Perhaps you think I am not too deserving. It isn’t my nature to weep. Even in this letter I could not describe how dreadful things are not knowing from day to day whether we shall find ourselves homeless—and nowhere to go—and no money to go there.
This sounds like the adventures of “Tish” does it not? But whether some morning I shall find a grand surprise or not—I still [think] that what you are doing is fine and splendid, for nothing builds morale and inspires self confidence and courage like money in one’s purse. I should long to be able to say “It is a pleasure” to the person who could think of such a fine thing to do. However I must move by Wednesday so my landlord says—but where or how I don’t know.
But shall leave change of address for postman. But remember—I won’t miss what I never had—so unless you feel I deserve it—give to the others. Most sincerely, Edith M. Saunders.
Two days later, Sam mailed a check for five dollars to Edith Saunders. It was forwarded and caught up with her a few days later.
In the letter, Saunders obliquely compares herself to “Tish,” an apparent reference to the redoubtable spinster Letitia “Tish” Car-berry, the heroine of the popular mystery novels of Mary Roberts Rinehart. It was Rinehart who said of life, “a little work, a little sleep, a little love and it’s all over.” At the time Saunders wrote her letter, she was twenty-four, stooped beneath the weight of the Depression, and suppressing the yearning for it to be “all over.”
But Edith Saunders’s life was just beginning. The themes she touched on in her 1933 letter to B. Virdot would resonate throughout her long life. Whether because of her parents’ divorce, her own disastrous first marriage, the unscrupulous man who cost her a fledgling business, or her justifiable perception that men were given an unfair advantage, Edith Saunders sought and held the upper hand over most of the men in her life.
She married five times and in each divorce emerged with that much more of a treasury. Her exes did not fare so well. Among them was a senior engineer at Chrysler, Steven Lazorshak, husband number four. Edith Saunders would settle in the exclusive Bloomfield Hills suburb of Detroit and live in an expansive brick house with a manicured courtyard and a pool. (She would later marry the gardener, Paul Lemieux, husband number five.)
“Nothing,” she had written in 1933, “builds morale and inspires self confidence and courage like money in one’s purse.” Edith Saunders became a bona fide millionaire, perhaps not entirely self-made, but a millionaire nonetheless.
But it was not just about money. She had also been determined to make up for the educational deficit of her youth. “I had never finished high school and regretted that very much,” she wrote decades later. So, in her midfifties, she studied for six weeks and earned her General Educational Development diploma, or GED. She then went on to earn a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English. She taught English literature in high school for years.
Edith Saunders died in 1999 with a long string of men’s names after her own and a sizable estate. But even in death, she left behind a legacy that reflected what stirred her to write to B. Virdot in 1933. To her two brothers, Robert and James, she left only one thousand dollars each and a hand-written note in the codicil to her will suggesting it was more than they deserved. Ten years after her death, there is still property from her estate unclaimed in the hands of the state of Michigan, which is seeking her heirs.
And finally, perhaps stung by the shady businessman who cost her a business in 1933, she endowed the Oppenheimer-Mancuso (Lazorshak) Award at Central Michigan University, established in 2000. A member of the class of 1965, she funded it from her estate. The one-thousand-dollar prize goes to “a senior philosophy major who submits an outstanding essay on the subject of the necessity for teaching ethics and/or character development in the elementary grades.”
As a twenty-three-year-old woman, Edith Saunders had hoped to better her position in life through business, but the Depression and a predatory businessman scuttled that dream. One after another, her marriages failed or ended, but each provided her another rung toward financial stability and social ascendancy. Five marriages later, she was a millionaire, had acquired the education long denied her, and found a profession that gave her a measure of autonomy and pride.
She was hardly the first to recognize that marriage could act as a kind of social elevator that could carry one either up or down. Her first marriage, brief but defining, had taken her into the depths; the subsequent ones were more to her advantage. B. Virdot—Sam Stone—was no less aware of the role marriage could play in one’s social and financial fortunes. His mother, Hilda, had often pointed out that she had married beneath her in accepting Jacob’s hand, and that had she done otherwise, she might have averted much of the heartache and hardship that followed. That lesson was not lost on Sam. In marrying Minna, he took a major step upward, and won for himself social acceptance in circles that until then had been beyond his ken. It did not mean he did not love her, but to win such position with a ring and to gain a lifelong tutor in the finer things of life—literature, music, and manners—made the union all the richer. What Minna got in the bargain was a man of great heart and a student eager to improve himself.
