Everyone it seems has an ancestor whose life is a mystery. Someone who lived on the margins of family, whose behavior was both excused and inexplicable. The black sheep, part of the family yet seldom spoken of. Perhaps a loner. Perhaps inflicted with a disability about which no one dared speak.

These qualities describe my great uncle, my grandfather’s younger brother, Shmuel Wiezbowicz, known in this country as Sam Waxman, and colloquially by his family as Shmulke.

I never met Shmulke. Nor, growing up, did I ever see a photograph of him. Before beginning this research, I knew practically nothing about him, other than he was my grandfather’s younger brother. When, on the rare occasions my relatives mentioned his name, it was with a sense of “otherness.” He was off the path, part of, yet outside, the family.

Stranger still, when my family moved in 1965 from the Lower East Side to the Bay Area, he was then living in Los Angeles, our only relative residing west of the Hudson River, and yet we never visited him nor he us. I’m not even sure my mother ever contacted her uncle. I don’t recall my parents mentioning his death in 1975, and I suspect they did not learn of his passing until some years later.

As my interest in family history grew, I knew that a full picture of my family could not be complete without piecing together his story. Through Ancestry.com, I learned that he was born on April 26, 1906 in Zambrow, the Polish town where his parents lived. His sister (my great aunt Adele) mentioned in her recorded recollections that he left Zambrow sometime in the 1920s, lived in Cuba for a few years, came to New York, married, and then moved to Los Angeles. Her daughter (my aunt once removed) told me that Shmulke had two children, a son who, to her knowledge, may still be alive and living in Greece and a daughter who never married and passed away several years ago. She was, however, able to provide me with some photographs of Shmulke and his family.

A few years ago, I learned that one can get access to a relative’s immigration records by filing a request with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS, formally known as the INS). USCIS, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, has a genealogy department that handles requests for such documents. They are available for persons either born more than 100 years ago or deceased and who either arrived in the U.S. before 1945 or were naturalized before April 1, 1956.

And so, with some extra time on my hands during the early days of the pandemic, I decided to find out what information the federal government might have about Shmulke. Knowing his birth year and place of birth, I submitted a Genealogy Index Search Request,

About two months later, I received an encouraging email with the following attachment:

A C-file, I learned, contains copies of records evidencing the granting of naturalized U.S. citizenship by courts between 1906 to 1956. An AR-2 form is an Alien Registration Form that noncitizens living in the U.S. between August 1940 and March 31, 1944 were required to complete.

So the government did have information about Shmulke. To get them, I’d have have to pay $65 per file. (A recent proposal to raise the fee elicited fierce opposition among the genealogy community and the granting of a preliminary injunction in federal court enjoining the DHS from raising the fee.) The day after I paid, another email arrived listing the documents requested:

Then I waited. And waited. I was prepared to wait. I’d heard such requests take about 18 months to process, and that the pandemic was causing further delays. (The DHS website states that “we try to respond to all requests within 90 days.”) I’d heard that some people have waited more than three years to hear back from USCIC.

One day in mid April, 2022, nearly two years after I’d submitted my request, an envelope containing a CD arrived in my mailbox.

Fortunately, I still had an old laptop with a CD Rom drive. The disk contained three files, one for each of the requests. I skimmed through them. There were 80 pages of documents, which, significantly, included Shmulke’s sworn deposition as well as other documents he submitted to the federal district court in connection with his application for American citizenship.

Here, then, is Shmulke’s story, as best I can piece it together from the files, what I’d already learned about him, as well as some genealogical findings that flowed from the files.

Shmulke attended Polish schools in Zambrow through 8th grade. After he left school, he worked as a shoemaker. In 1927, at the age of 21, he was drafted into the Polish army. I’m sure he was not happy with this development. Six year earlier, his brother had been required to serve in the Polish army, an unhappy experience that led him to abscond and smuggle himself from Poland across the German border. Fortunately for Shmulke, the late 1920s was a relatively quiet time on the Polish borders, so he was not place on active duty. His transfer to the reserves was scheduled to go into effect on September 22, 1929.

