At what, I do not know. He never spoke about these three years of his life. Neither did the relatives nor neighbors who sent out all those ultimately revealing scraps of sound over my youthful head.
It is difficult not to wonder about those three years. Why the silence? And it was, I see now, total silence. I never heard a word of complaint pass my father’s lips. Of course, I never heard him utter a word of joy, either. I mean about himself. He was always lavish with praise of his children, his wife, his neighbors, his bosses, his relatives, passers-by in the street. My father clearly held the firm belief that whatever evil existed in the world had not been created by the human beings who inhabited it. This was, of course, why there were those who called him stupid. As I consider the three years of his journey to America, common sense would seem to indicate that he must have been at least obtuse.
During the time he spent working his way across Europe and part of Asia, King Alexander I of Serbia, his queen, and many members of the court were destroyed in a bloody assassination; the repercussions of the Russo-Japanese War were shaking the complacent rulers of capitals from St. Petersburg to Vienna into a terrified hunt for scapegoats; Germany’s Wilhelm II, on his way to Tangier to try to solve the Moroccan crisis, narrowly avoided three attempts on his life; Father Gapon’s effort to lead a group of workers with a list of grievances to the Czar’s palace gates ended in a savage massacre; street fighting broke out in Moscow; curfews for Jews were established in Warsaw and Berlin; the Young Turks, beginning to throw their weight around in their efforts to seize control of the Ottoman Empire, discovered the heady effects of anti-Semitism as an instrument of national policy.
It could not have been easy or even safe at this time for a penniless young Jew to keep himself alive—and accumulate the price of a steerage passage to America—during the course of a three-year trek across a couple of continents that were resorting desperately to repressive measures, many of them savage, designed to prevent themselves from coming apart at the seams. How my father managed it, I will never know. I am not altogether sure I want to know. I suspect it was the method of the management that sealed his lips. I believe it was his capacity to turn his back on evil, no matter how savage or degrading, that made it possible for him to survive the experience of those years and arrive in New York harbor with a smile.
The testimony to the smile was not, like most of my recollections, hearsay. There was an eyewitness. We, the members of my family, always called this eyewitness Uncle Yokkib. I didn’t then know why, and I didn’t care. I realize now that I hated Uncle Yokkib all the days of my life while he was alive. On learning a number of years ago that he had died, I remember being puzzled and distressed by the pleasure I got from the news. Two weeks ago, at my father’s grave, I finally understood why.
It was Uncle Yokkib—so called, I am pleased to say, not because he was related to our family, but merely because he too came from Woloshonowa—who invented the oldest, if not the best, of the many jokes about my father that were told across my head when I was too young to understand them.
On the Castle Garden staff of the immigration authorities at that time there was a group of men known in Yiddish as “conductors.” It was their job to conduct, to the homes of their nearest relatives or friends in the New York area, those immigrants who were not called for in person. The custom would seem to have been a sensible one.
Many, if not most, immigrants from Central Europe in those days were illiterate. Almost none spoke English. Very few had ever, save for the momentous journey that had just brought them to the New World, traveled very far from the small town, or shtetl, in which they had been born. Their innocence was, I recall quite clearly, often childlike. It is probably safe to say none arrived laden with the wealth of the Indies, but very few arrived totally penniless. Almost all had on their persons some pittance, the remainder of the tiny hoard that had paid their way to America. The pickings would seem to have been lean, but not so lean, apparently, that the underworld of the day was uninterested.
The continued robbery of the pitifully innocent in and near the dock areas might have continued indefinitely. The waterfront criminals brought the authorities down on their heads when they enlarged their activities to include white slavery: many of the female immigrants were, of course, pretty. The public protests began to make themselves audible. Into being came the system of sending out the unmet immigrant with a conductor.
