By MICHAEL F. DWYER
These next two episodes focus on the grandparents of my late friend and colleague John H. Brutkoski (1943–2010), who taught Social Studies at Otter Valley Union High School for 37 years. John’s time there extended well beyond the school days as the ticket-taker at games and all the summers he and Pattie Candon spent painting. We had snippets of conversation over the years about his grandfather John [Jan, in Polish], after whom he was named. One detail I recall is that John remembered his grandfather came from a place in Poland that had no trees. A point here on pronunciation: most people who knew John would have said his last name as Brutowski, forgetting a K followed the T. Donna Brutkoski, John’s daughter, always enunciated her last name clearly, giving voice to the T the K and the S rather than a W. [John’s father, Herman chose to spell the name as Brutkoski, claiming the S sound was closer to the Polish pronunciation].
Before unfolding the story of twenty-five-year-old Jan Brutkowski, a Polish farm laborer, who sailed in the steerage of the SS Neckar from Bremen, arriving in New York City, on April 7, 1912, let me share some broad brushstrokes of Polish history. The Kingdom of Poland was completely swallowed up by Russia, Austria, and Prussia by 1795. Russia held the largest portion of territory, where conditions for peasants amounted to virtual slavery. Almost nothing is known about Jan’s life in the village of Sumova, located in the northeast of present-day Poland near the border of Lithuania. He possessed a rudimentary education, equivalent to three years of elementary school.
With his country of origin listed as Russia on the ship manifest, he left behind his bride, Aleksandra [known as Alice in American records] Libuda and joined at least six other men aboard the ship who were destined for West Rutland, Vermont,—his sponsor Adam Libuda, undoubtedly a relative of his wife. Family lore, supported by many other oral histories, claimed he was recruited right on the docks to work for the Vermont Marble Company. Indeed, he would labor in the quarries there until months before his death in 1955.
A year later, on 30 September 1913, Aleksandra Brutkovska [inflection in Polish surnames with the final consonant ending in A for women] arrived aboard the ship Koln arriving in Boston. Their first child Julia was born in West Rutland on July 18, 1914. She would be followed by Genovefa [Genevieve] on November 12, 1915, Czeslaw [remembered as Charles] in January 1918, who died at eight months during the influenza pandemic, and Hieronomi, born on June 15, 1919. Hieronomi would have translated as Jerome, but the West Rutland Town Clerk could not get the hang of it and wrote the name as Herman as he henceforth would be known.
By the time the Brutkowskis landed in West Rutland, they joined a tightly knit Polish immigrant community united by language, customs, and staunch allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. Polish native Rev. Valentin Michulka (1878–1969) loomed largely in the lives of the immigrants. Ordained a priest in 1904 in Rome, he soon accepted a call to found a church, St. Stanislas Koska in West Rutland. He oversaw the building of a school and invited nuns of the Order of St. Felix [known as the Felician Sisters.] to staff the school. While families may have been poor, they donned their Sunday best for Mass and holy days of obligation. With Polish spoken exclusively at home, the children learned English at school. It would have been typical for Julia and Genevieve to graduate from West Rutland High School, it was more the exception for Herman, a first generation Polish American, to graduate from high school in 1937 while the country was caught in the throes of the Depression. Most of his peers were already working in the quarries during their teens.
Census records attest to John Brutkoski as a diligent worker: in 1940, it stated he worked 52 weeks in the year. Having lived in rental housing on Baxter Street for three decades, the Brutkowskis were able to purchase a duplex, the other half inhabited by family, on Highland Avenue in West Rutland. Granddaughter Lorraine Nicolini recalls they raised chickens and had a huge garden with winter stores of potatoes and winter sauerkraut.
Typical of first-born American children of Polish immigrants, eldest daughter Julia married within her own ethnic group. She married Stanley Jankoski and remained in West Rutland. They lived to celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary. Herman married Mary Kamuda just a month before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. [The Kamuda family will be the focus of the next installment] He soon enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Army Corps and was in California when son John was born. Herman and his family moved to Brandon in 1951. They ran the Union Street Market from 1951 until 1962. Daughter Genevieve was the exception; she moved to New York City, where she met her husband, Ernest Nicolini. Nonetheless, she like her siblings were married by Monsignor Michulka at St. Stanislas. The beloved pastor lived long enough to celebrate the funeral Masses of Jan and Aleksandra whose gravestone reflects their Polish names.
Looking back on Jan/John Brutkowski’s life, one wonders, did he realize the American dream? He had a labor-intensive job, never lived to retire or gain a pension. He died at the age of 68. Did Jan regret leaving family whom he would never see again? Had he remained in Sumowa, he likely would have been conscripted to fight in the Tsar’s army during World War I, during which Russian soldiers suffered catastrophic losses. His village and surrounding area were occupied by the Germans. With the creation of Poland as a sovereign state in 1918, the fighting continued between the Soviet Union, Lithuania, and Poland until 1922, with some villages occupied and reoccupied. Jan’s Polish family certainly would have suffered in World War II, with the invasions first of the Soviet Union and then the Nazi army. His Jewish neighbors as well as Polish citizens were slaughtered by the Einsatzgruppen. All members of West Rutland’s Polish community would have known someone who perished. Here Jan and Alexandra Brutkowski would live out their lives unmolested by war and derive the satisfaction of seeing their children educated and gradually attain higher standards of living than the intrepid immigrants who braved an ocean to settle in West Rutland.
Acknowledgments: The Brutkoski family: Sandy, Donna, Sharron, Joe and Joanne Scarborough; Lorraine Nicolini, and Olivia Boughton of St. Stanislas Parish.
