American Judge

Seventy years ago, Heinrich Cramer sailed into New York Harbor aboard SS American Judge and passed the Statue of Liberty. The twenty-seven-year-old former soldier of a defeated army then spent five weeks in limbo, on Ellis Island, unsure if the United States would admit him. He spoke Low German, High German, and Russian, but not English, and he had very little money in his pocket. Finally, on November 24, 1950, the day after Thanksgiving, he left the storied immigration station, found lunch in Manhattan for a dollar, and set forth — now known as Henry — on his next chapter.

For the better part of his life, Henry was a proud U.S. citizen who loved God and country only slightly more than he loved horses and a fresh loaf of rye bread. He settled in Middle America, where he married a woman from Orange County, California, who could trace her family roots to eighteenth-century Virginia. He worked a dairy farm, raised three kids, and drove a school bus in his...