Nobody was waiting for my father when he disembarked at Castle Garden. If anybody had been, it would have been a miracle; and perhaps he would not have been surprised, since my father knew, as most immigrants did, that he was journeying to a miraculous land. However, when my father set out from Woloshonowa, he told nobody he intended to go to America. It is possible that he did not know it himself. Pawing about among those scraps of sound that passed over my head as a boy, I get the feeling that when my father left home rather hurriedly, he had no destination in mind. He seems to have been sent on his way by one of man’s oldest motivations: the desire to put space between himself and an unpleasant situation.
The desire to go to America—no immigrant, it seems, ever spoke of going to New York or Chicago or San Francisco, to anything less than the entire golden continent—must have taken shape in his mind sometime during his three years of wandering across Europe. I once heard him say that when he arrived in New York he believed he was the first citizen of Woloshonowa who had ever set foot on American soil. He was wrong, of course, as the authorities at Castle Garden soon proved.
Out of an experience that was obviously strewn with repetitive patterns, they had worked out an effective cross-indexing system. Everybody had to come from somewhere. If you kept track of where everybody came from, you had the beginnings of a method for disposing of everybody who followed. It certainly did not take the authorities long to discover that over the years quite a few men and women had come to America from Woloshonowa. In even less time they established that one, a man named Yokkib Berlfein, had been conducted, when he arrived in New York several years earlier, to the home of another ex-citizen of Woloshonowa, also named Berlfein, on East Fourth Street, between Avenue D and Lewis Street. A Castle Garden conductor was assigned to take my father to the Berlfein home.
This proved to be a crowded cold-water flat on the sixth floor of what later came to be known as an “old law” tenement, and was always identified as a fire trap. The Berlfeins had never before seen my father, and he could not remember ever having seen any of them. But they all knew the Kramer inn outside Woloshonowa, and they made my father welcome. Years later, at a party in our own cold-water flat given by my mother—my father paid for it, but my mother “gave” it—to celebrate my bar mitzvah, I heard an account of this welcome.
I had carried into the safety of the bedroom the eight fountain pens, one pocket watch, and six five-dollar gold pieces that had been presented to me by various guests as mementos of the occasion. I concealed the gifts under the shirts in the one dresser drawer that was my private terrain, and turned to go back to the party. My way was blocked by Uncle Yokkib and a group of guests he was entertaining just outside the bedroom door.
Perhaps he saw me. Perhaps he didn’t. In any case, he neither got out of my way nor did he stop talking. He did not send the words out over my head, either, as people did when they talked about my father in Deutsch’s grocery or Lesser’s drug store. If anything, it seemed to me Uncle Yokkib, noting that I was immediately behind him, raised his voice. I soon gathered that he was describing my father’s first night on American soil. I don’t know, of course, what he had said before I came up to the group. From what I did hear, however, it was not difficult to guess at the nature of what I had missed.
“There’s schlemiels and schlemiels,” Uncle Yokkib was saying in Yiddish to his chuckling audience. “And all right, naturally, a green one, he’s just fresh from the ship, smart like you and me you don’t expect him to be. But God in heaven, a dope like this, it’s once in a lifetime you see a thing like
this. Especially now, it’s already after we showed him the toilet, and he asked for a piece of soap, so he could wash his hands in the pot, and then he put his finger in the gas to see what made it burn like that, so blue. So I said all right, now it’s time to eat. But now you’re in America, so now you’ll eat only American food, so I gave him a banana. Everybody, we all watched, and this schlemiel, he never saw a banana before, so naturally, he turns it around in his hands like he’s holding something, I don’t know, a pistol maybe, he expects it should explode. Go ahead, I said, eat. It’s good. It’s American food. Eat. So this schlemiel, guess what he does? He puts the banana in his mouth, and he starts to eat it, with the skin on it and everything. He eats the whole thing, the skin and all! And all the time, on his face, that stupid smile, like it’s good! Like he’s enjoying himself!”
It does not seem to have occurred to Uncle Yokkib that my father was enjoying himself. It did not occur to me until two weeks ago, standing beside his grave. Now, putting my mind on it, I see a young man who has just survived three years of a wandering struggle for survival across Europe and part of Asia. He finally achieves what must have long seemed impossible. He arrives on American soil. Why shouldn’t he smile? A few hours later this same man, who has for so long been keeping himself alive on stolen scraps of garbage, is offered a piece of fresh fruit. Wolfing it down, skin and all, what could be a more natural reaction than a smile?
