by Maisie Mosco
David gazed at the imposing edifice which stood directly opposite the station approach. He could not see it too clearly in the gathering darkness, but there was something holy about it. “Is that a shul, Rabbi?” he asked as they turned left into the main road.
“That? A synagogue?” The little minister’s homely features crinkled with amusement. “One that size we don’t have yet! Mine is a room with the ceiling falling in, but God doesn’t mind, a snob He isn’t. That beautiful building is Manchester Cathedral.”
A flicker of apprehension crossed David’s expression.
“Here, there’s no need to fear the Church, my boy. It’s not like in Russia.” Rabbi Lensky took a tin of snuff from his pocket as they jogged under a railway bridge. “We’ve left the Irwell behind, it’s safe to clear my breathing tubes!” he joked inserting a pinch into each of his flaring nostrils. “And now we’re entering Strangeways, where our people live.”
Everyone began peering into the dusk to get a glimpse of the locality. Gloomy expanses of brick and deserted streets met their eyes on both sides.
“Where’re all the people, Baruch?” Yossel inquired as they passed a lonely mongrel raising its leg against a lamp-post.
“Eating their supper, or working still. But you should see it on a Sunday morning! And anyway, we’re not really there yet.”
Moishe Lipkin had a perplexed look on his monkey face. “Why’re all the buildings painted black, Rabbi?”
“They weren’t in Rostov,” young Lazar Lensky informed his middle-aged relative who had been born and bred there.
“Oy,” the rabbi sighed. “The way a Jewish family gets split up nowadays, your children don’t even remember me, Yossel. They’re not painted black here, either, boys. They’re coated with soot.”
“What’s the soot from?” David wanted to know.
“Such inquiring minds these lads have! I hope they’ll also apply them to studying the Talmud. The soot is from the smoke which belches from many chimneys. Everyone burns coal in their grate here and Manchester isn’t short of factories. Cotton mills also they have in the area, they call it the cotton capital of England. You see that big lorry and the one behind it?”
A couple of vehicles were clattering past in the opposite direction, both piled so high with great lumps of cloth the drivers had to crack their whips to keep the straining horses on the move.
“That you’ll get used to seeing. They’re taking the cloth from the mills to the station goods yard.”
“You fancy working in a mill, Mr. Sandberg?” Yossel asked Abraham.
Abraham looked startled by the question. “How comes a cobbler to a loom?”
“My husband was the best cobbler in Dvinsk,” Sarah said proudly. “If things had only been different, he’d have had his own shop.”
“Oy vay,” the rabbi groaned. “If things had only been different! Everywhere I go they’re singing that tune. As it happens there’re no mills where our people live and work, but I promise you in every other street you’ll find a garment factory.”
“We had boot factories in Dvinsk,” David told him. “My Uncle Ephraim used to work in one, but they made him join the army and he hasn’t come back yet.”
He never will, Abraham thought. And if the local police inspector hadn’t spoken up for me because his wife said nobody could mend her fine slippers like I did, they’d have taken me also. What kind of world was it, when a woman’s slippers could save a man from mutilation or death? It didn’t require a war to cut down a Jewish lad who found himself in the Russian army. His Tsarist comrades saw to that.
Sarah moved closer to him, aware of what he was thinking. Whenever his brother brother’s was mentioned his handsome face tensed with pain. “It was a long time ago,” she whispered comfortingly. David had never known his uncle, he only knew what he had been told.
“But nothing’s changed, has it?”
“Something has, for sure!” Sarah chuckled with satisfaction. “Fat Mrs. Ivanovitch will have to find someone else to mend her slippers now.” She clutched Abraham’s arm. “What’s that coming towards us?”
A very tall, narrow vehicle was rattling down the road.
“How is it moving, Abraham? I don’t see any horses.”
“Only trains can move with nothing to pull them,” Shloime Lipkin said confusedly.
