A Secret Gift (37 page)

During those toughest of days in 1933, thousands of surgeries were performed across Canton without any prospect of payment—and there was no Medicaid reimbursement. There were many such unheralded heroes, and their names crop up in letter after letter. Among these was Dr. Guy B. Maxwell. He died three years later. Other physicians too were appreciatively mentioned in the B. Virdot letters for tending to those who had no means of paying for their services. Among these were Dr. John H. Underwood and Dr. Zadock Atwell.

Deep into the Depression, Dr. Atwell was overcome by debt, and he and his wife sought to collect from those whom he had treated without payment. Atwell’s wife, May, called upon the homes of those whose babies he had delivered for free. But the families had nothing to pay her with, and Atwell ultimately lost his own home. It was a crushing blow. In 1933, at the time the letters cited his kindness, he was sixty-seven.

BUT FOR THE small acts of kindness by ordinary citizens, whether the dogcatcher, the dairyman, or the doctor, the Depression might well have been insufferable. Every family that endured the Hard Times had a memory of someone who took a chance on them, carried them on credit, or looked past their tattered coats and overalls and treated them as they would have wished to be treated. That was the message B. Virdot sought to send that Christmas, that even those most down on their luck were part of the community and that the well-being of one was of concern to all. It was the message Clyde Romesberg carried with him from the Depression—the fate of his embattled ship rested in the hands of the entire crew.

For Sam Stone, unlikely Santa that he was, the B. Virdot gift was, I believe, a reflection not merely of a Yuletide spirit but of what he had come to believe was part of the character of the nation that had taken him in. In the Old World, no one had been less wanted than the wandering Romanian Jews, but even they had found a home here. Reaching out to the dispossessed was a quintessentially American act, and though Sam never acknowledged that he was himself an immigrant, he often cited the country’s willingness to take in those of other lands. By extending a hand to the needy that Christmas, I believe he was both making a payment on an old debt and participating in a distinctly American rite—that of sharing the bounty of the new land with others.

His faith in America could only have been reaffirmed by the selflessness of the letters addressed to B. Virdot. Many came from those who had little themselves but sought help only for others—neighbors, friends, family. Frances Lindsay, whose husband, James, was a clerk for the Pennsylvania Railroad, hoped B. Virdot would help out their neighbors, the family of Willis and Minnie Evans, who for years had put away every spare penny in the bank only to lose it all when the bank failed. Evans was a carpenter who’d been out of work for three years. Her letter concluded, “folks like us have no reason to ask for help . . . but you can inquire anywhere here and you’ll find these folks ‘All Americans.’ ” So genuine was their concern for others that the Lindsays did not even include their own return address.

T
here was little Sam Stone wanted more than to be a part of his adopted country, but perhaps he did not always understand or appreciate what that required of him. America was a country of laws and processes. It offered a clear path to naturalization. But he had come from a place where the rights of citizenship could be conferred or withdrawn at the state’s whim. Generations could live on the same plot of land, and, in the time it took to sign an edict, be reduced to trespassers and aliens. His early years had taught him to distrust the state. I can’t say with certainty what was in his mind when he chose to create that fictional autobiography. It was clearly unlawful, but it may have had some rationale rooted in the insecurities of his youth. If the state could take away so much with the stroke of a pen, why should he not be able to restore it with the stroke of his own pen?

In 1921, Sam Stone had persuaded suspicious government bureaucrats to issue him a passport. At the time, it seemed a triumph. The matter of his citizenship had been disposed of once and for all, he thought. After all, a passport is proof of citizenship—unless it’s obtained by fraud. For two decades the matter of his citizenship went unquestioned. Sam was living an exemplary American life, a good and loving father and husband, a veteran, a solid provider to his family—immediate and extended—a highly respected member of the community, a man of deep patriotic feeling.

But not even snug little Canton provided safe haven from the events unfolding a world away. In 1940 the specter of another cataclysmic war crept across the Old World. Sam had hoped he had left such horrors behind. Now those same forces threatened to unravel all that he had won—his position, his identity, his honor, and even his freedom.

In June of that the year the United States enacted the Alien Registration Act, or Smith Act, as it was known. Coming on the heels of the annexation of Czechoslovakia and the nonaggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, it criminalized calls for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. But it also required all those of foreign birth over fourteen years of age and residing in America for thirty days or more to register and be fingerprinted. Failure to comply meant prosecution, fines, and up to six months in prison. Those who were found to make false statements on the forms and had been in the country for five years or less faced deportation. The provisions sent a chill through the immigrant community. Within four months of its passage, 4.7 million aliens had registered.

But Sam Stone was not among them. He had let the four-month window come and go, undoubtedly tormented by the dilemma he now faced. It was a situation entirely of his own making. If he continued to ignore the registration requirements and cling to the fallacy of his Pittsburgh birth, he risked being found out, prosecuted, and jailed. But if he came forward and admitted that all the affidavits, birth records, and passports were the products of his own deception, he would have to face possible legal consequences as well as public humiliation.

