SIX

KAUNAS–EYDTKUHNEN–NEW YORK

Emigration Routes

The Muscovites [Russian border guards] started shouting and shooting: some [of us] were arrested, others made it across, and our guide disappeared without a trace. . . . We’re standing in the forest, it’s completely dark, and we we’re soaked to the neck. It’s cold. . . . At dawn, we went to the farmers’ fields and rented two horse carts to Eydtkuhnen. It was still seven miles to Eydtkuhnen. We paid two rubles each. We arrived in Eydtkuhnen on Saturday evening. I had written in the postcard that we’d leave on Monday, but we left on Thursday: as we didn’t receive the money for a long time, we spent 4 days in Eydtkuhnen, and I had to throw all the food to the dogs, as it was soaked. So, I ask you to go to Iankel and ask for 5 rubles each: if he doesn’t want to give it back, we should take him to court.

We left Eydtkuhnen on Thursday morning. We rode [by train] through Prussia for three days, day and night. . . . We arrived in Rotterdam on Saturday evening.¹

Lithuanian emigrant Kazimir Seniunas in 1903 on his ten-day trip from Lithuania to Rotterdam to embark for America

Now the gendarme turned to my mother and asked: “Where are you traveling to? Do you have a passport? Do you have ship tickets? How much money do you have? To whom are you traveling? And where are you traveling from? . . . With your third class tickets, you cannot travel to America because it is now strictly forbidden to allow those passengers . . . into Germany. Since that is the case, you must go back to Russia. If you have enough money, you can pay the cashier [the difference] and they will exchange your tickets for those in the second class.” . . . My mother began to cry, to beg, to explain, but the gendarme curtly told her that no crying and no begging would help here. . . . “But,” [he said,] “I can give you a piece of advice:

“You will now be sent to Kibart. . . . In Kibart there is a well-regarded man by the name of Shidorsky. You should go to this Shidorsky and tell him your situation. He has a brother in Idtkunyen [Eydtkuhnen], who is also well regarded and who has helped passengers like you cross the border more than once. It’s possible that he might also be able to help you.”

A ray of hope flashed across our frightened faces—the hope that, maybe, the good and kind Shidorsky would help us cross the border. This joyous hope gave us the strength and power to bear the terrible blow.²

Thirteen-year-old Jewish emigrant Maschke (Mary) Antin from Polatsk (Polotsk) in today’s Belarus on her way across the border in 1894

ON MAY 26, 1903, AFTER a ten-day transatlantic passage, eighteen-year-old Lithuanian Kazimir Seniunas from Zapyškis (Sapieżyszki, Sapizishok), a village near Kaunas, arrived in Ellis Island aboard the Dutch steamship Ryndam. In the ship manifest, he specified that he planned to move on to his brother-in-law in Worcester, Massachusetts, a train ride that was supposed to cost eighteen rubles, or approximately nine US dollars.³ It is unclear whether he made this journey immediately after debarkation since he indicated that he possessed just two US dollars. Seniunas’s whereabouts are unknown. He does not appear in the 1910 US census but may have changed his name or returned to Europe after earning enough capital for a fresh start. Mary Antin became a renowned immigration rights activist and supporter of Theodore Roosevelt. Her 1912 account, The Promised Land, was based on this 1894 letter and became an influential book on recent immigrants’ lives in the United States.

These personal accounts set the stage for yet another group of mobile people. Unlike early tourists, they had a more arduous journey and often had no idea where their final destination in the United States would be—in a country they would help turn into a major economic powerhouse in the decades preceding the First World War. As a fourth-class train passenger en route to Rotterdam, Seniunas literally traveled on the same tracks as the tourists described in chapter 4. However, he did not refer to a Baedeker travel guide and was not looking for hotels to make it a comfortable journey. While tourists, goods, and emigrants alike all passed through border stations like Eydtkuhnen or railroad hubs like Berlin, they rarely interacted, clearly separated from better-off passengers by railroad company employees and government officials at the various borders, ports, and railroad junctions. As a result, emigrants’ mobility was vastly different from other forms facilitated by the railroad, adding yet another facet to the “multiple mobilities” presented in this book.

The reasons for mass immigration into the United States are well known.⁴ After the Civil War, the country experienced tremendous growth in its territory and economy. To spur this development, the government encouraged immigration for most of the half century preceding the First World War. While the policies toward Asian immigration changed substantially over the 1870s and 1880s, leading to a de facto racist ban enshrined in the Chinese Exclusion Act, European immigration was generally permitted before the Great War.⁵ As Aristide Zolberg has pointed out, this selective entry control significantly shaped the American nation.⁶ Without a doubt, migration was a momentous development in transatlantic history, particularly considering the number of people involved—fifty-five to fifty-eight million between 1846 and 1940. However, as Adam McKeown has shown, we must place this into a global perspective with other migration systems of similar dimensions.⁷

This chapter follows emigrants’ trajectories from the northwestern part of the Russian Empire to the German border, along the Ostbahn to their embarkation ports on the northern European coast, and to the United States. Surprisingly, apart from the ship logs and Port of New York/Hamburg/Bremen/Rotterdam records, indicating the start and endpoints of the transatlantic passage, we know very little about the emigrants’ overland (rail) journeys.⁸ Consequently, the chapter’s main emphasis is on where transmigrants had to stop, where people smugglers, government officials, and railroad employees made decisions determining emigrants’ trajectories. In the process of making these decisions, officials frequently did not consider humanitarian aspects but applied discriminatory medical, racial, or ethnic categories.

In the decades preceding the First World War, along with other major European railroads, the Ostbahn and its cross-border branch lines facilitated transatlantic mass migration. The initiators of the line had not anticipated its decisive role in this massive movement. However, with the changing economic situation in the United States and eastern Europe after the 1860s, the railroad emerged as a significant nonhuman actor in this development, creating a new space of opportunities for prospective emigrants and transportation companies alike. We have already seen how the railroad fostered population growth in Berlin and, thus, internal German migrations. Similarly, it strongly influenced transatlantic emigration from Prussia’s northwestern provinces. These movements from within Prussia/Germany have found much attention in research.⁹ In contrast, this chapter focuses on the trajectories of emigrants from the Russian Empire, who usually crossed Germany as transmigrants to reach the Atlantic ports.

The chapter starts by describing the changing sociopolitical situation in the Northwest of the Russian Empire, focusing on the Jewish and Lithuanian groups. In the second part, I will underscore the space of opportunities created by novel transportation. Migrants’ exemplary trajectories across the borders reflect the challenges they faced and the support they received. The third part will look at the role of medical control and the development of inclusion and exclusion policies, implemented by state administrations and shipping companies.

LIETUVA, LITE, LITWA, NORTHWESTERN KRAI: MULTIPLE NAMES FOR A TRANSFORMING REGION

Historically, the Russian Empire’s northwestern region was the Lithuanian part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita). After the third partition of Poland-Lithuania, the whole area came under the rule of the Russian Empire. In 1862, when the railroad crossing at Eydtkuhnen and Verzhbolovo (Wirballen, Virbalis) was opened, the administrative unit directly to the east was known as Augustów Province. The surrounding provinces that were also in the catchment area of the Ostbahn were (clockwise from north to south) Kaunas (Kovno), Vilna (Vilnius), and Hrodna (Grodno, Gardinas). This was a multiethnic region, where Lithuanian, Polish, and Belarusian speakers were the dominant groups in the countryside. In contrast, Yiddish speakers (in Lithuania, they called themselves “Litvaks”) often constituted majorities in towns and cities.¹⁰ Smaller groups of German and Russian speakers intermingled, the latter mostly in administrative functions in urban centers.¹¹

As we have seen, the 1860s brought change to this rural region, facilitated by new transportation opportunities. The railroad also fostered industrial development and created new job opportunities—be it on the railroad and in its maintenance/administration or in the industrializing cities. Kaunas was the city closest to the East Prussian border at Eydtkuhnen, only one hundred kilometers, or two hours by train, away. This administrative center of the province by the same name was located at the confluence of the Neris (Wilia) and the Nemunas (Memel) Rivers and served as an important trading center. In the 1850s, new macadamized roads to Warsaw and St. Petersburg and steamship connections to East Prussia and the Baltic Sea via the Nemunas fostered communication and trade. From the early 1860s, Kaunas’s convenient location on the railroad line to Prussia and not far from the junction with the St. Petersburg–Warsaw line further stimulated trade and industrial development. As a result, the number of inhabitants rose from twenty-four thousand in 1860–1863 to seventy-one thousand in 1897 and eighty-four thousand in 1912.¹² In 1897, the Jewish population constituted a relative majority. It stood at 35 percent of the population, followed by Russian speakers (26 percent, primarily male and employed in administration and military), Polish speakers (23 percent), and Lithuanian speakers (6 percent).¹³ Also, starting in the 1850s, supported by several prosperous Jewish merchants and industrialists, Kaunas developed into an important center of Jewish culture, politics, and religion.¹⁴

While the city’s growth is impressive, Kaunas missed out on the large-scale industrial development of other urban areas in the region, such as the Baltic ports Libau and Riga. Since the city was located close to the Prussian border, Kaunas was meant to be a military stronghold in the imperial Russian planning. As a result, since the 1870s, investment went disproportionately into constructing fortifications around the city, thus hampering further industrial development.¹⁵ This contrasts with what we have seen in chapter 1, when at the same time, Berlin decided instead to eliminate its remaining Customs Wall, thus fostering industrial growth and development.

