by Alex Wagner
ME: Yes! Even the birth certificates, they don’t exist.
ARCHIVIST: Each culture is very different. In America…in America, I’ll tell you a story—I was in America and—[proceeds to launch into unintelligible conversation that maybe involved the following] and everybody called each other “dude”—as if everyone was a dude and that was it! [Or possibly, it was something relating to McDonald’s? The word for “dude” in French is mec, and French slang for McDonald’s is Mac—so it could have been either.]
ME: Yes, it’s complicated. Thank you very much!
Eventually, through a mix of the aforementioned rudimentary language skills, pantomime, and occasional onomatopoeic sounds meant to elicit pity and/or patience, I was able to gather that I needed to consult with an archival expert named Mr. Nilles on the matter of passport information that may have been collected when Great-Grandfather He(nry)(nri)(inrich) Wag(e)ner, né Mu(e)ller, departed Luxembourg, for both the first and second times.
As it turned out, Mr. Nilles had no particular idea about how to find Henry Wagner, except for a series of government records entitled “Mouvement de la Population Luxembourgeois,” a (limited) collection of papers detailing population movements in and out of the country. But Nilles’s old books (unsurprisingly) revealed to me that a lot of Wagners left Esch and returned to Esch and otherwise traveled around Luxembourg in the 1880s. In 1871, only a handful of people departed for other countries—nine, to be exact—though there were no records of their names. I held out hope that one of them was Henry Wagner, but had no way of knowing for sure. And I could find nothing documenting his return home.
I’d hit a wall and therefore did what any self-soothing amateur genealogist with a limited command of the local language often does: I started drinking. That evening, after I was plied with mediocre Bordeaux by a strangely friendly maître d’ at the cozy hotel restaurant,*2 the stout night clerk came in and walrussed his way around the restaurant, eventually settling in my vicinity. By way of the generous maître d’, this portly fellow discovered that I was in town to research my family from Luxembourg. I wasn’t sure whether it was the fact that I was “Chinese” (as far as most Luxembourgers were concerned) or the fact that I was roughly three decades younger than the average tourist/genealogist, but this admission seemed to delight everyone who heard it. “Famille en Luxembourg!” they’d say, as if this reality was so outlandish as not to be believed. A Chinese girl! With family from Esch!
The night clerk gave me a brief socioeconomic history of Esch-sur-Alzette, and noted the extraordinary wealth created by a so-called Iron Boom in the second half of the nineteenth century. I knew little about this apparently significant historical moment, but I’d had “reasons to return to Luxembourg in the second half of the nineteenth century” on my mind, and this information made me think perhaps Great-Grandfather Henry had returned home in the hopes of making a fortune. After all, he returned sometime between 1872 and 1877—the very same years of the Iron Boom. The night clerk suggested I might look to see if family land was sold during this time to a mining conglomerate, in an effort to put some much-needed cash in the Wagner/Muller pockets.
I spent the following day looking for any evidence that might suggest the Esch family had eventually struck it rich—or had at least been in the market to strike it rich—during Luxembourg’s Iron Boom. In the 1871 census, I could decipher that Michael Muller’s listed profession was “mine worker” (ouvrier mineur). Mining was crushing, backbreaking labor that left you with time for little else: If Michael Muller was mining well into his forties, there was little likelihood that he had enough capital to be a landowner. And if he didn’t own land, he wasn’t selling anything to the mining concerns, nor was he cashing in on any sales—regardless of whether the Iron Boom was happening in his backyard or not.
By 1880, it appeared that there were three other people living with Michael and Anne Marie Muller, possibly boarders to help cover rent. Not something people of means would do, and certainly not people who were newly rich. It was evident that Henry’s people had never gotten the big payday.
As I discovered this, the microfiche man who had been helping me decipher the very nearly illegible census script proclaimed loudly (and haughtily, I might add): “Ah, but your family was very poor!” as if to put me, the linguistically challenged Chinese American impostor, in my place.
