The first place my World War Two refugee family landed in America was a sprawling corporate-run farm that “The Spinach King” had created in rural south New Jersey.
As displaced persons, they were sponsored for work in this country by Charles Franklin (C. F.) Seabrook. By the time they arrived, Seabrook Farms had become one of the biggest producers of flash-frozen vegetables in the country.
Seabrook Farms held the most extraordinary conglomeration of people. C. F.’s grandson, John, describes it in a 1996 a fascinating New Yorker article, The Spinach King, like this:
Many of the workers at Seabrook Farms were refugees of twentieth-century upheavals and hardships: Italians avoiding their war with Turkey in the nineteen-tens; former soldiers of the White Russian Army in the late teens and early twenties; Americans who lost their jobs during the Depression; Jamaicans and Barbadians and German prisoners of war in the forties; Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs fleeing the advance of the Soviet Army in 1945; Japanese Americans from ’44 to ’47; and Estonians and Latvians running from Stalin’s rule in the late forties and early fifties. My grandfather built “ethnic villages” for the different groups, and this collection of villages became Seabrook. In the nineteen-forties and fifties, there were thirty different languages spoken in Seabrook, a town of about five thousand people.
Although it occurred before my birth, the legacy of Seabrook Farms as my family’s first home deeply infused my psyche. I can still picture the wooden trailer in which they had towed all their belongings when they finally left to strike out on their own. It remained a ghostly fixture in the back yard of our house in North Jersey for decades, until all the boards—paled by rain, sun, wind and time—deteriorated and all that remained was the steel axle and wheels. My mother planted flowers around it.
Seabrook Farms (1949) imagines my mother’s arrival to this place—both the salvation and disbelief—you mumble, home, until it rises like a question. It was published in my book Mouth Quill—Poems with Ancestral Roots.
NEW! Click below on the Audio to hear Kaja Weeks reading of the full poem, Seabrook Farms (1949).
Click below on Download to access the full poem in print.
NEW ANNOUNCEMENT! THE WORLD PREMIERE of the film by Helga Merits (a Dutch-Estonian journalist and documentary filmmaker) The Paradox of Seabrook Farms announced! MARCH 16th 2024 at 11 am at the Levoy Theatre in Millville, NJ. The film includes her extensively researched account of an amazing time and place in American history.
Lyric Overtones 