Figure 6.1. Map of the East Prussian borderland. Courtesy of Prussian Secret State Archives Berlin, GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 93E, Nr. 781, 267–268.

Map legend:

1 Kaunas (Kovno)

2 Eydtkuhnen-Verzhbolovo (Wirballen) crossing

3 Königsberg

4 Südbahn crossing, connecting Königsberg to Ukraine.

The link between the Ostbahn and the branch line of the St. Petersburg–Warsaw Railroad facilitated speedier and more affordable cargo transportation between the northwestern parts of the Russian Empire and western Europe, but it also allowed for more travel. While a growing number of business and tourism travelers filled the Russian railroads’ first and second classes, the number of people transported in the third and fourth classes reached even more astonishing numbers. Long-distance cross-border travelers boarding these classes were usually emigrants; they were looking for either seasonal employment in Prussia or more permanent opportunities even farther away, often in North America.

As we have seen, the Eydtkuhnen and Verzhbolovo borderscape served as an essential gateway for travelers between the Russian Empire and the rest of Europe. Also, jointly with the other railroad border crossings, these towns developed into important transit trade centers. However, this border region was much more than that. It also developed into a large transitional space for emigrants from the northwestern part of the Russian Empire. In this chapter, two groups of emigrants will find special attention—namely, Lithuanian and Yiddish speakers. Given imperial Russian population policies and the ethnic composition in the region, these groups constituted the majority of emigrants taking the Ostbahn to reach the western European embarkation ports.

Lithuanian Peasants

The reasons for the emigration of Lithuanians are manifold. A minority left for outright political reasons. As in other parts of former Poland-Lithuania, where the uprisings of 1830 and 1863 found strong support among the population, the imperial Russian government imposed policies directed against the national movements of both Poles and Lithuanians. The administration expropriated participants of the uprising and deported many to Siberia, redistributing the land to Eastern Slavic landowners. Through administrative measures, the government reduced the influence of the Catholic Church while at the same time strengthening Orthodox Christianity. This came as a blow to the primarily Catholic Lithuanian speakers. In addition, administrative measures reduced education in the Lithuanian language.¹⁶

Furthermore, printing in Latin and subsequently in Gothic letters was outlawed, which led to the development of influential Lithuanian printing presses in East Prussia and large-scale book trafficking from Prussia into the Lithuanian-speaking regions of the Russian Empire—until the ultimate lifting of the ban in 1904. Similar to what we already observed in the case of Polish books smuggled across the border at Aleksandrów, the Lithuanian Knygnešiai, or “book carriers,” relied on existing cross-border networks and used the newly expanded railroads to reach Lithuanian centers in the Russian Empire.¹⁷

At the same time, a dense network of private, usually Catholic Lithuanian schools was set up, leading to the development of a literate Lithuanian space that would help create a modern Lithuanian national movement and encompassed an increasing part of the Lithuanian-speaking population. As a result, in 1897, almost 50 percent of the Lithuanian population was literate, compared to only 29 percent in the empire at large.¹⁸ This was particularly so after the 1905 Revolution, which brought more cultural and political rights for non-Russians.¹⁹

While the oppression of Lithuanian culture and Catholic religion affected migration, two additional, intertwined reasons had a more substantial influence on the growing number of emigrants: conscription regulations and economic hardship. In 1874, a new law provided for six-year general conscription for most male Russian imperial subjects over the age of twenty-one. While the firstborn sons of each family were excluded, it still was a burden not everyone was willing to bear. For example, in 1903, when Kazimir Seniunas emigrated, a staggering 45.7 percent of all recruits from the neighboring Vilnius Province did not show up at the recruiting points; an overwhelming majority consisted of Lithuanian and Yiddish speakers who subsequently emigrated.²⁰

This added to the dire economic situation of the predominantly rural Lithuanian population. Despite the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the mainly Polish landed gentry still possessed most of the land. As a result, many landless peasants worked as farmhands for unsustainable wages. On top of that, since they usually held only small plots of land, even the growing number of independent Lithuanian farmers struggled economically, facing difficulties in providing for their families. Their second (and further) sons faced the most challenging future. Since usually the firstborn took over the farm, younger sons were forced to enter the ranks of landless peasants and faced the prospect of lengthy military service at the age of twenty-one.

For many, migration to the cities and emigration were the only realistic ways out. Since the few industrializing towns in the region did not provide enough job opportunities for the growing rural population, many Lithuanians went to other big cities in the empire or chose to emigrate.²¹ Consequently, because of the lack of opportunities, Kaunas, the city closest to the Lithuanian-speaking countryside, in 1897 had a Lithuanian-speaking population of only 4,092 (6 percent of the total population), while Riga and St. Petersburg had Lithuanian-speaking populations of 28,648 and 26,000, respectively.²² Another option was emigration. Eidintas estimates that from 1868 to 1914, 300,000 Lithuanians—primarily landless peasants—emigrated to North America.²³

Litvaks: Jewish Townspeople

As Yuri Slezkine has pointed out, official imperial policy toward Jews at the time “was essentially the same as that toward other ‘aliens,’ oscillating . . . between legal separation and various forms of ‘fusion.’”²⁴ However, the empire’s Jews’ social and economic status differed significantly from that of other ethnic groups in the empire. For one, they inhabited urban spaces more often. During the second part of the nineteenth century, industrialization and the emancipation of serfs led to a dramatic aggravation of their economic situation. As in other European regions, population growth led to land shortages in the western parts of the empire, inhabited mainly by ethnicities other than Russians. Also, Jewish subjects had traditionally served as middlemen in tax collection, liquor sales, and foreign trade; over time, the state began to take over these roles. With the development of a modern banking system in the Russian Empire, the Jewish moneylender also became obsolete; in addition, the railroad threatened the livelihood of the peddler.

As the bureaucracy and industry encroached upon these professions, the state also barred Jewish applicants from newly developing job opportunities, such as employment with the government or railroad institutions.²⁵ The empire’s Jewish subjects thus faced a “double squeeze” regarding the changing social and economic environment and the government’s increasingly discriminatory policies.²⁶ While Jews from the region sometimes settled down in nearby East Prussia or other European countries, emigration to North America became the rule.²⁷ In the early twentieth century, 83 percent of all Jewish emigrants from the Kaunas region went to the United States, mainly to New York.²⁸

In the Lithuanian lands, most Jews earned a living in crafts or trade. In the Kaunas Province, Jewish believers usually had a share of over 90 percent among the merchants.²⁹ In the Lithuanian countryside, Jews maintained a well-organized trade network; they bought up farm produce to trade it in the towns.³⁰ This Jewish dominance in trade made them an ideal target for Lithuanian antisemitism based on economic competition that developed toward the end of the nineteenth century.³¹

The trigger for a significant increase in Jewish emigration was the assassination of the reformist emperor Alexander II in March 1881. It was followed by a wave of violent antisemitic riots and pogroms that shocked the Pale of Settlement in the western and southern provinces of the Russian Empire, with a death toll of several dozen people and many more wounded, raped, and deprived of their livelihood.³² At the same time, anti-Jewish violence erupted in some parts of Prussia’s eastern provinces, although they remained limited in the number of casualties and damage.³³ In Jewish history, “the years 1881–2 have become recognized as a decisive turning point.”³⁴ Not only did the empire’s authorities fail to effectively suppress outbreaks of “spontaneous” anger in most cases but they also condoned the violence in some situations. The conditions deteriorated even further when the government issued a series of explicitly anti-Jewish edicts.

