Steven V. Roberts, a veteran news reporter and a native of Bayonne, walks in a mysterious world of nostalgia these days, his steps following a twilight trail that only memories can still travel. While he followed his own past in his first book, “My Father’s Houses,” Roberts’ new book follows in the steps of immigrants, bringing into contemporary times the immigrant vision of America.
Roberts returned to the Jewish Community Center on Dec. 9 to talk about what might be called a sequel – more stories about immigrant lives, but viewed from the other side, and their struggles to get to America.
“Bayonne is a wonderful example of the changing pattern of immigration.”—Steven V. Roberts
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Yet prior to his book signing at the JCC, he seemed very much at home, talking about his family and the houses they built. His father, he pointed out, was among the people responsible for building the community center in 1952.
“I spent many happy years here,” he told the dinner gathering of family, friends, classmates and others who were part of a past he still imagines. He said in passing later that he can still see these places in his head years after leaving Bayonne for the wider world.
Although couched as a memoir, Roberts’ new book is extremely political, filled with the passion of making a new life, and tales of people who find some deeper strength to brave the trip from the familiar old world into the unknown potential of a new world.
Roberts talks about it as drive, but his own passion for their stories is connected to his past in Bayonne and his previous book, which detailed his own family’s struggle. Only now, he is looking at these journeys not from where they land in America, but from the many other countries where they started.
While these are stories of relative strangers – people he has met during his long journalistic career – in truth, they are the story of his family and the millions of other families who take the same chance to make a better life. Some of them are driven out by political forces such as communism, others by lack of economic opportunities in their own native lands.
From Bayonne to the world
“I’ve traveled around a lot of places with this book, but this is the place that is special to me. Always has been and always will,” he said.
Even though the stories in his newest book are about people from around the world, he said the book’s foundation is really Bayonne.
“Growing up in this community and this world, and having an appreciation for what the immigrant population meant to this city – hard work and energy and dedication that all of our families, all of our parents and our grandparents had,” he said. “I lived in a house with one set of grandparents, while the others lived three blocks away. I thought everybody grew up that way. Imagine my surprise when I went away to college and found out it wasn’t true.”
He said the people in the room were the product of a generation of parents who made sacrifices, and that he wanted to tell the stories of the people living today and those who preceded them, and show the direct connection between them.
He said Bayonne has supplied him with a rich source of information that allows him to keep writing, although he jokingly said he might have finally run out of Bayonne material. Yet later during the public session, he said that the stories here and elsewhere are often universal stories, and that people reading a story he tells about Bayonne may well see stories of their lives and their own families in them.
“I’ve had a lifelong interest in immigration,” he said. “But it isn’t that they spoke differently or had different foods. It was their tenacity, a drive and ambition to make a new life here. Growing up here gave me a sense not only of the richness of immigrant life, but of the virtues. What we all shared was a wonderful heritage of virtue, of hard work, and of determination.”
Growing up in Bayonne, however, did give him a somewhat distorted vision of the world at large.
“Until I went to college, I thought Protestants were a small minority group,” he said.
He said he never forgot Bayonne in all the years roaming around this country or around the world. Wherever he went, he wrote about immigrants.
What’s found, what’s lost
In his hour-long talk at the community center, he talked about the separation immigrants feel – parents who see their children go, children leaving for a better life here and missing what they leave behind, and the strange feelings that accompany even what should be a positive move.
“I never completely understood it until I got it right from the point of view of a country sending people here,” he said.
While a professor at George Washington University, Roberts tried to engage his students in stories of their own families, and found that the modern day tale of immigration strongly resembled those he was familiar with. Only these immigrants were coming from places like Vietnam or China.
This book, he said, was inspired by the need to update the story he had told about his own family’s immigration.
Immigrants leave something behind.
“You leave the graves of your ancestors. The food never quite tastes the same,” he said. “The air never quite smells the same – for better or for worse. They never really feel at home; they live suspended between the two places.”
What has changed is the number of countries sending people to the United States.
“Bayonne is a wonderful example of the changing pattern of immigration,” he said. “When I grew up here, nine-tenths of the immigrants came from three or four places: Russia, Poland, and Italy. It’s much more today.”
He said in the older pattern of immigration, it was mostly men who came. Women could come, but they couldn’t come by themselves.
“Today, a lot of the immigrants coming are single women,” he said.
In greeting Roberts, Mayor Mark Smith said it was a pleasure to welcome Roberts back to Bayonne, asked him to come back more often, and encouraged him to continue to write.