Her name is Goldele. She’s my age, maybe a year older. I’ll tell you a nice story about Goldele. We met at the Ezra. You probably don’t know what the Ezra is, so I’ll explain. The Ezra in Antwerp is like the Alliance in Vienna—it’s created for the emigrants’ benefit. The difference is that Alliance is a man’s name but Ezra sounds like a woman’s. You can tell because you call the Alliance a “he” and the Ezra a “she.” That makes it easy to figure out who’s who.
Anyhow, as soon as we arrived in Antwerp, we went straight to the Ezra, which is really very different from the Alliance. The Ezra throws people out but the Alliance doesn’t. A girl named Fräulein Zaichik sits there and writes everything down. You can go to her whenever you want and talk your heart out to her as much as you want. Everything you say, she enters in a book. She’s a very nice girl. She asked me my name and gave me a candy. But I’ll tell you more about Fräulein Zaichik another time.
Now I want to tell you about Goldele. She comes from Kutneh and arrived here last year with her parents, sisters, and brothers. It was Succos, after the High Holidays, and they were going to have a celebration that all Jews would envy. It wasn’t going to be anything extravagant, and they’d been knocked around like all the emigrants—but they had steamship tickets to America for the whole family, and they were going to leave on Succos. They were well dressed. Each of them had been given two shirts and shoes without holes. Now a year later all she has left is is one shirt and no shoes at all. If not for Fräulein Zaichik, she says, she would go barefoot. Fräulein Zaichik gave her a pair of her own shoes, still in good shape. She showed them to me. They were fine, but a little too big for her.
Well, Succos came. It was time for them to board the ship. Goldele’s parents were told they all had to pay a visit to the doctor. The doctor examined them and found they were all strong and healthy and could go to America. But she, Goldele, couldn’t go because she had trachoma. At first they didn’t grasp what that meant. Then it sank in. It meant that all of them could go to America but that Goldele would have to stay in Antwerp. They wept and wailed. Her mother fainted three times. Her father insisted on staying here with her, but it wasn’t possible—that would have meant they all lost their steamship tickets. So they decided that they would all go to America but that she, Goldele, would stay behind until her trachoma cleared up.
Now almost a year later it’s still not cleared up. Fräulein Zaichik says her eyes aren’t healing because she cries constantly. But Goldele says there’s another reason—it’s on account of bluestone salve! Every time she goes to the doctor, he smears her eyes with the same bluestone salve that he uses on all the other patients. If she could afford to buy a different salve, she would have been cured long ago.
“And what about your parents?” I ask her.
“They’re in America. They’re making a living. Almost every month I get a letter from them. Come look—can you read? Read them to me!”
She takes a pack of letters from her bosom and gives them to me to read aloud. I would have been glad to, but I can’t read handwriting. If they were printed, I could have read them. She laughs at me and says a boy is not a girl. A boy needs to know everything!
I’m afraid she’s right. Ah, how I wish I could read handwriting! Ah, how I envy my friend Big Motl because he can read and write. Goldele has Big Motl read her the letters from America, and Big Motl zips right through them. The letters are written in the same style and in almost the same words:
“Dearest Goldele, darling Goldele, long life to you! When we in America remember that our child was torn from our arms and left on your own in a strange land among strangers, we cannot bear our lives. Day and night we weep and wail for our bright star that was taken away right before our eyes. . . .” And so on.
Big Motl reads, and Goldele cries and wipes her eyes. Fräulein Zaichik sees this and scolds us for making her cry. She tells Goldele she’s ruining what’s left of her eyes! Goldele answers her with a laugh, and more tears pour from her eyes.
“The doctor is ruining my eyes with his bluestone salve worse than I am with my crying.”
We say goodbye to Goldele, and I promise I’ll see her tomorrow at the same time.
“God willing!” Goldele responds, making a pious face like an old woman. And both of us, Little Motl and Big Motl, go for a walk in Antwerp.
D.