Defiantly, I responded: “Yes, but in America, my great-grandfather was very rich!”
This was mostly untrue, of course. Wagner’s Bar and Grocery was not exactly Trump Tower, though it certainly informed my father’s invocation of Henry as a “cultured” man and a “translator.” My dad—long an advocate for the poor and working class—always trumpeted his own humble (if storybook) Iowa beginnings.
But in my dad’s retelling the story of his forefather Henry, what always struck me as hypocritical, or at least odd, was his appreciation for his grandfather’s wealth, his formality and expensive furniture. There was always something Warbuck-ian about this, the way my father—the nobody son of a rural mail carrier—spoke about Henry Wagner’s possessions with such undisguised materialism. Though my father always maintained that it never occurred to him that he was from the working class, it certainly occurred to him that the things in Henry Wagner’s house were not the same as the things in his house.
Henry’s crystal and silver and mahogany were a source of pride. Being a corn-eating, stickball-playing, Catholic church–attending American was very important to my dad and his conception of self, but so was the fact that his people were “dignified” Europeans from the “merchant class.” People who spoke multiple languages and dined with silver and drank from crystal. Maybe this was the most natural reaction for someone who grew up with little, an acquisitiveness born of meager circumstance, like Ricky from Silver Spoons. But I had always wondered if it wasn’t somehow also fraudulent: proposing to be one thing and then simultaneously aligning yourself with its opposite.
This was in many ways the crux of the American immigrant story: the penniless arrival who made his way up the economic ladder, the Horatio Alger bootstrapper who became not only the backbone of our society, but was living testament to the fact that divine providence shone down on the American Project. To be close to that—presumably the rags, but most certainly the riches—was very important to us Americans. To be somehow connected to affluence, as my father insisted he had been, was a repudiation of those who thought little of your family and its prospects. Even if that wealth had ultimately evaporated, it was something later generations held on to (as my father had), a reminder that they were once great.
And what if that capital came from someplace sordid? What if the foundations of that success were built on someone else’s land, what if it required the blood and sacrifice of entire nations who remained unrecognized (and poor!) even after all that fortune had been created? My father was a well-intentioned liberal who promoted equality and espoused egalitarianism, but he still clung to his connection to prosperity and “high culture”—treasure he knew nothing about, a fortune amassed in the dark, as far as he was concerned. It compromised the very things he proposed himself to be.
And now that fraudulence deepened: Those classy beginnings and that imagined European education were both probably fakes, stories we’d told ourselves that had little in common with reality. In fact, Henry Wagner was the bastard son of a miner, a man who worked as an ox-cart driver in a crappy little mining town and smuggled himself the hell out of Dodge with the first folks who would give him a ride.
I went in search of photos from the era in the Luxembourg National Library collection, black-and-whites from the heyday of the country’s mining era. Industry may have been booming, but you wouldn’t know that from the look of the land and its people. Downtown Esch, with its dirt roads and empty streets, was hardly bustling; the businesses appeared few and far between. Mining factories on the outskirts of the city were h
ulking industrial wastelands. The men—miners of indeterminate age—posed outside the mouths of the mines with a look of bleary resolution.
I could only imagine the terror that accompanied a descent into the earth each day: Here was a day’s work. And these were the boom times. Seeing these pictures, as much as unraveling any other part of our family history, made me comprehend the absolute and piercing poverty of the Wagner homestead. The darkness of soot and coke, the meagerness of this existence, it was as far away from lace and silver and mahogany and a goodly Christian life as you could imagine. Those trappings of wealth were all set design for our American play, and if you pushed just a little bit, the scenic background gave way to reveal dust and wires and filth behind it.
* * *
—
I’d uncovered Henry Wagner’s economic background but had yet to unravel the central mystery of this European sojourn: Was he—or anyone in his immediate family—Jewish? Having discovered the truth about our formerly high-class roots, my natural inclination was toward skepticism as it concerned our deeply Christian faith. If in retelling his story, we had papered over Henry Wagner’s mean beginnings, it didn’t seem like much of a stretch to guess he could have rewritten the script on his religious education, as well.
