The Aquitania and Papa

I’m thinking about my grandfather today, in a different way from before. Last night, I finally found his Ellis Island ship manifest from the Aquitania. Because of name changes, misspellings, and a wrong year, it has taken this long for me to track it down. Finding the manifest makes a key moment in his history— and thus, mine— so much more real.It was 1924, not 1926. This is an important detail because it was the year of the Johnson Reed act, famous for rigid ethnic quotas curtailing much immigration from southern and Eastern Europe and all but ceasing it from Asia. My grandfather’s father had come ahead to the US, leaving a mother and four children in Poland. I can only imagine their anxiety of separation as the gates seemed to be closing.

Papa often spoke about his arrival in the US— the excitement, yes, but also the sorrow. It turns out he was younger than we thought— not quite five years old, and his brother Jack was about two. Papa held a loving sorrow for most of his life, that his father greeted the baby brother first. In the past, I had imagined him as school-aged. Now, I see him as all the more a little tyke needing to be scooped up. (Jack was Papa’s favorite, though!)


The manifest gave me the date of his arrival. I was able to go to The NY Times archives and find the article about his ship’s arrival— the Aquitania was a big sea vessel, a little larger than the Titanic had been, and much luckier. Papa and his family were obviously in the lowest / poorest tier, but among the first class passengers were a Polish prince, the famed Bloomingdales, and some people in the film industry! Just a little bit of past trivia that was amusing to find.
The world Papa came to was such a different one than the world we live in now. The world he left in Poland is so different from Poland today, too. But for so many Sundays of my childhood, I sat with him and listened to his wisdom (or watched him watch sports games) and knew I was lucky.
I don’t know if I ever mentioned this here, but I dedicated the novel section of my dissertation to him. His journey inspired so many questions; his belief in me inspired me to seek so many answers to questions and connections to so many people, places, and times.

Written February, 2022
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