I suspect I might have done more than that. I can hear myself roaring with exultant laughter. But I have never attained what I see now was one of the central traits of my father’s character: a becoming modesty. He was not an exultant laugher. He was a quiet accepter.
Having accepted America, and its fruit, with the smile that Uncle Yokkib thought foolish, my father turned to the next task: how to earn his keep in the Berlfein household, where everybody was welcome, even people who did not come from Woloshonowa, so long as they paid their share of the rent. My father earned his by finding a job the very next day, thus providing Uncle Yokkib with another funny story for his repertoire.
All the young immigrants who boarded with the Berlfeins on East Fourth Street worked in the men’s clothing sweatshops on and near Allen Street in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. A great proportion of New York’s male immigrant population was, in those days, “in cloaks and suits.” It was an industry that never seemed to have enough help. As a result, the owners of the factories were willing to take on untrained men. The movements of most immigrants during their first few days in America rarely varied. First day, to the home of a friend or relative, for a reunion. Second day, to the shop in which the friend or relative worked, for a job. My father was either unaware of this pattern, or he did not find it attractive. At any rate, early on the morning after my father’s arrival, when Uncle Yokkib awoke and looked for his new boarder with the intention of taking him to the shop where Uncle Yokkib worked, he discovered that my father was gone. If this fact caused any concern to Uncle Yokkib or the other members of the Berlfein family, it did not appear in his version of what happened. I prefer my own.
My father was too excited to sleep. He lay awake for several hours after Uncle Yokkib and his audience had laughed themselves into insensibility. Shortly before dawn, unable to remain in the half bed that had been assigned to him, my father rose, dressed quietly, and tiptoed down into the street. He had no sense of fear. A man who had tramped from Warsaw to Moscow, from Istanbul to Marseilles was not likely to be intimidated by the streets of the Golden Land coming awake in the morning sun. My father started walking. Everything he saw interested him, often because much of what he saw was not unlike what he had seen on the streets of Moscow and Warsaw and Marseilles.
A couple of hours after he left East Fourth Street, he stopped to watch a man unload baskets of oysters from a horse-drawn wagon. My father had earned many a meal in Marseilles by unloading oysters. The man asked my father to lend a hand. He did so, gladly. When the wagon was unloaded, the man asked my father to join him at breakfast in what proved to be the service kitchen of Fleischmann’s Hotel on Lower Broadway.
Conversation did not languish. In those days everybody in New York talked Yiddish. Or so it seemed to my father. Indeed, so it seemed to me until I was almost five years old and my mother enrolled me in the kindergarten class of P.S. 188. Until then, Yiddish was the only language I knew. I still speak it in a manner that used to excite the ridicule of Uncle Yokkib: with the accents of my father’s corner of Austria (or Poland). I have always liked the singing sounds made by that accent. So, apparently, did the people in that hotel kitchen. Before the luncheon crowd started coming in, my father was standing behind the oyster bar, wrapped in a white apron, his shucking knife at the ready.
Most of those who later said he was stupid had been led like captives by their cowed predecessors to the chains of their first jobs in the sweatshops of the Golden Land. My father had found his first job by himself. Not in a poorly lighted, badly ventilated, vermin-infested loft where the victims bent over their sewing machines like serfs cringing from the lash. My father had found his first job by himself, in a large room, gaily decorated with paintings and mirrors, full of the cheerful sounds of clinking glasses and laughing men, where he stood proudly upright, performing with dexterity and relish a difficult task that required great skill. He loved every minute of it, and his colleagues loved him. That, I see now, was one of the reasons, perhaps the only one, why Uncle Yokkib worked so hard to put an end to it.