Shmulke, however, did not wait until his was placed on reserve status. He wasn’t going to risk active military service. On March 15, 1929, he left Zambrow, leaving behind his mother, father and four sisters. He would never see his mother and three of his sisters again.

His sister Adele, the only sister to immigrate to the U.S., stated in her memoir that Shmulke “ran away from home.” This suggests that Shmulke worked secretly on his plans to leave Zambrow, not even telling his family in advance about his decision. In a postcard dated the 18th of the Jewish month of Sivan, he give a picture of himself to a friend, Shimon, on the back of which he wrote in Hebrew: “I give you this picture in everlasting memory to my dear friend Shimon, from Shmuel Wierzbowicz, Zambrow.”

In 1928, the last full year Shmulke lived in Zambrow, 18th day of Sivan came out on June 6, 1928, indicating that Shmulke’s plan to leave was at least a year in the making.

In addition to avoiding active army service, Shmulke would have had other reasons for leaving Poland, ones shared by other Polish Jewish youth in the late 1920s: limited job prospects as well as rising anti-Semitism. He may also have had a more personal reason: to get away from his family. His parents were traditionally religious Jews while Shmulke, based on his lifestyle in the U.S., may well have already left religious practice. Shmulke may also have resisted his father’s expectation that he help out in and eventually take over the family oil press business. My grandfather had left Poland eight years earlier, leaving Shmulke as his father’s only remaining son in Zambrow. Shmulke had no interest in participating in the business.

My grandfather’s decision to settle in New York doubtless influenced the timing of Shmulke’s departure. By the time Shmulke left Poland, my grandfather was married, raising a family in the Lower East Side and employed (however marginally) in the paper goods business. While it would take him another seven years to obtain U.S. citizenship, his presence in New York provided the anchor Shmulke needed to realistically hope of making a life in the U.S.

Shmulke’s first destination was the port city of Bremen, Germany. Bremen was–and continues to be–one of the major port cities for travel from the European continent. The 650 mile journey via rail would have included stops in Warsaw, Berlin and Hamburg, as shown in this Google map image:

From Bremen, Shmulke boarded the S.S. York, sailing west. But his destination was not the United States. Of course, he wanted to come to the U.S., but he couldn’t get in. The Reed-Johnson Act, passed by Congress in 1924, required immigrants bound for the U.S. to first obtain a visa from a foreign consulate, and Shmulke didn’t have one. Nor could he reasonably hope to get one.

By 1929, America’s highly restrictive immigration laws were firmly in place. The 1924 law limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota, intended to keep people like himself–namely, Southern and Eastern Europeans–out of the country. The quota capped immigration at two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. (It also completely excluded immigrants from Asia.) Under the law, only about 6,000 slots existed for the masses of Polish citizens who wanted to immigrate to the United States. (As a point of comparison, the law permitted more people from Norway, with a population in 1925 of about two and a half million, to enter the U.S. (6,453) than from Poland (5,982), whose population at that time was about 25 million.)

However, the law contained a loophole that Europeans hoping to immigrate to the U.S. exploited: it did not apply to people entering the U.S. from the Americas if they lived in a Central or South American country for five years. To be sure, this loophole was not intended to help people in Shmulke’s position. Rather, it existed so that growers in the Southwest could hire out cheap laborers from Mexico. By immigrating from a country in the Western Hemisphere, one could enter the U.S. as a “non quota” immigrant.

And so Shmulke set sail from Bremen to Cuba, landing in Havana, according to his deposition, “on or about April 1, 1929.” Shmulke was not alone in using Cuba as a stepping stone for immigrating to the United States. Cuba, by the time Shmulke arrived there, had an estimated Jewish population of between 10,000 to 24,000. So many Jews arrived to Cuba to facilitate their later immigration to the U.S. that it became known colloquially as “akhsanie Kuba” (hotel Cuba). Of the approximately twenty-five thousand Jews who entered Cuba from 1918-1947, nearly half of them eventually immigrated to the United States.

Shmulke stayed in Cuba for about three years. While there, he would have had three main objectives: making a living, finding a wife and, most importantly, figuring out a way to get to the United States. He succeeded in accomplishing all of these goals.