Either way, the stakes were enormous. How would he explain himself to his three young daughters, to his wife, to the community? And just as weighty, after so many years, would he find himself reduced once again to Sam Finkelstein, the penurious Romanian refugee, the undesirable? There was that word again
—alien
—the word that Romania used to strip the Jews of all rights and legitimacy. Now it was the U.S. government that used the word and threatened to take away all that he had.

It is not clear how much even his wife, Minna, knew. Given her legal acumen and ability to slice through deception, it is likely that she knew at least some elements of the truth. The protective way in which she responded to my questions decades later—her demand that I drop my inquiry—was further evidence that even if she did not know the particulars of Sam’s deception, she knew something was amiss about his past. Whatever she knew would have made her profoundly uncomfortable. She vigorously defended and supported Sam, but she was also a stickler for the truth. When I was five or six, I once told her a lie and was found out. She marched me into the bathroom and washed my mouth out with Ivory soap while lecturing me on the corrupting nature of lies.

And yet, from the correspondence that was discovered among her personal papers in 2009, it is clear that she played a role in counseling Sam and acted as a liaison between him and the lawyers he retained to help him decide a course of action. In 1940, after the four-month registration deadline had passed, Sam retained a Dayton, Ohio, attorney named Samuel Finn. He was a perfect choice—the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and just far enough removed from Canton so as to not attract his neighbors’ attention or suspicion. In the succeeding months Finn would meet privately with the Immigration commissioner exploring Sam’s options, but without revealing

Sam’s identity. The commissioner told him a legitimate passport was itself proof of citizenship. The operative word was
legitimate
.

Apparently unaware of Sam’s innumerable deceptions, Finn attempted to track down the proof that Minna and Sam had provided him documenting Sam’s birth in Pittsburgh. The chief piece of evidence was an official-looking birth certificate, which had been signed April 25, 1921, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The record gives his name as “Sam Stone,” and says that he was born at 29 Gum Street in Pittsburgh on March 9, 1889. His parents are listed as Jacob and Hilda Stone, both born in Russia. It even lists the midwife who delivered him—“H. Sandusky.” Three weeks after his birth, on April 1, 1889, the record indicates that he left America with his parents and returned to Europe. At the bottom of the document appears the name of “J. H. Harkins, Clerk, Department of Public Health, who attests that the record is to be found in the Birth Register.” The record even included the exact site of the original document—volume 376, page 291.

But Pittsburgh authorities informed Sam’s lawyers that there was no such record of his birth on that page or any other page. There was indeed a famous Pittsburgh midwife named Hannah Sandusky, known variously as “Bobba Hannah” (Bobba is Yiddish for “Granny”), “the Angel,” and “the Saint.” The Lithuanian immigrant delivered more than thirty-five hundred babies in Pittsburgh, the last one in 1909 when she was eighty-two. But she had died in November 1913, eight years before Sam submitted the birth certificate. With her death and the absence of any public record, there was no support for the legitimacy of his certificate. Finn and his associates conducted a thorough search of Pittsburgh records and found nothing to bolster Sam’s claim. They apparently were unaware that they had been sent on a fool’s errand. Sam knew full well that his documents were fabricated.

Two decades earlier, in creating this fictional autobiography and the records to support it, he had allowed himself to act out of fear or impatience, or both. Whether he had been spooked by the hysteria of the Red Scare or duped himself into thinking that he could confer citizenship on himself with a drawer full of false documents, I will never know. What is clear is that the decisions he made that had once seemed expedient would later cause him untold anxiety. B. Virdot had been a role he could assume one week and discard the next. He defined that part; it did not define him. That was not so with the tangled autobiography he had created as a young man. What he had authored long ago would not release him from its grip. In middle age and later years it continued to threaten him, to put his public reputation, his stature in the family, and even his personal freedom at risk. By the 1940s, he recognized it for what it was: a Faustian bargain that could come due at a moment’s notice.

It appears that Minna and Sam had a heart-to-heart about what to do. Among Minna’s papers is the alien registration form, filled out in pencil. In it, Sam wrote that he was born in Pittsburgh, but added this revealing sentence: “My family and my personal recollections are these: my parents had emigrated in or about 1888 and during their residence here I was born but having no proof am registering in a desire to comply with the law in any eventuality.” But by then Sam had become hopelessly ensnared in his own scheme. He could not fall back on a faulty memory when he had personally fabricated a fraudulent birth certificate, complete with forged signatures, and then par-layed that into a series of passports and other sworn declarations that were patently false and contradictory. The registration form filled out in pencil was never submitted.

There was now no innocent explanation and no way to invoke confusion or faulty memory as a defense. The record was one of deliberate and calculated deception. At that late date, the web of lies would not admit good-faith error or parental miscommunication. In the end, he fell back on his old strategy: holding fast to the lie. And he got away with it, if you can call living decades in uncertainty and anxiety getting away with it.