Frankly, I do not remember my family receiving nearly half a million dollars when they arrived here as refugees from the Holocaust.
Land of opportunity, yes, thank goodness, but no goldene medina (golden land of paradise) awaited them, nor the others who somehow got around FDR’s quota.
Upon arrival, the work had just begun, and for most, making it in America came only through the sweat of your brow.
But under Joe Biden, migrant families coming here illegally are to be compensated $450,000 if, during the Trump Administration, they were separated at the border.
So, the streets are paved with gold after all, but for border scofflaws.
The more the better as Biden and company purposefully invite the traffic that will eventually turn America into Honduras.
Israel has its own story about the influx of illegal immigrants, among them Sudanese and Eritrean, a flood of which can be harmful to the Jewishness of the nation.
In the United States, most illegals are airlifted and dumped throughout the country without being checked as possible health risks to themselves or their new neighbors, who never expected them or asked for them, and most are not “children,” as we are told to believe, but grownups, the majority of them men.
They keep coming, illegally, and those from the past who obeyed the laws and played by the rules are perplexed by the disparity from one group of newcomers to another.
My group were called greenhorns. Not a compliment, and not the worst of the situation.
Recall the scene in “Godfather Part 2,” where Vito Corleone arrives as a child at Ellis Island and after being examined is placed in a cell to recover, or, be sent back, due to some health defect that was found in the boy. That was not fiction but fact for the many who had made it this far, and as for me, I was in the same type of cell after it was discovered that I’d had Scarlet fever.
In those days, citizenhood was prized. You were lucky to get in, and luckier if they let you stay.
The process took years, and there were always documents to fill out, schedules to meet, and appointments to keep (as it was for my parents).
As it turned out, one mistake from all the paperwork and you had to start all over again…years of waiting in the wrong line.
Everything had to be exact.
Even at the point at arriving in America, there were still harrowing obstacles.
After weathering German patrols on the high seas, The Serpa Pinto, the ship of hope, arrived in Philadelphia, but not to stay. Passengers were to be moved along to Canada.
FDR did not want us, and neither did Mackenzie King. Canada’s message for the Jews fleeing Hitler was, “None is too many.”
But a deal was in the works, and Canada it would be. Second best will do. But not so fast.
A slim wooden board serving as a plank was placed between the ship and a bus; the bus then leading to a Montreal-bound train. Read this for the memoir of it all.
But first…walking the plank.
Some, in horror, saw it as trap, a trick, a test meant to be failed.
In fact, an announcement was made, blared loudly, to warn against breaking the law, which would be “setting foot on American soil.”
Setting foot on American soil was meant literally and was forbidden in the strictest terms. Life and death hung in the balance.
Even an accidental slip would cause you to be arrested and sent back. Armed soldiers, rifles drawn, were keeping watch.
Nothing came easy….
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
