Occupation: Master of Chess

Credit: Jonathan Schick (see below)

Jonathan Schick, who is researching Akiba Rubinstein's life, had found (and kindly shares) the following 'List or Manifest of Alien Passengers' for the S. S. Berengaria, sailing from Cherbourg to New York, arriving there on Feb. 1st, 1928. The list includes (click on the picture for larger image), on lines 15 and 16, Akiba Rubinstein and his wife, Enia Rubinstein.

The list includes, inter alia, her place of birth, and the fact that both declared that they read German and Russian -- presumably, in addition to Polish and Yiddish (as well as Hebrew, at least in Akiba's case, as noted before on this blog), which they didn't declare to the immigration official, perhaps because Russian and German were more "international" languages. Knowing many languages was very common among Europeans of their generation, as even the list of passengers here shows.

Of particular interest is the 'occupation' line, which puts down Enia as a Housewife and Akiba as a 'master of chess'. Quite accurate.