The Temporary Laws of May 1882 restricted the right of Jews to settle in rural areas inside the Pale of Settlement and limited the economic activity of Jewish businesses. In 1886 and 1887, the government introduced a quota, drastically limiting the total number of Jewish students at high schools and universities.³⁵ With these measures in effect, many Jewish subjects lost their livelihood or faced a decline in living standards. Jewish businesses’ competitors often capitalized on the antisemitic atmosphere to remove their rivals, taking over their Jewish neighbors’ workshops and companies. The better-educated Jewish youth saw no prospects in a state that would bar them from higher education and that also drafted most men for six years of military service. As John Klier has pointed out, in this atmosphere, “mass emigration of Jews from Russia began to appear as a genuine possibility.”³⁶

The pogroms of the 1880s were exceptionally violent in the Ukrainian provinces of the empire. For this reason, most emigrants at that time headed for the borders with the Habsburg Empire in Galicia. Henceforth, the name of the border town Brody turned into a synonym for the emigration of Russian Jews and of impoverished Galician citizens—primarily ethnic Poles and Ruthenes.³⁷ In the Northwest, the governor-general of Vilnius, Count Eduard Ivanovich Totleben, responded energetically to the anti-Jewish frenzy, preventing major clashes in the region.³⁸ Still, the hostile economic and social conditions caused many Jews from this part of the empire to also emigrate. For the northwestern provinces of the Russian Empire and the northeastern part of the Kingdom of Poland, the border crossing at Eydtkuhnen became the bottleneck for emigrants on their way to the United States.

THE TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTION AND MIGRATION CONTROL

A New Space of Opportunities

Innovations in transportation modes had a decisive impact on the increase in migration. By 1860, almost one-third of passenger traffic arriving in New York was under steam; five years later, it was over half, and it rose to 90 percent in 1870. The number of passengers rose from an average of 247 per sailing ship in 1856 to 1,500 per steamship in the 1880s. In the 1850s, sailing ships crossed the Atlantic in about one month, whereas steamships made the passage in about twelve days.³⁹ The cost of the passage dropped dramatically, as larger and technically improved sailing ships and then steamships forced the price downward. As a result, between 1870 and 1900, the cost of a third-class ticket (the steerage class) decreased from $40 to $20; sometimes, traveling to America was cheaper than traveling for work to certain distant European locations.⁴⁰

As for official control in the countries of departure, except for the Russian Empire, most European and Asian states relaxed their restrictive policies to retain their people. At the time, with international trade and exchange on the rise, the possible threat posed by unregulated migration seemed to be negligible compared to the benefits. As we have already seen in the chapter on international travel, passports were less important—at least in the western half of Europe and across the Atlantic.⁴¹ Growing transatlantic trade further fostered the rise in the number of migrants.⁴² The shipping companies had a vested interest in the unhindered movement of people to keep their westbound ships fully loaded—eastbound ships carried merchandise from the US, such as cotton.

The shipping industry was not alone in its interest in unregulated migration; railroad companies in Europe and the US too were on board.⁴³ While the European railroad network extended ever further into the landlocked territories of the continent, increasing the possibility of migration, the railroad ventures in the United States needed a cheap labor force to construct new lines as the country expanded westward. To this effect, the American government granted the railroad companies land for the actual construction of the lines and the creation of new settlements along the rail corridor.⁴⁴

Between 1861 and 1914—peaking after 1881—1.5 million Russian subjects of Jewish faith left their homeland. They added to the long-standing tradition of western and central European emigration to the United States. Between 1900 and 1914 alone, “almost 2 percent of all Jewish residents of the Pale of Settlement were leaving every year.”⁴⁵ At the same time, 2.5 million non-Jewish Russian subjects also left the country. In sum, between 1899 and 1910, 43.8 percent of all emigrants from the Russian Empire were Jewish, 27 percent Polish, and 9.6 percent Lithuanian. Finns and Germans followed with 8.5 and 5.8 percent, respectively, while Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians combined accounted for a mere 4.4 percent.⁴⁶ As Tara Zahra has observed, paradoxically, “the least ‘desirable’ citizens from a nationalist perspective, members of national and linguistic minorities, actually enjoyed the most freedom of mobility.”⁴⁷

Clandestine Crossings: Attempts, Failures, and Successes

In the 1840s, Prussia and other German states granted their citizens the right to emigrate, given that they were not subject to military service.⁴⁸ Emigration was seen as a safety valve to alleviate social problems such as poverty. Accordingly, when the railroad and the steamship provided less-expensive long-distance transportation, the number of emigrants from the German states rose steadily. As Klaus Bade has pointed out, during the peak years of emigration between 1846 and 1893, the annual number of transatlantic emigrants from the German states regularly exceeded one hundred thousand and occasionally even two hundred thousand individuals.⁴⁹

Given the discrimination against some non-Russian ethnic groups in the western borderlands, one might assume that the imperial Russian government would follow the German example and encourage emigration to ease social and ethnic tensions and promote the move of undesired population groups. Paradoxically, even in the case of its Jewish citizens, the empire never officially legalized or encouraged emigration.⁵⁰ People were instead seen as a resource that might settle the vast, sparsely populated lands in the Asian parts of the empire. As Leslie Page Moch and Lewis Siegelbaum have demonstrated, subjects from the European parts of the empire indeed settled in the far eastern territories of the empire in great numbers.⁵¹ As a result, in the Russian Empire, even decades after the official emancipation of serfs in 1861, emigration of ethnic Russians remained at a low level, and emigration of other groups occurred mostly clandestinely, even if they risked arrest. Even more surprisingly, returning migrants faced tremendous financial and bureaucratic obstacles—even if they had left the country legally. Exemptions were only made for the few thousand Russian and Eastern Slavic peasants repatriated.⁵² On the eve of World War I, Lithuanian peasants returned from abroad at 28.83 percent.⁵³ Because they faced not only poverty but outright ethnic discrimination, the rate of Jewish returnees was much lower.⁵⁴

As Eric Lohr has pointed out, these policies came at a high cost and faced opposition even from within the government.⁵⁵ Government officials claimed that among the emigrants were many qualified workers in their most productive age, creating a phenomenon later described as “brain drain.” The Ministry of War also insisted that emigration would weaken the military staffing, with young men leaving the country before they fulfilled their service. However, the restrictive policies did not hinder people from emigrating clandestinely. As we have seen in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, most emigrants who crossed the border this way succeeded by bribing border guards or enlisting the help of smugglers.⁵⁶

Still, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs gradually “led the way toward de facto legalization of [the emigration of] some groups.”⁵⁷ In 1892, it legalized the operations of the Jewish Colonization Association. The organization established over four hundred branch offices by 1910 to assist Jewish people with their emigration plans and provide a more affordable passport service and train tickets to the border.⁵⁸ However, because of administrative and financial obstacles, official permission to leave the country remained out of reach for many prospective emigrants.

Not only was the official authorization in the form of a foreign passport expensive but it also required “permissions from several layers of the bureaucracy”; unlike today, the Russian passports of the time were not necessarily meant to facilitate travel but rather to control and to limit movement.⁵⁹ The difficulties in obtaining a passport translated into the results of a contemporary study from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The agency estimated that about 90 percent of emigrants crossed the border illegally.⁶⁰ We have already encountered Kazimir Seniunas’s risk-taking border crossing. Another account we have is of Alexander Harkavy, originally from Nowogrudok in the Grodno Province, who was nineteen years old when he left the Russian Empire in 1882. He was a member of the Am Olam movement, an organization that sought to renew life in agriculture and focused on emigration to America. Instead of establishing an Am Olam community in the US, he achieved fame as an important lexicographer, a pioneering linguist of Yiddish, and an activist for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. In retrospect, he described his route across the border in 1882 as follows:

Figure 6.2. Advertisement for the M. Wolsztein travel agency, selling transatlantic tickets. Alleged unofficial emigration agency, ca. 1908. Courtesy of Central Archives of Historical Records Warsaw, AGAD, zespół 247, sygn. 723, 138.

