The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

“Mama says secrets are bad,” I informed him. “She says that if you can’t say something to everybody, you probably have no business saying it at all.”

  Papa frowned. “True,” he said carefully, “but sometimes, kindeleh, doesn’t Mama also tell you that some things are best kept to yourself? That good little girls should keep quiet when they’re asked?”

  I considered this. Slowly, I nodded. How I wanted to agree with him, to preserve my sense of being prized. “She says I’m not very quiet. She says the mouth on me is going to cause nothing but tsuris.”

  My father threw his head back and laughed. “Okay, then. Can we agree then, that with me, your papa, you are going to be a very good little girl? That you’re going to make a special effort and keep all of our secrets?”

  He squeezed my hand. I had finished my chocolate, and the end of it was a sort of grief. But in the beam of his attention, oh, I felt like blossoms. “Yes, Papa,” I said.

  We walked past warehouses toward the port. Suddenly, Papa stopped and squinted out across the harbor. “Do you know what a shmendrik is, Malka?”

  Yet he did not wait for my response. “Sometimes,” he exhaled, “a person has to think for himself.”

  Inside a drafty hall by the pier, men sat behind little barred windows and stabbed squares of paper onto spindles. The great room was far larger than the detention center, yet nearly as chaotic. One wall was plastered with pictures of ships with different-colored flags spread behind them. Papa looked at the paper in his hand, then steered us over to a long line. “I have some important business,” he said. “You stay close.”

  We waited. And waited. I was getting very good at this. “Important business” in those days was the concern of grown men only, and it held no interest. I sang to myself and imagined myself waltzing in a glittering dress. When that little fantasy was exhausted, I made up a game in which I picked out patterns in the floor tiles and tapped on them with my toes. Finally, when we were almost at the front of the line, my father knelt down. His dark gray eyes were exactly level with mine.

  “Now, kindeleh, I need you to do me a big favor.” Gingerly, he began to unbutton my coat. He ran his hand along my sleeve and felt for my hidden pocket.

  I gave a little cry.

  Papa smiled at me intensely. “Why the noise, kindeleh?” he said softly. “Didn’t we agree that you were going to be a good girl?”

  He smiled at me so hard it seemed as if his face would crack.

  “But Mama—”

  “It’s okay.” He glanced around the hall. “Mama is sick, right? She is in quarantine, yes? Well, I have to replace our tickets. The ones for South Africa are no good anymore. So I want us to do this as our secret. As a surprise. To help make her feel better.”

  “A surprise?”

  Papa nodded rigorously and cupped my face firmly between his hands, as if to steady me, and gave me a violent kiss on my forehead. Then he quickly resumed fumbling with my coat buttons.

  My lips started to tremble. “Papa, no!” I cried, taking a step back. “No! Stop! I don’t want to! Don’t make me!”

  He glared at me. “Shush, shush!” he fairly spit, his face growing livid. “Listen to me, Malka!”

  But I couldn’t help it. I stomped my feet and flailed and wriggled and cried, “I don’t want to wander forty years in the desert! I don’t want to go to the bottom of the map!” I wailed, “I don’t want to go to Africa! I want to go to America! I want to be with the moving pictures!”

  My father froze. For a moment I was sure he was going to give me such a wallop as I had never felt. But instead he regarded me slowly, with a sort of delighted amazement.

  “Do you, now, kindeleh?” he said. “Well, then.” Exhaling, he reached out, rumpled my hair, and drew me toward him. He gave me another loud, wet kiss on the forehead. “Then it just so happens,” he said, “that this is exactly what you and I are going to do.”

  For days, the new tickets burned like six little coals in the secret pocket of my coat. Oh, how I wanted to tell Mama! The minute she and my sisters were released from quarantine, it became agony. Every night I lay beside my sisters, imagining Mama’s delight when we finally boarded the ship and Papa and I announced that we were going to America instead. I tingled with the thrill of it— it would be like Purim! I didn’t think I could keep quiet, but anytime I looked at Papa, he gave me his special wink and brought a finger to his lips. Even if I so much as hinted, he warned me, it would ruin the surprise utterly.

