by T Cooper
APRIL 9, 1924
BY AMY BLOOM
APRIL 9, 1924
On April 9, 1924, Senator Ellison DuRant Smith of South Carolina makes a speech in the halls of the Senate, calling for—begging—America to shut the door on immigrants. “Let us breed pure American citizens,” he says. “We do not want to tangle the skein of America’s progress by those who imperfectly understand the genius of our government. Let us keep what we have …”
In the fifty-seven blocks of the Lower East Side, just that day, there are 112 candy shops, ninety-three butchers, seventy saloons, forty-three bakeries, and 500,000 Jews, and just that day Lillian Leyb arrives in America. She has two pieces of paper inside her blouse, for safe-keeping, in addition to the usual, which isn’t much.
She had sold her mother’s red silk petticoat, sold the one goat that had wandered free and safe, sold the Kiddush cup, and given away the things for which no one had the money or the interest. A neighbor had given her their daughter’s coat; the dairyman had given her a satchel that had belonged to his brother. Lillian had stood in a dead woman’s coat, holding a dead man’s leather bag, and her mother’s half-sister had limped over to press a flyer into Lillian’s hand: Come to America, the New World. 45 rubles a ticket. Beneath the words there had been a drawing of workers; you could see they were workers because they were short and bowlegged, with caps on their heads, and instead of a chicken under the arm, or a bolt of cloth, each little man had a bag of money, with the American sign for money on the bulging sack, and they were running, running, with their bags of money to a pillared building across the street, marked BANK. The puffs of smoke from the factory, the streetlamps and workers’ shiny black shoes, all had a round, friendly quality to them.
“This place is cursed for you now,” Aunt Mariam had said, waving her hand at the empty yard and the dark house. It had sounded as if she was also suggesting that the village was now cursed by Lillian and her unlucky, eviscerated family. “Go to America, you have a cousin there, Frieda. My other sister’s daughter. My niece. Here’s her letter.”
Lillian hadn’t said, But I don’t know them. She hadn’t said, Will they be kind to me? She hadn’t said, You have always wanted our house. She had to go. She had buried her parents and her husband and made a grave for her daughter, whose body had not been found (Mariam swore she saw Sophie’s body floating in the river out of reach, and Lillian could not ask her if she said that to comfort Lillian, put an end to her uncertainty, or to hasten her departure.) She was twenty-two, she would go to America. She had read Frieda’s letter every day. They have room, Frieda says, for family or dear friends. They have a little business and can provide employment while people get on their feet. It is a great country, she writes. Anyone can buy anything, you don’t have to be gentry. There is a list of things Frieda has bought recently: a sewing machine (on installment but she has it already), white flour in paper sacks, condensed milk, sweet as cream and doesn’t go bad, Nestle’s powdered cocoa for a treat in the evening, hairpins that match her hair color exactly, very good stockings, only ten cents. They have things here that people at home cannot even imagine.
Lillian cannot imagine, even as she’s walking through it, the noise, the crowds, the filth that is nothing like mere dirt, a dozen languages, market day times a million, a boy playing a harp, a man with an accordion beside a terrible, patchy little animal, a woman selling straw brooms from a basket tied to her waist and three more strapped to her back, making a giant fan behind her head, a colored man in a pink suit with black shoes and pink spats, singing something loud and cheerful, and tired women, who look like women Lillian would have known at home, smiling at the song, or the singer, a very old man and a very young girl selling shoelaces and shiny twists of dough on a stick, and the smell rises up through Lillian’s chest and under her chin, making her swallow and swallow again, so she has to wipe her hand over her mouth and pull hard, she is that hungry. She did not imagine that as she approached cousin Frieda’s apartment building—having held up the letter and the block-printed address a dozen times to faces that were blank, or worse than blank, knowing and dubious, and held it up to some people who could not themselves read, who pushed her aside as if she had insulted them—that a woman would be standing across the street, dressed only in her nightgown and a man’s overcoat.
Lillian watches the woman open a folding chair and take a china plate from her pocket and hold it on her lap. People pass by and put a few coins in the plate. Frieda comes down the stairs and hugs Lillian. “Dear little Lillian,” she says. Frieda is thirty. Lillian remembers her from a family wedding. Frieda took Lillian into the woods, and they picked wild raspberries until it was dark. Lillian watches the woman across the street, sitting stock still in the chair, tears flowing down her face, onto her large, loose breasts, splashing onto the plate with the coins.