Mr. B. Virdot’s Story:
A Foreigner No Longer
Those efforts at self-improvement did not begin in Canton but were fully realized there. Exactly why Sam Stone first came to the town is not known. More than a dozen years of his life are largely unaccounted for. From Pittsburgh, he wandered from state to state, boardinghouse to boardinghouse. A niece says he spent time in West Virginia. It was there that he likely did his unpleasant work in the coal mines. In 1914, then twenty-six years old, he was living in Kenosha, Wisconsin, working as a salesman in Block Brothers department store—the Block Brothers were themselves Jewish immigrants. Two years later, he was managing S & J Gottlieb Dry Goods in the same city. From those years only a single scrap of paper survives, a sheet of stationery from a shoe store on which Sam had copied a poem by the Cleveland, Ohio, poet Edmund Vance Cooke. It is titled “How Did You Die?” The first stanza reads:
Did you tackle that trouble that came your way
With a resolute heart and cheerful?
Or hide your face from the light of day
With a craven soul and fearful?
Oh, a trouble’s a ton, or a trouble’s an ounce,
Or a trouble is what you make it.
And it isn’t the fact that you’re hurt that counts.
But only how did you take it?
By 1917 Sam was in Chicago, briefly working for a millinery shop. On June 5 of that year he registered for the military, one of twenty-four million American men to do so. He listed his name as “Samuel J. Stone,” his date of birth as March 2, 1888, and his birthplace as Bucharest, Rumania. It was one of the last times he acknowledged that he was an alien.
Years later, Sam told me he received his military training on the fields of Gettysburg. He never went overseas but he did see death. One afternoon, while his tentmate was cleaning his rifle, he was struck by lightning and was killed instantly. The body was blackened and Sam was close enough to have his own brows singed. I have a black-and-white picture of him standing in front of a field tent holding his bolt-action rifle affixed with bayonet. Underneath, in his unmistakable pen, Sam wrote “THE UNDECIDED SOLDIER.” Doubtless he enlisted because he had to. But he must have felt considerable ambivalence, torn between his desire to serve his adopted land and his apprehension about wading into the interminable disputes of the Old World from which he had hoped to forever distance himself.
A year later, he was living in Canton, a boarder in the home of a local Jewish merchant. On January 9, 1920, he told a U.S. Census enumerator that he and his family had emigrated from Germany in 1900. He also claimed to have been naturalized as an American citizen. The lifelong lie was beginning to take shape. But as I later unwound the skein of lies, I came to at least understand, if not his reasons, then at least his fears.
It was no later than 1920 that he invented the story of his birth in Pittsburgh. For the next sixty years, he would hold fast to that account, risking everything. But why suddenly invent such a story? Perhaps it was because he was now beginning to establish himself in Canton as a businessman and he yearned for the social acceptance he imagined came with being native-born. He was admittedly impatient and yearned to be American in every sense of the word.
But something else was happening in the country then that had to frighten him. Across the nation, there was growing xenophobia and suspicion of leftists, anarchists, labor organizers, and Eastern European immigrants. A rash of bombings in major cities heightened tensions. Thousands of immigrants were rounded up and put in jail. Hundreds were deported in the middle of the night. Much of the suspicion centered on the foreign-born. Jewish refugees in particular came under scrutiny, linked in the minds of many to the sort of internationalism and labor activism that was behind the radical assault on America. Provoked in part by the Bolshevik Revolution, the bombings and unrest triggered a hysteria that Sam would have seen as a direct threat to him.
