Hello, America

by Livia Bitton-Jackson

  Alex is involved in leukemia research. He is passionate about this work, about his commitment to discover the cause of this dread disease. “You know what my secret dream is?” he asks, and his eyes scan my face with that look of bliss Aunt Celia ridiculed once and I have since come to love. “That you and I, working together as man and wife, will find a cure for cancer!

  An icy cold hand tightens a grip on my throat.

  In a flash Alex reads the panic in my face, and a deep furrow appears between his eyebrows. His eyes, now darker than I have ever seen, lock onto mine as he slowly intones with a voice as heavy as lead, “I know your answer, angel. You don’t have to say it. You don’t want to share my dream.”

  The sharp sting in Alex’s words—his tone—is excruciating.

  “Alex,” I plead, and my voice drowns in tears. “You know I want to be a teacher. I was waiting to tell you… . I’ve gotten a job … was going to tell you today. I was saving it as a surprise.”

  Alex’s face mirrors infinite sorrow. His voice drops to a hoarse murmur. “I’m losing you. You’re arriving too fast in this country. Becoming too accomplished, too independent. You don’t need me anymore. As long as you were new and helpless, I had hopes.”

  Alex’s sad, brutal honesty cuts into raw flesh.

  “Alex, isn’t a relationship between equals preferable? My arriving—shouldn’t it enhance our friendship?”

  Alex’s head hangs low.

  “I have imagined … I have dreamed that you were Galatea to my Pygmalion. I fell in love with a young, ailing, frail, ardess refugee, and dreamed of nurturing her to health and molding her in an image of my own making—a sophisticated woman of the world. I was wrong about you. You are not artless or frail. You are a strong woman; intelligent and capable, mature beyond your years. In a short time you have gone far. I’m losing you.”

  The air is charged with my sense of futility in the face of Alex’s dejection. There is nothing I can do to alleviate his pain … my pain. Dr. Alexander Hirschfield—the fine doctor, energetic, brilliant, a man of irrepressible gusto and remarkable competence, a multitalented artist, grieving for the loss of his dream—is beyond consolation.

  And I? Alex, I love you … need you. I need your strength, your friendship … your love. I need your embrace. I need you, Alex, now as much as ever.

  And yet, all at once I realize with chilling certainty that I cannot have you. I can no longer welcome your love … not on your terms. Your love for me is wrapped up in your dream, and I am afraid I’m not ready to embrace such love. I’m not ready to be a slave to your dream. I must be free to pursue my dream. I must be free to grow … to find my own way in America.

  Oh, God help me. Am I capable of paying this horrific price, of giving up all that Alex means to me? Am I capable of ending the fairy tale … bursting my bubble of bliss?

  Chapter Fifteen

  WHAT’S THAT NUMBER ON YOUR ARM?

  As autumn arrives, Ocean Avenue is blanketed by brilliant yellow, orange, and burgundy leaves. The oppressive heat and harsh radiance of the long summer days are now replaced by the exhilarating chill of the early dusk, by lonely, lingering nightfall slipping into the night. There is a gentle, sad mystery in the air, a subtle premonition … a nameless promise that fills my heart with longing.

  I long for Alex. The poignant beauty of autumn deepens the void that was Alex … the beauty that Alex was to my life.

  But autumn also means the beginning of the school year—the beginning of my teaching career in America. Teaching first grade is as thrilling as I had hoped, and bit by bit the void begins to fill.

  Although I expected American children to be different, the little six-year-old boys and girls are in many ways just like the children I taught in the transit camp in Vienna and in the refugee camp in Feldafing, Germany, just as eager to learn and just as ready to be loved.

  I have a need to dispense both—learning and love. Sometimes I wonder, are the two not one and the same? I believe for me they are. For me sharing knowledge is sharing love. The Talmud teaches: “Words that come from the heart, enter the heart.” These small American boys and girls in my class seem to respond to my “words from the heart” with the same enthusiasm as did my little charges in the refugee camps.

