The American Millionaire

Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.

From An American in the Making by Marcus Eli Ravage, 1917.

Even an imaginative American, I suppose, must find it very hard to form anything like a just idea of the tremendous adventure involved in the act of immigration. The alien in our midst is too elusive an object for satisfactory study. He changes too rapidly. But yesterday he was a solid citizen in his particular village of Sicily or Rumania, of a piece with his ancestral background, surrounded by friends and kindred, apparently rooted in his native soil. To-day he is adrift in a foreign world, mute and helpless and tragically ridiculous — a soul in purgatory, a human creature cut from its moorings, the most pitiable sight to be met on this earth.

To-morrow? Who knows? To-morrow very probably you will find him a prosperous citizen again, very earnestly devoting himself to some strange — until recently undreamed-of — business, giving orders or taking them, even now perhaps a bit discordant against his new setting, and, except for one or two well-hidden scars, none the worse apparently for his translation. Who shall find the patience to follow him in his tortuous career?

What is surely most amazing is that he should have started out at all. Considering the pangs of separation and the risks that warn and threaten him and beset his path, why, you might ask, should he want to emigrate? Is it the dream of avarice? Yes, in part. And the hope of freedom? Without a doubt. But these are general motives and remote. The far-flung clarion call of American liberty and her promise of equal opportunity are the powerful lodestones that draw all immigrants alike. There are more particular motives than these to spur him on. Even freedom and economic independence have a varying meaning to individual aliens. Station in life, and nationality, and age, all play their part in composing his mental picture of America. And, as in war, so also in emigration, there are always immediate causes as well as remote and general ones.

I have myself been asked hundreds of times why I have come to America, and I trust that there was no malice in the question. As a rule, I have pointed to the usual reasons. I explained that at home in Vaslui, and in Rumania generally, there was very little opportunity for a young man to make anything of himself. My parents had ambitions for me which their clinging, hopeless poverty made impossible of attainment. And I was only a child of sixteen, and I longed for the great world with its rich prizes and its still richer adventures. My soul was thrilled with the dream of conquest and the pious hope of delivering my family from want and oppression. But while all this is true, it was not the whole truth. In fact, I quite omitted from my account the most vital, because it was the most direct, cause of my migration.

The remainder of the truth is that in the year of my departure from Vaslui America had become, as it were, the fashionable place to go to. Hitherto it had been but a name, and by no means a revered name. But suddenly America had flashed upon our consciousness and fanned our dormant souls to flames of consuming ambition. All my relatives and all our neighbors — in fact, everybody who was anybody — had either gone or was going to New York. I call it New York, but you as Americans ought to be informed that the correct spelling is Nev-York, as every refined person in Vaslui knows.

I did not, then, as you see, come alone, to America. I came with the rest of the population of Vaslui. And Vaslui was merely a sort of scouting-party, to be followed directly by the main army. It has probably been forgotten in this country, if indeed it was generally noted at the time, that about the year 1900 there was what, to my eyes, appeared to be a national migration from Rumania to New York, a migration which seemed literally to include well-nigh the whole Rumanian race.

What had so suddenly raised the prestige of New York among the Vasluianders and the Moldavian traveling public generally, I am in an excellent position to relate, for it so happened that the principal agent in this grand scheme of advertising among us the attractions of New York was a not distant relative of my own. I am well aware that such services as his ought not to go unrewarded, and I know that already your curiosity about his identity is getting the better of you, but until a committee of representative New-Yorkers assures me of its appreciation of mine and my countrymen's patronage, I feel in honor bound to respect my kinsman's modesty and to guard his secret. Meantime you shall know him by the name of Couza. Couza is a royal Rumanian cognomen, and my relative, whether by divine gift or forethought, had an unmistakable royal air, at least while he was in Vaslui.

Couza, then, put in an appearance in our town during the winter of 1899, after an absence in America of some fourteen years. For months before, if you had put your ear to the ground, you might have heard the distant rumble of his approach, and Vaslui held not only its ear to the ground, but its breath. It seemed to us that our life had been hitherto dull and common, but that at last it was to be tipped with glory and romance. Couza's brother Jacob became overnight the first citizen of the town, and this reflected glory was shared by all our family.

Those daily letters that Jacob received were inquired after by the whole community. They became, in the truest sense, Vaslui's first newspaper, for they contained the only intelligence we cared to hear about. Now he was embarking at Nev-York, and now he had landed at Havre. A long succession of bulletins reported him at the various capitals and great cities of Europe. He was coming, coming, coming. The air was growing too thick for respiration. On the street, in the market, at the synagogue, we kept asking one another the one question, "When will he arrive?”