Our first destination was a small city in Lithuania near the Prussian border. We arrived there after noon, and turned in at a hotel outside the city. There we found a Jew engaged in border crossing. . . . We contracted with him to cross us into Prussia at a price of three rubles a head. Toward evening the man brought a large wagon that brought us as far as the border district. There we got off the wagon, and the man left us alone. He went off to bargain on our behalf with one of the district’s residents. No sooner did he leave than we began to fear for our lives. We were terrified that army border guards would see and catch us. After an hour, our border crosser returned with a Christian man and both quietly ordered us to come along. Trembling mightily we followed them. They led us into Prussia. The border area was filled with wells of water and slime, and we grew impatient at our pace. Finally, after wandering about for half an hour, we came to the city of Eydtkuhnen in Prussia. The short time had seemed to us like an eternity. When told by the men that we were no longer in Russia, our joy knew no bounds.⁶¹

After twenty-four hours in Eydtkuhnen, Harkavy and his group took the train to Hamburg, then a boat to Hartlepool in northeastern England. From there, they took a train to Liverpool (250 kilometers) to embark on a fifteen-day-long transatlantic passage to Philadelphia.⁶²

As we have seen in the case of Seniunas, not all border crossers were as lucky as Harkavy. When Russian border guards obtained permission to use their guns to hinder people from crossing, smugglers and emigrants alike, they routinely shot and wounded individuals.⁶³ Police regularly arrested people without proper documentation. In the years preceding the First World War, the Verzhbolovo railroad police minutes frequently referred to people who “attempted to flee abroad clandestinely.”⁶⁴ In one of their repeated attempts to crack down on people traffickers, Russian police translated the Lithuanian letter from Kazimir Seniunas to his father in 1904. In the letter, Seniunas urges his father to inform the authorities about the shady practices of one Iankel, whom the authorities identified as “Jew Iankel Girshev Rotman,” who “secretly smuggled emigrants across the border and delivered them to America.”⁶⁵ The administration banished him from the border district for three years.

People traffickers and bribed border guards were collaborating in the emigration business. As police reports of 1909–1910 show, many times low-ranking Russian border guards let people pass for small bribes.⁶⁶ Measures against these operations were usually short-lived or fueled by special interests. In Verzhbolovo in 1903, Sergei Miasoedov filed an extensive report on the border crossings in his operational area. He had been deputy head of the Verzhbolovo gendarmes since 1894 and was responsible for the security of the regional section of the Warsaw–St. Petersburg Railroad but also assisted the border guard.⁶⁷ He argued that the situation was unacceptable: one to two hundred people crossed the border illegally every day. Miasoedov pointed at the “wholesale corruption of the local Russian authorities,” bribed not only by people traffickers but also by steamship companies.⁶⁸ In his view, only a radical change in the emigration policy would improve this situation: legalizing emigration and creating easier access to passports.

Not surprisingly, this was not a selfless, courageous report. For example, by denouncing the Braunshtein brothers’ semi-illegal immigration business in Verzhbolovo, Miasoedov pretended to end their virtual monopoly on steamship ticket sales and their organizing of cross-border smuggling of prospective emigrants. However, at the same time, he wanted to support his friends and their businesses, which were suffering from the heavy competition. While holding stakes in the emigration business himself, Miasoedov had a vested interest in smoother border crossings.⁶⁹

Transmigrants: Prussian Authorities and Jewish Aid Committees

The difficulties of prospective emigrants did not end on the Prussian side of the border. In 1881, the authorities were initially reluctant to let Jews from the Russian Empire cross their borders without proper identification. At that point, the newly established German Central Committee for Russian-Jewish Refugees (Deutsches Zentralkomitee für die Russischen Juden) in Berlin advocated for the admittance of refugees and allocated the necessary funds. After 1901, a Help Committee of German Jews (Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden) arranged for even more effective assistance.⁷⁰ These committees formed a European transnational support network dating back to 1860 and the foundation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris. As part of a “transnational civil society,” this organization played a significant role in coordinating and financing aid for those of Jewish faith throughout the recurring migration crises.⁷¹

Jewish Germans, only recently emancipated, had two motives for establishing these committees. First, they felt a strong obligation to assist their fellow believers. Second, they feared being identified with the poor and persecuted Jews from the Russian Empire, the so-called Ostjuden. Close identification with this “Other” might have endangered their precarious status amid rising antisemitism and xenophobia, at a time when the government tried in vain to Germanize its ethnically mixed eastern borderlands. As a result, the Prussian government perceived immigrants and seasonal laborers from abroad as a threat to “Germanness.”⁷² In 1885, Prussia even deported citizens from the Habsburg and Russian Empires, who often had inhabited the rural areas of Prussia for decades (see chap. 5). They were primarily poor seasonal workers and Polish or Jewish “unwelcome strangers,” as Jack Wertheimer has put it.⁷³ For many German nationalist politicians, the reestablishment of law and order in the country’s “ethnically endangered” East would meet the goal of maintaining a clear-cut line between the Self and the ethnic Other; “Germany’s eastern border was [thus] a central location for the construction of the German nation,” as Sebastian Conrad tellingly stated.⁷⁴

To navigate this unfriendly political atmosphere, Jewish Germans took over the financial burden of accommodating Jewish migrants from the Russian Empire. They defended the migrants’ rights and arranged for their speedy emigration.⁷⁵ In 1881, in Eydtkuhnen, Jewish and Christian inhabitants established a local branch of the German Central Committee. If one believes the source, its first chairman was “Christian banker Gudovius [Gudowius] . . . a respectable and patriotic man.”⁷⁶ In May 1882, he guaranteed the orderly transportation of Russian Jews from Eydtkuhnen to the ports in the face of the Prussian border guards, whose policy until then had been to prevent those without a passport from crossing the border.

Now the Prussian authorities modified their earlier stance as to “illegal immigrants” and assumed a more pragmatic attitude. Government documents mention several reasons for this policy shift. First of all, the humanitarian aspect was an important one since foreign journalists and government representatives started reporting from the Russian Empire itself and increasingly from the border checkpoints, thus possibly hurting Germany’s image abroad.⁷⁷ Second, with the aid committees’ financial guarantees for the emigrants’ journey to America—often backed by international donors—the local authorities’ main fear of thousands of non-German paupers settling within their jurisdiction was baseless. Third, the Prussian minister of the interior was fully aware that it was virtually impossible to successfully control the Prussian-Russian border without a costly increase in the number of border police. Finally, Prussian State Railroads and German shipping companies had a financial interest in transporting prospective emigrants. As a result, in 1882, the ministry made the following provision: those without passports were allowed to enter Germany if they could show financial means sufficient to pay for the transatlantic passage.⁷⁸ Henceforth, the new policy was to let emigrants from the Russian Empire into the country, register them at the border railroad stations, and send them directly to the ports.⁷⁹

The aid committees raised funds among the Jewish community and beyond to support the purchase of tickets for the migrants’ transatlantic passage. We must keep in mind that emigration was a costly enterprise.⁸⁰ Therefore, initially, it was not the poorest Russian subjects that could afford it. Not surprisingly, many emigrants (like Kazimir Seniunas) ran out of money at the border after paying for the illegal border crossing and the transatlantic passage. The aid committees’ support at the border was thus desperately needed to prevent a humanitarian crisis. Now, even impoverished Russian Jews did not have to fear deportation and could obtain steamship tickets—given they passed the health inspection at the border. While non-Jewish emigrants like Lithuanians were less privileged in support networks, they were still let through if they possessed a steamer ticket.

