The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor's Son

by Sholem Aleichem

  It’s a miracle they let her in with those eyes—to say nothing of surviving the sea voyage. The times we saw the Angel of Death face to face! The times we said good-bye to life!

  Everything seemed fine and dandy when we boarded the Prince Albert. My friend Mendl and I explored the ship from prow to stern. We couldn’t have been more thrilled. Picture living in a three-story house on water! You take a turn around the deck with your hands in your pockets and you’re traveling to America. You stop to have a drink and you’re traveling to America. You sleep in a bed at night and you’re still traveling to America. And the people—a whole city! They’re all traveling to America like you and everyone knows everyone in no time. You find out more about a person in a day than you normally would in a year.

  Whew! The number of women my mother, Brokheh, and Taybl have made friends with! That’s nothing, though, compared to Elye and Pinye’s new friends. They talk on and on. The women discuss household things: kitchens, pantries, laundry, linens, socks, pillowcases. The men talk about America, jobs, Columbus, anti-Semitism, pogroms.

  A person might think they couldn’t live without pogroms. I’ve told you I don’t like to hear about them. The minute someone starts on a new one, I’m off. I take Mendl by the hand and we go for a walk in the streets of the Prince Albert.

  The Prince Albert is a big, fine-looking ship. It has marble stairs, brass railings, and lots of iron and steel. And the crew! Some are stewards and some are sailors, a whole bunch of them. They run around all over. Mendl and I are green with envy. We promise each other that we’ll go to sea when we grow up.

  The one thing wrong with the Prince Albert is that you’re not allowed everywhere. Try going beyond the steerage deck and you’re chased away. The sailors are a rotten bunch. And the first-class passengers are no better for letting the sailors behave like that. Are they afraid we’ll bite them? Mendl doesn’t like it one bit. He can’t understand why a ship needs different classes. America has no classes, he says. If I don’t believe him I can ask my brother Elye.

  Elye hates those kind of questions. It’s better to ask Pinye. Pinye loves to talk about such things. He’ll bombard you with words. Get Pinye started and he’s like an alarm clock that keeps going until it runs down.

  I found Pinye sitting on deck with his nose in a book. Pinye doesn’t read with his eyes. He reads with the tip of his nose. That’s because he’s nearsighted. When I was practically on top of him I said: “Pinye, I have a question.”

  Pinye took his nose from the book.

  “What’s up, little man?”

  “Little man” is Pinye’s name for me. I mean it’s his name when he’s in a good mood. He’s almost always in a good mood, even when he’s fighting with Elye or Taybl is sulking.

  I asked Pinye if Mendl was telling the truth.

  You should have seen him catch fire and shoot sparks! Why, America, he said, is the only country in the world with real freedom and equality. Only in America can you be sitting with the President on one side of you, and a bum, a down-and-outer, on the other, and next to the bum is a millionaire. Civilization! Progress! Columbus!

  Pinye cut loose with his biggest words. A Jew standing next to us, a stranger, mixed in:

  “If it’s such a wonderful country and everyone is so equal, how come there are down-and-outers and millionaires? You’re not being logical.”

  But let Pinye fight his own battles. I had found out what I wanted to know. Mendl was right. There are no classes in America. Classes are bad. So are first- and second-class passengers. Just don’t ask me why. What have they ever done to me?

  Mendl says: “Who do those fat cats think they are shutting themselves up with a lot of shiny mirrors? Do they think they’re too good for the likes of us lower-deckers? Aren’t we human too? Don’t we all pray to the same God?”

  In the end, they got their comeuppance. It happened on the night of Yom Kippur, when the upper crust had to stoop and join us in steerage.

  Since the Prince Albert sailed after Rosh Hashanah, we spent Yom Kippur at sea. Our last meal before the fast was roast potatoes. All our meals were potatoes, because the Prince Albert had no kosher kitchen. There was also bread and tea with sugar. I tell you, it wasn’t half bad. I could live on nothing else for a whole year. Brokheh says too many potatoes make you fat. But what doesn’t Brokheh say? When did Brokheh ever like anything?

  She didn’t like the Prince Albert either. She said it was too slow. Who ever heard, she said, of a single trip taking ten days?

  We tried explaining that it was because of the ocean, not the ship. Pinye pointed out that there’s three times more water than land in the world. Elye said it’s only two times. He knows his geography, he said. The world is two-thirds water and one-third land. That means twice as much water. “Three times,” Pinye said. “Twice,” insisted Elye. “Three times!” “Twice!” They fought for a while and made up.

