Recovering the stories of historically marginalized people often requires looking in unexpected places, as such stories are too often disregarded, undervalued and thus under-preserved. For Benjamin Moore, his work took him, quite literally, to an alleyway dumpster. During a routine jog around the South St Louis (Missouri, USA) neighbourhood of Soulard, Moore found himself deep in construction debris and trash. By chance, he discovered a 1917–18 schoolyear workbook belonging to John Gergen, a then-nine-year-old migrant from Hungary. Gergen's fountainpen schoolwork, containing lessons from literature to history to mathematics in a mix of English and Sütterlin (a form of German script), would serve as the point of departure for Moore's powerful exploration of migration, identity and memory in turn-of-the-century America. Grounding his focus in the story of young John Gergen and his extended family, all of whom lived in a rapidly changing St Louis neighbourhood, Moore crafts a brilliant analysis of turn-of-the-century migration. Specifically, he interrogates the ways in which social, cultural and political institutions compelled Gergen (and other migrants like him) to redefine their identity in complex and contradictory ways – often multiple times over. The Names of John Gergen details assimilation, as well as resistance to it, as processes of ‘haphazard and contradictory negotiation’ (p. 13). To comprehend migrant identity formation most fully, Moore argues that attention to the social, cultural, political and legal forces that migrants confronted in local, national and international contexts is crucial.
The book follows a chronology parallel to that of the extended Gergen family's migration from Totontál County (then Hungary, now Romania and Serbia) to St Louis, focusing mostly on the first four decades of the twentieth century. Moore maintains a balance between investigating the various authoritative bodies that attempted to control, regulate and assimilate migrants and the efforts of resistance employed by migrants in their attempt to retain their cultural identities. Exploring a complex web of forces – from Soulard settlement workers to Missouri education laws, or processes of sorting immigrants by ‘desirability’ prior to their entering steerage and complex naturalization processes – Moore convincingly demonstrates the various ways institutions of power, no doubt motivated by xenophobia, racism and middle-class fears, attempted to erase multi-ethnic cultural identities in favour of Americanizing and urbanizing migrant populations. Despite such forces, however, migrants waged powerful resistance against assimilation. In the case of John Gergen, his Banat Swabian identity and familial cultural heritage remained strong. This is evidenced by the travels he and his family took back to their small Hungarian town, the family's retention of Banat Swabian naming conventions as the family grew in the USA, their continued use of the German language and, for some in the family, delayed or non-existent efforts to become US citizens.
It is nearly impossible to summarize fully and accurately the detailed and thoughtful research Moore has assembled. The Names of John Gergen simultaneously tells a local, national and transnational story about a single man, an entire family and an entire population of migrants – all of whose identities were deeply shaped by the competing motivations of their own personhood, their local community, their home nation and civic and private institutions. Not only does Moore accomplish all these tasks, but he does so with richly satisfying detail, taking the reader throughout time and space from a back-alley discovery in 2004, to the depths of a boat as a steerage passenger on a gruelling journey across oceans, to a walk through the neighbourhood streets and tenement districts of 1910s South St Louis. This astounding level of detail showcases Moore's skill as a researcher, as well as his creativity in using what is available in the archive, like census data and ship manifests. But it is also a testament to his success in discovering that to which scholars of immigration are rarely privy: original documents created by migrants themselves, such as schoolwork or family photographs. These exceptional documents survive now, not in a dumpster or a family's attic storage, but peppered throughout the pages of Moore's work. Their inclusion are effectively gifts to the readers who get to trace the story of young John Gergen and his extended family as they establish their lives in St Louis – and, as a result, leave one to wonder about the countless other migrant families just like the Gergens that one will never know or see, but perhaps can more fully appreciate because of Moore's work.
Throughout the book, Moore reiterates how Gergen's story is as much about forgetting and being forgotten as it is about migration and identity. For Moore, Gergen's life and the many unknowns about it serve as a reminder of ‘what all of us have the potential to be’: one day forgotten (p. 282). For this reviewer, the book is more about the power of memory and the will of a skilled researcher. It is about how something seemingly unimportant – in this case, a singular year of one young boy's schoolwork, discarded as trash – can reveal not only about an individual or their family, but about the complex social, cultural and political networks in which they negotiated their lives. While there is still plenty we shall never know about John Gergen, Benjamin Moore's study is a powerful testament to the possibilities of just how much one can learn from a single, unassuming source.