  The difference between teaching in Europe and teaching in America lies in the method of discipline. Very quickly I learn that American children are not accustomed to sitting perfectly still in the classroom. Neither are they accustomed to a slap on the wrist, a most natural element of the European classroom.

  My fellow teachers are aghast when during recess I tell them that I slapped little Phillip on the wrist for fidgeting and talking in class.

  “What is cops?” I ask. “He threatened to call the cops.”

  Uproarious laughter greets my words, then one teacher explains, “Cops is another word for police. But this is serious. You committed a grievous error.”

  “What error?” I ask, taken aback.

  “Didn’t you know that in America no manner of physical punishment is allowed?”

  I’m truly shocked at this news. “No manner of physical punishment? But … how can you teach without an occasional slap?”

  “You’ll learn,” my colleagues advise, and I take their warning to heart.

  My task is to teach my little pupils elementary Hebrew—to read and write Hebrew characters, and to master a basic Hebrew vocabulary. Teaching a new language to such young children is a wonderful challenge. My pupils and I together participate in the daily adventure of learning new words and new concepts; together we experience the great fun of beginning to speak a new language.

  Besides fun, there’s something else.

  As I stand before the classroom of eager childish faces, I am overcome by a sense of the enormity of my survival—a validation. Ever since that fateful day when Dr. Joseph Mengele, the “Angel of Death” in Auschwitz, pulled me out of the line leading to the gas chambers, I’ve been plagued by agonizing guilt: Why me? Why me? Why was I spared from among my friends? Why was I granted life while they all died?

  This classroom of children helps assuage my guilt. My commitment to dispense learning and love is my raison d’etre—my justification for being alive.

  The Hebrew classes end at noon. When the bell rings we file out of the classroom, and as we line up in the corridor and march to the lunchroom, and even during lunch, we continue our game of speaking Hebrew. After lunch I accompany my pupils back to the classroom for their afternoon session, and we say goodbye to each other. They remain in class for the regular public school curriculum in English, taught by a new shift of educators, and I join the two other Hebrew first-grade teachers on the subway ride home.

  Mrs. Lichtenstein and Miss Brandwein also live in Brooklyn, and the three of us travel together part of the way, sharing snippets of our lives, getting to know each other during the hour’s journey every afternoon.

  During the third week I am summoned to the principal’s office. Oh, my God, the principal must have found out about the slap on Phillip’s wrist!

  My legs tremble as I enter the office.

  “Miss Friedman,” the principal gets to the point without preliminaries. “I must admit, when I returned from Israel and discovered that Mr. Gordon had hired you, I was upset,” he says with a frown. “No certificates, no formal education? How could he take such action? Yet there was nothing we could do. Mr. Gordon had given his word, in the name of the school, in writing. We consulted a lawyer, and he confirmed what we already knew: A written commitment is like a contract and could not be broken. But the lawyer advised us to watch you closely. He advised that at the first mistake, we had the right to dismiss you.” I take a deep breath… . Here it comes… . This is the end. “These past three weeks were your trial period, and I am letting you know that you’ve made it. After observing you teaching, relating to the children, I am compelled to agree with Mr. Gordon. He believed you were a born teacher. I just can’t understand how he knew.”
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  I walk out of the principal’s office on cloud nine. I can’t believe it. The principal, instead of dismissing me because of the slap, praised me for my teaching! Thank you, my God, thank you. I promise I’ll be the best teacher I can ever be!

  My heady ride on cloud nine lasts less than a week. At the first monthly staff meeting the principal turns to me with a frown. “Miss Friedman, see me in my office right after the meeting.” And I suddenly find myself down on earth.

  Oh, no, the news of the slap has finally caught up with me.

  The principal launches into the subject as soon as I enter the office. “Miss Friedman, we’ve received serious complaints about you.”

  “Complaints? What complaints?”

  “Parents called me with indignation, I might say with alarm, that you’re frightening the children with atrocity stories. You’re spreading horror stories in the school… .”