I, Little Motl, and my friend Big Motl are not alone. We have another friend, a boy of thirteen named Mendl. He was also left behind in Antwerp on the way to America, not on account of his eyes but for something else. His parents lost him along the way, somewhere in Germany. As he tells it, his family was surviving on herring, which gave him heartburn. He jumped off the train for a moment at a station for a drink of water, but the train left without him, and he was stuck without a ticket, without a kopek, and without a shirt on his back. Because he didn’t know the language, he pretended to be mute. The committee took him everywhere to see if anyone could recognize him. Then he spied a party of Jewish emigrants. He approached them and told them his story. They took pity on him and brought him along with them to Antwerp, where he managed to reach the Ezra. The Ezra wrote a letter to America trying to locate his parents.
Now he’s waiting for an answer and a steamship ticket, or rather a half-price ticket, because he’s young. He’s not really that young, but he acts young. He’s probably a bar mitzvah, though he doesn’t put on tefillin. He doesn’t have any. When the emigrants found out that Mendl was thirteen and didn’t have tefillin, they made a fuss: “Why doesn’t someone see to it that he has tefillin?” To which Mendl said, “Why doesn’t someone see to it that I have boots?” An emigrant with keen eyes reprimanded him, “Oh you ungrateful boy! Not enough we worry about you—you’re sassy!” The emigrant with the keen eyes managed to collect enough from the other emigrants to buy Mendl a pair of tefillin.
You can get anything you want in Antwerp. Do you think there are no prayer houses or synagogues in Antwerp? Wrong! And what synagogues! One of the synagogues is Turkish. Do you think Turks pray there? Not at all! Jews pray there, the same Jews as we, but they pray in Turkish. You can’t understand one word! Our new friend Mendl took Big Motl and me there. The three of us have become fast friends. All day long we walk around the city. When we were in Brod or Cracow or Lemberg or Vienna, my mother was afraid to let me take a step away from her. Here in Antwerp she isn’t afraid. In those cities, she says, there were only Germans, but here in Antwerp we are among our own people. You hear Yiddish spoken. She means the emigrants. Long live the emigrants! Among the emigrants we really feel at home! And soon we’ll have guests, God willing. After Shabbes our in-law Yoneh the baker is coming with his family. We’re waiting every day for our neighbor Pessi and her gang. Then the fun will really begin.
I’ll tell you all about it.
XIX
THE GANG IS HERE!
A .
You’re already familiar with the gang—our neighbor Pessi and her husband Moishe the bookbinder and their eight children, each of whom, as I told you, has a nickname. The youngest is my age, nine and a half, and they call him Vashti. His real name is Hershl, but because he has a birthmark on his forehead, the older children gave him the nickname Vashti. I like him because he doesn’t cry. No matter how much you beat him, he takes it silently. Once he tore somebody’s prayer book, and his father beat him with the board on which he cuts paper. Vashti suffered for two days straight. He even refused to eat. People were afraid for his life. His mother, our neighbor Pessi, was already mourning for him, and his father was beside himself. Everyone thought it was the end of Vashti, but not so. On the third day Vashti asked for bread and ate as if after a fast.
The children all love to eat and really enjoy their food. Their own mother calls them the Hungry Locusts. Pessi is a very fine woman but a bit too fat. She has three chins. I’ve drawn her on paper several times. Once Vashti saw me doing it and grabbed the drawing and showed it to his mother. She laughed. My brother Elyahu found
out and wanted to punish me for my figure drawings as usual. Luckily Pessi stuck up for me: “A child likes to fool around. It’s not worth eating your heart out over.” Long live Pessi! I love her. I just hate when she kisses me. When she arrived in Antwerp, she hugged me and kissed me like her own child. She kissed everyone, but more than anyone, naturally, she kissed my mother. When my mother first glimpsed her, it was as if Pessi were my father risen from the dead. My mother cried so hard that my brother Elyahu fell upon Pessi, blaming her for making my mother ruin her eyes so she can’t go to America.
Everybody who comes to Antwerp has to go to the doctor. The first thing you’re asked is “Have you been to the doctor yet?” “What did the doctor say?” When you go to the Ezra, she sends you straight to the doctor. When we first came to the Ezra, all my mother wanted to do was tell the story of her life, starting with her husband and ending with the stolen bedding. Fräulein Zaichik wrote it all down in a book. My mother had more to tell but was interrupted by one of the other Ezra.
