by Karen White
“His name is Carl Laemmle, and he’s a German-born Jew . . . He founded a film company called Universal Pictures, in California.”
The names didn’t mean anything to Liesel, but from the sound of Psota’s voice, she knew it was something impressive.
“He’s already helped a lot of Jewish families in his hometown in Germany and other places in Europe. Many of them are on their way to America as we speak. I’ve written him personally to ask him to also sponsor you. I’ve told him not only that you dance, but that you’re also a great seamstress and learned how to make costumes from your talented mother. He has many contacts in California and New York, so there will be work for you when you arrive.”
Liesel felt a lump in her throat. She couldn’t believe that her teacher would go to such lengths to get her out of a country that now so clearly no longer wanted her or her family.
So many of their neighbors had stopped talking with them. Once her father’s shop was shuttered closed by the new anti-Jewish laws, most people shunned them.
But a sudden fear gripped her, as Psota had only mentioned there being work for her in America. “And my parents?” she questioned, her voice barely above a whisper. “Will he sponsor them as well?”
He turned his gaze away from her, looking past the long French doors of his office. On Psota’s desk she noticed another photograph, this one of him as a boy with his parents, when he was close to the same age as she was now.
“No,” he said softly. “He can only sponsor you . . . I’m very sorry.”
Before she could get the words that were forming on her lips, he anticipated what she was going to say.
“Liesel, I’ve already spoken to your parents. I actually discussed it with them before I even wrote to Mr. Laemmle.” He stopped speaking for a moment, and his eyes once again left her and settled on the ground. “They realize what’s going on here. They want you to take this opportunity. They want you to go. To America.”
—
By June, Liesel had her affidavit and visa. As per Mr. Laemmle’s instructions, she would leave for Antwerp, and from there she would take a boat to New York. That afternoon, as she said good-bye to her parents at the train station in Brno, her mother reached into the basket she was carrying and pulled out a package.
“What is it?” Liesel asked, her voice struggling to keep back her tears. For the first time in her life, Liesel’s feet felt heavy, as if someone had poured cement into her soles. She wanted to anchor herself to the street and tell her parents it was impossible for her to leave them.
“I made your favorite,” her mother said, tears forming in her eyes. “Apple strudel . . .”
Liesel took the package, and in her hands she could feel a little bit of the warm fruit seeping through the cloth.
“Now I can pretend that you’re just going off somewhere to dance,” her mother said, forcing a smile.
Liesel sensed how fragile the long loaf of strudel felt in her hands.
“I’m afraid it might break before I eat it.”
“It doesn’t matter if it splits apart, my darling. Even if it separates into crumbs, all the ingredients are still there.”
Her mother’s hands reached over and clasped Liesel’s.
“It’s just like Papa’s and my love for you.”
—
Liesel arrived in New York not knowing a single word of English. She did know some German, though, which would serve her well, as Mr. Laemmle had arranged a sewing job for her with a German Jew who owned a costume atelier in the theater district. As for her ballet classes, Psota made sure she could study in the evenings with a former Kirov dancer, a Madame Polyakov, on the Upper West Side. But each night, no matter how tired Liesel was from her sewing work or her ballet, she lay awake worrying about her family back in Czechoslovakia.
She had written countless, increasingly desperate letters to her parents back in Brno but had only received one back since her arrival in New York. That letter, sacred to her now, she kept folded carefully in a small box in her dresser drawer.
Our dearest Liesel,
As I write this to you, I imagine you with your bright eyes, your joyful smile, and your leotard and dance shoes close by. This is what a mother does to warm her heart. We have seen Master Psota, and he tells us that Mr. Laemmle has made good on his promises to you. That you are working and still studying your ballet. Papa and I can’t tell you how happy it makes us to know that your life in America is moving forward.
We have received your first letter and do not want you to worry so much about us. Psota has made sure I stay busy sewing. He has the dancers visit me before curfew, and only one or two of them come each week so as not to raise suspicions that he is helping supplement our income. Franny and Tomas Kohn have chosen to go to a place outside Prague called Terezín. They say if we go there, it will be safer than staying in the city. Papa hasn’t yet decided if we will go, too. How much longer we have to choose before they choose for us, I do not know. But please do not worry about us, milácku. Knowing that you are smiling across the ocean gives us sustenance. I pray we will see you soon.
All our love,
Mama and Papa
She had read the letter so many times that the paper was now in danger of tearing at the folds. Because she had only been able to bring a small suitcase with her, Liesel now had so few tangible things that connected her with her family life back in Brno. She had two dresses that her mother had sewn for her, a small leather photograph album that captured scattered memories of their family vacations in the Moravian countryside, and a recording that Psota had brought to her the night before she left, which she had carefully wrapped within the layers of clothing in her suitcase.
That last night, when her mother had tried her best to make something from what little they had left in rations, Psota came to their apartment to say good-bye.
When Liesel opened the door, he was standing there in his elegant suit. In one hand he held a bunch of flowers for her mother, and in the other, a record that he gave to her.
