In the years that followed, the Bennafield family has been plagued by tragedy and crime. As a young man, Bennafield’s son Donald served time in prison. Donald’s wife, Martha, was found murdered in a field in 1991. It remains an unsolved homicide. One of Donald’s daughters was convicted of prostitution. Allen Bennafield’s daughter, June, served in the military and died of a heart attack at twenty-nine. His son Paul found work in a steel mill. Bennafield’s son David, born four months before his father wrote to Mr. B. Virdot, worked for thirty-eight years as a special delivery driver for the U.S. Postal Service in Cleveland. In March 2006, his stepson Shaun was sentenced to twelve years in federal prison for selling crack cocaine.
It is no wonder, then, that Allen C. Bennafield’s oldest son and namesake, Allen C. Bennafield Jr., now eighty, has no interest in speaking of his father. He refused to even listen to the words his father had written to Mr. B. Virdot. Perhaps it was because he chose such a different path from his father. Allen Bennafield Jr. left home early, and served in the army, then the air force. Later he retired as a captain in the Washington, D.C., police department. But despite his insistence on distancing himself from his father and his clouded past, his thirty-five-year-old daughter, Leta Bennafield, has doggedly sought answers about her family’s origins. She has spent years researching and trying to reconstruct the family tree, as twisted as it may be.
An information technology administrator, Leta has posted numerous entreaties on the Internet’s genealogy sites seeking to fill in the gaps left by a grandfather who did what he could to obscure his own roots. To this day she continues to ask questions, and to this day her father declines to answer them—either because they dredge up unpleasant memories or because he may not know the truth. His son Damon, a former advertising executive, now lives in Atlanta, Georgia, the state where, a century and a half earlier, the Bennafields worked the cotton fields as slaves.
Mr. B. Virdot’s Story: The Crossing
The more I dug into Sam’s past, the more I discovered that he had something in common with each of the people he helped, and that I shared something in common with their descendants. Like the grandchildren of Noble Wright and George Carlin, I was to discover that my grandfather, for all his goodheartedness, had broken the law. And like the descendants of A. C. Bennafield, I was to learn only after his death that the man I thought I knew had concealed an earlier life unknown to us all—though it hurt no one but himself.
There were early hints that Sam Stone’s life was more complex than he let on. As a young adult, my mother, Virginia, learned that Sam’s name had once been “Finkelstein,” meaning “shining stone.” She despised the name, in part because it sounded less American than “Stone,” and in part because it linked our family to what she regarded as Sam’s less reputable kin. Sam had taken it upon himself in his early twenties to change his name to “Samuel J. Stone.” He liked its lapidary quality and its strength. Out of that block of stone, Sam might have seen himself as a sculptor chiseling a new name and a new life for himself. “Samuel J. Stone” was a name befitting an executive, a self-made man, literally. Thereafter, the name Finkelstein was almost never uttered, and when it was, it was said in a hushed voice.
Over the next few years he persuaded his three brothers and three sisters to take the Stone name as well. Each of the brothers used the middle initial “J.” It was a sign of his growing influence over the family, both as the oldest son as well as the most successful member of the clan. In time, even his mother, Hinde, changed her name, but his father did not.
The siblings understood that it was taboo to utter the old name and conspired to wipe out their own pasts. Their children would be raised as my mother was—with little or no knowledge of their early circumstances or origins. At one time or another, Sam had claimed his parents were German, Russian, Bohemian, or Romanian. I remember that when he spoke there was the slightest trace of an accent. There were just a few words he said that reminded me of the actor Bela Lugosi and brought to mind Transylvania. But it was not enough to fix it to a certain place, or even to be sure that it was foreign. It was a mere residue that only a forensic linguist could perhaps track to a crossing in steerage or time in a ghetto.
I had a copy of Sam’s birth certificate from Pittsburgh but was unable to find any evidence of his birth in that city. I searched records in several surrounding cities and towns and found nothing. I began to have fundamental doubts about the veracity of Sam’s sketchy account of his own early life. At that point, I expanded my search to include ships’ passenger lists under the name “Finkelstein.” That too seemed fruitless. But just when I was about to give up, I found them: Janne (Jacob) Finkelstein, forty-three; his son Sam, fifteen; his eldest daughter, Hana Sure (later known as Sarah), seventeen; and his son Moses (later known as Mack), eleven. Sam and Hana Sure were listed as “laborers,” and Janne as a “private dealer.” They sailed from Le Havre in France aboard the La Champagne and arrived in New York on October 6, 1902. They listed their final destination as Pittsburgh. Their nationality was “Roumanian,” their home village, Dorohoi. It was the first I’d ever heard of Dorohoi. It meant nothing to me. It was also the first time I heard that my family’s roots went back to Romania.
