The Parallel Lives

 Music. Two Neil’s. The first is Neil Sadaka. 

     In 1974, Sadaka recorded a haunting song entitled “The Immigrant.” “Harbors opened their arms to the young searching foreigner, come to the light of the beacon of liberty. Was it anything like that when you arrived? A legend that spoke of a mystical magical land called America.

     “It was a time when strangers were welcome here. Music would play. They tell me the days were sweet and clear. It was a sweeter tune, and there was so much room that people could come from everywhere. . . . To find they’ve closed the door, they don’t want him anymore.”

     Sadaka dedicated the song to John Lennon, who was fighting deportation back to England.

     The second Neil is Neil Diamond. In 1980, for his movie “The Jazz Singer,” Diamond recorded the song “America.” 

     “Far, we’ve been traveling far, without a home, but not without a star. Free. Only want to be free. We huddle close, hang on to a dream. On the boats and on the planes, they’re coming to America, never looking back again. They’re coming to America today!”

     At certain concerts, Neil would introduce his song by projecting a picture of his grandmother, Molly Rapaport, then a Jewish girl, and explain.

     “It was almost a hundred years ago. A little girl, twelve years old and alone, was put on a train in Kiev, then in Russia, and made the journey 1200 miles to Rotterdam in Holland. She then boarded a ship to make the great voyage to freedom in a place called America.

     “That little girl was my grandmother. She and her daughter, Rose, inspired me to achieve everything that I have achieved in my life. Her courage will never be forgotten.”

     Literature. In 1894, writing in Yiddish, Sholem Aleichem published a series of eight stories under the title, “Tevye the Dairyman.” The fictional Tevye tells stories about his seven trouble-prone daughters, his wife Golde, his poor life in Tsarist Russia, and his duty to his Jewish faith.

     In a final story, entitled, “Lekh-Lekho,” (Get Thee Out), a Tsarist decree expels the family. 

     Theater. The musical, “Fiddler on the Roof,” is an adaptation of “Tevye the Dairyman,” In the final scene, Tevye, Golde, and the two youngest daughters leave for America.

     History. In 1901, a family of Germans by the last name of Ament, or Amen, then living in Franken Cuter, or Frank, in Russia near the Volga River, prepared to migrate to America. 

     In Russia, “They lived in villages protected by a high fence, fearing Russian intrusion or the wolf packs that ran wild on the Russian steppes. The wolves were hungry in the winter’s snow.”

     Conrad was the dad, Catherine the mother. Six of their nine children tagged along. The seventh child was David Amen, then 14 years old. The family settled in Culbertson, Nebraska, near McCook. They gravitated to farming, the work they knew best. They searched for land

     In 1904 or 1905, two sisters, in their teens, also from Frank, Russia, migrated to America, fed up with a brutal step-mother’s abuse. Their names: Anna Mary and Anna Margaret Lebsack.

      They too came to Nebraska. The older sister married David Strasheim, and settled in Lincoln, but Anna Margaret traveled west to McCook, and there, in 1907, she married David Amen. David and Anna Amen were my maternal great-grandparents. 

     In the fall of 1911, in Frank, Russia, the brother of the two Lebsack sisters, a farmer named Jacob, plus his wife Katherine, and their four children migrated to America. They settled in Hastings, Nebraska. In 1917, they too moved north of Proctor, Colorado.

     There, the two families, the Amen’s and the Lebsack’s, farmed corn and hay. 

     Like other Volga Germans from Russia, the families became German Congregationalists.

     Katherine Lebsack told her kids, “Be glad we are in America, or we might not be living.”