(gentle music)
- Welcome to Stories From the Stage.
Produced by WORLD Channel and GBH Boston.
In partnership with Tell & Act.
I am Patricia Alvarado Nuñez
- And I'm Liz Cheng.
We're the co-creators of Stories From the Stage.
In every episode,
multicultural people stand in front of a live audience
to tell a personal story based on a theme.
Well today, it's American Journey.
- Two women whose family came
to this country for the opportunities.
They had among our most enduring stories.
And Patricia, our first storyteller,
as you know, is Szifra Birke.
She was born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts.
(gentle music)
BIRKE: My parents were originally from Poland.
They came to the U.S. after the Holocaust,
they were both Holocaust survivors
whose entire families--
all but three cousins on each side--
everyone else was killed.
- Like many children of immigrants in her generation,
much like me,
she didn't ask her parents about what they'd been through.
- I could have actually asked the questions
had I realized that I could have asked the questions .
- Szifra just wanted to be like everyone else,
an American girl.
But as she grew older,
she began to have questions about the past
and about the meaning of her name.
Here's her journey.
(gentle music continues)
I'm 16 years old.
I'm at City Hall with my younger sister, Ros,
and I'm there for my birth certificate
so that I can get my driver's permit.
And I, am, psyched.
I'm pretty excited about the idea of driving.
So I tell the woman behind the counter,
"Susan Birke, B-I-R-K-E."
And before I can even tell her my birthdate, she says,
"Oh, honey, I know your family, and that's not your name."
And I think, "I'm 16.
"I've lived with this for a long time,
I think I know it's my name."
She said, "It has a Z in it."
And I think, "Oh, well, maybe they spelled Susan with a Z,
"because my parents are Holocaust survivors,
"English was their fourth language,
and they spelled, may we say creatively."
So she hands me back a piece of paper,
a little white piece of paper, and she's right,
it has a Z on it.
It says, "S-Z-I-F-R-A R. Birke,
B-I-R-K-E."
We are the only B-I-R-K-Es in Lowell,
and it's June 28, 1950, this must be me.
But this is a me I have never seen before.
Walking back to my parents' clothing store,
my sister and I are, like, "Sifra," "Zifra,"
"Sy-fra," "Zy-fra."
Unintelligible.
Until my sister breaks out in hysterical laughter
and says, "Oh, my God, Sue, they named you Szifra."
I'm 16.
I'm a cheerleader.
I just want to be normal.
I just want to be Susan Birke.
It wasn't a great name, no frills, no fuss,
but it worked just fine.
Now I find out that I am going to be Szifra?
Szifra is my Hebrew name.
When you're a Jew, you get a Hebrew name.
You don't do anything with your Hebrew name,
you just have it.
We get back to my parents' store.
I show them this piece of paper.
I am melting down near tears.
They ignore me.
They start this volley back and forth--
or as my dad would say, "Forth and back."
(imitating Polish accent): "So, Stella, voos is this R?
I thought we named her Szifra Leah."
"Yeah, I thought we did, too."
(laughter)
"I think I figured it out.
I think we named her Rukhl."
(laughter)
Rukhl-- what does that sound like?
Vomit, right?
(guttural): Rukhl.
25 minutes ago, I'm Susan Birke.
No middle initial, no nothing, I'm just Susan Birke.
Now, 25 minutes later, I am 16 years old,
in Lowell, Massachusetts,
and I'm Szifra Rukhl Birke.
(laughter)
That night, I'm, like,
"So where did the Susan come from, then, all these years?"
(imitating Polish accent): "Vell, a customer.
"Ve vas calling you Szifra,
"a customer told us it's not a good name in America.
"Ve say, 'Vat should ve call her?'
"They tell us, 'A good American name is Susan.'
"So ve called you Susan.
(laughter)
I guess ve forgot."
(laughter)
Between that moment and going to B.U. to college,
I am back and forth-- or forth and back--
about, do I go with Szifra?
Do I go with Susan?
Do I go-- what do I do here?
And I decide to take the plunge and go to B.U. as Szifra.
I tell people my name is Szifra when they ask,
and they call me Szifra,
'cause I just told them that was my name.
On the home front, my eight-year-old brother
is deciding to be a big ally and he tells people,
my friends when they call,
"We don't have a Sue or Susan who lives in our home,
but we do have a Szifra, if you would like to speak with her."