“Eviction,” Frieda says. “You can’t pay, you can’t stay.” She says in Yiddish, “Es iz shver tzu makhen a leben” (“It’s hard to make a living”). She wants to make sure Lillian understands what she’s saying. She doesn’t want Lillian to be frightened, she says, everything will work out fine between them, but there is nothing wrong with Lillian seeing, right away, how it’s nothing to go from having a home, which Lillian does now, with her cousin Frieda, to having no home at all, like the woman across the street who was thrown out that morning. Frieda takes Lillian by the hand and crosses the street. She puts a penny in the wet plate and says, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lipkin.” Going up the stairs to her apartment, Frieda says to Lillian, “Poor thing.” The lesson is not lost on Lillian, still holding everything she owns in Yitzak Nirenberg’s leather satchel.
At the end of her forty-fifth day in America, Lillian understands that Judith is offering her something. “Hey, Lilly. Let’s get us a …” Lillian doesn’t quite catch what Judith says they should get. Judith is on her way to being an American girl. She gave away her shawl, she told Lillian she gave it away, she wanted so bad to be rid of it, and bought a little blue jacket at Kresge’s. She has the American shoes, the green blouse she bought from the vendor, irregular but very good, and she is learning English, very fast. To Lillian, her English is good already; it is like something you hear on the radio.
What Judith has in mind is hot dogs and mustard and sauerkraut, and the man gives them extra because Judith has a way about her. That’s what she says to Lillian: “As one might say, I am right-handed, I have a way about me.” Lillian might have a way about her too. In Breslov, there were people who thought she had a way about her, but not here. In English, she is the ugly stepchild; people are not inspired to give her things, they want her not to even be where they are looking. There is a free class that adults can go to in the school on the corner, and Lillian goes when she can, sometimes on Tuesday, if she is not too tired, and she goes sometimes on Thursday, when she cannot get Joseph—who makes the most money of anyone in Frieda’s apartment and stammers badly and smells like smoke and rotting leather, and is therefore most in need of companionship—to take her to the movies, which Lillian feels is also an education. Each time she enters the classroom, on the blackboard there is the same list: the noun (the thing), the verb (the action), the adjective (the kind of thing), and the adverb (how it is done). Judith says, “Just talk.”
To go to the English class for adults (Miss Eriksen teaches, and her English is to Judith’s as Judith’s is to Lillian’s; it is white satin, and there is not a bump or tear or bulging thread in it), Lillian passes the Fishbein family and Mrs. Arbitman on the stoop.
The Fishbein boy blinks at Lillian slowly and then bawls like a goat, “Ma, Ma, Ma,” yanking on his mother’s dress until the hem is almost down over her slippers, and then Mrs. Fishbein’s great arm comes up, blocking the sun. Louie is not afraid; it would be wonderful if Louie was afraid. “Ma,” he says, “why is the stove hot?”
“Hot?” she says. “It’s hot because there’s a fire inside. It’s hot to cook the food, and if you touch even the door it will
cook you—like a chicken. It could burn up a little boy, that fire, jump out, the flames, and burn you to a crisp.”
She lifts her skirt to her thigh (she does this when the subject of stoves, or children, or tenement conditions, comes up) and she shows her son and Mrs. Arbitman and Lillian a large webbed triangle, dark red and wide as an iron, where she was burned. They have all seen it before; it is her treasure, as Mrs. Arbitman has her husband’s death certificate and Frieda has her one blue eye and one brown and her boarders—Mrs. Fishbein has her terrible scar.
The social worker comes up the steps, carrying clothes for the Lipmans. She particularly likes the Lipmans because they are so grateful. They thank the social worker when she comes up the stairs, they thank her when she takes the clothes out of the bag, and when she hands out the clothes, and when she goes down the stairs, and when she is walking away from the building, Mrs. Lipman yells out the window, “Thank you, thank you, God bless you, lady.” The Lipman girls wear old ladies’ black bombazine skirts, the bottom flounces torn away to make them for schoolgirls; their brothers wear men’s plaid knickers, so big they fall to the boys’ ankles, like they are handed down from giant giddy children.