BIG BUSINESS AND MEDICAL CONTROL: THE RAILROAD, SHIPPING COMPANIES, AND POLICIES OF EXCLUSION AND INCLUSION

For emigrants from the Russian Empire who had made their way to the first German railroad station, the Prussian railroad administration arranged special trains to Hamburg and Bremen and even granted discounts on groups of at least thirty travelers. In May 1882, around one hundred refugees per day continued their journey from Eydtkuhnen to Hamburg. At the time, the local aid committee resolved the Prussian authorities’ concerns that transmigrants could introduce contagious diseases. They sent their “board member Dr. Weintraub” to Verzhbolovo, where the doctor examined the transmigrants and rejected those deemed sick.⁸¹

Subsequently, migration became a veritable business for the Prussian state and private enterprises. Emigrants spent their money on fourth-class Prussian State Railroad tickets, paid for lodging at the border stations, and, finally, paid for tickets with German steamship companies. In Eydtkuhnen, the “honest Christian banker” Mr. Gudovius not only was a member of the local aid committee but also was involved in the emigration solicitation business and sent his agents to the Russian Empire, offering services as emigration facilitators. Since this business was officially illegal, they faced the possibility of arrest, fines, and even deportation to Siberia.⁸² As Tara Zahra has demonstrated, occasional spectacular arrests occurred not only in the Russian Empire but also in the Habsburg realm.⁸³

However, the standard approach was to let both the Russian and Prussian authorities take part in the business—be it symbolic fines paid to officials or outright bribes of border guards so they would ignore what was taking place in their sector. Thus, as Ruth Leiserowitz has pointed out, in the “East Prussian liberal transit space, . . . there were many ways to make money.”⁸⁴ The sheer numbers for Eydtkuhnen support this statement. From November 1895 to November 1896, 13,232 emigrants passed through the town.⁸⁵

Hamburg and Bremen were essential destinations for these transmigrants. Both cities already had good reputations regarding care and legal protection for emigrants. In 1851, thirty years before the mass migration from Eastern Europe started, a private initiative established the Hamburg-based Society for the Protection of Emigrants. Its main task was to provide the then predominantly German emigrants with information about affordable lodging, transportation options, and possible destinations in the United States. The society managed to ban the so-called runners from the railroad stations, who tried to sell the arriving emigrants overpriced tickets and accommodation.⁸⁶ In 1855, the Senate of Hamburg set up a Committee of Emigration, placing the existing information centers under their control and supporting closer collaboration with the police.⁸⁷ With this system in place, many emigrants did not embark on the less expensive transatlantic steamers from other northern European ports. Contrarily, they started their transatlantic journey in Hamburg or Bremen, where the HAPAG (Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft) and the Norddeutscher Lloyd operated. Beginning in the 1860s, the two steamship companies set up a network of representatives (agents) in popular migration regions and at the border stations to recruit prospective emigrants. While German emigration peaked in 1882 (250,000) and afterward declined, HAPAG and Lloyd turned their interest to emigrants from eastern Europe. Annual migration from the Russian Empire stood at 1,000 in 1870 and rose to 21,000 in 1882 and 61,000 in 1892. In 1907, it reached its peak, with 258,000 people, accounting for almost one-fifth of the overall immigration to the US. In 1906–1907, HAPAG and Lloyd held nearly 20 percent of the share of total US immigration.⁸⁸

In July 1892, with an ever-growing stream of migrants arriving in Hamburg, the HAPAG opened migrant hostels next to the “America Quay.” Emigrant trains no longer had to stop in the city but went directly to the port.⁸⁹ Accounts of emigrants depict the living conditions in the hostels as unacceptable at times. For example, Rose Gollup recalled the lack of food during her family’s one-week stay in Hamburg.⁹⁰ On the other hand, as Mary Antin reported, there was a kosher kitchen in place, and inscriptions within the hostel were not only in German but also in Yiddish.⁹¹ Despite the less-than-ideal situation, most transmigrants obtained mandatory medical certificates proving that they had successfully passed the control station and were admitted for transit.⁹²

Health Control: Public Health Concerns, Ethnic and Social Exclusion

Other obstacles could occur for the small number of emigrants who left the Russian Empire legally. Mary Antin’s family possessed a passport and did not have to sneak over the border at night.⁹³ As we have seen in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, in April 1894, her family was stopped for medical reasons. Fearing that poor migrants might carry diseases, the German authorities forced them to exchange their third-class steamship tickets for second-class tickets. This medical selection process combined ethnic and social stereotypes, including the idea of a “public health menace”—a trope popular with American and European antisemites.⁹⁴

Remarkably, the Antin family’s coerced stop at the Russian-German border was linked to policies shaped in the United States. The US Immigration Acts of 1882 and 1891 introduced increasingly restrictive health and social controls for immigrants, barring sick people and so-called paupers from entering the country. Upon boarding the steamship in Europe, each prospective immigrant to the US had to obtain a clean bill of health issued by certified doctors.

The Ram family from the Kaunas region is another example among millions. This Jewish family consisted of twenty-nine-year-old Tesse; her thirty-two-year-old husband, Leib; their three-year-old son, Chaim; and their newborn daughter, Neche.⁹⁵ On May 11, 1892, Hamburg doctors Dr. Romann and Dr. Müller examined their state of health and permitted them on board the steamship Moravia as steering passengers no. 402–405. The 813 immigrants in steering class, among them many families, with a total of 119 children, hailed from all over east central Europe and Germany. On May 26, 1892, the Ram family reached the immigration inspection station on Ellis Island, which had opened on January 1 of that year.⁹⁶ Here, the family passed their final medical control. This new federal screening center was the successor to the New York State–run Castle Garden.⁹⁷ Whereas authorities controlled first- and second-class passengers aboard the incoming ships in New York Harbor, steerage passengers passed through Ellis Island, turning it into an American icon and an important symbol representing the dreams of millions of immigrants.⁹⁸

These medical controls were based on the Immigration Law of 1891, in which the federal government took complete authority over immigration. Henceforth, federal officials and the Public Health Service (PHS) inspected and occasionally turned prospective immigrants away. The PHS created three categories of diseases that were grounds for barring immigrants, with the contagious eye infection trachoma being the most common. However, most immigrants with diagnosed conditions finally entered the United States after receiving medical treatment.⁹⁹ This is true for Kazimir Seniunas, who was mentioned at the beginning of the chapter (figuring as Kasimir Sedunin in the ship manifest). He was held for six days in the hospital before finally being admitted to the United States on June 1, 1903.¹⁰⁰

The rejection of those who are (supposedly) in poor health is a long-standing motive at borders across the globe. While medical control has gained in importance during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, it was not the first global health crisis to affect mobility on a massive scale. In 1892, a cholera outbreak spread from Afghanistan across Asia and into European Russia, fostered by new railroad lines and increased mobility in the Russian Empire. As a countermeasure, the Prussian government sealed off the border; starting on July 18, it sent transmigrants bound for Hamburg or Bremen in sealed trains directly to barracks in the ports.

For the Russian Empire, 1891 and 1892 were peak years of emigration, caused by famine and the expulsion of Jews from Moscow. As Richard Evans has shown in Death in Hamburg, it is possible that, unwittingly, immigrants brought the cholera pathogen with them. Despite medical examinations and the quarantine of prospective emigrants in barracks, inadequate sanitary conditions and the hot summer weather favored the spread of the epidemic.¹⁰¹ However, it was first and foremost an outdated water supply system and poor decision-making by the Hamburg authorities that triggered the cholera outbreak of summer 1892, claiming some 8,609 victims.¹⁰² Nonetheless, blaming transmigrants from the Russian Empire for the outbreak was convenient. This stereotype was widespread in the United States, where antisemites portrayed Jews as unclean, unhealthy, and disease prone. This was despite statistics indicating that “Jews had the second-lowest death rate of thirteen ethnic groups” residing in New York.¹⁰³ Other evidence refuting the racist medical argument against emigrants originated in Bremen. In the early 1890s, the number of emigrants embarking from this port was similar to that of Hamburg, However, because of the city’s modern water supply system and early medical precautions, only six people lost their lives to the cholera epidemic.¹⁰⁴

For transmigrants from the Russian Empire, the cholera outbreak of 1892 had yet another implication. When the Hamburg epidemic had fully unfolded, the authorities knowingly admitted sick persons aboard the steamers to America when quarantine would have been the proper measure. The easiest way to do so was to provide them with clean bills of health. In May 1892, the Ram family made it to the United States safe and sound aboard the Moravia. However, when this same vessel returned to New York from Hamburg in August 1892, twenty-two people died of cholera before even reaching North America. Several more steamers followed, with emigrants passing away on board before the authorities finally halted the operations. As was the case of the outbreak in Hamburg, most probably contaminated drinking water spread the disease aboard the vessels.¹⁰⁵ As a result, the US government quarantined all incoming ships for twenty days and then brought the admittance of immigrants from Europe to a standstill. These policies lasted until February 1893 and led to a dramatic decline in immigration to the United States.¹⁰⁶ At this point, the emigration ports of Hamburg and Bremen had to deal with thousands of stranded migrants and chose to seal off their city borders.