Abraham eyed the passengers on the top deck, as the thing drew near. “A train with two storeys? And no roof?”
Gittel held on to Moishe, in case he might try to leap over the side of the cart and board it when it clanked past. “Nobody warned me to expect railway lines on the streets here!”
“Me neither,” Hannah Lensky wailed gathering all her children to her bosom.
“It can’t be a train, there’s no steam,” David said thoughtfully. He watched the vehicle recede into the mist. “Whatever makes it go must come from that long thing sticking up on top. But what’s it attached to?”
Everyone looked up and saw the wires overhead.
The rabbi was laughing so hard he dewed his beard with spittle. “What greeners we are when we first get here from the old country!” he gurgled. “In English they call that a tram, so you’ve learned your first English word. In Yiddish we don’t have a word for it.”
“Tram!” all the children chorused delightedly.
“In the wire overhead, there’s electricity, we don’t have a word for that either.”
“Electricity,” the children repeated.
Their parents stared up at the wires nervously.
“They used to be drawn by horses and some still are,” Rabbi Lensky explained. “But not the ones on Bury New Road, our district. So when you need a ride somewhere you’ll take a tram.”
Sarah clutched Abraham’s arm again. “Never!”
The rabbi went on talking, but Sarah was no longer listening. She glanced at her sons who would soon be loose on this broad highway with its dangerous traffic, she couldn’t go with them everywhere they went.
“Tram, Mamma!” Esther piped from her lap.
She smoothed her daughter’s tangled hair, which flamed like Abraham’s and Sammy’s, and smiled at how quickly she had picked up the English word. But Esther was quick for a child not yet three. It would be easy for the little ones to adapt themselves, they had nothing to compare things with, nothing to remember. Even the children of David’s age would soon settle down into their new life. For their parents it was different. How would she ever get used to it here? Find her way about and do her marketing? Would the shopkeepers laugh at her because she couldn’t speak their language? The ill-lit side streets seemed to be skulking in the shadows and had a mean, unfriendly look about them. Different from Dvinsk, with its cosy market place where she’d fed the pigeons in the days when there’d been bread to spare, before she’d grown up, and the river had looked fresh and clear as it flowed on its way to meet the Baltic, not like a mess of rancid soup fouling the air. Where she’d fallen in love with Abraham and borne her children and her parents lay buried beside her sister, who’d been prettier than her and so courageous. How had little Fredel, only fourteen, found the courage to walk into the Dvina, on and on until the current swept her away and covered her head? Their parents believed she had lost her mind, but Sarah didn’t think so. All the young girls swore they’d drown themselves if they were ever violated by the soldiers who roamed the countryside. A good Jewish girl wouldn’t want to live afterwards. Others had been ravaged, too, but Fredel was the only one who kept her word. Sarah looked at her daughter and shuddered. But Esther would grow to girlhood in a country where such things didn’t happen, where the people weren’t barbarians and nobody had the right to snuff out your life like a candle because you were a Jew.
“Stop daydreaming, Mother!” David gave her a prod. “The rabbi wants to show us something.”
Sarah became aware that the cart had halted. She stopped fingering her brooch and listened to what Rabbi Lensky was saying. You couldn’t bring back the dead and thinking
about them didn’t help you to go on living.
“You’ve been travelling so long, a minute or two more won’t make any difference and this you have to see, it will make you feel at home.” The hanging lantern at the front of the cart cast its glow on the minister’s face as he indicated a large, gracious building on their right, which seemed out of place in its humble surroundings. “The Assize Courts, where all the worst criminals get tried,” he announced.
A tremor of indignation rippled through the vehicle and everyone looked at Yossel Lensky. The insult had come from his cousin.
Yossel found his tongue. “We should feel at home there!”
Rabbi Lensky was enjoying himself. He had shown the building to new arrivals before and always played on them the trick which had been played on him the first time he saw it. “Don’t get excited, Yossel. You haven’t yet seen who is up there on the top.”