The social worker says to Mrs. Fishbein, who is still waving her arm over Louie like the wrath of God, “I think you are frightening your son, ma’am.” Louie buries his face in his mother’s leg, his hand covering the scar, not from shame and certainly not from fear. Her whole body is a comfort to him: her wide, fat white arms, strong as a man’s, her cracked, dirty feet, and her fierce Ukrainian eyes. Everything she has, everything she is, is his. Louie moves his hand up to his mother’s neck and pets her chest.
Mrs. Arbitman laughs. “The frightened boy,” she says.
The social worker gathers up her little red jacket around her (it is very like Judith’s and Lillian makes a note to tell Judith that; it will please her), and, knowing she is overmatched, opens her mouth to answer and closes it.
Mrs. Fishbein tells her she had two children die in a fire, because of no heat, and they turned the stove on and the building burned with them in it, and when this lady becomes the mother of dead children, then she can tell Mrs. Fishbein what’s what.
The social worker leaves, like that, pink as sunset, and it is a great day for Mrs. Fishbein; she will tell this story to everyone, for months to come, how she told off Pearl Lipman’s social worker. This is what Lillian’s days are like. But in the night, she dreams of the deaths of her family. She wakes to the sound of her own screaming and to Judith’s warm body. She eats bread and cabbage with strangers in a small, dirty room. She puts in and takes out stitches to make clothing, puts together blue petals and takes apart flawed silk flowers, and she does it all badly. She learns the language of a country she hates, so that she can dig deeper into it and make a safe hole for herself, because she has no other country. She walks with Judith down Essex Street every Saturday night at 8 o’clock, to watch the modern world, to move like an ox among Americans.
Judith’s collar and sleeves and waistband are stuck with pins, and two straight ones dangle in the corner of her mouth. They bob up and down as she works, and they move—only a little— when she whispers to Lillian that they are hiring seamstresses, tonight, at the Goldfadn Theatre. Every girl in the city, that is from Flatbush to Franklin, will go. It is very generous of Judith to tell her. No one tells Lillian anything and she could spend a whole evening wandering the streets looking for the Goldfadn Theatre and find nothing. If Lillian knew where gold might be buried, would she tell Judith?
The crowd at the back of the Goldfadn Theatre is like an all-girl Ellis Island: American-looking girls chewing gum, kicking their high heels against the broken pavement, and girls so green they are still wearing fringed brown shawls over their braided hair. Two older women, pale and dark-eyed, are pulling along their pale, dark-eyed children. That’s a mistake, Lillian thinks. She would ask a neighbor to watch the child. She would leave the child in Gallagher’s Bar and Grille, at this point, and hope for the best—but she knows that is the kind of thing you say when you have no child. Lillian walks away from the women with children; they reek of bad luck.
Lucky girl, Lillian’s father told her, told everyone, after she had fallen in the river twice and not drowned and not died of pneumonia. He said that smart was good (and Lillian was smart, he said), and pretty was useful (and Lillian was pretty enough), but lucky was better than both of them put together.
Lillian and Judith push their way to the middle of the crowd and then to the front, and then they push themselves into the sewing room of the Goldfadn Theatre, soon they are standing inches away from a dark, angry woman with a tight black bun (“Litvak,” Judith says immediately and happily; her mother was a Litvak), and also from two men, who are, even to the dullest girls, stars in the firmament of life, visitors from a brighter, more beautiful planet. Mr. Reuben Burstein, the Impresario of Second Avenue, is a little wider, with gray hair brushed back like Beethoven and a black silk vest, and Mr. Meyer Burstein, the matinee idol, the man whose Yankl in The Child of Nature was so tragically handsome, so forceful a dancer, so sweet a tenor, that when he romanced the gentile Russian girl Natasha, women wept as if their husbands had abandoned them, and when Yankl killed himself—unwilling to marry poor pregnant Natasha and live as a Christian—everyone wept, not unhappily, at his beautiful, tortured death. Meyer Burstein is a little taller, with a smart black fedora, a cigarette, and no vest over his silk shirt.
