UPPER FREEHOLD: Local musician seeks to have Finnish citizenship restored

By Joanne Degnan, Staff Writer
   UPPER FREEHOLD — Finnish-born cellist Elina Snell- man-Lang holds a 100-markka bank note from her homeland bearing the portrait of her great-great-grandfather and recalls the day she discovered she had unwittingly forfeited her Finnish birthright by becoming a U.S. citizen.
   ”I was so upset,” says Ms. Snellman-Lang, 47, of the Lynnwood Estates neighborhood in Upper Freehold. “When I became an American citizen, I thought I could keep my Finnish citizenship too because I was born there, but it was automatically revoked and I didn’t even know it at the time.”
   The fact that Ms. Snellman-Lang’s ancestor, J.V. Snellman, is considered the founding father of modern Finland, makes her situation all the more ironic and a cause celebre in her homeland. To put her case in historical terms Americans can relate to, the situation is akin to the U.S. government revoking the citizenship of one of Thomas Jefferson’s great-great grandchildren.
   J.V. (Johan Vilhelm) Snellman was a scholar, journalist and politician widely regarded as the architect of Finnish nationalism during the 19th century when Finland was annexed by Russia. He pushed educational reforms that made Finnish, not Swedish, the country’s official language in 1863 and was responsible for convincing Czar Alexander II to allow Finland in 1865 to issue its own currency that wasn’t tied to the Russian ruble. (The Finnish markka was eventually replaced by the euro after Finland joined the European Union in 1999.)
   One of the most influential men of his time, J.V. Snellman still looms large in Finnish culture 130 years after his death. The nation celebrates Finnish Heritage Day every May 12 on the anniversary of his birth, has a Snellman museum in Kuopio where he lived, and a statue of him that stands in front of the Bank of Finland in Snellman Square, Helsinki.
   The plight of this revered historical figure’s descendant was chronicled last month in one of Finland’s major newspapers, the Helsingin Sanomat in Helsinki, the city where Ms. Snellman-Lang’s 82-year-old father, Olavi, and 77-year-old mother, Sanna, still live. Ms. Snellman-Lang says she is cautiously optimistic that the publicity may help to restore Finnish citizenship for her and for other Finnish expatriates around the world who are in the same situation.
   Ms. Snellman-Lang has lived in the U.S. since 1990, three years after marrying her American-born husband, Jeffrey Lang, a French horn player now with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The couple met in Tel Aviv, Israel, where she was studying music and he was principal horn with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. They were married in Finland in 1987.
   ”It was music that brought us together,” says Ms. Snellman-Lang, who now works part time as a cellist in the Broadway production of “The Lion King.”
   The couple settled in a Finnish community in Cresskill, N.J., so she could pursue her master’s degree in music at Mannes College in Manhattan. They had two toddler-age sons and were both working in New York City (he played in the orchestra for the Broadway show “Beauty and the Beast”) when the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack occurred and prompted her to reassess her immigration status.
   ”I had always been here with a green card, working … and everything was going fine,” Ms. Snellman-Lang said, referring to the identification card that serves as proof someone has been granted authorization to live and work in the United States on a permanent basis. “Then came 9/11 and that changed everything.”
   Worried that she could lose custody of her U.S.-born children if something should happen to her husband and she was deported to Finland, she quickly applied for U.S. citizenship in the fall of 2001.
   ”We were talking in this Finnish children’s play group that I belonged to about how Finnish women living here might not have any rights to their children if something happened to their spouses,” Ms. Snellman-Lang recalls. “Because I was just here with a green card, I was told I wouldn’t have any rights.”
   Ms. Snellman-Lang officially became a U.S. citizen in July 2002. She says she was unaware that Finnish law in 2002 did not allow dual citizenship, and that she lost her rights in Finland as soon as she took the oath of U.S. citizenship.
   ”I didn’t even know about it,” she says. “I still had my Finnish passport that was valid for 10 more years and I didn’t realize that I’m not really a citizen.”
   In fact, Ms. Snellman-Lang continued using that Finnish passport every year to travel to Finland with her husband and children for six-week vacations at their summer cabin in Viitasaari. There was no notification from Finland that her citizenship had been revoked, she said.
   Paradoxically, just months after Ms. Snellman-Lang unwittingly lost her Finnish citizenship in 2002, Finland changed its laws in 2003 to allow dual citizenship and set up a process for expatriates with revoked citizenship to reapply.
   According to the European University Institute’s Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, about 21,841 Finnish expatriates from all over the world reapplied for citizenship before the May 31, 2008, application deadline. Ms. Snellman-Lang, however, wasn’t one of them because she didn’t know then that she had lost her citizenship in the first place, she says.
   It wasn’t until the summer of 2008 when a Finnish masseuse in Philadelphia casually asked her if she had reapplied for Finnish citizenship under the new law that Ms. Snellman-Lang realized what had happened and began making frantic phone calls in a futile attempt try to get her citizenship restored.
   ”It turned out that I had just missed it by a couple of months,” Ms. Snellman-Lang says. “It feels so unfair.”
   As a practical matter, Ms. Snellman-Lang can continue to visit Finland with her family using her American passport, but she still feels as if she’s lost part of her heritage by losing her Finnish citizenship.
   ”It’s really the principle of the thing,” Ms. Snellman-Lang says as she puts the 100 markka bearing J.V. Snellman’s portrait back inside a picture frame. “I am so very happy to be American, but I still want to be Finnish.
   ”I have tried hard to keep my connection to Finland,” she points out. “I bring my family there every summer, my children speak the language, and they have learned all the customs, foods and traditions.”
   Nevertheless, Ms. Snellman-Lang is upbeat that everything will work out and she will one day regain her Finnish citizenship.
   ”I was already contacted by the (Finnish) embassy here and they wanted a copy of my U.S. citizenship, so there is something happening, I think,” Ms. Snellman-Lang says. “I am very hopeful.”