postscript Sam Hallick was my maternal grandfather; his Arabic given name was Hussein Shousher. The family knew that he had lived in South Dakota, that he had married twice during his twenty-year stay in the US, that his second wife in the US was Ayshi Jabbara from the town of Joub Jannine, and that Sam Hallick and Ayshi Jabbara had an American-born son, named Mahamed S. Hallick (aka Mike). An online image of a gravestone in Sioux Falls, South Dakota discovered by one of my brothers displays an epitaph reading ‘Ashey, Wife of Sam Hallick, June 1886-Jan 21, 1919’ with Quranic inscriptions in Arabic. This photo of the gravestone has great significance for our extended family and calls forth our not-so-distant immigrant past. The Sam Hallick of Sioux Falls narrative is both a sentimental retelling of family folklore and a snapshot of a significant modern Arab Muslim immigrant presence in early twentieth-century South Dakota. Sam Hallick spent the first two decades of the twentieth century in the United States. Mostly lost to history, available information speaks only to his years in South Dakota from roughly 1909 to 1920. He was literate in Arabic and English, successful in business, and had a modern sense of fashion and technology, but he left no written account of his experiences in the United States. If he kept a journal or sent letters home, they have yet to be found. There is no record of his port of entry and there is some uncertainty in the public record about his year of entry: 1901 or 1902. His naturalization papers have not been located, and the public record is silent on his first eight or nine years in the United States. Before settling in South Dakota in 1909 at the age of 24 or 25, there is no confirmed documentation of his existence in the United States, an unnarrated life that cannot be fully assembled. Fragments include two photos of Sam Hallick in his Sioux Falls stores, several professional portraits of him alone and with family members, a small portrait photo of his first wife, Jessie Wayne, commercial ads and personal announcements in the Sioux Fall’s Argus Leader , a Security National Bank account book showing substantial deposits in 1920, a watch fob and chain, and a handful of official records, attesting to his residency in South Dakota from 1909 to 1920. There is also documentation of his two marriages, the death of his first wife in 1910, the birth of a son in 1917, the death of his second wife in 1919, and his ultimate departure from the US in 1920. For the 1910 Census, Sam Hallick lived in Clark, South Dakota; the record indicates that he was born in 1886 in Turkey Asia/Syria and arrived in the US in 1901. He was a naturalised US citizen, a widower, the head of household and a grocer living in a boarding house in Clark with 'two brothers' and a brother-in-law. Sam Hallick married Jessie Wayne in Coddington, South Dakota in 1909; both were 25 years old. Only a few months after they married, Jessie died, most likely from tuberculosis. Sometime, probably not long after Jessie’s death, Sam and his brothers moved to Sioux Falls, parting company with the Waynes. The first appearance of Sam Hallick in Sioux Falls is in the 1913 city directory, which lists his business as the Hallick & Ramaden confectionary on Main Street. He was associated with other retail ventures in Sioux Falls and neighbouring Canton: the Snow Ball Fruit Store (1916), the Temple Grocery (1916), and the Basket Grocery (1919), all in the centre of Sioux Falls’ prime business district.
Salah Hassan files
Sam Hallick, circa 1915, at his confectionery counter, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
He was doing very well in the summer of 1920, just before his departure from the United States. In June 1920, he made a deposit of $12,197 (equal to $382,229.59 in 2022 values) in the Security National Bank of Sioux Falls. Sam Hallick appears to have remade himself in the mould of the modern American man, transcending the markers of cultural difference that distinguish the Arabic-speaking immigrant from the English-speaking native-born Euro-American. His situation in South Dakota is in many respects representative of the numerous Arabic-speaking immigrants who settled in the United States, whose legacies can still be felt in cities such as Sioux Falls, the name of which remains a reminder of the colonisation of Indigenous Peoples. Ottoman Syrians entered the scene of US colonialism at the turn of the century as an alien third party and despite non-European foreign origins, as part of the merchant class in a booming provincial city, Sam Hallick and other Syrian immigrants became circumstantial participants in modern American settler colonialism. Upon his return to Lebanon in 1921, as Hussein Shousher carrying a laissez-passer from the French Embassy in New York, he entered his homeland as a colonial subject of a European power. In the post-WWI era, his ancestral village of Qaraoun in the Beqa’a Valley was assigned to the French as part of the newly created Mandate of Lebanon. As a 1901 immigrant to the United States, Sam Hallick achieved full citizenship, but on both sides of his twenty-year residency in the United States – before he left Qaraoun and after he returned, he was subject to Ottoman imperial rule and later to the French mandate authorities: Turkey (Asia) Syrian, US citizen and French colonial subject, he died in 1932, fourteen years before Lebanon achieved national independence from France. My family is in North America – belonging to Little Syria communities in Toledo, Ohio and London, Ontario—not because Sam Hallick immigrated to the United States, but because he returned to his home village in the Beqa’a Valley.
p
Salah D Hassan's areas of research are modern imperialism, anti- colonial movements and Arab American history. He has produced two films: Death of an Imam (2010) and Migrations of Islam . He teaches at Michigan State University.
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on site review 42: atlas :: being in place
:: emigration
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