A Medal Of Honor For Sargent William Shemin…a Century Long Odyssey

I am in the east room of the White House on June 2, 2015 for what is turning out to be the most amazing family reunion I could ever have imagined.

- Dan Burstein

At the podium, President Barack Obama is presenting the Medal of Honor to my 86 year-old cousin, Elsie Shemin-Roth, and her sister, Ina Bass, who are both daughters of Sargent William Shemin, a man who fought bravely in World War I almost a century earlier. This is an extremely rare posthumous presentation of the Medal of Honor, the military’s highest award for battlefield valor, in consideration of Sgt. Shemin’s “extraordinary heroism and selflessness, above and beyond the call of duty.”

William Shemin, whom we knew in our family as Bill, was a younger first cousin to my grandmother (Leah Shemin). Leah—my father’s mother—and many of my Shemin relatives had their origins in a small town called Orsha in what is today Belarus. Around the turn of the 20th century this Russian town near the Dnieper River had a population of about 13,000—a little more than half of them Jewish. My grandmother’s branch of the family, and a whole generation of our forebears, including Bill Shemin’s parents, fled Tsarist pograms, famines, and a general lack of opportunity in Russia to come to America in the late 1800s and early 1900s. (If you’ve seen Fiddler on the Roof, you can imagine Orsha back then, even though Fiddler is set in Ukraine, a few hundred miles to the south).

Like William Shemin, who was born in Bayonne, New Jersey in 1896, my father was a first generation American, born in the Bronx in 1915 to Russian immigrant parents. As my father made his way through high school, college, and law school, Bill Shemin would give him his first job working in the greenhouse Bill ran after he had returned from WW I, obtained a forestry degree at Syracuse University, and established his business growing trees, flowers and plants on Boston Post Road in the Bronx.