There was, for example, among the families visited for this study, a
family from the Russian Ukraine. The man's father was a peasant farmer
with six acres of land and a large family of children. The income from
this small property was supplemented by hiring out as laborers on the
large estates near by. As the boys grew up they left home. Two had
already come to America when the father of this family left in 1910.
At the time he left there were thirteen people trying to get their
living from six acres of land.
Another family from the same country were trying to live on the income
from the farm of the man's father, who had four acres of land and five
sons.
SEPARATED FAMILIES
In such families, and even in less extreme cases, it is evident that
the cash needed for the emigration of the whole family is difficult to
secure. It often happens, therefore, that the family does not emigrate
as a group, but one member--usually the man--goes ahead, and sends for
the rest as soon as he has earned enough to pay their passage. It is
then some time, usually from two to four years and occasionally
longer, before he is able to send for his family.
One Ukrainian man interviewed in this study came in 1906, leaving his
wife and four children in the old country. He had difficulty in
finding work he could do, wandered from place to place, never staying
long in one place, and it was eight years before he had saved enough
to send for his family. Another man, a Slovenian, came in 1904, and
was here seven years before he sent his wife money enough so she could
follow him.
Separations of this kind are often destructive of the old family
relationships. What they mean in suffering to the wife left behind has
been revealed by some of the letters of husbands and wives in a
collection of letters in _The Polish Peasant_,[1] especially in the
Borkowski series. These are letters written by Teofila Borkowski in
Warsaw, to her husband, Wladek Borkowski, in America, between the
years 1893 and 1912. During the early years the letters usually
thanked him for a gift of money and referred to the time when she
should join him in America. "I shall now count the days and weeks. May
our Lord God grant it to happen as soon as possible, for I am terribly
worried," she wrote in 1894.
As time goes on the intervals between the gifts grew longer, and she
writes imploring him to send money if he is able, as she is in
desperate need of it. In 1896 she had been ill and in the hospital.
"When I left the hospital I did not know what to do with myself,
without money and almost without roof ... so I begged her and promised
I would pay her when you send some money" (p. 353). And in 1897 she
wrote:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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