Shmulke was fortunate that he could put his skills as a shoemaker to good use in Cuba. Cuba’s Jews were heavily involved in the garment industry, especially in the manufacturing and sales of shoes. In the early 1930s, “Jews began opening up their own shops, producing cheap and functional shoes. Within a few years, there were 150 shoe factories owned by Jews in Cuba that employed 6000 to 8000 workers” (Steinberg, An Ongoing Jewish Diaspora—the Story of the Cuban Jews, 6).

Shmulke could have resided in Cuba for five years, enabling him to enter the U.S. legally. But he didn’t want to wait that long. There was another way he could make it to America without waiting five years: smuggling himself into the country. Being only 90 miles from the American shore, Cuba served as a desirable staging ground for smuggling operations into the United States. (Garland, After the Gates Closed, 94). Among the common methods used were stowing away on vessels bound for the U.S., traveling to Canada and then crossing the lightly guarded border illegally, and obtaining a fake visa (Garland, pp. 104, 114, 139).

Shmulke choose the former of these options. According to the declaration (translated from Spanish) of Ruel Echeverria y Roig, clerk of the Correctional Court of the First District, Shmulke and a fellow Polish Jew, one Judel Witrielm, snuck onto an American steamer at 1:00 a.m. on January 26, 1932. They hid themselves on a lifeboat on deck. One of the crew members participated in the plan and supplied them with food. Unfortunately, during a last inspection before the ship was to leave port, Shmulke and his companion’s whereabouts were discovered. They were taken back to land and, presumably, held in custody pending resolution of their case. Justice was swift but, fortunately for him, not severe. Just a week later, on February 4, the two men appeared in court to face the charge of attempted fraud. A Cuban lawyer was appointed to represent them. They pled not guilty. A trial immediately commenced. Upon the testimony of the ship’s captain, the court found them guilty and fined them each $31. He would have to spend a day in jail for each day he failed to pay that amount. Shmulke paid.

This fine, however, was not enough to deter Shmulke from trying again. Just two weeks later, Shmulke stowed away on an English freight ship. This time, he had better luck and was not detected. The freighter arrived in the port of New York on March 2, 1932. As Shmulke declared, “your deponent entered the United States without immigration inspection.” He had successfully smuggled himself into the United States.

Doubtless my grandfather, known by those who worked with him as “honest Joe,” played some role in aiding Shmulke’s illegal immigration scheme. As Garland notes, “Family members in the United States . . . were often intimately involved with their relatives’ illegal immigration, even if they themselves had entered the country legally. They put up capital for the trip, corroborated fraudulent stories when necessary, and provided homes and other means of support for immigrants once they entered the United States” (Garland, p. 146). Even though they hadn’t seen each other in 11 years, Shmulke’s first destination upon landing in New York was my grandfather’s Lower East Side apartment.

Why didn’t Shmulke wait until he had lived in Cuba for five years, at which point he could have legally entered the U.S.? The answers, it appears, was love.

Shmulke, it seems, met his future wife in Cuba. Her name was Eva Richman. Eva was a fellow Polish Jew, four years Shmulke’s junior. She was two years old when her parents came to the U.S., along with an older sister, in 1912. In June, 1927, her father Joseph became a naturalized U.S. citizen. The law at the time provided that biological children under the age of 21 automatically attain citizenship when one of their parents become a naturalized citizen. (A 1941 law lowered the age to 18.)

With their citizenship status secure, the family was able to freely travel to and from the United States. Joseph and Eva went to live in Cuba during which time Eva likely met Shmulke. Joseph returned to New York in March, 1930.

Eva stayed behind in Cuba for another five months, perhaps to spend more time with Shmulke. She arrived back in New York on August 25, 1930.

Shmulke and Eva were apart for more than a year and a half when he arrived in New York. Perhaps they had pledged themselves to each other and planned to get married as soon as Shmulke could manage to make it to the United States. To complicate matters, however, while Shmulke still lived in Cuba, or soon after he arrived in New York, the Richman family moved from the Lower East Side to Los Angeles. But Shmulke was not going to let this distance keep him from his beloved. He boarded a train west to follow after her. On October 21, 1933, he and Eva were married in Los Angeles.

