My Grandparents’ Immigration Woes Were Tragically Like Today’s

I’m named for my two grandmothers, Mary and Kay, and my mother trained me not to answer to “Mary,” lest I leave her mother out. Growing up, I was lucky to know all four of my grandparents, and my latest novel, American Ending, is inspired by their story: immigrants who face exploitation, discrimination, a pandemic, and the heartbreak of who gets to be an American citizen—100 years ago.

I could not find my people on the bookshelf, Old Believer Russian Orthodox who consider theirs the one true church—Catholics broke off from them. Like most fundamentalist sects, they are rich in rules, starting with food: no milk, meat, or eggs for six weeks before Easter or Christmas, on Wednesdays, Fridays, and saints’ days. During services, which are conducted in Church Slavonic, women and men stand on opposites sides of the church, and the women wear long skirts and cover their hair (which it is a sin to cut; wearing makeup is also a sin). So is smoking, because your body is a temple, but not drinking, because Christ’s first miracle was turning water into wine. They are, after all, Russian.

The two sides of my family arrived here from Suwalki, Russia (now Poland) to mine coal in the Appalachian town of Marianna, Pennsylvania. The men suffered from black lung (as did my maternal grandfather), lost a limb in explosions, or died in cave-ins. The women married at fourteen (my paternal grandmother) and gave birth to a house full of children, who in turn became miners or child brides. Their story deserves to be told. Not having it on record furthers the insult that America’s industrial success was fueled by exploiting them, akin to overlooking that both the White House and the U.S. Capitol were built by enslaved people. Both sets of grandparents got themselves out of the mines to Erie, where there was another Old Believer Church—there are only five or six in America.

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