  And so I continued to wear my gray coat all day long and to bed at night. But it was my silence that raised suspicion, not my words. “What’s wrong with you? You’re too quiet,” Mama said with a frown one night, touching the back of her palm to my forehead. “Don’t tell me you’re getting sick now. That’s all that we need.”

  When Mama asked Papa if they shouldn’t exchange the old tickets to Cape Town for the next steamer to Africa, Papa informed her that he’d already gone ahead and done just that. For one heart-stopping moment, Mama looked at him darkly.

  “Oh,” she said tightly. “And how much did that cost you? I suppose you had to go ahead and spend the rest of the money as well?”

  Papa gave her a severe, wounded look. “What? You don’t trust your own husband to make a simple exchange? Steerage on one ship costs the same as another, Tillie.”

  He hadn’t spent any of the remaining marks, he insisted, beyond what we’d needed for food, of course. And if she didn’t believe him, so help him God, she could see for herself. “Malka,” Papa called out, motioning me over. “Please. Take off your coat. Show Mama the money we have left.”

  When he said this, my father appeared perfectly at ease—so at ease, in fact, that I wondered for a moment if he’d forgotten about the new tickets altogether. My heart beat furiously. But before I could undo the first button of my coat, Mama waved me away.

  “Fine, okay, I believe you,” she said wearily.

  But I needn’t have worried. You see, my mother could do and survive many things: She’d had seven children, ripped from her loins on a burlap mattress beneath the spastic flame of a kerosene lamp—two of the babies stillborn—and the last one, me, nearly bleeding her to death.…She could till the potato fields that remained hard as a fist and yielded little all year.…She could pay bribes to keep my brother, Samuel, out of the Russian army for another year, only to have him die of influenza.…She could give birth to me after the pogrom that my father insisted would never happen—in which she saw her own father beaten to death, blood and teeth spraying from his mouth like water as two soldiers batted at him with the butts of their rifles while he writhed on the floor—the crowd outside torching our forlorn barn and cheering as she hid with my siblings, petrified, in a neighbor’s chicken coop.…She could help my father arrange for counterfeit papers, and she could endure the nighttime ride across checkpoints hidden in a cart beneath piles of rotting cabbages with her hand clamped over my little mouth.…She could look piously, then flirtatiously, then pleadingly, at the smug officials at the immigration office as they yawned and cracked their knuckles and cleaned their fingernails with pocketknives while she and a hundred other immigrants accumulated beseechingly in a line before them, hour after hour. After finally—finally!—getting all the necessary forms and stamps and signatures and approvals, she could nurse herself and three daughters through conjunctivitis in a cold infirmary in a foreign city that was understaffed and overextended and utterly indifferent. She could even calculate on the side of a paper bag how much the money changers had cheated us in exchanging our precious rubles and rands for German marks. She could do a multitude of things, my mother, and bravely so. But she could not tell the simple difference between a boat ticket for South Africa and one to the United States. Because my mother, of course, could not read.

  Chapter 2

  In the many interviews I’ve given over the years, I’ve often recounted what it was like to see the Statue of Liberty for the first time. As a starving little Russian girl, I
’d stood in the crush of people on deck, forlorn and shivering, utterly wretched. And then, suddenly, the statue appeared before us like a mint green goddess arising from the sea, a modern-day Venus on the half shell. Always, I describe how I’d felt a bolt of elation at this moment—how I’d pointed and jumped up and down, crying, “Mama, Papa—it’s her!” From the way she’d stood sentry in New York Harbor, I’d thought Lady Liberty was some sort of American angel. For months after our arrival in New York, I’ve confessed to reporters, I actually prayed to the Statue of Liberty each night.

  And the media, oh, how they loved this story! Even today, they still quote it occasionally.

  Our customers loved it, too—especially when I told them how it was the inspiration behind our first national logo: the Statue of Liberty holding a red-white-and-blue ice cream cone in place of her torch. We’d developed this just before the war, crediting my childhood experience, of course. Nowadays, everybody copies it. I can’t tell you how many goddamn times I’ve had to go to court over trademark infringements.

