they could repay him, he basically said, "Get me out of here!" So they showed him a bunch of passports to choose from, and he chose one with the name Rosenberg because he thought it sounded like a good American name. Heyman married Jennie when he was only 16 and they sailed to America and landed in Ellis Island. Heyman invented the self-threading (self-tapping) screw, which was universally adopted in all fields of engineering and used in the 1938 restoration of the Statue of Liberty. Some 64,000 screws were used to strengthen the structure. This may be one reason why I feel so strongly about America living up to the promise she makes in the words of Emma Lazarus, in her famous poem etched under the Statue of Liberty:
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "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!