Straw Bag, Tin Box, Cloth Suitcase: Three Immigrant Voices

Three women, from three different continents and separated by generations, share stories of coming to the United States. Sarah's great-great grandmother Manya fled the Cossacks in the Ukraine at the turn of the twentieth century.

Grace's mom escaped with her family during the Iranian revolution in 1979. Raquel and her family fled gang violence in El Salvador in the 2010s.

These three stories, all accounts of the authors' real family stories-Manya is legendary author Jane Yolen's grandmother-highlight the essential commonality of the immigrant experience.

About the real families in this book.
All three of these stories are fictionalized accounts based on the facts of how our families came to
America. All three families were fleeing oppression, revolutions, gang violence, possible death. Our
stories sound very much the same, though they are generations apart.

Jane's family on both sides came over to America in the early 1900s from the Ukraine,
(the Yolens) and Latvia (the Morowitz-Berlins). But this telling is much more directly
from the experience of the Yolens. The way in which they left, red-headed Manya
driving children in the cart, the straw bag, are stories the Yolens tell. That family
consisted of mother, father and eight children who-when they came to America (in
three different stages, actually) consisted of 4 girls and 4 boys, from the oldest (27)
boy, then three girls in their late teens, then a boy 10, a girl 9, Jane's father 7, and
the youngest boy 6. They were running from the devastation of the pogroms, those
constant raids by Cossacks who were in the pay of the last Russian Tsar. That tsar was
overthrown and executed with his entire family in 1917, the year the Russian Revolution
began. By then the Yolens and Berlins were settled in America. But Manya's straw
bag always waited, fully packed, by her bedroom door--just in case they had to make
another quick flight from terror.

Marjorie was born in New Orleans but moved to Iran with her American mother and
Persian father as an infant. She had a very happy and ordinary childhood in Tehran
until the Iranian Revolution forced her family to flee to the US in 1978/1979, during the
time the Shah of Iran was overthrown and 52 Americans were held hostage in the US
Embassy in Tehran. As in the story, Marjorie, her mother Kathryn and brother Kamran
waited as long as possible before leaving, then lived with family in Ohio until her
father Bahman got out the following year. Once reunited, the whole family moved first
to California and later to Maryland, the place-even though she lives now in Scotland
with her children-she still thinks of as home. She works with immigrant groups. She
and Jane met because of their mutual interest in writing poetry, and decided to write
a book together about how their families came to America, once they realized how
many of the same sort of things had happened to each of them.

The story told here is by Raquel is from modern times. Raquel's family was separated
for eleven years, living in poverty, as their Papa tried desperately to raise enough
money as a farmworker in America to keep them safe and to bring them legally
across the border. Even threatened by gang violence, the girls, their mother, and young
brother managed to stay alive. Finally, because of the brutality Papa de Paz had
suffered at a farm, he was given a coveted visa so he could bring over his wife and
four of their five children. (By then, the fifth --and oldest child, Rosa,--was by American
visa rules too old to be considered a child, and would need to get her own visa and
make her own way, asking for asylum by herself. But up till now Rosa has been too
afraid to make the trip.) Raquel is learning English, working as a caretaker with people
in their own homes, and singing in a chorus. She and Jane met at the Center for New
Americans and with the help of translator Laurie Millman (head of the Center), they
worked on her part of this book together.