Orphan #8

by Kim van Alkemade

  The Hebrew Orphan Asylum baseball team, circa 1920. My grandfather, Victor, is seated in front of his brother Seymour, the team’s “pillar of strength.” Photograph from author’s collection.

  Contractor of Waists

  There is some mystery to the disappearance of my great-grandfather, Harry Berger, a contractor in the shirtwaist industry who’d been born in Russia in 1884 and arrived in New York in 1890. On the admission form to the orphanage, it is remarked that “Father is tubercular and is at present in Colorado with his brother,” which gives the impression that illness and the inability to work were behind Harry’s decision to leave his wife and three young sons. But the story I remember hearing is that Harry had gotten a young Italian woman who worked for him pregnant; when her family threatened to kick her out, Harry asked his wife if the girl could live with them. Fannie refused, but she hadn’t been prepared for Harry to up and leave. Decades later, suffering from dementia, Fannie relived the day he left, pleading from her nursing home bed to the ghost of her husband: “Don’t leave, Harry. Think of the boys. Put back the suitcase, we’ll get through this.”

  I imagined Rabinowitz Dry Goods to look much like Isaacs Hardware Store in Leadville, Colorado. Courtesy of the Beck Archives, Special Collections, University Libraries, University of Denver.

  They didn’t get through it. Harry ran off to Leadville, Colorado. Fannie couldn’t go home to her parents because she’d defied her father in marrying Harry—unlike Fannie’s obedient sister, who’d been married off by their father to a rich uncle. After Harry left, Fannie sold her household effects for a total of $60. She might have turned, in desperation, to prostitution—many abandoned mothers occasionally did—or tried to eke out an existence on charity. Instead, she went to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, like thousands of parents before her, who, for reasons of death or desertion or illness, were unable to care for their children.

  The Hebrew Infant Home, where Dr. Solomon conducted her research, was inspired by the real Hebrew Infant Asylum. This picture shows the glassed-in babies in the isolation ward. Courtesy of The New York Academy of Medicine Library.

  Like many inmates of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, my grandfather Victor and his brothers, Charles and Seymour, were not really orphans, and certainly not up for adoption. What was unusual was that their mother ended up living at the institution to which she had committed them. In 1918, the orphanage was experiencing a serious shortage of help. With so many men in the military, women had greater employment opportunities, making jobs at the orphanage—with its low wages, long hours, and residence requirements—a hard sell. While Fannie always said it was a miracle that the superintendent offered her a position on the very day her sons were admitted to the institution, it’s also true that her poverty and desperation to be near her children made her an ideal candidate.

  When Fannie started working at the orphanage as a domestic in the Reception House, Charles was only three years old—too young for the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. He was sent to the Hebrew Infant Asylum, where he soon contracted measles. When Fannie went to visit him, she wasn’t allowed into the ward and could only stand in the hallway listening to his cries. When Charles recovered, Fannie threatened to quit unless her son was allowed to live with her in the Reception House. After Charles was old enough to join his brothers in the main building, Fannie was promoted to counselor and her duties included helping to process new admissions. Every child committed to the orphanage spent weeks quarantined in Reception. Besides having their heads shaved, they were evaluated by a doctor for physical and mental condition, tested for diphtheria, vaccinated and given an eye test, a dental exam, and surgery to remove their tonsils and adenoids. My great-grandmother Fannie often let the traumatized children cry themselves to sleep at night in her arms.

  Ever Efficient Boy of the Home

  Even before my discoveries at the Center for Jewish History, I’d wanted to learn all I could about the institution where my grandfather Victor had grown up—an institution so large it was its own census district. I’d read The Luckiest Orphans, the most complete history of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum ever written, and was so appreciative of the insight it gave me into my grandfather’s childhood that I wrote the author, Hyman Bogan, a letter of thanks. Apparently, he wasn’t used to getting fan mail. I was amazed when I answered my phone one evening in 2001 to hear a strange man’s voice say, “Is this Kim? You wrote to me about my buh-buh-buh-book.” Hy later told me his stutter had begun after being slapped on his first day in the orphanage.

  Fannie and Victor at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. Photograph from author’s collection.

  I asked if I might meet him in New York for an interview and he was delighted at the prospect. Together we toured Jacob Schiff Playground, the public park on Amsterdam Avenue where the massive orphanage once stood. Much of my fictional depiction of life in the Orphaned Hebrews Home was inspired by Hy’s words and memories. Thanks to him, I was able to imagine Rachel’s life in the orphanage, from clubs and dances to loneliness and bullying.

  My research suggests that my grandfather Victor flourished at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. By the time he was a high school senior, he was a salaried captain—a position just below counselor—as well as vice-president of the Boys’ Council, a member of the Masquerade Committee, secretary of the Blue Serpent Society, and a member of the varsity basketball team. He was “the hustling young business manager” for The Rising Bell, the orphanage’s monthly magazine. Upon his graduation from DeWitt Clinton School, Vic was praised for his “stick-to-it-iveness” and “pleasant personality.” A “brilliant future in the outside world” was predicted for this “ever-efficient boy of the Home.” Though he rarely spoke of his childhood in the orphanage, he did express his gratitude for the institution in which he lived from age 6 to 17.

