RUTHFULLY YOURS

Like most immigrants, they couldn’t speak the language. Coming from a small village in Russia, they had never seen anything even remotely like New York City. They could have arrived from another planet. All they had to guide them was a piece of paper with the address of a distant relative who lived on the Lower East Side.

After generations of extreme poverty and religious persecution, Moshe and his more savvy wife, Yetta, had decided to sell their house and borrow enough money to pay for two tickets to America. The plan was that father and son would then earn enough money in the New World to bring over the rest of the family. Constant hunger was a hallmark of Samuel’s childhood in Russia. His daily diet had consisted of one piece of black bread and a potato dipped in herring sauce for flavor. Occasionally there were onions and radishes and a glass of milk for the children. It had been that way for generations and there was little chance it would ever change.

Breaking with tradition, Yetta chose to send Samuel instead of her eldest son. Although Samuel looked even younger than 15, Yetta believed that he would fare better than his older brother. She knew her son.

There was no government assistance for the giant wave of immigrants to America at the turn of the 20th century. Instead, like all the immigrants that had come before, they would fend for themselves. They also helped each other. The distant relative on the Lower East Side took in Samuel and Moshe, even though, with three children and two boarders in only three rooms, that was a challenge. Another distant cousin, with a larger home in Brooklyn, soon took them in until they could afford a room of their own.

After a series of jobs that brought in more money, and going to school at night to learn English, Samuel started his own business. He bought nine sewing machines on credit and hired employees. Many trades were closed to Jews, but the garment industry seemed to belong to them.

After two difficult years, during which the 20-year-old businessman worked 20 hours a day and lost money, his business began to improve. He hired more employees, bought more sewing machines and moved to larger and larger spaces. A terrible experience with a sadistic foreman in one of his early jobs had taught him the importance of treating his workers with respect and paying them fairly.

By 1915, merely 15 years after Samuel had arrived, his S.L. Hoffman manufacturing company occupied a seven-story, block-long building and was the largest producer of inexpensive women’s dresses in America, supplying Gimbels, Macy’s, M -0.03 % Bloomingdale’s and Marshall Field’s. Samuel Hoffman would eventually serve on the boards of banks and educational institutions.

At the end of his long life, Samuel believed that his real success lay not in business but in family. His only son, Burton, became an orthopedic surgeon. His grandsons: two doctors and two professors. This immigrant story might be like any of the millions of others in America—people arriving with nothing and succeeding beyond their dreams—except for one detail.

Samuel’s second-oldest grandson, Jeff Hoffman, to his mother’s distress, chose to study what sounded like a discipline with less-than-sturdy career prospects: astrophysics. But it worked out. Ninety-three years after his grandfather and great-grandfather had arrived in the New World wearing their winter clothes in midsummer, Jeff Hoffman donned another kind of unusual garb, left the space shuttle Endeavor, and floated 400 miles above the Earth in a mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.

Jeff Hoffman’s grandfather, who died in 1976, didn’t live to see his astronaut grandson’s 1993 trip, but chances are that Samuel, amazed by his own flight from a two-room, dirt-floor hut in Russia, wouldn’t have been surprised. Anything seemed possible in America, even sailing across the stars.

Mr. Kozak is the author of “LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay” (Regnery, 2009).