Uncle Yokkib’s arguments were persuasive. Jews were forbidden by Holy Writ to eat oysters. To handle them was, therefore, a sacrilege. Working for gentiles was not specifically enjoined. Neither was employment in an establishment that sold alcoholic beverages. The combination of the two, however, could not help but be frowned upon by God. It was true that my father had arranged to work on Sundays, so that he would be free to attend services in the synagogue on Saturday. But the fact remained that this arrangement was made possible only because the second oysterman, who happened to be a Jew without very strong religious convictions, preferred to take his day off on Sunday. My father was therefore, Uncle Yokkib pointed out, aiding in the destruction of the soul of a fellow Jew. And finally, of course, there was the economic argument. Shucking oysters in a saloon was not a skilled trade. It was true that my father was earning a bit more than an unskilled apprentice in cloaks and suits, but he would never become more skillful, and therefore he would never earn more than he was earning now. His job had no future. Until he acquired a skill, and was accepted in a trade where he could practice it, my father would never have a future. And without a future, what good was a man in America?
My father listened politely to Uncle Yokkib’s arguments. None of the scraps of talk that passed over my head ever reflected on his manners. My father was always a good listener. Night after night he listened on East Fourth Street to Uncle Yokkib, and morning after morning he went off on foot to the oyster bar on Lower Broadway. Then, one night, perhaps a year after he arrived in America, my father came home from work and found in Uncle Yokkib’s cold-water flat an argument he could not disregard.
Just as it was the common practice to lead most young men who arrived from Europe directly to the sewing machines “in cloaks and suits,” girl immigrants were always led to a “place.” A “place” was the home of a family that wanted and could pay for domestic help. All “places” existed in that shapeless, uncharted land north of Fourteenth Street known as “uptown.” Here people were rich. Here people were always looking for good servants. Not that the people who arranged for an immigrant girl to go into a “place” acknowledged even to themselves that they were getting her a job as a servant. What they were doing was handling a difficult problem in the best possible way for all concerned. Everybody had to work, even girls. But girls also had to be protected. They could not be turned loose in areas where they might be victimized by men. Most girl immigrants had no trades. In Europe, as a rule, they had done nothing more skilled than help their pare
nts with the housework and, if they lived on farms, with the chores. What gainful work could such girls do in a crowded city where there were no cows to be milked or chickens to be fed? They could sweep. They could cook. They could wait on table. And they could take care of small children. To be able to do this in a respectable home, in return for bed and board, would have been considered a sensible arrangement. What made going into a “place” a desirable plum for an immigrant girl was that, in addition to her board and keep, she was paid a certain amount of money.
Therefore, the movements of most girl immigrants during their first days in America were as inflexible as those of the men. First day, to the home of a friend or relative, for a reunion. Second day, to the “place” that had been found for her long before she arrived. Anna Zwirn, like my father, was either unaware of this pattern, or she did not find it attractive. She had been born on a farm in Hungary near a town called Klein, or Small, Berezna. She had many brothers and sisters. I have never been able to find out how many. There were certainly more than the farm could support, or needed, to get the work done. At the age of twelve, following a custom of the area, Anna Zwirn was placed in service with a family in the town or city of Gross, or Large, Berezna. She was given her board and keep, plus a small sum of money paid semi-annually. Every six months this money was divided into two parts: three quarters was sent to Anna’s parents on the farm; one quarter was given to Anna for pocket money. She spent none of it.
After eleven years, at the age of twenty-three, Anna had saved enough to pay for a steerage passage to America. She left from Gross Berezna without informing her parents on the farm in Klein Berezna. She didn’t inform anybody else, either. When she arrived at Castle Garden, there was nobody to meet her. The cross-indexing system set up by the immigration authorities turned up no recent arrivals named Zwirn, but during the past few years a number of Hungarian immigrants from the neighborhood of both Klein and Gross Berezna had arrived in America and had settled on East Fourth Street. A conductor was assigned to take Anna Zwirn to the home of one of her compatriots named Eckveldt. The Eckveldts lived in the cold-water flat on the floor below the Berlfeins in the “old law” tenement that almost a year before had become the home of Joseph Tadeus Isaac Kramer.
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