  But I knew there was another side to Victor’s childhood memories. In 1987, my dad had gone missing; for two months, we’d had no inkling of his whereabouts. When Victor said, “I want to talk to you about your father,” I was expecting the same optimistic platitudes I’d been hearing for weeks: that everything would turn out fine, how brave I was, how strong. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. “Your father left you. You just forget about him from now on.” I knew Victor’s attitude was misplaced—if we were sure of anything, it was that my dad hadn’t run away to start a new life somewhere else—but my grandfather had gotten my attention. “My father left us, too, when me and my brothers, your uncles Seymour and Charles, were just little boys.” I understood now. Victor was offering me advice, one orphan to another, on how a child gets through life without a father: just forget about him.

  “We got a letter from my father once, did you know that?” This was news to me. I’d always assumed my great-grandfather had vanished, whereabouts unknown. Until I started researching my family history, I didn’t even know his name. “When your Grandma Fannie worked at the Reception House in the orphanage, we used to visit her on Sundays, me and my brothers. One time, she read us this letter she’d gotten from California, that our father was sick and would we send money for his treatment. She asked us boys what should she do. We told her not to send him a dime. A few months later she got another letter saying that he died, and would we send money for a headstone. Me and my brothers, we said no. He left us, like your dad left you. We didn’t owe him a thing, and neither do you. Remember that.”

  The dining room in the Orphaned Hebrews Home, where the Purim Dance was held, was inspired by this photograph of Thanksgiving dinner at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. Courtesy of The New York Academy of Medicine Library.

  What amazed me more than the revelation of the letters was Victor’s anger. It radiated off him, like heat rising over asphalt. Seventy years had elapsed and still he was mad at his father for making him an orphan. In April, the melting snows would expose my father’s body, revealing that I was the daughter of a suicide, the outcome I’d suspected all along. Surely, that was different from the way Harry Berger had left his family? But however they left
us, Victor and I were both children abandoned by their fathers.

  This picture shows patients suffering from tuberculosis being treated with heliotherapy at the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society, my inspiration for the Hospital for Consumptive Hebrews. Courtesy of the Beck Archives, Special Collections, CJS and University Libraries, University of Denver.

  Instead of following my grandfather’s advice to forget, however, I became intensely curious to know more. I began researching my family history, learning all I could about Harry Berger, the man who left his wife, forcing her to commit their sons to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. Eventually, that research led to the discoveries that inspired me to write Orphan #8.

  Conditions among Animals

  The question that remained was about the woman who had conducted the X-ray treatments that left the children bald. Dr. Mildred Solomon is a completely imaginary character, unlike her counterpart in the novel, Dr. Hess. He was inspired by the real Dr. Alfred Fabian Hess, who was an attending physician at the Hebrew Infant Asylum during the years in which my novel is set, and where he conducted research into childhood nutritional diseases, including rickets and scurvy. His infant isolation ward was lauded in a 1914 article in the New York Times, which stated that “the great advantage of the glass walls” was that “neither nurse nor doctor need pay many visits to the children under their care.”

  An X-ray of a 14-month-old baby with scurvy and an enlarged heart, from Scurvy: Past and Present by Dr. Alfred Hess (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1920).

  In the novel, my character’s dialogue is inspired by the real Dr. Hess’s own writing; in fact, the long passage Rachel reads in the medical library is a direct quote. And yes, he was married to the daughter of Isidor and Ida Strauss, who went down on the Titanic.

  The real Dr. Hess was often assisted by Miss Mildred Fish, coauthor on some of his nutrition studies and my inspiration, along with Dr. Elsie Fox, for Dr. Solomon. My research took me to the New York Academy of Medicine, where I began to understand my character of Mildred Solomon more fully—the struggles she would have gone through, the pressures she was under, the goals to which she aspired. Dr. Solomon’s confrontation with Rachel gives the elderly woman a chance to defend her life’s work and her actions.

  In the early twentieth century, the medical field was becoming more scientific, and research became increasingly privileged. Amazing discoveries seemed to justify whatever methods were necessary to achieve the miraculous vaccinations and treatments that conquered disease and relegated conditions, such as rickets and scurvy, to the pages of American history. Today, the ethics of many such experiments have been condemned: the testing of the polio vaccine on children in an orphanage; the study of untreated syphilis in prisoners; the sterilization of people who are impoverished or intellectually disabled. Sadly, disenfranchised people have often been “material” for medical experimentation.

  A ward at the Hebrew Infant Asylum, circa 1908. Courtesy of The New York Academy of Medicine Library.

  It seems impossible now, however, to look back on experiments like those conducted by Dr. Fox and Dr. Hess and not see them through the distorting lens of the Holocaust. When telling people what Orphan #8 is about, I have learned that saying the words “Jewish children” and “medical experiments” in the same sentence is almost guaranteed to elicit a remark about Nazis. It seemed inevitable that Rachel herself, looking back on her childhood, would draw the same comparison, and only fair to allow Dr. Solomon to defend herself from these charges.

