Wedding photo of August and Bertha Menge West, 1915

Clay County Histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC

Cousins Bruce West and Roger Blakeway recently came to the museum and we got to chatting about their mysterious grandfather, August West. August was a German-Russian immigrant who came to America in 1910. He married a German-Russian girl, Bertha Menge, in Enderlin, ND. They moved around a lot – Sheldon, Kathryn, Lucca, Alice, West Fargo, Dilworth, and eventually to “the Flats,” a piece of level ground amid the sandy beaches of old Glacial Lake Agassiz just south of Buffalo River State Park.
At The Flats, the Wests were neighbors with Joseph and Eleanora Blakeway. August West and Joe Blakeway both worked for the Northern Pacific Railway and, rumor was, in the moonshining business as well. At least some of those rumors were true. In 1929, Joe Blakeway sold moonshine to the wrong guy and ended up in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. He never came home. That’s a story for another day.
August West would not talk about his past, not even to his family. His children did not even know his real name, though they knew it was not August West. When they asked their father why he chose that name, he replied that he came to America in August and he was going West. When they asked what his birth name was, he remained silent. Nor would he answer questions about where he grew up.
But at least one of August’s daughters got the truth from her father, and on her deathbed she confessed the family secret. August was Jewish.
There’s no proof (August made sure of that) but this explanation makes sense. Perhaps August was fleeing Russian Anti-Semitism and he did not trust America to treat Jews fairly, either, so he left his Jewish identity in Russia. August could not reveal his true name because it would likely expose his Jewish roots. He could not reveal his hometown because the Russian Empire often forced Jewish families into segregated Jewish communities.
Searching through the paperwork his life produced, we find that he wrote his birthplace on his World War I draft registration card: “Dubna, Walenske, Russia.” Today, this town is almost certainly Dubno, Volhynia, Ukraine. Placenames can be confusing in this multi-ethnic borderland because they change depending on if they’re spelled in Russian, Polish, Czech, German, Yiddish, or Ukrainian, but Dubno fits this explanation. Dubno was home to the region’s largest and most prominent Jewish community, the hometown of famous rabbis, poets, and intellectuals – precisely the kind of place that August must keep secret if he was to start over as a Gentile in America.
Heartbreakingly, August West was wise to leave Dubno. According to the Virtual Jewish Library, Dubno in 1931 had a Jewish population of approximately 7,364 (accounting for 58% of the town’s residents). Only about 300 of them survived the Nazi genocidal massacres and concentration camps of World War II.
Was August West wrong to hide his Jewish identity in America? I won’t judge him. We know, unfortunately, that Anti-Semitism runs deep in our country as well. It was probably true that he and his children had better opportunities and were safer from harm by adopting the German-Russian identity of August’s wife Bertha. According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Jewish people make up only 2.4% of the American population but are the target of about 60% of all religious-based hate crimes.
“Our Grandpa’s story is important, I think,” Bruce West says, “because it relates on a personal/individual level, and brings understanding to the mystery of where and how we end up depends upon the fickleness of life.”