In this context, the Prussian state accommodated a growing number of transmigrants and consequentially tried to prevent further migration across its eastern borders. The Ministry of the Interior appointed a commissioner for health-related issues in the border regions and sent military personnel to protect the frontier that was temporarily closed on August 29—that is, it was closed for those holding third- or fourth-class tickets or no ticket at all, implementing a social selection of sort.¹⁰⁷

Not only the transmigrants and the port and border cities faced massive challenges relating to stagnating emigration. The Hamburg- and Bremen-based transatlantic steamship companies complained about a financial loss of 8–9 million marks in 1892; the Prussian railroads feared an additional loss of 2 million marks.¹⁰⁸ When the Senate of Hamburg sealed off the border with Prussia, HAPAG faced an enormous decline. Those migrants who were already inside Prussia switched to the port of Bremen. Hamburg finally lifted the blockade in November 1893, after HAPAG threatened to move its business away.¹⁰⁹

In his research on the privatization of Prussia’s Eastern Border Inspection, Tobias Brinkmann holds that in the mid-1890s, the two companies effectively took over migration control from the Prussian state.¹¹⁰ The HAPAG’s Jewish German director Albert Ballin played the leading role in this deal; he “was one of the chief architects of a hugely profitable and innovative transport system.”¹¹¹ In negotiations with the Prussian government after the cholera outbreak of 1892, he guaranteed that the shipping companies would take care of the health screening at the border, rejecting those who would rather not pass the American health control and who would thus be returned to Europe at the companies’ expense. Also, the shipping companies agreed to admit only those migrants who held a ticket for a transatlantic passage and possessed sufficient funds to support themselves. In exchange, the German government granted the two companies a quasi monopoly over the transatlantic passage. In 1892, they established a consortium with British lines, the Continental Pool. In 1908, they even fixed the percentage of passengers for each participating company.¹¹²

As for Mary Antin and her family, they resumed their emigration by train. They had to pass through a control station in Berlin-Ruhleben. This station was erected in 1892 as one of the results of the agreement between the Prussian government and the shipping companies who paid for it. Initially, there were three barracks with beds for two hundred emigrants each. Conveniently, in an adjacent building, agents of the shipping companies sold their tickets. In a separate building, there were showers and disinfection facilities; a sick ward for quarantining migrants had space for twenty-four people. To facilitate orientation within the station, authorities mounted information signs “in the Hungarian, Slovak, Polish, and Hebrew language”—the latter’s indication being evidence of the journalists’ ignorance of the prevailing Yiddish language.¹¹³ During peak migration, the shipping companies ordered up to two special daily trains to transport the transmigrants from Berlin to the ports.¹¹⁴

Figure 6.3. Transmigrants from the Russian Empire at Berlin-Ruhleben control station, ca. 1895. Richard Nordhausen (illustrations: W. Zehme), “Der Auswandererbahnhof in Ruhleben,” Die Gartenlaube 9 (1895): 140. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q19155442#/media/File:Auswandererbahnhof_Ruhleben_-_Wartesaal,_Zehme_1895.jpg. Public domain. Accessed July 3, 2023.

With the erection of the control station, the Berlin municipality resolved yet another alleged issue repeatedly mentioned in newspaper articles and official reports. When transmigrants waited for connecting trains, they congested already heavily frequented train stations in the city center, creating a source of friction among the local population. In addition, the public feared the “constant danger . . . of contagious diseases, like smallpox, epidemic typhus, etc.”¹¹⁵ In Ruhleben, authorities could easily maintain control and keep the transmigrants separate from the city’s inhabitants, thus enforcing a sanitized border within the country. This fits into the pattern of social separation we observed in the example of other railroad stations. In the case of the transmigrants, the railroad companies erected yet another barrier between the “Self” and the “Other.”

Mary Antin described Ruhleben as “some type of prison,” where every “order had to be obeyed.”¹¹⁶ The control station’s personnel ordered the Antin family to take a shower, and they disinfected their luggage with steam—at a price of two marks per person.¹¹⁷ On the same day, a train brought the family to Hamburg, where they stayed nine days in the emigration hostel. After a two weeks transatlantic journey, they finally arrived in Boston and reunited with Mary’s father.¹¹⁸

Eydtkuhnen and Other Border Stations: European “Ellis Islands”

The shipping companies got an even firmer grip on transmigrants’ trajectories in the following years. Following a decree of the Prussian secretary of the interior in 1895, the HAPAG and Lloyd companies erected additional control stations at the Prussian-Russian railroad border stations in Crottingen (Kretinga), Prostken (Prostki), Illowo (Iłowo), Otłoczyn, and Eydtkuhnen, where the initial screening of emigrants took place “according to American access rules.”¹¹⁹ In exchange for their financial commitment, the Prussian government agreed to let the HAPAG and the Lloyd accept only those transmigrants into the country who promised to buy their steamship tickets. The control stations consisted of a main building, a medical building, a ward, and restrooms. Passengers had to await disinfection in a waiting room. Even before getting undressed for the disinfecting shower, they had to present themselves in the bureau of either the Lloyd or the HAPAG and obtain or verify their tickets.¹²⁰ During the screening process, walls and guarded gates hindered the migrants from leaving the control station, thus making them de facto detainees of the shipping companies.¹²¹

Between 1903 and 1906, an even more devastating series of anti-Jewish pogroms shook the Russian Empire. This was during a time of economic depression, revolutionary upheavals, and the unpopular Russo-Japanese War. Antisemitic movements gained the upper hand, and politicians successfully blamed Jews for the unrest. The Kishinev pogrom in 1903 started a series of violent anti-Jewish attacks that soon spread across almost all provinces of the empire, leaving over two thousand Jewish citizens dead and many more wounded and deprived of their livelihood.¹²²

As a result, an even more significant number of people left their homeland. Those emigrants from the northern and central part of the Pale of Settlement made their way across the border to East Prussia, soon creating dramatic situations at the border checkpoints, railroad stations, and the existing control stations. Local Jewish communities failed to cope with the growing number of impoverished fellow believers. As a result, Königsberg Jews established a local branch of the Berlin-based Help Committee of German Jews. Again, these organizations raised funds, established a shelter, and assisted prospective emigrants who either did not possess the necessary funds to continue their journey or got into trouble with local authorities.¹²³ In August 1904, the social democratic newspaper Vorwärts published an article criticizing the unfair treatment of eastern European emigrants and the monopoly of the German steamship companies in the emigration business.¹²⁴ At the end of 1904, because of the growing critique concerning the treatment of Jewish transmigrants, the help committees organized an international conference in Frankfurt am Main to coordinate the efforts of the different European organizations to better protect emigrating Jews.¹²⁵

In 1906, the Information Bureau of the Jewish Colonization Association sent a representative, J. Teplitzki, to report on the conditions at the border in Eydtkuhnen. Up to ten thousand people a month passed through the border town; sometimes the crossing could take several days.¹²⁶ Teplitzki reported as follows:

At the gate of the inspection station, which is always closed, stands a policeman. After passing through the gate, one enters a long, narrow corridor between very high fences; only then does one arrive at the station yard. The inspection station building is small, old and made of planks. It consists of three equal parts: one of them for new emigrants who have not undergone the medical examination and have been found healthy. Emigrants who are found to be ill are sent back or taken to a detention camp in the same yard. The inner part of the building is also divided into three sections: at the two ends are bathrooms for men and women, and in the middle section there is a device for disinfecting luggage.¹²⁷

A first medical examination had already been carried out in Verzhbolovo; yet another followed in Eydtkuhnen, rejecting those would not pass the US immigration control and would have to be sent back to Europe at the expense of the shipping companies.¹²⁸ In peak migration times, the living conditions inside the station would deteriorate rapidly. In 1909, Der yidisher emigrant gave an account of overcrowded and dirty quarters with two or three people sharing one bed.¹²⁹ Despite many critiques, the shipping companies did not substantially improve the situation. German government officials inspected the station too infrequently, and most transmigrants were either scared or incapable of adequately communicating in German and therefore could not voice their complaints.¹³⁰

With the health-certificate system in force, most emigrants registered at one of the control stations to continue their emigration by train to Bremen or Hamburg. On busy days, the roads leading to these stations were crowded with people walking there on foot and carrying their few belongings.¹³¹ After 1895, the control stations in Eydtkuhnen and nine other border crossings de facto served as remote control points for American immigration regulation. As a result, most rejected emigrants were turned away in Europe and not at American ports. In 1909, 2.4 percent of the three hundred thousand emigrants were denied at the German border stations. In addition, more would not be admitted on the ships in Hamburg or Bremen. By contrast, in the same year, the US Public Health Service rejected just 1.03 percent of all immigrants at the US borders.¹³²

CONCLUSION

Emigrants from the Russian Empire add to the multiple mobilities we have observed so far. While they traveled on the same tracks as tourists or freight, they did so under different circumstances.