  A Wall They Cannot See

  Joan Nestle, cofounder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, came to Milwaukee to give a lecture while I was in graduate school there. She read to us from a letter given to the archives by a woman who had endured the humiliation and fear of a police raid on a lesbian club in the 1950s. When I imagined Rachel and Naomi’s relationship, at first I thought no further than their romantic reunion at the carousel. But as I developed the novel, I realized how important it was to explore the ways in which the characters would have responded to the repressive era in which they lived. As a lesbian writing at the time explained, “Between you and other women friends is a wall which they cannot see, but which is terribly apparent to you. The inability to present an honest face to those you know eventually develops a certain deviousness which is injurious to whatever basic character you may possess. Always pretending to be something you are not, moral laws lose their significance.”

  In the 1950s, psychiatry in America purported that homosexuality was a psychological disorder that could be cured through analysis and therapy. The prevailing scientific view, as expressed by Dr. Frank Caprio in Female Homosexuality: A Psychodynamic Study of Lesbianism (New York: Citadel Press, 1954), was that homosexuality resulted from “a deep-seated and unresolved neurosis.” Caprio explained, “Many lesbians claim that they are happy and experience no conflict about their homosexuality, simply because they have accepted the fact that they are lesbians and will continue to live a lesbian type of existence. But this is only a surface or pseudohappiness. Basically, they are lonely and unhappy and are afraid to admit it, deluding themselves into believing that they are free of all mental conflicts and are well adjusted to their homosexuality.”

  Postcard by Photobelle W.I. Courtesy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives Photo collection, found images folder.

  As adults, Rachel and Naomi would have lived with the dual experience of their relationship being both invisible (as female spinster roommates) and dangerous. Lesbian teachers and nurses, in particular, were fearful of losing their jobs and reputations. Living in the Village would have helped to ease their sense of isolation. As Caprio helpfully notes, “The Greenwich Village section of New York City has for many years been known as a center where lesbians and male homosexuals tend to congregate, particularly those with artistic talent.” But when Naomi’s Uncle Jacob offers them his apartment rent-free, the move out to Coney Island exacerbates their sense of isolation.

  The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society would have been one group where homosexuality was not condemned. Sigmund Freud’s 1909 visit to Dreamland, Luna Park, and Steeplechase Park led him to confide to his diary that the “lower classes on Coney Island are not as sexually repressed as the cultural classes.” Freud’s visit to Coney Island was the inspiration for the 1926 formation of the Amateur Psychoanalytic Society, which met monthly and hosted an annual Dream Film award night—home movies which dramatized significant dreams and presented the dreamer’s accompanying analysis. One of them, “My Dream of Dental Irritation” by Robert Troutman, openly explores a gay theme. According to Zoe Beloff, editor of The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle (New York: Christine Burgin, 2009), “Troutman says he was drawn to the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society as a teenager struggling to come to terms with his homosexuality.”

  As adults, Rachel and Naomi would have lived and worked in a society that denigrated and maligned their sexuality. In the orphanage, however, the atmosphere may have been more permissive. One man, recalling his years at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in response to a survey, matter-of-factly observed, “As far as homosexuality was concerned, I think there was plenty of it going around. In my own case, I jerked off quite a few fellows, and they did likewise to me.” For girls, intense crushes—including love notes, jealous intrigues, and displays of affection—were common, though these relationships were widely understood as immature substitutes for the heterosexual attractions that were expected to eventually replace them. Unless, of course, the girls bravely chose to live “a lesbian type of existence.”

  —Kim van Alkemade

  The carousel at Coney Island amusement park in the 1950s. Jewish woodcarvers from Eastern Europe crafted many such horses. Close-up from photograph in author’s collection.

  Reading Group Guide for Orphan #8

  1. Was Harry Berger wrong to run away? What might have been different had he stayed?

  2. What might have been different if Rachel could have told h
er friend Flo the truth about her relationship with Naomi?

  3. Was Dr. Solomon wrong to use Rachel in her experimental study of the X-ray tonsillectomy?

  4. In what ways did the Orphaned Hebrews Home benefit the children who grew up there? How were the children affected by that experience?

  5. Was it selfish of Sam to leave Rachel in Leadville with their Uncle Max? Why do you think Sam keeps leaving his sister behind?

  6. If Dr. and Mrs. Abrams had known that Rachel was “unnatural,” do you think they would have still been kind to her?

  7. What do you think of the way Mrs. Hong treats Sparrow and Jade?

  8. Is Dr. Solomon to blame for causing Rachel’s tumor, or should she be thanked for spurring Rachel’s discovery of it in time for treatment?

  9. How have the medical attitudes about treating women with breast cancer changed since Dr. Feldman’s time?

  10. Would Rachel have been justified in giving Dr. Solomon an overdose of morphine in revenge?

  11. How do you think Naomi will react when Rachel tells her about the cancer and her upcoming surgery?

  12. What other walls have the characters built around one another, or themselves, in the novel?

  Credits

  Cover design by Emin Mancheril

  Cover photograph © Karina Simonsen/Trevillion Images