Kostik: Chancing Execution, This Sixteen-Year-Old Escapes to America from Czarist Russia by Himself and Builds the American Dream

Life for the Russian peasant under Czar Nicholas in 1910—and especially the czarina—was not pleasant. Any show of dissent was met quickly with violent consequences from the Cossacks, the czar’s not-so-secret police. Kostik Kopituk, a native of a village near Pinsk, Byelorussia, became a bricklayer apprentice in one of the czar’s construction companies at age eleven. Over the next four years, he began to consider going to America at the suggestion of his schoolmate friend, Itzahkh Cohen. Kos...