The examples of Kazimir Seniunas and the Ram and Antin families show how the Ostbahn served as an intermediary or nonhuman actor, facilitating mass emigration. For hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Russian Empire, the East Prussian entangled borderscape was “a large-scale transitional space,” as Ruth Leiserowitz has accurately put it.¹³³

For those prospective emigrants who successfully passed the border and health inspection, Eydtkuhnen was already halfway to America and worth remembering—a European Ellis Island and an important rite de passage. In fact, Eydtkuhnen and Ellis Island were two termini of a transatlantic corridor that the transmigrants were not supposed to quit during their path. To enter, cross, and leave this corridor, people had to deal with various layers of government agencies, transportation companies, and nongovernmental organizations, all of whom held political, regulative, financial, and humanitarian stakes in the emigration business.

The imposed restrictions were much tighter for third- and fourth-class passengers than for first- and second-class passengers. In addition, emigrants had to navigate sanitized borders. To reach North America, migrants had no choice but to obey the rules of medical, social, and ethnic inclusion and exclusion, imposed transnationally by the United States and Germany, as well as by railroad and steamship companies.

NOTES

1.AGAD, zespół 247, sygn. 246, 6–8. I am grateful to my colleague Vasilijus Safronovas for the translation from contemporary colloquial Lithuanian to modern English. Alissa Klots helped me with the Russian Empire’s officials’ Russian translation.

2.Yudkoff, “Translation of Mary Antin’s Yiddish Letter,” 41–42. This article contains the English translation of Mary Antin’s original 1894 letter, sent from the US to her uncle in Polatsk/Russian Empire. Antin translated, edited, and published several extended versions of this letter before publishing it as a widely read book: Antin, Promised Land. On the role of the letter for historical research refer to Rüthers, “Between Threat and Hope.”

3.Seniunas’s name appears as “Kasimir Sedunin” or “Sedmin” in the ship manifest. Refer to NA WDC, record group 85, Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1897–1957, publication T715, roll 360, image 134 (list W), position 3. Available on http://ancestry.com.

4.For an overview, refer to Moch, Moving Europeans, 147–160.

5.On restrictions on and discrimination against Asian immigrants to the United States, refer to McKeown, Melancholy Order. For a more recent, global perspective, refer to Ngai, Chinese Question.

6.Zolberg, Nation by Design.

7.McKeown, “Global Migration,” 156.

8.Notable exceptions are Alroey, “Out of the Shtetl”; Brinkmann, “Why Paul Nathan Attacked Albert Ballin”; Szajkowski, “Sufferings of Jewish Emigrants.”

9.Klessmann, “Long-Distance Migration,” 102–103; Bade, Land oder Arbeit? On the railroad’s role for emigration from Germany, refer to Roth, Das Jahrhundert der Eisenbahn, 142–150.

10.On the 1897 census, 99.34 percent of Jewish believers in the northwestern part of the Russian Empire indicated Yiddish as their mother tongue. Refer to Levin, “Social, Economic, Demographic and Geographical Characteristics of Lithuanian Jewry,” 130–131.

11.The first comprehensive census in the region dates to 1897. At the time, the Suwałki Province had a slight majority of Lithuanian speakers, followed by Polish and Yiddish speakers (23 percent and 10 percent, respectively). Refer to the data compiled for this region in Ernst Ferdinand Müller, Statistisches Handbuch für Kurland und Litauen, 24–25.

12.Müller, 13.

13.Troinitskii, Pervaia Vseobshchaia perepis′, 80–83. The census takers asked for the mother tongue.

14.For basic information on the Kaunas Jewish population of the time, refer to Levin, “Kaunas.”

15.Balkelis, Making of Modern Lithuania, 2.

16.Kiaupa, History of Lithuania, 250–253.

17.The book smugglers have an elevated status in Lithuanian national history. See Leiserowitz, Sabbatleuchter und Kriegerverein, 132–137.

18.Balkelis, Making of Modern Lithuania, 8.

19.On the development of the Lithuanian national movement, refer to Kiaupa, History of Lithuania, 263–302; Balkelis, Making of Modern Lithuania.

20.Eidintas, Lithuanian Emigration to the United States, 27. The numbers for the previous years were hovering around 20–25 percent.

21.Eidintas, 22–25.

22.Eidintas, 60.

23.Eidintas, 58, 61. In 1899, US immigration authorities introduced the category of “Lithuanian” in the statistics where immigrants could self-identify with a “people or race” they belonged to. All numbers on Lithuanian-speaking immigrants to the US are estimates. Even after 1899, some Lithuanian speakers did not necessarily identify as Lithuanians.

24.Slezkine, Jewish Century, 114.

25.Slezkine, 115–116.

26.Slezkine, 116.

27.Leiserowitz, “To Go to or through Prussia?,” 233–236.

28.Levin, “Social, Economic, Demographic and Geographical Characteristics of Lithuanian Jewry,” 156–157.

29.Ambrulevičiūtė, “Economic Relations between Jewish Traders and Christian Farmers.” The share was 92.1 percent in 1879, 89.2 percent in 1897, and 96.5 percent in 1911. Statistic on p. 75.

30.Ambrulevičiūtė, 82–83.

31.Staliūnas, “Lithuanian Antisemitism in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” 139–144.

32.The Pale of Settlement comprised all territories acquired from Poland in the three partitions and included additional territories on the northern shore of the Black Sea. For maps on the Pale and the spread of the 1881–1882 pogroms, refer to Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882, xxi–xxiv. It is impossible to indicate the exact number of pogrom victims. Frankel mentions forty killed; John Klier puts the number at fifty (including some perpetrators). Refer to Frankel, “Crisis of 1881–82;” 10; Klier, “Pogroms,” 1377.

33.At the end of 1880, a crowd smashed the windows of shops owned by Jewish citizens in Berlin. In July 1881, eight hundred to one thousand people participated in a riot in Pomeranian Neustettin (Szczecinek), smashing windows of about twenty-one Jewish shops; riots in Konitz (Chojnice) and other places followed. Refer to Weinberg, Pogroms and Riots, 73–75.

34.Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882, 255.

35.Joseph, Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910, 60–63.

36.Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882, 267.

37.Kowalski, Przestępstwa emigracyjne w Galicji; Pollack, Kaiser von Amerika.

38.Weeks, “Jews and Others in Vilna-Wilno-Vilnius,” 88.

39.Zolberg, Nation by Design, 185.

40.Zolberg, 204.

41.Zolberg, 20; Salter, Rights of Passage, 2, 25–26, 102–104.

42.Zolberg, Nation by Design, 131–132.

43.For a concise description of the railroad system’s influence on migration in both the United States and Europe, refer to Roth, Das Jahrhundert der Eisenbahn, 142–153.

44.Hibbard and Gates, History of the Public Land Policies, 244–245, 255–257. For the German-language brochure of 1865, refer to Illinois Central Railroad Company, Ein wegweiser zu den Illinois central-eisenbahn-ländereien.

45.Slezkine, Jewish Century, 117.

46.Eidintas, Lithuanian Emigration to the United States, 30. As Eidintas has pointed out, many Lithuanian speakers were rather indifferent in terms of their nationality, and as a result, they often indicated “Polish” (related to their majority Catholic religion) or “Russian” (related to the state’s name). See Eidintas, 13.

47.Zahra, Great Departure, 112.

48.Torpey, “Leaving: A Comparative View,” 16–17.

49.Bade, “German Emigration to the United States,” 140.

50.On discussions in Jewish and non-Jewish circles on the migration of Jewish subjects within or out of the Russian Empire in the early 1880s, refer to Kel′ner, “Evreiskaia emigratsiia iz Rossii.”

51.Siegelbaum and Moch, Broad Is My Native Land, 16–31.

52.Lohr, “Population Policy and Emigration Policy in Imperial Russia,” 171–173.

53.Eidintas, Lithuanian Emigration to the United States, 67. Numbers combine the years 1895 to 1910.

54.While the rate was much lower, it was not uncommon. See Sarna, “Myth of No Return.”

