'Certificate of Naturalization'

In our basement was a gray file cabinet we were forbidden to touch. Naturally I opened it and in one of the drawers I found an old leather wallet containing the ID cards of a stranger with the surname Kurpiewski. Who is this? Why is the name so similar to ours? I couldn’t ask because that would have been an admission of guilt. Only years later did I figure out that Karol (Charles) Kurpiewski was my paternal grandfather, who died shortly after I was born. When did he change the family name, and why? I have friends who can rattle off the branches of their family tree as easily as the alphabet, whereas my forebears are mostly a mystery even two generations back. 

While clearing out my late brother’s apartment, my nephew found our Polish grandfather’s naturalization certificate, dated September 17, 1920, eight months before my father’s birth. It’s filled with revelations and further mysteries. The surname is spelled in two ways, ending in “-ski” and “-sky.” Why Virginia and not Ohio? Because he was in the service, stationed at Camp Lee. He was “a subject of Russia”? New information but not a surprise. After the Armistice, Poland regained its independence as the Second Polish Republic. The certificate states my grandfather was then twenty-four, meaning he was born around 1896. No mention is made of a wife, children or an occupation, though I know in Cleveland he was an ironworker, as were his three sons.

 

Coincidentally, today is the 104^th anniversary of the Battle of Komarów in the 1919-21 Polish-Soviet War. The Poles achieved a decisive victory and the Soviet 1st Cavalry Army suffered a disastrous defeat. This was the conflict in which Isaac Babel rode as a correspondent with Semyon Budyonny, commander of the Soviet 1st Cavalry Army. Lenin, the arch-imperialist, wanted to regain control of the territories abandoned by Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 – a treaty soon annulled by the Bolsheviks. In his 1920 Diary, Babel writes on August 31, 1920:

 

“The military order to leave Zamosc, to go back to the rescue of the Fourteenth Division, which is being forced back from Komarow. The shtetl has again been taken by the Poles. Poor Komarow. “

 

This is the war Babel turned into the stories he collected in Red Cavalry (1926). By emigrating, my grandfather avoided one war only to be enlisted in another when the U.S. entered World War I in 1917.  

 

[The 1920 Diary is included in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (trans. Peter Constantine, W.W. Norton & Co., 2002).]