“It’s a going-away gift,” he told her. “Dvorák’s New World Symphony.”
She knew it well. It was a favorite of the music students at the conservatory who shared part of the building with the dancers, and Liesel had heard it several times floating through the walls of the practice halls. The composer was a Czech who had written it while living in New York and conducting the Philharmonic. The symphony was filled with melodies that were inspired by Native American music and by African American spirituals that Dvorák had heard in America. The second movement was especially beautiful; one of the boys at the conservatory tried to impress her after rehearsal one day by telling her that it had inspired another American composer to create a song called “Going Home.”
“An appropriate gift,” she said, smiling and kissing him on the cheek. “Thank you so much. I’ll treasure it.”
That night, after they ate the simple potato dumplings that her mother had prepared, her father took the record Psota had given Liesel and put it on the Victrola.
The music had a layering to it that befitted the evening. In it she heard the longing for one’s homeland, infused with a ray of hope.
“Dvorák wrote it when he was in America, Liesel.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
“I’ve thought about choreographing a ballet to it . . .” His voice drifted. She saw him close his eyes, as if imagining the choreography. All of them later hummed along with the theme from the second movement.
That night everyone seemed to welcome the comfort the music offered. It filled the space where words failed them. And later in New York when Liesel could not find the peace to sleep when haunted by fears of what had befallen her family, she would think of the beautiful strings and the English horn in the second movement and consider it an invisible thread that connected her heart to her family back home.
> Liesel shared her small apartment with another girl whom Mr. Laemmle had also helped bring over from Europe. It was sparsely furnished, with just two beds and a kitchen table and chairs. But after a year of working for Gerta Kleinfeld’s costume atelier, Liesel had enough money to buy a secondhand Victrola from a consignment shop, without feeling guilty that it would draw too much from the money she was saving to one day bring her family to America.
On the nights the pain of being separated from her family was unshakable, she would put on the Dvorák recording from her teacher back home and imagine all of them in the living room again, her parents’ soft hands within reach.
Once the day began, though, she was too busy to allow herself to feel melancholy. She spent hours stitching hems, taking in bustiers, and adding embellishments to the costumes of women who performed at supper clubs. This was the bread and butter of Gerta’s business. And after she finished at Gerta’s around one P.M. each day, she would try to take an afternoon class at Madame Polyakov’s dance studio to practice her ballet, using a portion of her wages to pay for her lessons.
Liesel was grateful she had learned a skill from her mother that could pay the bills. Within Gerta’s sewing studio, chorus girls, with their elaborate hair and makeup, white smiles, and perfect curls, stood in front of the mirror as Liesel pinned their fittings so their costumes enhanced their figures. At the conservatory back home, she had danced in nothing more than a leotard and tights, with her hair swept back into a bun.
But in the crowded and noisy confines of the sewing room, Liesel learned the art of transformation. Her mother had taught her about ballet corsetry and whaleboning, but here in New York she learned about waist nippers and other items that could transform even the slightest girl into a goddess.
Over the next several months, she began to develop a close relationship with the dancers who were sent over to Gerta’s for fittings. The girls liked Liesel’s light touch with her needle and thread, and the way she understood, from her own years of training as a classical dancer, how their bodies moved while they performed. She knew how important it was that their costumes not only flattered their bodies but also held up while they danced.
“Raise your arms up,” she would say to them in her broken English. “Arch your back . . .” She gave them cues to enable her to alter the costume so it would not shift or gap while they stretched their bodies and moved across the stage. She understood that nothing was more distracting for a dancer than to feel that her costume might come undone.
About a year after she arrived, one of the girls, who was named Victoria, struck up a conversation with her.
“You always move so elegantly,” she told Liesel. “You move just like a dancer . . .”
Liesel smiled. “I do dance. But only ballet.” She took a pin from her cushion and slipped it into the hem of Victoria’s skirt.
“I knew it!” Victoria laughed. “I could see it, just how you moved across the room. Shoulders back, neck long . . .”
Liesel laughed.
“Plus you have great legs.” Her eyes ran over Liesel from top to bottom. “Why, heck, you should be dancing with us, not holed up in here!”
Liesel bent over to find some more fitting pins and to take in Victoria’s costume. She was standing near the full-length mirror and was trying to adjust the corsetry to fit Victoria’s tiny rib cage.
“I have no stage background,” Liesel said. “Just my time at my school back in Europe and the classes I take here after work. I’m lucky to have this work sewing . . .”
“Don’t be silly,” Victoria answered. “I can see with a little makeup and some work, you’d be fantastic on the stage. Your posture is perfect, and the dances are really easy. We’re just background beauty for whoever is singing that night. It’s not hard at all, especially compared to ballet . . .”
“But my English . . .”
“You don’t even need to talk! Just to understand the directions . . .” Victoria was beginning to move her arms about.
“Careful,” Liesel said, slightly amused by the suggestion she could be a dancer in New York City. “I don’t want you to scratch up your arms with all these pins.”
