Hello all!
I'm here with a Christmas story book today - a fictional tale woven around one of the Found Relatives photos - and it's come alive within the covers of an old book, repurposed to tell a new story.
I know you won't have time right now, what with Christmas breathing down our necks, but I hope you'll be able to pop back some time over the festive season with a nice glass of mulled wine to enjoy the story.
It's a window onto the lives of two men from very different backgrounds, Luigi and Josef, joined in friendship - enduring hardship, battling to give their families a better life in a new country, and learning to embrace new customs and traditions.
Luigi hailed from a large Italian Catholic clan, and Josef came from a Viennese Jewish family. Usually they might have kept to their own kind on board ship, but circumstance and coincidence brought them together.
Each of them was fairly newly married, and was making the journey taking care of a pregnant wife.
The women, Grazia and Anna, shared the trials of morning sickness added to sea-sickness, and the two men found ways to communicate despite the language differences.
The two young families arrived in New York in late November, 1925, with little more than the clothes on their backs and a few treasured belongings, of very little value except to the families themselves.
Between them they had enough broken English to cope with the necessary immigration details at Ellis Island, and to begin to find their way around the vast city.
By the time they had found themselves somewhere to stay, sharing a room in a tenement building on the Lower East Side - close enough to both the Italian and Jewish enclaves for each of them to feel at home in some way - it was almost Christmas.
Walking the streets of New York in search of work, the two men gazed at the preparations under way with round eyes of amazement. Some things were familiar but others were new and beautiful.
Even back in the old country, many wealthy Jewish families had begun to decorate their homes with trees and exchange gifts, celebrating Christmas as a secular holiday and adding its traditions to the Hanukkah celebrations.
Here in New York it seemed to be a badge of assimilation to embrace the festivities.
Luigi and Josef longed to be able to deck their small room with lights and decorations to relieve the gloom, but that first year the most they could manage were a few fir branches gathered up from the streets, where they had fallen from other trees being dragged to wealthier homes.
From then on it became a silent pact between the two men that of any money they managed to earn, a cent or two would be put aside towards being able to celebrate a proper Christmas in their new country.
A few good years followed, with Josef finding regular work in the garment factories; and for Luigi, an experienced mason, there was usually a way to put money in the kitty.
And although it was strange to both of them that the 25th of December should be the main day of festivity, they felt that embracing the change would be a symbol of their commitment to this country they were trying to make their home.
Despite their Christmas kitty, most money still had to be conserved for essentials, so the women would make small decorations from scraps and paper to brighten the place, and Luigi and Josef would gather any leftover greenery from outside the grocers' stores on their way home from work.
With their special savings, they would buy candles for the menorah brought over by Anna, and small packets of lametta, fine strands of silvery lead foil which glimmered amongst the collected pine branches in the candlelight.
But it was the brightly advertised baubles and Christmas ornaments that they really longed to be able to afford... what must it be like to buy a whole box of the gleaming glass decorations in one go?!
Slowly, they were starting to be confident that one year in the near future that dream might become a reality.
But disaster struck with the great Crash of 1929... those dreams of a prosperous, festively-decked home suddenly seemed hollow, and more distant than ever.
Through the struggles of those years, even when they were queuing in the breadlines, the months spent sharing their small room with two extra families (seven adults now, and five children between them... at least there was warmth in huddling together), the dream of those bright lights and colourful decorations was a kind of beacon to keep fighting towards.
Together, Luigi and Josef kept their own particular faith that one day the doors being shut in their faces would open again, and that they would be invited back inside. They weren't asking for charity, just for the chance to work.
Then, suddenly, there seemed to be light at the end of the tunnel.
News filtered through the streets and alleys that there was help coming for the working man from the new mayor, Fiorello La Guardia (an Italian, as Luigi proclaimed triumphantly, beating his chest with pride).
There would be investment and capital works to provide employment for the desperate men trying to feed and house their families.