(laughter)
I'm 30, living in Indiana, couple of sons,
people ask me about my name, I tell them the truth,
Szifra was an Egyptian nursemaid.
I tell them the half-truth, she was an Egyptian nursemaid,
but I don't tell them the Jewish part of the story.
I'm 50 years old with my mom, sitting at her table,
and my very stoic mom is staring at me very intently
with tears in her eyes.
My mother doesn't have tears in her eyes very often.
I ask, "Like, so, is everything okay?"
(imitating Polish accent): "Yeah, Szif, everything's okay."
"It doesn't look like everything's okay."
(imitating Polish accent): "Vell, I'm just thinking,
looking at you, you look just like my mother."
Well, I don't know if that's, like, a good thing
or a bad thing.
Because my mother's mother, Szifra,
and her father, and her brothers,
and her sister, and the rest of the family
were exterminated in the Holocaust,
like my dad's family.
So I decide to ask her, "Is this hard?"
And she says,
(imitating Polish accent): "Vell, yeah, it's hard,
"but it's a good hard.
"Because I loved my mother.
"I loved her so much.
(voice breaking): "And when I look at you, I see my mother.
"And I get to see her close and be close to her.
I'm so glad we named you Szifra."
"And I'm so glad you named me Szifra, too."
It's been 51 years
since that moment when I would have done anything
to be the cheerleader Susan Birke.
Today, when people ask me about my name--
which you can imagine happens regularly, S-Z-I-F-R-A, Szifra--
I tell them the whole story.
I tell them that Szifra was one of the two
very brave Egyptian nursemaids
who refused to obey the pharaoh's orders
to kill the Jewish boys--
the Jewish boy infants.
That Szifra was my grandmother's name,
and she was killed in the Holocaust.
I tell them all sorts of things about my name,
including the Jewish part of the story.
I was too nervous at 30
to tell the Jewish part of the story,
and to talk about my name.
Today, I couldn't be more proud, more honored,
to be able
(voice breaking): to share my name,
and to share this story for all the Szifras,
and all the Rukhls,
and all of the Leyzers,
and Khayims, and all of the people
who couldn't tell their own story
because they didn't survive to tell it.
Thank you.
(cheers and applause)
♪
- Szifra Birke is a business consultant
based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.
In a moment, we continue our theme of American Journey
with a story of a beaten up green station wagon
and what it means to travel
the country in search of belonging.
(gentle music continues)
(gentle music)
- You are listening to Stories from the Stage.
Our next storyteller is Grace Talusan.
TALUSAN: I am an immigrant from the Philippines.
I came here when I was three years old.
- Like so many immigrants,
Grace and her family never thought
they would be staying in the U.S.
My father was the first to arrive in the United States.
His plan was to come here and further his medical education,
and then go back to the Philippines
so that he could set himself up well.
So, he knew he would be gone for a few years,
so he sent for my mother, my older sister, and I.
We always planned to go back to the Philippines,
so my mother started collecting gifts to bring back home.
She collected bed sheets and towels,
and even toilet paper,
because she thought it was just so much softer here
than it was back home.
But as happens sometimes,
you go someplace and that place changes you.
So my father started to dream, and he started to wonder:
what would it be like to stay here?
What would our lives look like?
What would the lives of his children be like?
And so he took a risk,
and he took the exam for foreign medical graduates,
and he passed.
And all of a sudden, this whole new world
and future opened up for him and our family.
He opened his own medical practice, hired a staff,
bought a house in the suburbs, and bought his first new car,
which was a Chevy Caprice Classic station wagon,
turtle green interior and exterior.
(laughter)
And his idea is that cars are meant to be pragmatic.
They should get you from A to B, safely.
And so one of the first things we did with that car
is we drove to visit his brother and sister in Toronto.
Family is really important in the Philippines,
and we didn't have family in Boston,
so that was one of the first things we did.
So we all piled into the station wagon,
we drove to the Canadian border,
and the Border Patrol took one look at our station wagon,
which was piled up with suitcases, and our passports,
which were just about to expire, and he sent us back.
And he... I didn't know at that time,
but soon after that, we...
our status became... we became undocumented.
Our status became-- we had over-stayed our visas.
And my parents hired a lawyer
to regulate our papers,
but the lawyer didn't help, and took their money,
but it took maybe 15 more years
until we were able to fix our status.
But I didn't care.
