My great-grandmother Elana Jankauskus immigrated to America from Lithuania in 1921. She lived in a small farming village near Kaunas, Lithuania. She spoke Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian. She and her mother had been waiting for her older brother to come back from the war, after being taken away to fight in the Red Army. Her family farm had been mostly destroyed, along with her village after the Russian revolution of 1917. Eventually they gave up waiting, and took a boat from Lithuania to Germany. They then took another boat from Germany to America.
Upon arriving in America, they didn’t have any difficulty getting through Ellis Island. This was mainly because all her other family was already in America, as she was the last of 6 siblings to leave Lithuania, and the ones who hadn’t gone into the military had come to America. She lived in New York for a while, caring for her mother until she died, and then moved to Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, she married a much older man from Lithuania, and they lived in Cambridge. They lived in a Lithuanian immigrant neighborhood, which had a Lithuanian catholic church. The church was the center of their community life. She and her husband had a shoe store that they ran. However, it failed during the depression, as very few people had the money to buy new shoes. They decided to reopen the shoe store as a “café”, which was really a bar. They called it the Marion Café, and lived above it. She then had two children, Alton and Alphonse. In 1939, her husband died, and after that, she ran the bar and raised her two sons.
She eventually remarried an Irish man named Charlie Mahoney, and had her daughter Helen shortly after. In 1946, they moved from Cambridge, to Lynn, which is also in Massachusetts. It was a large step-up in social and economic status, since they were leaving the immigrant neighborhood in Cambridge. Her husband was a successful businessman, and helped her run the bar. Unfortunately, he was an alcoholic, and started to run the business into the ground. She eventually divorced him, but still felt obliged to help him a few years later when he was dying. She sold the bar and retired around 1960, and then lived the rest of her life in Lynn. She never became fully fluent in English, but that never affected her life.