“I don’t care who is up there on the top. I demand an apology!”
“Have a look, all of you, just the same.”
The fine, Gothic structure was veiled in mist and dusk had darkened into night, but a carved figure was just discernible perched on the apex of the gable which crowned the entrance.
“Who is it?” Yossel snapped, then the moon peeped from behind a cloud and lit the figure.
Everyone gasped.
“Moses in Manchester? How can it be?” Abraham rubbed his eyes and looked again.
“He’s got the Torah in his hand, Father!” David exclaimed.
“What better than the Books of the Law could they have there?” Rabbi Lensky asked. “When the Court begins a new session here, all the judges walk up the steps in a procession wearing their robes and wigs and trumpets are blown to herald them, but no judge is higher and wiser than the Almighty.”
“Will we be able to see the procession?” David asked eagerly.
“Never mind the procession, just keep your mind on the Torah and Moses.”
David glanced up the street beside the Court as they moved on. “What’s that big building at the back, Rabbi?” Something about its forbidding bulk made him shiver.
“You didn’t see the bars on the windows? It’s the county jail.”
“A nice cheerful place to have in your neighbourhood!” Shloime Lipkin quipped.
“Why do the Jews live near it?” David inquired.
“Oy, he’s here with his questions again!” the minister said in mock exasperation. “Well I’ll tell you, little man. When I look at Strangeways, the only reason I can think of why our people settled here is it isn’t too far to walk from the station.” His beady eyes twinkled mischievously. “Like most who are coming now, those who came first weren’t escorted in a fine conveyance like this. Which my young congregant Menachem, who’s driving us, borrowed from his boss, a greengrocer. And swept the rotting cabbage leaves out of, before he would allow me to get in. Those in whose footsteps you’re following got off the train and shlepped on their two feet, with their bundles on their backs, and stopped when they got tired is my opinion.”
“You won’t hear me and my wife grumbling, Rabbi,” Yankel Cohen said gruffly. “Not after the place we lived in. You were either up to your ankles in mud, or choking with dust, according to the weather. Who knows from pavements even, in the shtetlach in the Pale? The WC, excuse me for mentioning it, was a hole in the yard—”
“Ours had a screen round it,” Shloime interrupted. “And for water we shlepped two miles.”
“Ours had a screen, also. You think we’re not respectable?” Zelda Cohen joined in. “And we too had to walk a long way to bring water.”
“How often did you clean your windows?” Gittel asked her with a smile.
“Never. And you?”
“The same.”
“How could anyone not clean their windows?” Sarah said in a shocked voice.
Gittel and Zelda shared a laugh, then Gittel replied for both of them. “The houses didn’t have any.”
„Except when a loose plank fell off the wall and then you had an open one,” Yankel grinned. „So you see why we won’t grumble.”
Rabbi Lensky had a special place in his heart for those of his brethren forced by imperial decree to live in the squalid, makeshift townlets within the Pale of Settlement, much of which was an arid wilderness along Russia’s Western border. Five million Jews had been banished to the Pale, but God had begun to set them free and with His help more would follow. “Who is entitled to grumble when the Almighty has granted them a new lease of life?” he said gently.
How lucky we were, living in a pleasant place like Dvinsk, Sarah reflected. There was always someone worse off than yourself. She felt for Abraham’s hand in the darkness and entwined her fingers with his. “Let’s try to remember what the rabbi said, Abraham. He’s right.”
“Some of the stores stay open late, to oblige people,” the rabbi said as they passed a couple which had their lights on. He peered through the windows inquisitively. “Mr. Halpern’s not too busy tonight, people think twice before they spend money on a haircut.”
They could see the bald-headed barber sweeping the floor in the flickering gaslight. Next door, a greengrocer was weighing some carrots for a woman in a ragged shawl.
“Poor Mr. Radinsky!” Rabbi Lensky chuckled. “That’s Mrs. Kaplan he’s serving.”