“So you’re going to America?”
We said, “We’re certainly not going to Yehupetz.”
Another person from the Ezra asked, “Have you been to the doctor yet?”
“What doctor?”
“Here’s an address. Go first thing to the doctor, and he’ll examine your eyes.”
Hearing the word eyes, my brother Elyahu looked at my mother and turned pale as a sheet.
What frightened him so?
B.
It’s done, thank God. We’ve all been to the doctor except my mother. She’ll go later. My brother Elyahu is afraid—she’s cried too much lately. The doctor examines our eyes and writes something down, signs it, and puts it in an envelope. At first we’re frightened—we think he’s written a prescription for our eyes. We ask him what he wrote. He points to the door, and we assume he is asking us to leave. We go up to the Ezra and show her what the doctor has written.
Fräulein Zaichik opens the envelope and reads the notes. “I can tell you good news,” she says to us. “The doctor says you all have healthy eyes.”
Of course that’s good news! But what are we going to do about our mother? She doesn’t stop crying. We plead with her, “What are you doing to us? Aren’t you afraid, God forbid, the doctor will reject your eyes?”
“That’s why I’m crying!” she replies, and places a compress on her eyes. An emigrant barber gave her the compress. He’s a homely man with terrible teeth but is quite vain. He wears a copper watch on a silver chain and a gold ring on his finger. His nickname isn’t very nice—they call him Beaver! He came to Antwerp with Pessi and her gang. They became acquainted on the train and stole across the border together. They didn’t have the same troubles we did. No one wanted to murder them, and no one stole their bedding, but they still had a horrendous time. In Hamburg, they had to go through a steam bath. What stories they tell of Hamburg! It makes your hair stand on end! Sodom is a paradise compared to Hamburg! People in Hamburg treat emigrants, they said, a lot worse than we do our prisoners. If not for Beaver, Pessi and her family would have died there.
Beaver helped them in their hour of need. He is a nervy person—he stood up to the Germans. The way he told the story was a treat! He spoke to them only in Russian, he said. He knows Russian well, no doubt better than our Pinni. Pinni says that everything Beaver tells us would be fine if it were true. But from the very first Pinni took a dislike to Beaver. He made up a song about him. When Pinni doesn’t like someone, he writes a song about him. If you like, I can repeat it to you:
Beaver our surgeon-barber
Has the chutzpah of a robber.
He steals your time to tell you stories
Packed with a thousand made-up worries.
You need them like a bellyache.
You listen for the poor man’s sake.
After all he has a clever brain,
Can keep you healthy, even sane.
C.
The barber-surgeon Beaver takes it upon himself to cure my mother’s eyes. Once he’s finished, he says no doctor in the world will find anything wrong with them. He learned how to do it back home. A barber-surgeon is half a doctor. Besides, when he was in Germany, he observed how they cured emigrants’ eyes. They can make blind people see.
Pinni quips that it may be the other way around. Beaver gets angry and buries Pinni in words. He says Pinni is far too clever for America! They don’t like smart alecks in America! America is a country where there’s no time for fooling around. In America you say what you mean, you mean what you say. In America your word is your word. America is built on truth, honesty, righteousness, honor, humanity, compassion, justice, equality, confidence, and faith.
“And on what else?” asks Pinni.
This infuriates Beaver all the more! Too bad they’re interrupted just then. Someone is asking for us outside. Who can it be? We go out—guests! Guests! Guests! Our in-laws have arrived, Yoneh the baker and his whole gang! A new gang! Again there is great joy: my sister-in-law Bruche is kissing her parents, and my brother Elyahu is kissing his father-in-law and mother-in-law. Pinni can’t hold back and also kisses our in-laws.
Beaver joins in and kisses them too. Puzzled, the guests ask, “Who’s this?”
“I’m Beaver,” he explains.