  Who would be the cantor on Yom Kippur? My brother Elye, of course. Not that he was ever a cantor before, but his father was a famous one. And he has a good voice and knows Hebrew—what more could anyone want? Pinye had the whole ship begging Elye to sing the Kol Nidrei. He spread the word that the young man with the blond beard—that’s Elye—is a musical wonder. You should hear him pray! Not to mention the little man who is his brother (that’s me!) and sings a mean soprano. It’s enough to make God himself take voice lessons.

  It didn’t matter how much Elye tried begging off or swore he had never been a High Holy Day cantor. Nothing in the world could get him out of it. He was practically dragged to the prayer stand—I mean to a round table covered with a white sheet. Pinye said to me:

  “Let’s go, little man. Get to work!”

  We gave those passengers a Kol Nidrei to remember!

  But the Kol Nidrei was nothing compared to the prayers that came after. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It started with some sighing and throat-scraping. Then came the quiet sniffles. That led to the blowing of noses, which grew so loud after a while that the whole place was bawling its head off. Everyone was thinking of where he had been a year ago—in his own town by his own prayer stand in his own synagogue with its own cantor and choir boys.

  Now we were vagabonds, so many head packed together in a cattle drive. Believe me, even the first-class spiffs with their shiny top hats couldn’t hold back their tears. They had their silk handkerchiefs out and were pretending to mop their brows, but I could see them crying sure enough. The stewards and sailors stood at a respectful distance, watching the Jews rock back and forth in their white prayer shawls. They must have been thinking that all that sorrow did us good. Elye gave it all he had while I pitched in with the harmonies. My mother stood in the women’s corner in her good silk shawl, holding her prayer book and weeping her heart out.

  She was blissful. At last she was in her element.

  The next morning we rose early to start the service on time. We might as well have stayed in bed. Not only couldn’t anyone pray, no one could walk or even stand. Our heads were spinning too fast to see straight. We felt so bad we wanted to die. As a matter of fact, that’s what we thought we were doing.

  What was the matter? I’m too tired to go on now. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.

  CROSSING THE RED SEA

  I was telling you about the humdinger that hit the Prince Albert that Yom Kippur. It was a bad one. We’ll never forget it.

  It didn’t start out like much, just a strip of black cloud at the edge of the sky soon after Kol Nidrei. My friend Mendl was the first to notice it. That’s because all the other Jews were still yammering below and reciting Psalms after the prayers. Mendl and I had gone for a walk around the ship and were sitting quietly in a corner. It was a calm, warm night and we were feeling happy and a little sad. I don’t know what Mendl was thinking. I was thinking about God. I was thinking how big he must be, sitting up there in charge of everything. How did it feel to be prayed to and praised by so many Jews pouring out their hearts to you?<
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  My mother says God hears and sees everything and knows my every thought. I was hoping she was wrong, because just then I was thinking of a juicy apple, a sweet pear, and a nice glass of cold water. The potatoes were giving me heartburn.

  Elye would kill me if he caught me drinking on Yom Kippur. He wanted me to fast the whole twenty-four hours, even though I wasn’t thirteen. “We’ll see about that,” my mother said. Now she was looking for me everywhere. A sailor showed her where Mendl and I were sitting in the prow. “Motl?” she yelled. “Motl!”

  “What is it, Mama?”

  “You know what it is! Go to sleep! Have you forgotten you have to get up early tomorrow? It’s Yom Kippur.”

  Not that I wanted to, but I went to bed.

  The sky was black when we woke in the morning. The sea was angry and wild, its waves higher than the ship. They tossed the Prince Albert up and down like a toy. The sailors staggered like poisoned mice. The stewards clung to the railings. The passengers hugged the walls and reeled with each step.

  All at once it began to pour buckets. The thunderclaps came one after another. God was whipping on his chariot—and on his holiest day! Bolts of lightning flashed across the dark sky. The Prince Albert groaned and rolled with the waves. The rain pelted down. It felt like a second Noah’s flood. But hadn’t God sworn that the first was the last?

  “Crossing the Red Sea was nothing compared to this,” said my brother Elye.

  “Nothing!” Pinye echoed. It was the first time I had ever heard them agree.

  The comparison caught on. Before long everyone was looking out the portholes and talking about the Red Sea. I mean everyone who didn’t run to the deck to puke his empty guts out. Yom Kippur? Prayers? Who could even remember what day it was?

  The first to break down in our family was Brokheh. For a while she screamed she was dying. Then she began swearing at Elye. What ever made him think of going to America? She had known all along that Siberia was better. Why, Siberia was gold next to America!

  My mother came to Elye’s defense. She tried explaining that all things came from God and had to be borne. It said in the Bible …but my mother never said what it said in the Bible because just then she turned green. One look at her made Taybl sick too.