“Something’s peculiar about her?” Gittel quizzed.
“If you get her for a neighbour you’ll find out! Mr. Radinsky’s Menachem’s boss, a man with a heart of gold. His wife’s is made of iron.”
“I’m relieved the storekeepers’re Jewish,” Sarah said.
“If they weren’t you’d go without all the things you’re used to. In England, the goyim don’t know from black bread and salt herring. Now quick! Show me the addresses, I’ve just given myself an appetite. First we’ll take our young couple with the baby, it should be in bed already and its little mother also.”
Yankel cleared his throat awkwardly. “It’s like this, Rabbi—”
“All right, you needn’t tell me,” the kindly man cut in. “I see it on your face. Listen, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, you’re in good company, I too had no address to go to when I arrived. Tonight you’ll stay at my house, it’s not my house but where I live they’re good-natured and it won’t be the first time they’ve added water to the soup.”
Zelda was white with weariness. “A thousand thanks, Rabbi.”
“Tomorrow we’ll try to find somewhere,” Yankel promised.
“Tomorrow will take care of itself,” the minister replied with a pastoral smile. Because it invariably had to, it was an essential Jewish philosophy.
The Sandbergs stood outside their landsleit’s house, their boxes and bundles cluttering the pavement, watching the cart trundle away.
“Knock on the door already!” Sarah said nervously to Abraham.
“I’m not sure which one it is.”
“I think Rabbi Lensky pointed to the one on the right,” David said helpfully. All the doors were in pairs.
“It’s the one on the left,” Sarah said. “The curtains’re the ones Malka had in Dvinsk. They’ve still got the same hole in them.”
Abraham lifted the rusting knocker and gave the door a gentle tap. “I wouldn’t mention that to Malka, if I were you. I’d be careful what I mention.”
“We’re not inside the house yet and he’s already putting a muzzle on me.”
David was busy looking around. “It’s not very nice round here, is it?”
“He’s the one you should put the muzzle on,” his mother told his father. She surveyed the short, narrow street. At one end was the main road, at the other a high, brick wall with broken glass on the top to keep out intruders. “If the Lipkins’ landsleit lived in this street, their Moishe would soon be cut to ribbons!”
Abraham stepped back and looked at the house, which was cramped in the middle of a grimy terrace of others just like it. “You think maybe they’re out? I don’t see any lights.”
“The whole street can’t be out at suppertime.” All the houses were in darkness. “There must be two rooms and everyone uses the back one,” Sarah surmised. “Give another little knock to the door.” She tried to control her nervousness but it showed in her voice. “Though what we’ll say when they open it… I feel like a beggar, standing here.”
“Beggars we’re not, but choosers we can’t be right now, either.” Abraham applied the knocker with a little more pressure. “And even a landsleit’s home isn’t made of elastic,” he warned preparing Sarah and himself for the worst. “You heard what Rabbi Lensky said about houseroom being hard to find, the Berkowitzes could be already full up.” He peered through the letterbox as if he expected to see a hundred newly arrived immigrants crowded within.
Sarah pulled him away. “A nice thing it’d be if Malka and Chaim saw you spying on them! Knock again, louder. Remember how Chaim talks at the top of his voice? Maybe that’s why they didn’t hear.”
David reached up and pounded the knocker so hard the sound echoed down the street.
“Now they’ll think we’re trying to break the door down!”
“Calm yourself, Sarah.”
“How can I, when I don’t know what kind of reception we’ll get? And you know how I hate asking favours,” she whispered as the door opened.
Chaim’s beefy face beamed like a welcoming lantern from the dim lobby, dispelling her doubts. “Malka! Put down the soup ladle!” he bellowed excitedly. “You won’t believe who’s here!” He clasped Abraham to his barrel-chest, half lifting him from the doorstep. “So come inside, all of you! Why’re you waiting there?”