Shmulke brought his newlywed back to New York in November, 1933, presumably to be closer to the center of the footwear manufacturing industry.

Although Shmulke lived with his brother during his first year in the U.S., they apparently did not maintain close contact when he returned to New York. One reason may have been that my grandmother did not like Eva. In her memoir, my aunt recalls that Eva (to whom she refers as Chava) “was a plain girl and very simple. My mother didn’t like her very much. My mother asked Shmulke why he chose such a simple girl, and he answered ‘zi folkszich (she obeys).’ This also went in the family’s list of sayings. For some reason I don’t remember any real closeness between the families, although they did visit us. . . . My father never said a single word against them though my mother had a way of showing that she didn’t think much of them.”

On December 7, 1934, Shmulke and Eva’s first child, Judith, was born. The family struggled economically. Shmulke worked at several different shoe stores, earning, in his words, “a minimum of $30 a week.”

Now that Shmulke had married, started a family, and found employment, he had one more major milestone to achieve: obtaining American citizenship.

Shmulke faced a major obstacle in accomplishing this goal: he was an illegal immigrant. Fortunately, this problem had a viable, though not foolproof, solution. He could leave the U.S., present himself as an immigrant, and then obtain a visa from a foreign consulate to enter the country legally. He chose to go to Canada, the foreign country closest to New York.

Shmulke went about diligently gathering every kind of document he might need to prove that he was an eligible and suitable candidate for immigration. He needed to show to American immigration officials that he was employable, or, in the parlance of immigration law, not “likely to become a public charge.” In addition, he had to demonstrate that the name he had adopted in the United States, Sam Waxman (the last name being the one my grandfather had begun using in the U.S.) and Shmuel Wierzbowicz, were one and the same person. Finally, he had to prove that he was not a criminal. His plan was to bring these documents to the U.S. consulate office in Montreal.

Given his spotty work history and conviction in Cuba, convincing immigration officials to grant him a visa was no certainty. Yet his marriage, his family, his chance of obtaining American citizenship, indeed, his entire future, depended on it.

Shmulke left no stone unturned. He went to the New York Police Department and obtained a letter attesting to his good character.

He went to the Polish consulate in New York and obtained documents, which he had translated into English, attesting to his birth in Zambrow, Poland.

He contacted his parents back in Zambrow, who went to the regional capital of Lomza to obtain a letter attesting to the lawful life he had led before leaving Poland.

His parents were able to obtain another letter from the Polish authorities attesting to his employment as a shoemaker.

He got letters of reference from his various employers in New York.

To show that he wasn’t indigent, Shmulke obtained letters from the various institutions where he had deposited money. His savings included $229 in a U.S. Postal Savings account (who knew that the post office once had savings accounts?), $425.88 in the Lincoln Savings Bank of Brooklyn and $387.87 in Morris Plan Industrial Bank of New York, for a grand total of $1,042.75 (about $22,000 in today’s dollars).

How had Shmulke managed to save over a $1000 within four years on $30-a-week jobs, during the height of the Great Depression no less? Once again, my grandfather probably came to his rescue. I suspect that before Shmulke obtained these letters, he gave money to Shmulke to deposit into his accounts in order to inflate the amount of his savings. My grandfather would resort to a similar stratagem a year later to facilitate the immigration of his father from Poland. Family, for my grandfather, always came first.

Shmulke obtained two letters of reference attesting to his good character and his identify as “Sam Waxman” and “Szmul Zelko Wierzbowicz.” His brother was not one of his references, probably because Shmulke felt that letters from U.S. citizens would be more helpful. One letter was from his cousin, Rose Hellerstein. (Ms. Hellerstein was apparently the daughter of his mother’s brother as his mother’s maiden name was Kohn, and in Ms. Hellerstein’s Petition for Naturalization, she lists her original name as “Sprinte Rochla Kohn”.) She declared that she knew Shmulke from Zambrow as Shmuel Wierzbowicz, and that he now used the name Sam Waxman. The second declaration was from Irving Rubinson, who had recently becomes Shmulke’s brother-in-law. Irving had recently returned to the U.S. after traveling to Zambrow and marrying Shmulke’s sister, Adele.