  “Horror stories? Rabbi, what are you talking about?”

  “The children reported that you told the class you were in a concentration camp.”

  “Concentration camp? I have never …” All at once I remember. “Ah yes. A little boy in class, I think it was Baruch Sturm, noticed the number on my arm and asked what it was. I replied that it was done in the concentration camp, where we had numbers instead of names. That’s all I said. I didn’t elaborate. I had been warned not to talk about the camps, was told people in America didn’t want to hear … to know about what happened. And I certainly wouldn’t talk to first-graders about the horrors … But since the pupil posed a question, I had no choice but to provide a truthful answer—as direct and as simple an answer as I could.”

  “You shouldn’t have given that answer,” the Rabbi says disapprovingly.

  “What other answer could I have given?”

  “You should have answered it was your telephone number.”

  “What! My telephone number, tattooed on my arm?”

  The principal’s shiny black desk assumes an otherworldly dimension as I stand before it, grappling with the principal’s words. “Rabbi, do you want me to tell a lie to my pupils?” It takes great effort to control the trembling in my voice. “Do you want my answer to imply that they have a madwoman for a teacher who tattoos her telephone number on her arm? And what happens if I move and change telephone numbers? What is your suggestion, Rabbi?” I can no longer contain my voice, and it rises to a fever pitch. “What is your suggestion, Rabbi?”

  Despite my anguish I am aware that the questions I have hurled at the principal only camouflage the storm in my soul. They do not even touch on the banality of his remark … the blatant triteness that in one flippant swoop trivialized the tragedy of the Holocaust of our people—both his and mine.

  The principal does not lose his cool. In an even voice he says, “No matter what, my reply would have been preferable to the one you gave.”

  As I stand there a chasm opens between us, with the rabbi sitting solidly on the far side of the abyss and me standing at the edge of the precipice that is getting wider and wider threatening to engulf my world.

  Unaware of the offensive nature of his remark and of the abyss it has opened between us, the rabbi, with the frown on his face somewhat faded, delivers his final warning: “I hope you’ll remember what I’ve told you, Miss Friedman.”

  I will remember. I will remember as long as I live… .

  In my pain and bitterness I wonder, do all Americans, Jews and Gentiles who were untouched by our tragedy and don’t even want to hear about it, feel like him? Do they also prefer to believe that the number tattooed on my arm in Auschwitz is nothing but a harmless New York telephone number? Do they also prefer to place me, and all of us with numbers tattooed on our arms, beyond the pale of their world?

  Chapter Sixteen

  MOTHER HAS A JOB

  Mother lands a job as a finisher in a workshop called Ripley’s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, manufacturing men’s suits and coats.

  “What’s a finisher?” I ask. “What a funny word.”

  “It’s not funny for us newcomers,” Aunt Celia remarks, laughing. “Hey, just because you’re a teacher—a professional—but the rest of us, we all are finishers… . Your uncle, I, and all our friends—and now your mother. A finisher works on the assembly line, adding a part to the piece under production. As you know, I stitch lining into ties; your uncle, into hats.”

  “I put lining into men’s suit jackets,” Mother adds. “Then pass it on the assembly line to the next worker, who puts on buttons … whatever.”

  I learn another new word—piece worker. Mother is a piece worker at Ripley’s. Piece workers are paid per piece—lining stitched, sleeves set, or buttons sewn—and so their earnings depend on the number of pieces they manage to complete by the end of the workday. Their earnings depend on speed.

  “Speed is almighty God in the workshop,” Mother observes after a few days at the factory. “There is a sort of competition going on for the number of pieces done at the end of the day, not just for money. It’s a contest of skill, stamina, cleverness, even youth. At the end of the workday when the foreman announces the number of pieces done by each worker, you can hear a pin drop.” Mother says in amazement.

  “They kill themselves to win,” she goes on, shaking her head. “Win at all cost. Some don’t even take lunch breaks. And what do they win at the end of the day? A moment of glory, a few extra cents, and a ferocious pain in the lower back.”

