My Grandfather Was Welcomed to Pittsburgh by the Group the Gunman Hated
On their second attempt to leave Europe, in 1921, my grandfather and his family spent three days in an outdoor potato cellar. The potatoes don’t seem to have been much help; my grandfather would later recall that they subsisted, for those three days, on stale bread and water. He was 12, or maybe 14—official immigration records conflict with family lore. His father and older brother had already settled in the U.S.; my grandfather, along with his mother and two of his siblings, had left their Ukrainian village once before, but had been caught by the Bolsheviks, jailed, and then returned to their village. This time, having successfully crossed the river into Romania, they were determined to evade that outcome. They left the cellar and traveled mostly across open fields. Eventually they reached a