Pinni bursts out laughing. And my mother? She does what she always does—she cries! My brother Elyahu is ready to kill himself. He looks at her and tugs at his beard, but this time he says nothing. These are, after all, relatives, in-laws from the same town. Why shouldn’t she have a good cry?
“How did you steal across the border, and where did they finally welcome you?” we ask our in-laws, and they have tales enough to tell! But I have no patience for their stories. I go off into a corner with Bruche’s little sister Alteh. She’s ten years old now, almost eleven, the same age as Goldele, the poor little girl who was left behind in Antwerp on account of her eyes. I tell Alteh about Goldele and her sick eyes, about my friends Big Motl and Mendl, about the Ezra and Fräulein Zaichik, who writes things down in a book, and about the doctor who examines eyes. I tell her all about Vienna and the Alliance that hates Jews, about Cracow and Lemberg, and how we stole across the border and barely escaped with our lives. I don’t leave anything out.
Alteh listens wide-eyed to everything I say. Then she tells me what happened to them. Her father had long wanted to go to America, but not her mother and the rest of the family. They said that in America you had to work hard, and her mother wasn’t accustomed to that. Her mother had a fur cape that her father had bought in the good years when they still had money. Now that things were bad and the creditors were pestering them, they decided to sell everything and go to America.
But when it came to selling the fur cape, her mother refused, insisting she’d sell everything except the fur cape. Her father pleaded, “Why do you need a fur cape? In America you don’t need a fur cape!” Her mother protested, “What do you mean? How many years did I beg God for a fur cape, and then I finally lived to have one. I have no intention of selling it now.” Day and night all they heard at home was “fur cape.” The whole family took the mother’s side, fighting with the father. It almost led to a divorce between her father and mother, all on account of the fur cape. Who got their way? Of course, her mother! They didn’t sell the fur cape. They brought it with them, wrapping it separately in a package. But by the time they got to the border, it had disappeared.
Alteh tells her story, and that’s all I want to hear—whether they still have the fur cape. When I hear they don’t, I’m pleased. I take Alteh for a walk and show her the city of Antwerp. She is not in the least impressed. She’s seen bigger cities, she says. What do you say to that! I take her to see the inns where the emigrants are staying and introduce her to my friends. Nothing seems to impress her. She looks down on everyone and everything, a proud girl. She was always like that. Later on we go to the Ezra together, our gang and their gang. There we meet our neighbor Pessi and her gang. We also see
Goldele. Goldele wants to be friends with Alteh, but Alteh keeps her at arm’s length. Goldele takes me aside and asks me what’s so special about this girl, that she doesn’t consider her good enough to speak to? I tell her that a year ago at my brother’s wedding, people spoke of Alteh as a future bride for me. She blushes deeply, turns away, and wipes her eyes.
D .
Wait till you hear about the calamity that befell us. We take my mother to the doctor to have her eyes examined. He examines her eyes and says nothing. He just writes a note and puts it in an envelope. We take the envelope to the Ezra, but don’t find anyone there except Fräulein Zaichik, the one who writes everything in a book. She greets me with a laugh. She always laughs when she sees me. She sends me regards from Goldele.
She opens the envelope and reads the note, then stops laughing and wrings her hands.
My mother asks, “What is it?”
“What is it? The news, my dear woman, is bad! The doctor says you can’t go to America.”
My sister-in-law Bruche falls into a faint. My brother Elyahu turns pale. My mother turns to stone—she can no longer cry. Fräulein Zaichik runs for a glass of water. She revives Bruche, comforts Elyahu, consoles my mother, and tells us to come back in the morning.
On the way home my brother Elyahu lectures my mother for crying all the time and reminds her how many times he warned her not to cry. She wants to answer him but has no words. She raises her eyes and begs God, “Grant me and my children a favor, O Lord of the Universe, and take me from this world!” Our friend Pinni insists it’s all the fault of that liar, that barber-surgeon Beaver. All that day and night we blame one another. In the morning we go to the Ezra, who advises us to try to go by way of London. Maybe London will let my mother and her weepy eyes go to America. And if not America, at least Canada.
Tevye the Dairyman & Motl the Cantor's Son Page 33