I didn't know any of this stuff. I was a kid, I was an American,
as all my friends were, I rode in that station wagon to school,
to my activities, to band practice, to soccer,
and I had no clue that this was all going on.
The only difference was that we didn't leave the country.
So if there was ever a school vacation,
we didn't find us in the Swiss Alps skiing,
or in Cancun swimming in the winter.
We took road trips in that green station wagon.
We drove to Florida, we drove to the Midwest,
we went all over the South, and we saw how America was made.
We looked at the monuments and the battlefields,
we went to the White House,
we saw what America wanted to remember,
what they wanted to memorialize.
And we visited all those places in that car.
Now, my parents didn't want to spend money on fast food,
so my mother would bring
a rice cooker along on our trips, and chicken adobo,
and we would have that at the rest stops.
And I would look really jealously at the other families
who were unwrapping
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and potato chips,
and I just thought that was so exotic.
(laughter)
They also didn't like to stop very often, and one time,
I saw them switch drivers
without ever stopping the car on the highway.
(laughter)
My father kept his foot on the gas,
and he kind of inched his way over to the passenger side,
and my mother held on really tightly to the steering wheel,
and like looked straight ahead until she was able
to inch the rest of her body over
and then put her foot on the gas.
And we all cheered when they did that, it was great.
(laughter)
So we visited monuments and battlefields,
but my father's favorite thing was to go on a factory tour.
First of all, it was usually free admission,
and, secondly, you would walk away with a parting gift.
So we went to the Kellogg's factory,
and it smelled so good.
The air smelled like corn syrup,
and there were these big, hot vats of cereal,
and I just wanted to put my arm in
and take some and eat it.
But it was boiling hot, so good thing I didn't do it.
We went to the Chevy assembly plant,
which was full of metal and really boring.
And we went to the U.S. Mint, which we watched money get made,
and we dreamed of what we could do with all of that money.
The one place I remember is the cigarette factory
in Richmond, Virginia.
And we watched all this messy brown tobacco get packed neatly
into white cylinders, and then get packed into boxes.
And that day,
every single one of my family members
walked away with a free parting gift.
I had got my first carton of cigarettes at age nine.
(laughter)
So we finally got our documentation regulated,
and my father-- this is about 15 years in--
and my father was still driving that green station wagon.
And my mother felt kind of embarrassed,
because he was a doctor by now,
and he would park in the doctors' parking lot
at the hospital amidst all the Audis and Mercedes and BMWs,
and he had this ramshackle green station wagon in there.
So, eventually, he decided it was time to let it go.
He thought it had tremendous value,
it brought a lot of value to my family,
and so he parked it in the front lawn,
put a cardboard sign up, and put a price on there.
But, every week, his heart would be broken.
No one wanted it.
So every week he crossed out that number
put a lower number on.
Week after week this happened, until eventually,
he had to pay somebody $200 to come and tow it away.
(laughter)
So that green station wagon did more than just bring us
all over the United States, and bring us to school and work,
it was the place where we became American,
we learned what it was to become American,
and we became that in that car.
And it brought us safely from "new immigrant" to "citizen,"
from "alien" to "belonging," from A to B.
Thank you.
(cheers and applause)
- Grace Talusan.
She teaches Creative Writing at Brandeis University.
And is the author of a memoir called "The Body Papers."
Winner of the Restless Books Prize
for New Immigrant Writing.
- Well, Patricia, Grace's story is a bit like my own.
My mom became a citizen after my oldest brother was born.
I never knew until recently when I discovered his paperwork,
that my dad didn't become a citizen until much, much later.
And until his dying day,
he always thought he would return to China
to live out his life.
- You know, Liz as many, many immigrants,
I always thought I was going to return to Panama.
But now, you know, the US is home for me.
I think that once I got married,
and got a job that I love,
and bought a house,
I think buying the house was a big thing for me.
That's when I realized,
you're going to stay (laughs).
- Yeah.
That's definitely true of a lot of people.
If you have the time, check out Kenneth Eng's film,
"My Life in China."
After swimming from the mainland
and establishing a life in the US,
Ken's father does return to China
with unexpected results.
You know, I wish my father had seen this film.
From Stories from the Stage, I'm Liz Cheng,
- And I am Patricia Alvarado Nunez.
In our next episode,
we will have a stories about romantic encounters,
one across religious and racial lines,
and another that requires a flight halfway around the world.
- Listen and watch more of our unique stories
at worldchannel.org.
Share them with people you care about.
♪