But why all the secrecy, I wondered. There was no shame in being an immigrant. Why had Sam and his family taken such elaborate measures to conceal from their neighbors and even their own descendants the truth of their origins? He had sworn falsely under oath, violated federal laws, fabricated documents, and lied to his own children and grandchildren about his origin and their heritage. I needed to understand why. I suspected that in finding an answer I would also understand far better what it was that motivated him to take on the guise of B. Virdot.
But first, there was a more immediate mystery: how and when the rest of Sam’s family came to America. These too I eventually found in the passenger lists. Sam’s mother and four other siblings followed a year after Sam aboard the SS Ivernia. They sailed from Liverpool, England, and arrived in Boston in September 1903. Listed in steerage was Hinde Finkelstein, forty; an eleven-year-old daughter, Gusta (later known as Gussie); another daughter, Tina (later known as Esther), nine; a son David, four; and a son Isadore (later known as Al), nine. On the list, Hinde Finkelstein declared that she and the children were bound for Pittsburgh to join her husband, Jacob, and a brother-in-law, Hersh Eger, a dry-goods peddler already living in the Jewish ghetto of Pittsburgh’s Hill District.
On May 11, 1954, fifty-two years after boarding the La Champagne in Le Havre, France, for a crossing in steerage, Sam Stone returned to that port—this time with his wife, Minna, aboard the luxury liner Isle de France. But in all the intervening years, he did not speak to anyone of what it was that had driven his family from Romania or why it was he was so intent upon keeping it a secret.
IN YIDDISH, THE word for troubles is tsuris—the cumulative measure of a soul’s burdens; not the routine setbacks life deals out to one and all, but the true body blows to heart and will. Sam Stone knew the word though he would never say it. Yiddish was his native tongue, but it was a language he refused to speak almost from the moment he stepped off the gangplank in 1902.
On the passenger manifest Sam’s father, Jacob, and mother, Hinde, had both listed their home as Dorohoi. With some effort, I found it on a map. In my grandfather’s day, as today, it was a shtetl in northeast Romania that sat along the Jijia River. In 1899, some sixty-eight hundred Jews made their home there, a little more than half the town. Jews had lived there for centuries and in relative peace. By 1895, it had its own secular Jewish school.
All that changed during Sam Finkelstein’s boyhood. Increasingly Jews were singled out and marked by law as “foreigners” and “aliens,” targeted by the state, and ostracized by the community. Sam was born in 1888 in a country that year by year tightened an economic noose around its Jews. Laws barred them from working as peddlers or shop owners and made it illegal for them to sell sugar, flour, or other staples. In 1898, when Sam was eleven, new laws imposed a quota on the number of “aliens”—Jews—allowed to attend schools. (That word, alien, would haunt Sam throughout his life.)
Jews could neither vote nor obtain licenses. Crop failures and economic reversals turned their Gentile neighbors against them. They became targets for popular discontent and scapegoats of the state. In 1900, a new set of decrees was passed designed to starve the Jews or drive them into exile. They were forbidden from owning land or cultivating it, barred from living in rural areas, and even working as laborers, subject to a quota that required that two Romanians be hired for every “unprotected alien,” a thinly veiled reference to Jews. They faced homelessness, hunger, and depression. An influx of Jewish refugees from neighboring Russia and Galicia, nearly all of them destitute, triggered further repressive measures. The Romanian government declared the Jews “a nation apart,” separated by culture, faith, and dietary restrictions. As such, they were entitled to none of the civil rights accorded to those considered true Romanians.