It reached a crescendo in January 1920 when U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his special assistant, a young firebrand named John Edgar Hoover, arrested some six thousand people and held them without trial. The discriminatory residue of the Red Scare soon found expression in the nation’s ever-more-restrictive immigration policies, which took aim at excluding refugees from those countries suspected of carrying the contagion of radicalism. Technically the quotas were set as a percentage of each of those country’s immigrants and offspring already in the United States, but the baseline was set to 1890—before the great influx of Eastern Europeans—and was designed to reduce that immigration to a trickle. A 1924 law allowed a mere 794 immigrants from Romania. In such an environment, it is easy to imagine Sam’s eagerness to conceal his origins.
The governmental crackdowns and growing public apprehension raised the specter of anti-Semitism and even deportation. There was nothing that Sam Stone and his siblings dreaded more than the prospect of losing their place in America and being forced to return to the doleful landscape of their youth. It was something they talked about among themselves and it was an insecurity that several passed along to their children. That fear, that the Old World could somehow, even after two decades, reach out and seize him, was kindled anew by America’s midnight roundups of immigrants. Once already, in Romania, he and his family had been stripped of all the rights of citizenship. To “Sam Stone, the American,” falsely claiming to be native-born may at the time have seemed to offer a safe haven. Ironically, it was precisely that action that would later put him in fear of prison or deportation.
Amid so many contradictions in Sam’s life, there was also this: as intent as he was upon concealing his past, he was always true to it. He constantly drew upon it as a reservoir of acquired wisdom and never dreamed of apologizing for the humbleness of his beginnings, the rough edges, the gaps in his education. He may have reinvented himself—by changing his name, his country of origin, his date of birth—but he never attempted to be anything other than who he was, a self-made man who had grown up in Hard Times and who, even in his most prosperous days, identified with those who struggled. In that way, as in so many others, he shared a common bond with many in Canton who straddled two very different worlds.
Sam’s documents may have been fraudulent, but he was no fraud. He never put on airs, pretended to be high-born, or said an unkind word of those who were forced to scratch out a living. To the end, they were his people. The vulnerabilities he shared with them trumped any differences of religion, race, or gender, and if he fit in with those of privilege it was because they recognized in him something authentic, and not because he pretended to be one of them. So it was with Mr. B. Virdot. It was a made-up name, a pseudonym, but one that allowed him to express his truest self. That was the only contradiction in the man, that to be himself he had first to be someone else.
Such an act of prevarication would have found an understanding audience in Depression-era Canton, and well beyond. A lie that liberated one from encumbrances past and over which one had no control and bore no responsibility was still a lie in the eyes of the law, but if it moved a man and his family closer to their dream, if it distanced him from ancient prejudices, if it merely allowed him to be judged on the merits of his work, most, I would wager, would have withheld judgment. Canton was a place that had drawn its share of immigrants from countries deemed undesirable by the town’s longer-established upper crust, those same people who used the laws to close the door behind them. Being unwanted by others was something many in Canton had in common, that and the need to be valued, if not for who they were, then at least for who they or their children might become. For them, emancipation was more than a simple matter of emigration. Back then, many did not speak of the past, and some, like Sam, chose to fictionalize it. No one thought the less of them for it. Canton had summoned them all with the promise of a second chance.
V.
Families
The Crisis That Brought Them Closer
For Sam Stone, the real and final break with the past did not come until 7:45 Sunday evening, March 14, 1926. That was when his father, Jacob Finkelstein, died at Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh’s predominately Jewish Hill District. The cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage. He was sixty-five and determined to the end to honor the old ways. He died as “Finkelstein,” not “Stone,” and in the medical care of Jacob Grekin, a Russian Jewish doctor who emigrated the same year Jacob did—1902—and whose native tongue, like Jacob’s, was Yiddish. He was laid to rest in the New Light Cemetery in Millvale, just outside Pittsburgh, across the Allegheny River.
His obituary in Pittsburgh’s Jewish Criterion lists his surviving children. The sons are named “Samuel J., Max, David and Albert Finkelstein, all of Canton, Ohio and one brother.” Restoring the name Finkelstein to the sons, albeit in an obituary, was perhaps a last nod and concession to the old man, for by then all four sons had long since adopted the name Stone. If the boys had come to despise the baggage that went with their birth name, their father reviled its bastardization.
But, in one final act of defiance, my grandfather signed his father’s death certificate “Sam J. Stone,” not “Sam J. Finkelstein.”