At last the long-awaited telegram flashed over us, and I shall never forget my terrible disappointment on learning its message. For weeks I had been training in the boys' chorus which was to welcome the guest on his arrival. And now, at the last moment, he had cold- bloodedly decided to come in on the midnight train. The choral reception had, therefore, to be abandoned. Vaslui must content itself with a mere representative committee of citizens and restrain its pent-up enthusiasm as best it might till the morrow. I have a very vivid recollection of that night of Couza's arrival, for, although I was deprived of a direct share in the reception, I had a partial reward for my disappointment in the reflected splendor that fell upon me through my father. He, being one of the guest's family, was chosen a member of the welcoming committee; and toward two o'clock in the morning he burst into the house trailing clouds of glory from his rare experience.

We had been tossing about for several intolerable hours, wondering whether he ever would get back. No sooner did we hear his key in the door than we leaped up in our beds and greeted him with a chorus of inquiry that nearly frightened him.

"Is he here?" we yelled all together.

"Is he? Well, I should rather say so!" father cried, breathlessly, and still in the dark.

Then followed things amazing. For hours that seemed like brief moments we sat agape, listening to a detailed account of the arrival and a somewhat bewildering word-picture of the personage himself.

"You should see the old boy," my parent began. "It seems only like yesterday when I used to see him in these very streets, a slouchy, unprepossessing youngster, with his toes out at his gaping boot-tips, carrying heavy cans of milk around for his mother. Remember, mamma, he used to bring us our liter every morning before we got our own cow? And do you remember how your brother Samuel never tired of telling us what a dunce the urchin was at school? Ah, this Nev-York must be a wonderful place. Why, I did not know him at all when he stepped off the car, not until Jacob rushed up to him and was followed by the whole cheering lot of us. At first I thought he was a rov [rabbi]; he is so large, and stout, and dignified. He wore a long, black frock-coat and a high hat — just the kind that Reb Sander wears on Saturdays at the services.

“But when I got up nearer to him, I noticed that he was clean-shaven. Would you believe it? He did not even have a mustache. I never saw so many trunks and bags in all my life as they unloaded for him. And jewelry! He had diamonds in his cravat and brilliants on his fingers, and a magnificent gold chain from which hung a great locket stuck full of more diamonds. He is a millionaire, if ever there was one in America."

This was very exciting and altogether astonishing in many ways. It suddenly revealed America to us in a new light; for you must not suppose that we were so ignorant as never to have heard of the place at all. The name Nev-York was, indeed, rather new, and we admired father a good deal for throwing it so glibly into his account. But then you could not expect us to know the whole map of America in detail. Of America, however, we had heard considerable on several occasions. Whenever a Vasluiander went into bankruptcy, and whenever a soldier wearied of the discipline and deserted, it was bruited abroad that he had "run away to America."

There was a female beggar in the town whom mother always singled out for special kindnesses. I used to wonder about her, until one day I learned that she had once been the well-to-do mistress of a home of her own, but that her husband had tired of her and escaped to America. I had thus come to think of the place as a city of refuge, an exile which men fled to only in preference to going to prison.

I had heard of people going to Vienna and Germany and Paris, and even to England for business or pleasure, but no one, to my knowledge, had ever gone to America of his own free will. And of those who went, considering the circumstances of their departure, none ever returned to tell us what it was like, any more than if they had gone to the other world. In fact, a person gone to America was exactly like a person dead. That was why, on those rare occasions when a family followed its breadwinner to that distant land, the whole community turned out, and marched in slow time to the station, and wept loudly and copiously, and remembered the unfortunates in its prayer on the next Saturday.

I said that no one had ever returned from America. But there was one exception; and I mention it here because the individual was destined to become the villain in the piece which I am here transcribing. It was commonly gossiped in Vaslui that Itza Baer, who was hand-in-glove with officialdom, and whom every one feared and flattered as a notorious informer, had years before returned from America, where he must have had a stormy and ignominious career, because whenever anybody ventured to ask him about it, he would merely say that he preferred to serve his term than to live a dog's life in exile, and forthwith change the subject.

This Itza Baer was at first decidedly friendly to the news of Couza's coming. When the time arrived he even went so far as to consent to serve on the committee, and at the station he was, according to father's report, one of the first to greet the arrival. Father went into circumstantial detail in his account of this historic greeting. He said that the rest of the committee drew back a step and stood around in solemn awe while the two Americans exchanged compliments in English.