In his declaration, Shmulke made sure to emphasize that he had not changed his name for any nefarious purpose. He stated “that your deponent altered his name from Szmul Zelko Wierzbowicz to Sam Waxman, because of the fact that Americans found it difficult to spell and pronounce Szmul Zelko Wierzbowicz, and your deponent therefore uses the name Sam Waxman for simplification in spelling and pronunciation both in business and social circles, and your deponent did not alter his name to Sam Waxman to conceal his identity.”

Finally, Shmulke had to address his previous conviction in Cuba and illegal entry into the United States. Shmulke recounted his attempts to smuggle himself into the United States. Putting the most positive spin he could on the matter, he declared: “That your deponent was only arrested once in his entire life, that being in February, 1932, in Havana, Cuba, for attempting to smuggle his way onto a freighter to the United States without proper and legal documents and for which offense your deponent was fined by the Cuban authorities, 31 Cuban dollars. That your deponent’s conduct during his entire life otherwise, has been of an exemplary character.”

Armed with this portfolio of documents, Shmulke bid what he hoped would be a temporary goodbye to his wife and daughter and travelled to Montreal. He presented himself at the American consulate in late February, 1937, and submitted an application for a visa to re-enter the United States.

Consulate officials examined Shmulke’s medical condition. Other than noting a visual impairment (a strange finding since no photos show him wearing glasses), he was found physically fit.

On the fateful day of February 24, 1937, Shmulke received the document that would ensure his future, a visa to enter the United States as a quota immigrant.

Visa in hand, Shmulke immediately boarded a train, arriving the next day in St. Albans, Vermont.

Joyfully, Shmulke returned to New York. He and his family moved to Brooklyn where he continued his work as a shoemaker.

Shmulke diligently went through the steps needed to obtain citizenship, which required five years of legal residence in the United States. On July 10, 1942, just over five years after he had returned from Canada, he was awarded U.S. citizenship. His transformation from Polish immigrant to U.S. citizen, from Shmuel Zelko Wierzbowicz to Sam Waxman, was complete.

At this very time, a world away, Shmulke’s mother as well as his three sisters and their families, were entrapped by the Nazis in the Zambrow ghetto. Within half a year, they would all be murdered. When, a year after the war, the family received the fateful news, Shmulke joined his brother in sitting shiva.

Shmulke and his family, which now included a son, remained in New York.

Some time after 1950, Shmulke and his family moved back to Los Angeles, presumably to be closer to Eva’s family. What little contact Shmulke had maintained with his family while he lived in New York was severed.

Perhaps Shmulke continued to work as a shoemaker or in shoe sales. He lived a simple life, yet against difficult odds, managed to achieve what not many other Polish Jews in the 1920s had dreamed of: leaving Poland and making a life in America. The price of that dream, he apparently believed, was to detach himself completely from his family and all that reminded him of his Polish past.

Shmulke died in Los Angeles on June 21, 1975. He is remembered as a “beloved husband” and “loving father”. He is buried together with Eva, who died on February 7, 1987.

Sadly, Shmulke left no lasting legacy. His daughter Judith never married. She became a writer, living in Los Angeles and died in 1997.

His son, who went by the name Peter, moved to Greece and cut off relations with the family. His cousin told me that when Judith was during the last days in hospice care, Peter came back, “took her belongings, emptied her bank account and threw her dog on the street. A sad ending indeed.”

And so I come back to the central question I have about Shmulke. My family, both immediate and extended, remained, and continues to remain, very close. As my aunt was fond of saying about our sense of family, “blood is thicker than water.” This applied to everyone within my grandparents’ family, everyone except than Shmulke. He was the first of our family to leave New York, and when he left, he went all the way to California, leaving no trace. Was it out of shame? Anger?

Still, this exploration of Shmulke’s life has given me a renewed appreciation of the struggles his generation of Polish Jews faced. They lived in a dangerous world, unwanted in their native land yet facing immense obstacles in trying to make a life elsewhere. Who knows what inner toll it took to overcome them?

In the end, I am left with this photo, one that seems to sum up the enigma and mystery of my grant uncle Shmulke.