The family legend goes like this: 
Rose and Selig lived in Birzai, Lithuania. 
Selig walked Rose home after she was in a play, very enamoured of her. They soon became engaged.
Like many Jewish men at the time, Selig was conscripted to the Czar’s army, but he escaped through Shanghai to the U.S. He lived on Grand St, in NYC, and served in the U.S. army, gaining citizenship. 
He then moved to Texas where his brothers lived. Once established, he wrote back to Rose, who then was a college-educated schoolmistress in a Bolshevik school. 

He wrote, “Will you come and be my wife in America?” 
In 1921 Russia, famine, unrest, and anti-Semitism were rampant. Rose went to America, via Galveston, Texas, where the two married before she could get off the train.
Rose didn’t like Selig at first. He was a different man so many years later, and she was now a woman, educated in Moscow, speaking 6 languages, empowered. She went to live with her siblings in St. Louis for 6 months. 

Selig pursued her. Then, Rose said, “It was like a curtain lifted”, and that was how she fell in love with her husband and moved back to Texas.
I was born on Rose’s birthday, Oct. 29, the first of the fourth generation. My cousin Gloria gave me these salt shakers that Rose brought over on the boat and the train from Birzai, creating the life from which me and all my family come.

– Elizabeth Hendler

Relationship:  Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more