A Migrant

Jennie Doherty was 30 years old when she sailed out of Belfast Harbor in 1914. She left her mother and father and a few sisters and brothers in tears; they thought they would never see her again. She was on her way to the other side of the world, to faraway Canada, to help two of her older brothers. Earlier they had also left the family crying when they had migrated from Ireland in search of a better life as homesteaders in Alberta Province.

At the outbreak of World War I, the brothers enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force and were shipped off to Belgium to fight the German Army. Jenny stayed behind to manage the farm. Before she died in 1967, she was able to return to Ireland to see for the last time her remaining brothers and sisters. Her soldier brothers did not return to Canada. Their bodies, along with those of hundreds of thousands of other young men, are still lying under the muddy fields of Ypres.

Jenny was no match for winters in Alberta. Like many homesteads in western Canada, the Doherty farm fell apart. So she went to work as a maid in a hotel in Vermilion. Benno Fischer, four years younger than she, was one of the owners. My portrait, from an old photograph, shows her on the day they were married. Their daughter, my mother, was born in August, 1918, only five weeks before the Armistice that ended, in H.G. Wells’ words, “The war that will end war.”

Two days after I was born in June, 1941, Adolph Hitler’s armies invaded Russia. Six months later, bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Today bombs obliterate families in Gaza and Ukraine. Jesus is supposed to have said that the poor are always with us. The rich are with us too, and so are Hitlers. Migrants as well, still searching for better lives.