—
That afternoon, after Liesel had made sure her costume looked like a second skin, Victoria handed her Leo Stein’s business card. “Give him a visit,” she insisted. “You’re as much of a dancer as I was when I got started.
“Shouldn’t lock a body like that up in a sewing studio all day. Tell him Victoria Creegan sent you. It’s only three blocks from here. Go pay him a visit during your lunch break.”
—
It was now nearly three years since she had begun dancing at the supper clubs. The money she had saved from her paycheck and from her sewing, which she hoped to use one day to bring her parents over, remained untouched. But terrible reports were now coming out of Europe. Rumors of concentration camps and of Jewish families being rounded up and sent to places in Poland.
She spent so much of her day with a silk-screened smile imprinted on her face and her body propelling itself to embrace the laughter and music around her. But when the makeup was wiped off and her sequined dance costume put away, the black-and-white photographs in the newspapers were a haunting she couldn’t shake.
In those moments when she was alone, her body propped up in bed and a borrowed book she was using to study English on her lap, she saw her mother saying good-bye for the last time through a forced smile, and her father still holding on to her bag for a few more moments. She didn’t want to look at those horrible photos in the paper and believe her parents could be amongst the piles of bodies or reduced to dark ash. She wanted instead to look at the family photograph that sat on her nightstand and believe that they were still just as she had left them. Father in his dark brown overcoat and stylish fedora, and Mother always with something warm and sweet in her hands.
—
For two days, Gregori searched the crowds for the girl in the tulip green dress. He scanned the parade of dark suits and white shirts, and the women in their autumn costumes of felt hats and kidskin gloves. He listened to every footstep and took breaks between his playing in order to study the faces that stood in line for Murray’s pastries.
In the course of a day, Gregori saw several hundred commuters walk past him and his violin. Some stopped briefly to listen to him play, and a number of them dropped some change into his velvet-lined case as a token of their appreciation. But he still couldn’t shake the image of the girl with the light, dancerlike footsteps and the face of an old-world beauty.
Then, that following Tuesday afternoon, a little after one P.M., he saw her again. It was definitely her. Her unmistakable face. Her legs. That smile. The footsteps light as air.
This time, he knew he had to be quicker with his bow and start playing immediately. She had not responded to Mozart, so Austria was quickly erased from his mental list of possibilities for her homeland. Germany was the next obvious choice. It gave Gregori the option of one of the three “Bs”: Bach, Brahms, or Beethoven. Both Brahms’s and Beethoven’s violin concertos would allow him to impress the girl with his talent, but he could also play the “Ode to Joy” theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and ignite the crowd. Perhaps the attention around him would be a way to draw her near?
He saw a slight twirl as he began to play. Her heel had pivoted gracefully as she turned from Murray’s with her wax paper bag in her hand, like the miniature ballerina in a music box he once saw in an antiques store near his apartment. A twirling girl made of porcelain no bigger than his thumb with a postage stamp–sized skirt made of tulle.
He saw she had looked in his direction, but she did not stop as he hoped she would. He was sure that she had reacted to something in his playing, though. He had seen her twirl, a movement of pleasure and a visceral response to the music that had come from his bow. It was an improvement from the last time, he told hi
mself, trying not to be deterred. This time, as she walked toward the door, she turned her head and gazed back at him briefly. Her smile pierced his heart, a bounty more rewarding than all of the coins in the world.
—
As Liesel headed toward Mr. Stein’s office, she felt a buoyancy in her step that had nothing to do with the sunshine hitting her face or the fact that she knew she’d soon be getting her next paycheck. Something in the music she had just heard coming from the violinist in Grand Central had made her feel happy and alive.
She hadn’t heard the “Ode to Joy” in ages, and its inspiring melody lifted her. What had he played the last time? she now wondered. Was it Eine kleine Nachtmusik? She remembered hearing that music countless times wafting from the cafés late at night in Brno. This violinist’s playing was enchanting. She’d heard lots of the buskers in the subway stations since she arrived in New York, but most of them chose works by contemporary composers such as Gershwin or Duke Ellington, probably because they thought those were the pieces that would inspire people to reach into their pockets. But this man seemed to prefer the music that reminded her of Europe.
As she walked, Beethoven’s notes lingered in her mind. She thought of her former life back in Brno, and those days at the dance conservatory where the music students often tried to gain the attention of the most beautiful dancers by playing their instruments with as much passion as possible.
—
Those years were the sweetest in Liesel’s memory. A time when she not only began cultivating her love of dance and music, but also when she thought it would all go on like that forever. A life of culture and art, and of friends and family.
During her last year with Master Psota, she witnessed him at the height of his creativity as he choreographed Dvorák’s Slavonic Dances. He spent hours with her and five other girls from his master class calling out the intricate footwork. But even with the door to his studio closed, the beautiful music played by the chamber orchestra filled the entire school.
—
She was surprised at how much she was now looking forward to the rehearsals at Rosenthal’s dance studio. They provided a few consecutive days where she could grab one of Murray’s pastries and again be serenaded by the handsome violinist who seemed to be playing just for her.