Reading the grim history of Dorohoi, I caught my first glimpse of Sam’s early years and adolescence. The physical hardships that he and his family—and all of his faith—endured in those years could be read in the decrees of the state. But the psychological and emotional toll of such oppression on a childhood like Sam’s was only beginning to dawn on me. The notion that one’s homeland could turn on him, treat him and his family as trespassers, the subject of constant public suspicion, hostility, and harassment, made me see what Sam had been so eager to escape, why he had never spoken of it, and even why he had gone to such lengths to bury that past in the fabrication of a less nightmarish childhood.
As a child, he was pushed to the margins of his own society. The insecurities of a more ordinary adolescence pale beside what he faced. The tensions with which he grew up—the constant threat of violence and pogroms, the shame and degradation—were the defining features of his childhood, and they go a long way in explaining the man he was to become. The bleakness of Canton during the Great Depression, the specter of so many unable to scratch out a living, the sight of immigrant families pushed to the edge with no one to come to their rescue—all this must surely have triggered in Sam Stone recollections of his own bitter youth. The letters to B. Virdot from children and teenagers must have brought back to him memories of his own escape, the crossing, and the turbulent arrival. Turning his back on them, knowing what he had endured, would have been all but impossible. I do not have the benefit of Sam’s own story, but the historical record of what befell the Romanian Jews of his time fills much of the gap and explains why he was loath to speak of it.
For the Finkelstein family, remaining in Dorohoi was not an option. They faced what many Romanian Jews faced—extinction. U.S. Secretary of State John Hay described the plight of these Jews this way: “by the cumulative effect of successive restrictions, the Jews of Romania have become reduced to a state of wretched misery. Shut out from nearly every avenue of self-support which is open to the poor of other lands, and ground down by poverty as the natural result of their discriminatory treatment, they are rendered incapable of lifting themselves from the enforced degradation they endure.”
Those Romanian Jews who fled the country became known as the Fusgeyers, or “foot-walkers.” It was a mass exodus. By the thousands they walked across Europe, only to be rejected by one country after another. One account of the conditions they endured appears in the Jewish Criterion of Pittsburgh, published on August 30, 1900:
The Rumanian Jews possess, for the greater part, nothing but the few rags upon their bodies. The poorest among them do not travel in wagons or in ships, but drag themselves upon their wounded feet from one frontier to another. At home they leave nothing but the bones of their fathers in their graves, constituted the only ownership in the soil of their native land. They had to carry with them nothing else but the wanderer’s staff and the unendurable burden of their memories and their fears. . . .
The Rumanian Jews have no goals, they wander planless about like a horde of Northern water-rats endeavoring to elude the grasp of the birds of prey, and who, as they pass, pounce upon and devour their victim. No one desires them, everybody sends them farther on from their own district, and when they ask in despair, “Where are we to go, what is to become of us?” the only reply they receive is a shrug of the shoulder and a turn of the hand, mercilessly pointing to the distance further on into the unknown, unto the blue away, far away.
The suffering of Romania’s 400,000 Jews caught America’s attention. On September 17, 1902—nine days before Sam Finkelstein boarded the SS La Champagne—Secretary of State Hay protested Romania’s inhumane treatment of the Jews and pressured Romania to relent.
Nineteen years earlier, the poet Emma Lazarus had penned her poem “The New Colossus,” but it was not until 1903, the year Sam’s mother and four younger siblings arrived in America, that the now famous lines were added to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:
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!
In America, Sam Finkelstein and his family hoped to melt into the mass of ten million foreign-born in a country of seventy-six million. But thousands of Romanian Jews had preceded the Finkelsteins and found their welcome tentative at best. Americans made no secret of their displeasure at being a dumping ground for Romanian Jews. Secretary of State Hay said as much in his appeal to European heads of state. The New York Times article about his appeal was headlined, ASKS THAT ROUMANIA STOP OPPRESSING JEWS, and the subhead under it read, “Says Present Harsh Treatment Breeds Men Who Are Not Desirable Immigrants to This Country.”
His language reflected a deep antagonism toward these refugees. “The pauper, the criminal, the contagiously or incurably diseased are excluded from the benefits of immigration only when they are likely to become a source of danger or a burden upon the community,” declared Hay.
Immigrants like my grandfather and his family were seen as defective and future wards of the state. “Removal under such conditions,” warned Secretary Hay, “is not and cannot be the healthy intelligent emigration of a free and self-reliant being. It must be, in most cases, the mere transplantation of an artificially produced diseased growth to a new place.”