But the odd thing was that Itza Baer ever after had an ironical smile about his lips and an impish twinkle in his eye when referring to that English conversation. He was never seen speaking to Couza again, except at the temple on the Saturday following the event, and then it was neither in English nor in friendship. A mysterious coldness seemed to have developed between the two men almost from the start; and when Vaslui fell down on its knees and worshiped Couza as the great man he was, Itza Baer's jealousy — for jealousy was all it could be — turned into whispered threats at first, and finally into open hostility.

On the morrow after the arrival I saw him. I saw him on the first of those impressive progresses which were to become a regular, but not a common, sight in the daily life of our town for the next fortnight. He was riding slowly in a droshka, smiling happily, and bowing unpretentiously to the populace. The streets were lined with craning, round-eyed, tiptoeing Vasluianders, open-mouthed peasants, and gay-attired holiday visitors from neighboring towns who, having heard of the glory that had come to Vaslui, had driven in in their ox-carts and dog-carts to partake of it. I have sometimes seen the king ride in state through these same streets, and have heard the throng shouting, "Truiasca Regele!”

But this occasion was not boisterous, but dignified and solemn. Vaslui seemed too full for idle noisemaking. It seemed to feel that while the king was no doubt a fine fellow and all that, he had not come all the way from Nev-York, he had not brought with him any dozen trunks, he did not speak English, and wear diamonds, and dress in a different frock-coat every day. Quite the contrary: the king had on the same uniform every time he came to Vaslui. He was, after all, a sort of exaggerated army officer with an unnecessary amount of gold lace and other trappings about his person. He, like all military folk, might care for show and shouts. But an American millionaire was not a clown or a bear to be clapped at.

Why, he was the most modest and the simplest of men. Any other man of his great wealth would have put on airs and gone to the Hotel Regal, the exclusive stopping-place in Vaslui for all mere aristocrats. Instead, he went to his brother's home and unassumingly shared the humble quarters of his family. That appeared to be his way. Whatever was good for one man was good enough for every man. He never spoke of his wealth; indeed, he looked embarrassed and uncomfortable whenever the subject was alluded to. He positively disliked to talk about himself in any fashion.

He let his actions speak for him and all that he represented, and from his actions Vaslui was forced to draw the right conclusion. The sheer extravagance of that trunkful of presents he had brought from America for the immediate members of his family spoke volumes for his generosity and the abundance of his means. There was the neat little razor in the leather case for his brother Jacob which a child could use without cutting himself and which was reputed to cost no less than ten francs. Then came the wonderful penholder for his sister-in-law, which, as Couza explained at some length, dispensed with ink-wells and drew its life-fluid from some mysterious source. The children, too, were by no means forgotten. There were railways that were wound up like clocks and ran around in their tracks like real trains, and dancing negroes, and squawking dolls, and jews'-harps, and scores of other delights for the palate as well as the fancy.

And then the climax was capped when Couza himself drew forth out of that trunk of wonders the final package and proceeded to unwrap there from endless reams of tissue-paper, and just as his spectators were about to succumb to the torments of breathless curiosity, held it up and presented it to his old mother — a musical box to the value of twenty-five francs.

Moreover, no one but a millionaire could have behaved as he behaved in the synagogue on the memorable Saturday following his arrival. It was the usual custom for a distinguished guest to be honored with a reading of the Law, and it was expected from him, in turn, to make a suitable offering in return for the honor. But when the official reader paused for the donor to fill in the blank, Couza calmly and very distinctly said, "One hundred and twenty-five francs," and looked modestly about at the astounded faces of the congregation. That donation simply transcended our imagination. The high-water mark until that day and for years past had been recorded by Eliezer Kaufman, the wealthy merchant, now dead, who had once in an extravagant moment subscribed five francs; and the old men in Vaslui still talked of it in awed tones.

A hundred and twenty-five francs! Why, even when crops were bumpers a grain-merchant could garner no more than that in a month. The sum would bring a team of oxen, pay two years' rent for a house in town, or very nearly buy a modest dwelling in the country.

From that day on Vaslui became a changed town. Hitherto we had been content to gaze in abstracted admiration at the splendid phenomenon and the dim, romantic land that lay behind him. But now the shimmering apparition had become a solid reality. We had seen with our own eyes, and had heard with our own ears, the concrete thing that it meant to be an American millionaire, and Vaslui suddenly felt a vast ambition stirring in its galloping heart. Gone was the languor, the easy-going indifference, the resignation, the despair that once dwelt in the lines of our faces. We became a bustling, seething, hopeful community. A star had risen in heaven to lead us out of the wilderness.

Ravage, Marcus Eli. An American in the Making. Harper & Brothers, 1917.

Marcus Eli Ravage

Immigrant Stories

A collection of firsthand accounts from people who traveled to the United States and Canada in search of opportunity. Please feel free to follow and contribute!

View Group