  Yet—I might as well say it now, darlings—what else do I have to lose?

  The truth is, I actually don’t remember seeing the Statue of Liberty at all. Of course, we must have passed it. But I was upset at the time. And I was so little. The only details I recall from our arrival were a man beside me weeping uncontrollably—embarrassingly—and that in the commotion Flora lost her hat.

  But my legendary first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty?

  So sue me: I made it up.

  * * *

  Today my grandson, Jason, calls 1913 “the olden days.” But the year our family arrived in America, New York City already had its first skyscrapers, its first rickety cars, its first subway lines—the Interborough Rapid Transit—running beneath Broadway. Bridges were garlanded with electric lights. Already it was a great, throbbing, concrete heart.

  That same year, 1913, was also when the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed, establishing the income tax. Of course, there was no way I could’ve known that seventy years later this very piece of legislation would be used to persecute me—unduly, may I remind you. It was also the year Henry Ford perfected his assembly line. And I suppose it must be said, too, that it was the year Al Smith, governor of New York, pushed through a slew of labor laws. While these probably saved Flora and me from the most dangerous factory work as children, they proved to be a major pain in my ass later on. Please: You’re telling me a teenager can’t serve a milk shake?

  But most significant of all, in 1913 the first continuous freezing process was patented. This meant that ice cream could soon be manufactured in bulk, on an industrial scale. It arrived in New York at almost the very same moment that I did.

  Already, you see, darlings, the fates were converging.

  By 1913, numerous services had also been established to help immigrants landing in New York. Each ethnic group seemed to have its own sort of welcome wagon, a small legion of interpreters, advocates, and social workers who met know-nothings like us right on Ellis Island. When my family staggered off our ship, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was already waiting. Women in skirts, in these voluminous blouses with navy bows at their necks. Mustachioed men in tweed jackets and derbies, with clipboards—all looking so modern, so wealthy and clean! These were Jews?

  They stood in the disembarkation area holding signs in Yiddish, then whisked us before a phalanx of doctors. I was tugged at, my shirt was lifted. A man pressed a frigid metal disk to my chest. My eyelids were pulled back with a buttonhook to determine if I had trachoma. Officials went through the lines putting chalk marks on some people’s jackets. I wondered if this was a good thing, a lucky thing, until I heard the women shrieking, wailing, pleading.

  In a cold, forbidding room, officials asked our parents: Did they have jobs awaiting them, relatives, marketable skills? My mother shot my father a vicious look. The Jewish representatives in their fancy American clothes swept in. Their association would be lending us the twenty-five-dollar debarkation fee, they announced. Surely two people with skills such as my parents’ could find work quickly enough. Why, they could provide us with references. One of the social workers hoisted Flora up in her arms and gave her a soft pinch on the cheek. “The children, all four of them, are healthy and robust.”

  Remarkably, our parents’ silent treatment of each other went unnoticed. Most immigrants seemed to be struck dumb when they arrived. When anyone spoke to them, they just nodded and nodded. It almost didn’t matter that they had a translator. A couple would stand before a health official, nodding as he spoke. Then, as soon as they were released, the woman would turn to her husband. “What did he say, Yankel?” And the husband would look at her, alarmed. “I have no idea, Bessie. I thought you knew.”

  After our family had been thoroughly inspected, examined, and given the stamp of approval like so much kosher meat, we were “deloused” with violent sprays of powder from a can. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid workers then pulled my mother, Bella, and Rose behind a curtain.

  Today, everyone wears the same schmattes: the blue jeans, the T-shirts, those terrible tracksuits. My grandson, Jason—his idea of fashion is to rip up his T-shirts, then pin them back together with safety pins. “You know, you could save yourself a lot of time,” I tell him, “by not tearing them up in the first place.” I know, I know: It’s a “look.” He tells me he’s making a “statement.” But back then in Europe, we all had a look. We all made a statement—whether we wanted to or not. People’s clothes were like identity cards. You could instantly tell if someone was from Bavaria or Silesia or Galicia just by the embroidery on a bodice or the cut of a topcoat. Different villages had their own styles. Certainly, you could tell the Jews from the gentiles.