In an 1867 census, Henry’s mother and father were listed as Catholic. The same went for the family Henry eventually married into: the other Wagner clan. All registered Catholics.
I wondered whether Henry’s mother, Anne Marie, perhaps might have been raised Jewish, and later converted to Christianity after her marriage to Michael Muller? After all, Judaism was transferred on the maternal line. I began looking for census records for Anne Marie’s father, Pierre Wagener, the presumably grumpy grandpa who’d attested to his daughter’s single motherhood on Henry’s birth certificate. Anne Marie; her father, Pierre; and her mother, named Anne Hentgen,*3 all lived under the same roof until their daughter entered lawful wedlock, and so presumably a census record would provide some insight.
The Luxembourg government was not in the practice of asking about religion until nearly the mid-nineteenth century: If I wanted information about Pierre’s faith, I’d have to search for records after 1867. Which wasn’t going to be easy: Pierre Wagener was born in the year 1782. That was a long-ass time ago, and a census in 1867 would theoretically find Pierre at the ripe old age of eighty-five (!). For someone whose listed profession was “mine worker,” it was hard to imagine that Ole Pierre would have survived into his eighties, given the backbreaking labor of the era, and the poverty in which Pierre presumably lived. I gave it a shot anyway, but the only Pierre Wagener of Esch-sur-Alzette listed in the 1867 census was twenty-seven years old. Unless Pierre was Benjamin Button, this was not him. And thus the search for Jewish origins seemed done and over. I’d followed the increasingly poorly marked trail right into the mists of time, where everything vanished.
But before I departed my position in those featureless mists of time, I stood for a moment and wondered: What was I thinking, traveling to this strange little tax-free duchy, with scant knowledge of French or German, no archival research skills to speak of, and complete ignorance about how to conduct genealogical detective work? I decided to retrace my steps out of this fog and go home to the familiar, a place I could navigate. Where the names of the people were not an endless variation of Henry, Heinrich, Henri, Anne Marie, Anna, and Anne. Where it did not seem so impossible and curious that an Asian-looking woman might have European roots. Where the streets were not paved with cobblestones, and stores were open on Sunday, and the brown people in town lived in places other than the outskirts, and ran more than the doner kebab shop by the train station.
Home: a place full of chaos and ambition! And relatively high taxes! A place with many different kinds of brown people with many different grandparents. To a place I felt like I understood, a place where I could see myself. I could not see myself in Luxembourg City. Ever. It was, technically, my family home—but for other people, a long time ago. There was no vibration left in these streets. Nothing resonated. The national motto of Luxembourg was “We Will Remain What We Are.” Well, as it concerned my family of Luxembourgers, we sure hadn’t remained what we were: I could look in the mirror and know that we had become something else.
But I wasn’t done yet. Once I got home to the States, I decided to take what I knew and enlist someone who spoke the language, who might approach this process with a degree of professionalism, or at least literacy: someone who could uncover, with certain finality, what our religious roots were, and whether there had been any reason to forsake them along the way.
Using online databases at the National Archives and the Association of Professional Genealogists, I called as many experts in Midwest American/Western European genealogy as I could find, hoping to hire someone for the job. Most of them looked at the scope of my research and the dead ends I’d reached, the sheer number of Henry Wagners that had been uncovered, and issued a polite but firm rejection. But just as I began to get demoralized, an angel of mercy descended from the genealogical heavens. Julie Cahill Tarr was a genealogist who spoke the language and had family from Luxembourg and was based in the Midwest. Together, she and I distilled my abject feelings of confusion and despair into a few distinct and presumably answerable questions:
Was Henry Wagner Jewish—or was there any evidence of Judaism in his family?
Why did he leave Luxembourg, and was it, in fact, under questionable circumstances?