With his considerable expertise, and thanks to the labour organisations encouraged by his countrymen, Luigi was one of the first to find work on projects financed by funds supported by Roosevelt's New Deal, and he managed to find openings for his friend too. Josef was willing to turn his hand to anything, and as a fast-learning, reliable, diligent worker he made the most of any opportunity.
The winter cold of 1934 seemed to bite just a little less fiercely, warmed by the flame of hope, and a hot meal in the belly, though the decorations had been reduced again to a few scavenged branches.
As well as fighting to secure federal funds to help his city, Mayor La Guardia was appointing Italians and Jews to important positions in unprecedented numbers, and both Luigi and Josef felt the warmth of being fully accepted into this newly vibrant society. No longer the outsiders looking in...
... but an instrumental part of the recovering economy, starting to thrive under the new regime of municipal and federal support.
Now, each year, it was more than a few cents that they could add to the Christmas kitty, and each year they added a bauble or two to their Christmas box. So neither of them grudged the hard work.
They also now had adjoining apartments, the luxury of two rooms for each family.
"Now we are truly prosperous Americans," whispered Josef to his wife on their first night in their own apartment - still rented, still shabby, but theirs.
But somehow the habit of living as one large family was hard to give up.
So one apartment became the "sleeping apartment" - Luigi and Grazia, with Alessandro, Giovanna, and little Antonio (who was starting to insist on being called Tony) had one room, and Josef, Anna and their two children - Samuel and Leah - shared the other.
In the second apartment, they used the smaller room for cooking and eating - Grazia and Anna taking it in turns to prepare food, week by week, and learning one another's favourite recipes and which foods to avoid for either religious reasons or personal likes and dislikes.
The larger room contained a hotchpotch of chairs, some comfortable, some rather less so, handed down by wealthier members of each community, and it was where the families would gather in the evening to talk over the day's events and the successes achieved, or to reminisce about their respective homelands so that the children might learn something of their roots, and to sing and play games.
And it was to this room, one memorable December in 1938, that Luigi and Josef brought their long-desired prize... For the first time ever there was enough money spare for a few luxuries - and to buy, actually buy, a Christmas tree of their very own.
Oh, how they enjoyed selecting the finest, bushiest specimen, perfectly shaped... not somebody else's leftover trimmings but their very own tree.
They carried it proudly through the streets towards home, and as they neared the building, they could see the faces of all five children pressed up against the window, watching with eager eyes to see the grand arrival.
Nothing could have exceeded their joy and pride as the two families gathered to hang the carefully wrapped and much cherished ornaments which had been waiting so long for a proper home.
Once decorated with the baubles and "icicles" and garlands, and with the candles lit, the tree became truly magical. The children's eyes grew wide and the adults' eyes brimmed with tears.
And although they still lit the Hanukkah candles on the relevant days according to Jewish tradition, and celebrated with a feast of fish on Christmas Eve according to Italian tradition, both men insisted that all gifts should remain under the tree to be unwrapped on the 25th - the new tradition belonging to this country which was now their home.
The glow of the lighted candles echoed the glow in their hearts, and they sang festive songs in a mish-mash of languages, celebrating community, family, endurance, love, and friendship.
And although in the Christmases and Hanukkahs to come they would have to travel further, between homes which grew progressively larger (and ever more lavishly decorated), they always spent some of the Yuletide holiday together, and they never forgot that first tree, the one that meant they were now Americans too.
I'm dreaming of a White Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the tree tops glisten
And children listen
To hear sleighbells in the snow
From White Christmas,
written in the late 1930s by Irving Berlin
(who was Jewish)
I'd just like to say that these adventures are purely fictional (though influenced by some of my own family background). My apologies for any glaring errors - though I've done my best to be accurate where I've included historical information, and to be true to the spirit of the times and the people. If you feel inclined to explore further what life might have been like for thousands like Luigi and Josef, you might enjoy these extraordinary photos of Christmas in New York in the 1920s and in the 1930s.
