I was just trying to get home
Ben Kornetsky and Sonia Weingart met in 1918 and began “keeping company,”
as they called it. It meant that they would have a brief series of dates and, if
nothing went wrong, become engaged to be married. It was a simple courtship,
somewhere between the old country custom of arranged marriage and the
American custom of choosing one’s own mate. They came from a group of
people and a time when mating was for life and was more about survival than
romance or personal gratification.
Sonia was no greenhorn, having sailed past the Statue of Liberty with her
mother, Slova, and younger brother, Gidelie, some twelve years earlier. I know
nothing of the trip in steerage across the Atlantic except what I can imagine,
having read numerous such accounts. Were they eager, frightened, sick,
confused? I can only guess. Mine is not a family that talks about these things.
In an effort, some years ago to affirm my own heritage, to assure myself that I did
have a history and a people to whom I belonged, I was able to track down a copy
of their certificate of entry into the United States. It hangs over my desk now as I
write these words, material proof that I come from somewhere.
She arrived on Ellis Island, little Sonia Weingart, and left it as Sarah, undoubtedly
the result of the indifferent pen of a bureaucrat who was not familiar with the
name Sonia, but only with Sarah, at least for a Jewish girl. She was young