How did Henry, a teamster from a mining town, come to be a man of the merchant class once he arrived in America? (Where did all that fine china come from? How’d he get the cash to open Wagner’s Bar and Grocery, aka our version of Trump Tower?)
Cahill Tarr went to the Luxembourg American Cultural Society Research Center, located in Belgium. Belgium, Wisconsin. The nomenclature here was no coincidence: In the 1850s, thousands of Belgians and their Luxembourger neighbors left Europe for greener pastures and greater economic prospects in America. Attracted to cheap and newly vacated land in the Midwest (courtesy of the removal of its original Native American tribes), these settlers made home in places with considerable tracts of arable soil, like Wisconsin. A large number of Belgian residents in one particular part of the state resulted in a town called…Belgium, Wisconsin. Luxembourgers, aligned with the Belgians in history, cultural traditions, and religion, settled in many of the same places. Belgium, Wisconsin, was ground zero for all things Luxembourg in the United States.
Cahill Tarr combed through old copies of the Luxemburger Gazette and consulted colleagues who knew about German military history. She examined auction notices and passenger manifests and even more census data than I had. She even read nineteenth-century city liquor and bond permits from Allamakee County. But still, there were questions left unanswered.
To begin with, she could find no evidence that anyone in Henry Wagner’s family—neither his in-laws, nor his stepfather—was Jewish or practiced Judaism. The families of Anne Marie Wagner and her husband, Michael Muller, were listed as Catholic on all available government records. This, combined with the exceedingly Christian obituary written for my great-grandfather Henry Wagner—including his funeral at the Immaculate Conception Church and burial at Gethsemane Cemetery—led Cahill Tarr to the conclusion that the Jewish mystery of the Wagner clan was solved.
The Wagner clan wasn’t Jewish.
She posited that my great-uncle Leo, the one who had referred to himself as “just an old Jew” all those years ago, might have converted. But this seemed unlikely. Leo had remained in close proximity to his family throughout his adult life. It was he who was tasked with taking care of the family business until it was put up for sale. Nothing about his known biography would suggest a desire to break away from family tradition (and identity) for reasons unknown.
So maybe he was just drunk on Mogen David wine and felt particular kinship with its Jewish vintners wh
en he claimed membership in their faith? I didn’t know. Maybe Henry Wagner learned Yiddish as one of the tools of his trade? I realized I knew close to nothing (which is to say: nothing) about the Jewish diaspora in Luxembourg—an admittedly very specific field of study—and so I emailed Neil Jacobs, a former professor of Yiddish linguistics at Ohio State University. The good professor immediately disabused me of certain ideas.
Firstly, he explained, Yiddish was not an obscure form of communication. It was a hugely popular language: In the years preceding World War II, it was arguably the third or fourth most-spoken Germanic language, with eleven to thirteen million speakers. Secondly—and more important—was I sure that Henry Wagner actually spoke Yiddish? “When you say ‘spoken,’ ” Professor Jacobs said, “that could mean ‘really good at it for three minutes, but not three hours.’ ”
If Henry’s command of the language was more the former (three minutes) than the latter (three hours), Jacobs added, then it was indeed possible that he might have picked up certain Yiddish phrases as part of his trade. “Non-Jewish cattle dealers in Germany,” Jacobs explained, “over the years, incorporated Hebrew and/or Aramaic vocabulary through their contact with Jewish cattle dealers. From there, it took on its own life.”
Perhaps Henry had crossed paths with these folk in his commerce? Or perhaps he picked up his Yiddish in other circles. By way of an aside, Professor Jacobs added that “many words of Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary worked their way into marginalized groups.” In the underworld, in other words, there was Yiddish slang.
So there was that: If Henry Wagner had been involved in unsavory activities with unsavory characters, then perhaps this explained his command—however notional—of Yiddish. Which is to say yes, he might have had some Yiddish vocabulary, but in the same way that some of us know Yiddishisms from watching Seinfeld. It doesn’t make you Jewish.