  At the beginning there is grumbling on the line as Mother’s slower pace affects the flow of goods farther along the line, but then the foreman notices the superior quality of Mother’s sewing—how much finer her stitches are—and he works out an accommodation, allowing her pieces to be set aside for the buttonhole makers, whose work is done at a less hectic tempo.

  In the morning Mother and I travel together to work. Rising at the crack of dawn, I love the adventure of tiptoeing around in the dark living room where we sleep, whispering to each other so as not to wake Aunt Celia and Uncle Martin in the bedroom, then leaving the house soundlessly and making our way to the subway station in semidarkness. By the time we reach Kings Highway, the rising day splatters an eerie light on the deserted avenue ordinarily swarming with human traffic, and on the shuttered storefronts and fruit stands now cozily wrapped in layers of canvas. There is a sense of mystery—a sense of power—in being here before the rest of the world awakens … as if witnessing the beginning of time.

  We love traveling together on the subway, Mother and I. It’s fun to observe our fellow subway riders, exchange jokes and asides in Hungarian, play guessing games as to their identities, their ages, and their jobs and make bets as to where they’d be getting off.

  In a couple of weeks Mother becomes familiar with the train route, and she no longer allows me to accompany her.

  “But I’ll miss the fun of traveling together in the morning,” I protest.

  “So will I. But it comes at a sacrifice. In order to accompany me you must rise an hour earlier, losing an hour’s sleep. You need that extra hour of sleep.” Mother is firm, and I have no choice but to comply and regretfully give up on our morning fun.

  “I hope you’ll have time to teach me English. Now that I have a job and travel alone on the subway, I’ll need to improve my vocabulary. I don’t want to depend on you every time I need to make a phone call in English, or want to take public transport.”

  “Okay, madam,” I agree in a happy, jocular tone. “How about today? Let’s have our first lesson this evening!”

  Every evening I grill Mother in vocabulary and grammar, and indeed in a couple of weeks she learns enough English to do marketing on her own and travel freely by subway.

  The subway train becomes an integral part of our lives. I no longer suffer panic attacks after the doors close, converting the car into a hermetically sealed container. On the contrary, the total detachment and alienation of the passengers from one another, which at first shocked and saddened me, I now perceive as an as
set. I enjoy the anonymity it provides. In the crowded subway car I am free to do as I please without interruptions. I even relish the rush hour and its blessing of absolute privacy!

  The only requirement for optimum subway bliss is to secure a seat. After a short research I discover that the 6:20 A.M. train—a perfect timing for my eight o’clock class—has available seats in the last car. Once I settle in my seat, the subway car becomes my private study. Propped on my knee, my briefcase becomes my desk on which to write letters, grade my little pupils’ homework, and compose poetry once again.

  But once an incident in the subway reopens unhealed wounds. One afternoon on my homebound ride, a husky, blond Amazon in a nurse’s white shoes and stockings leans confidentially close to me and, thrusting her chin in the direction of a young woman standing nearby, says in an undertone, “These Jewish women. They are so brazen. They have no manners, no taste.”

  While I listen, incredulous, she goes on, “Do you see her? She is pregnant and look how she’s flaunting her pregnancy.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask, and, convinced that she was crazy, I draw slightly aside.

  “When I was pregnant I always wore a coat, a big loose coat to cover my body. Even in the summer I wouldn’t go out without a coat. We were brought up with good taste. But these Jewish women … they are vulgar, brazen hussies… . Heh!” As she speaks she shoots a gaze of utter disgust at the young woman who doesn’t even look pregnant to me. In my shock and disbelief I respond with the first of many questions that rush to my mind.

  “How do you know she’s Jewish?”

  “I can tell a Jew anywhere!”

  “Can you? Would you take me for a Jew?”

  “You? Oh, no. Certainly not! You must be German.”

  I pull up my sleeve. “Do you see this?”

  She looks at the number tattooed on my arm. “What is this?”