  Before our family was even permitted to set foot in America, my mother and older sisters were given modern haircuts. Their tattered, filthy clothes from the old country were disposed of and replaced with secondhand “American” dresses. Flora, perhaps because she was the prettiest, was given a small straw hat with felt violets on the brim. And, finally, a sweet-smelling woman in a striped blouse attempted to remove my gray coat.

  “Let me take that, kindeleh,” she said gently, trying to unbutton it. “It’s springtime here, and very warm already. We’ve got better for you now.”

  “No!” I hollered, as loud as I could. It was the geschrei I had been practicing since Vishnev, a geschrei designed to scare away the Cossacks. It bounced off the walls of the arrivals station and echoed through the tiled vaults of the enormous Registry Room.

  My mother glared at me furiously. “Oh, so now you scream? Now you finally listen to me?”

  These words were the first that she’d spoken to me in eighteen days. For you see, darlings—and I suppose this comes as a surprise to no one—Mama was not happy in the least when she discovered the change in our plans.

  The way I’d imagined it, Mama wouldn’t learn that we’d switched the tickets until long after we’d set sail. We’d be out on the open seas, dining in one of the great salons that the shipping companies had illustrated in their brochures. Papa would say to Mama, “Malka has a wonderful surprise for us.” And then I would announce that we were sailing not to Cape Town but to America. And then Papa and I would describe all that awaited us—everything that we’d seen in the moving pictures and on the streets of Hamburg. We’d tell Mama and Bella and Flora and Rose that in America we’d all be dancing in a grand parlor with armchairs and electric lights—all of us clothed as richly as Queen Esther—and we’d ride streetcars and eat magnificent chocolates while Papa grew rich with gold. Upon hearing this, Mama, I was certain, would be overjoyed. She’d be beside herself with gratitude and relief. I had imagined this scenario in my head so many times I could practically act it out—all the parts—right down to my sisters’ rapturous applause at the end.

  Yet what Papa hadn’t realized was that the ship we were sailing on to New York was named the SS Amerika. When our family arrived at the pier t
he morning of our departure, crewmen shouted at us through megaphones, “All passengers for the Amerika, form your lines here!” Around us, people strained against the barriers waving little American flags, cheering. A brass band played “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia.” My mother was not a stupid woman. “Herschel,” she cried, “we’re in the wrong line!”

  She reeled about frantically, looking for some official to rectify the situation. My father busied himself with our bundles, pretending not to hear.

  “Herschel!” she cried.

  That’s when I could contain myself no further. “No, Mama! This is the right line! This is the right line, Mama! We’re going to America!” I jumped up and down. “Papa and I, we switched the tickets!”

  Mama froze. She stared at us with the shocked, devastated look of someone who’s just realized they’ve been shot. Reflexively, she gripped her breast. Beside her my sister Flora tugged anxiously at the hem of her skirt. Mama brushed her away.

  “What?” she cried. “Herschel, is this true?”

  My father continued rearranging our sacks. Without looking at her, he grabbed three by their necks, twisted them violently, and slung them over his shoulder. “America is a better bet, Tillie. Hyram is a schlemiel.”

  My mother let out a horrific cry.

  “What?” said Bella. “We’re not going to Cape Town?”

  “We’re going to America instead?” said Rose. “But they gave us quinine at the infirmary!”

  “We saw the moving pictures! We saw the moving pictures!” I yelled, bouncing ecstatically. “There are women in gowns! And cream cakes! And fancy lights! And—”

  “Oy! Vey iz mir!” my mother cried.

  “You think I’d last a week in the desert with that shmendrik?” said my father.

  “And fountains of milk! And walls of bread! And gold buildings!” I shouted. “I’m going to dance in the pictures! Mama, it’s a surprise!”