The men are moving through the crowd like gardeners inspecting the flower beds of English estates, like plantation owners on market day. Whatever it is like, Lillian doesn’t care. She will be the flower, the slave, the pretty thing, or the despised and necessary thing, as long as she is the thing chosen from among the other things. Mr. Burstein the elder makes an announcement, and the voice is such a pleasure to listen to, the girls stand there like fools, some of them with tears in their eyes at its rich, thunderous quality, even as he is telling them only that Miss Morris (the Litvak) will pass around a clipboard, and they are to write down their names and their skills, or have someone write it for them, and after Miss Morris speaks to them she will indicate who should return tomorrow evening for more interviewing. There is a murmur at this last declaration; it was not so easy to get away for even one night, and Lillian thinks that the bad-luck mothers and the women who look as if they walked from Brooklyn might not return.
Miss Morris approaches. Lillian has rehearsed her remarks with Judith. “Very well, thank you,” if the question seems to be about her health; “I am a seamstress, my father was a tailor,” if the question contains the words “sew,” “costume,” or “work”; and “I attend night classes” (said with a dazzling smile), in response to any question she doesn’t understand. Judith will get the job. Things being what they are, Lillian knows that a girl who can sew and speak English is a better choice than a girl who can only sew. Lillian watches the profile of Reuben Burstein; he looks like a man from home. She heard his big, burnished English voice and, like a small mark on a cheek and a tilt in the little finger on a hand injured a long time ago— the tilt and the injury both forgotten—underneath, she hears Yiddish.
Lillian runs to Reuben Burstein and says, “My name is Lillian Leyb and I speak Yiddish very well, as you can hear, and I also speak Russian very well” (switching into Russian), “if you prefer it. My English is coming along,” before adding in Yiddish, “Az me muz, ken men” (“When one must, one can”), and when Reuben Burstein smiles, she adds, “And I am fluent in sewing of every kind.”
The Bursteins look at her; Miss Morris, who did have a Lithuanian mother, but was born right here in America and graduated the eighth grade and speaks standard Brooklyn English, she looks at Lillian without enthusiasm. The crowd of women look at her as if she has hoisted up her skirt to her waist and shown her bare bottom to the world; it is just that vulgar, that embarrassing, that effective. The elder Mr. Burstein pulls Lillian closer to him and waves his other hand towar
d Miss Morris, who directs the women to form groups of four to make it easier for her to meet them. There are instantly fifteen groups of four, and Lillian loses sight of Judith. Lillian feels like a dog who has leapt over the garden wall. She smiles up at Reuben Burstein; she smiles at Meyer Burstein; she smiles, for good measure, at Miss Morris. Lillian has been through a bad Breslov winter, the murder of her family, an ocean-crossing like a death march, intimate life with strangers in two rooms that smell of men and urine and fried food, and Lillian smiles at these three people, the king and queen and prince of her new life, as if she has just now risen from a soft, high feather bed to enjoy an especially pretty morning.
Reuben Burstein says, in Yiddish, “Come back tomorrow morning, clever pussycat.” Meyer Burstein asks, “Really, miss, how is your English?” and Lillian replies, very carefully, “I attend night classes.” She pauses and adds, “And they go very well, thank you.”
Lillian has washed out her underwear and lain her camiknickers and her slip and her hose on the radiator which has gone stone-cold in the night. She slips out past Frieda in the kitchen and walks to Second Avenue in cold damp underthings. She stands at the door of the theater, trying to feel a warm sun beating down on her, drying her knickers, and she imagines herself doing whatever either Mr. Burstein wishes her to do. She doesn’t know much, but perhaps that will appeal to them—more than something else, something Lillian imagines prostitutes do (and if she knew what it was, she would be rehearsing it right at that moment).
Miss Morris opens the door. “Oh,” she says, “you’re on time. In here,” she says, and Lillian is not unzipping the younger Mr. Burstein’s pants and not sitting on the lap of Mr. Reuben Burstein; she is putting on a neat black smock and taking her seat next to a fat, pretty girl with brown curls and a pink, friendly smile. Miss Morris hands her a gold velvet tunic and tells her to take in the waist two inches. Mr. Reuben Burstein walks by when Lillian’s hands are filled with gold velvet, and he winks at her.