55.Refer to the discussions within the government as analyzed in Lohr, Russian Citizenship from Empire to Soviet Union, 89–114.

56.Refer to the arrest of Rose Gollup’s father in the early 1890s, in Gollup, “From Russia to the Lower East Side,” 148–149.

57.Lohr, Russian Citizenship from Empire to Soviet Union, 107.

58.Lohr, 107–108.

59.Lohr, 84–85.

60.Lohr, “Population Policy and Emigration Policy in Imperial Russia,” 171.

61.Harkavy, “Chapters from My Life,” 55. For other accounts of clandestine border crossing into Prussia at the beginning of the 1890s, refer to Gollup, “From Russia to the Lower East Side,” 154–155. Hilda Satt Polachek and her family made their way from Włocławek to Thorn, also crossing the border illegally by bribing border guards. See Polacheck, I Came a Stranger, 22–23.

62.Harkavy, “Chapters from My Life,” 56–57.

63.AGAD, zespół 247, sygn. 365.

64.AGAD, zespół 248, sygn. 1220; sygn. 1290; sygn. 1355; sygn. 1457. I would like to thank my Frankfurt colleagues, Anna Gatzke and Andreas Röhr, for their help with transcription.

65.AGAD, zespół 247, sygn. 246, 1–2.

66.AGAD, zespół 247, sygn. 1286.

67.Fuller, Foe Within, 13.

68.Fuller, 23.

69.Fuller, 24. For earlier discussions on how to stop the nonregulated border crossings, refer to Klier, “Kontrabanda liudei.”

70.Refer to Brinkmann, “Managing Mass Migration.”

71.Brinkmann, “Zivilgesellschaft transnational,” 143.

72.On the alleged threat posed by seasonal laborers in Prussia and the role of the railroads, refer to Musekamp, “Saisonale Migration als Bedrohung für den Staat?” For a more general look at the history of foreign laborers in Germany, refer to Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerbeschäftigung in Deutschland.

73.Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers, 1.

74.Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany, 153.

75.Brinkmann, “Zivilgesellschaft transnational,” 138–140.

76.GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 1145, Nr. 114, Bd. 1, 2–3, 53.

77.Refer to the report for the British parliament of 1882, in GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 1145, Nr 114, Bd. 1, 218–139.

78.GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 1145, Nr. 114, Bd. 1.

79.GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 1145, Nr. 114, Bd. 1, 52–57.

80.Guy Alroey puts the average total expenses for an adult at 165 rubles, which in today’s currency would be approximately $1,685. As of 1908, immigrants to the US were required to present $50 (and not $25 as before) to be eligible to enter the country. This procedure led to an average cost of approximately $2,200 in today’s currency. Refer to Alroey, “Out of the Shtetl,” 96–99.

81.GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 1145, Nr. 114, Bd. 1, 56, 73–74, 127, 130; Bd. 2, 10–12, 48–49.

82.For example, between 1907 and 1909, Russian police tracked an emigration agent named Rosenberg across the empire. In 1907, he had been banned from the Kingdom of Poland, but he repeatedly violated this order. See AGAD, zespół 247, sygn. 723.

83.Zahra, Great Departure, 23–63.

84.Leiserowitz, Sabbatleuchter und Kriegerverein, 19, 213.

85.Leiserowitz, 211–219, numbers on p. 214.

86.Wüstenbecker, “Hamburg and the Transit of East European Emigrants,” 223–224.

87.Wüstenbecker, 224.

88.Clapp, Port of Hamburg, 84–85. In 1910, Hapag landed 40,021 cabin passengers and 114,023 steerage passengers in New York; the Lloyd landed 49,307 and 111,517, respectively. Their closest rival, the Cunard Line, transported 37,878 cabin passengers and 93,312 steerage passengers. For an in-depth study of the transatlantic migration business with a focus on shipping companies, refer to Keeling, Business of Transatlantic Migration.

89.Wüstenbecker, “Hamburg and the Transit of East European Emigrants,” 226.

90.Gollup, “From Russia to the Lower East Side,” 155.

91.Yudkoff, “Translation of Mary Antin’s Yiddish Letter,” 51, 53.

92.Brinkmann, “Why Paul Nathan Attacked Albert Ballin,” 60.

93.There is a significant disproportion between the accounts of emigrants leaving Russia illegally and those leaving legally. As a matter of fact, those traveling legally left more written accounts than their compatriots crossing illegally, most probably because of better education and higher income.

94.Kraut, Silent Travelers, 145.

95.The name is transliterated from the Ellis Island immigration records and may differ because of possible misspellings by authorities or fabricated statements by the family itself, who most probably did not possess any official documentation.

96.NA WDC, record group 85, Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820–1897, publication M237, roll 589, images 469, 476, 484. Available online on http://ancestry.com. I am referring to the original scanned documents and not to the transcript, which transliterates the names in an obvious false way and locates Kovno (Kaunas) in Austria.

97.For a concise though popular science history of Ellis Island, please refer to Cannato, American Passage.

98.Zolberg, Nation by Design, 224. The original building burned down in 1897, leading to the subsequent erection of the building as we know it today. Refer to Zolberg, 228.

99.Fairchild, Science at the Borders, 32–41.

100.NA WDC, record group 85, Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1897–1957, publication T715, roll 360, image 514 (list W), position 3.

101.Evans, Death in Hamburg, 279–284.

102.Evans, 290, 294.

103.Kraut, Silent Travelers, 146.

104.Evans, Death in Hamburg, 299–303.

105.Markel, Quarantine!, 93–94, 103, 130.

106.Cannato, American Passage, 85–87.

107.GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 247, Nr. 65; Wüstenbecker, “Hamburg and the Transit of East European Emigrants,” 227–228.

108.Wüstenbecker, “Hamburg and the Transit of East European Emigrants,” 228.

109.Wüstenbecker, 229.

110.Brinkmann, “Why Paul Nathan Attacked Albert Ballin.” For a comparative study on German migration control, refer to Reinecke, Grenzen der Freizügigkeit.

111.Brinkmann, “Why Paul Nathan Attacked Albert Ballin,” 49.

112.Szajkowski, “Sufferings of Jewish Emigrants,” 105. For more information on the pooling of passengers, refer to Keeling, Business of Transatlantic Migration, 63–70, 210–215.

113.B., “Der Auswanderer-Bahnhof in Ruhleben,” 143.

114.Schulz, “Der Auswandererbahnhof Ruhleben”; Hengsbach, “Die Geschichte des Auswandererbahnhofs Ruhleben.”

115.B., “Der Auswanderer-Bahnhof in Ruhleben,” 142.

116.Yudkoff, “Translation of Mary Antin’s Yiddish Letter,” 48.

117.Yudkoff, 48–49.

118.Yudkoff, 53–59.

119.Brinkmann, “Why Paul Nathan Attacked Albert Ballin,” 59.

120.Wüstenbecker, “Hamburg and the Transit of East European Emigrants,” 230–231. Later, additional control stations were erected in Tilsit, Insterburg, Ostrowo, and Posen.

121.Szajkowski, “Sufferings of Jewish Emigrants,” 107.

122.Joseph, “Jewish Immigration to the United States,” 481–485.

123.Jacoby, Jüdisches Leben in Königsberg/Pr., 57–60.

124.Vorwärts, August 3 and 30, 1904, cited in Wüstenbecker, “Hamburg and the Transit of East European Emigrants,” 233.

125.Brinkmann, Migration und Transnationalität, 85.

126.Alroey, “Out of the Shtetl,” 106, 109.

127.J. Teplitzki, “Reisebericht,” January 1907, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, ICA/34c, 6, quoted in Alroey, “Out of the Shtetl,” 107.

128.For a contemporary account of living conditions and medical examinations at the Eydtkuhnen control station, refer to Connolly, “In the Paths of Immigration.”

129.A. A., “Di daytshe control stantsyes,” Der yidisher emigrant 12 (July 15, 1909): 3, quoted in Alroey, “Out of the Shtetl,” 108.

130.Alroey, 109.

131.Szajkowski, “Sufferings of Jewish Emigrants,” 112.

132.Szajkowski, 107. In New York, between 1902 and 1907, US border officials rejected between 0.7 and 1.3 percent of migrants. Refer to Dorothee Schneider, “United States Government and the Investigation of European Migration in the Open Door Era,” 198.

133.Leiserowitz, Sabbatleuchter und Kriegerverein, 16.