  Pinye thought it was funny. “Just look at them!” he declared. “Women are one big laugh.” He jammed his cap down sideways and stuck his hands in his pockets. “They’re ninnies! What do I care if there’s a storm and the ship is rolling? I use my brains and figure out what to do. When the ship rolls that way, I bend this way; when it rolls back this way, I bend that way. It’s called keeping your equilibrium.”

  As Pinye was showing us his equilibrium, my brother Elye started looking pretty bad. Soon the two of them rushed outside to chuck up whatever was still in them. So did the other passengers. Then everyone dragged himself off to his bunk and collapsed like a bale of hay. And we weren’t across the Red Sea yet!

  Mendl and I held out the longest. Mendl had been taught a trick by a fellow emigrant, an old sea hand who liked to give advice. He had been to America three times. The trick, he said, was to stay on deck with your eyes on the horizon while pretending you were riding a sleigh. Before long the old sea hand was sprawled out like a corpse and Mendl and I were soaked to the bone. We couldn’t walk a straight line back to our bunks. We had to be taken by the hand and led there.

  How long did crossing the Red Sea take? Maybe a day and maybe two or three. I can’t rightly say. All I remember is how good it felt to be alive when it was over. The sky was pure as gold. The sea was smooth as glass. The Prince Albert skimmed the water looking like new, churning foam and spray in all directions. The passengers revived and flocked to the sunshine to enjoy a bright new day.

  Soon word got around that land was almost in sight. Mendl and I were the first to spread the good news that we had spied it. At first it was a yellow speck on the horizon. Then the speck grew bigger and clearer. Ships appeared in the distance. Lots and lots of them with tall, thin masts.

  All our troubles were forgotten. The passengers hurried to put on their best clothes. The women made themselves up. Elye combed his beard. Brokheh and Taybl went to get their good scarves. My mother put on her silk shawl. Mendl and I had nothing to do. But there was no time anyway. We were docking in America. All eyes shone with joy. The Jews who crossed the Red Sea must have felt the same way. That’s why they started to sing.

  “Hail to thee, Columbus! The Old World greets thee, O land of freedom—O blessed, golden land!”

  That was Pinye’s hello to America. He even doffed his cap and made a deep bow. Being half blind, he crashed nose first into the sooty head of a sailor. It’s a lucky thing the sailor was a decent goy. He just looked at Pinye’s bloody nose, grinned, and grunted into his mustache. It must have been one swell American curse.

  Suddenly there was a commotion. The steerage passengers were requested to return to their places. At first the sailors were polite. Then they weren’t. Whoever didn’t move fast enough was made to.

  There we were, young and old, men, women, and children, Jews, Christians, Gypsies, and Turks, with an iron chain on the door and no air. All we could do was stare through the portholes. It was worse than being seasick. We looked at each other like prisoners. “Why now? Why us?” my friend Mendl demanded with blazing eyes.

  The first- and second-class passengers were being let down a long gangway that must have had a hundred steps. But what about us? Didn’t we get off here too?

  “The likes of us can be made to wait,” said a Jew, a leech of a tailor from Heysen.

  As leeches go he wasn’t a bad sort, a snazzy dresser who wore fancy glasses, thought a lot of himself, and liked chewing your ear off. He liked to argue too and had already had a few fights with Pinye. It was all Elye could do to break them up. In the end the tailor had declared himself so insulted that he stopped talking to Pinye entirely. Not only had Pinye called him “Needle Pusher,” “Thread Eater,” and “Seamsterman,” he had thrown in “Fabric Filcher” too.

  Now that we were behind bars, though, the tailor talked nonstop even to Pinye. Half of what he said was in Hebrew:

  “Meh onu umeh khayeynu—what do folks like us count? Moshul kekheres hanishbor—we’re just so much scrap in their eyes. Except that real scrap isn’t thrown away so easily …”

  Did he get it from Pinye! What kind of comparison was that? He should wash his mouth with soap, the tailor should, for talking that way about America! He really gave it to him, Pinye did. You can’t say a bad word about America when Pinye is around. Not that the tailor thought he had said anything bad. All he had said, said the tailor, was that America was a fine place but not for us. We were going nowhere fast.

  That was too much for Pinye. He shouted: “What do you think they’re going to do, salt us away in a herring barrel?”

  “No,” said the tailor from Heysen with a triumphant sneer. “They’re not going to salt us away. They’re going to take us to a place called Ella’s Island and pen us up there like calves until someone comes to get us out.”

  Pinye didn’t let that pass in silence: “Get a load of this tailor boy! He’s a regular fountain of bad news. There’s nothing he doesn’t know. Who hasn’t heard of Ella’s Island? And who doesn’t know it’s an island and not a cattle pen?”

  The hotter under the collar Pinye became, the more the tailor from Heysen feared for his life. In the end he backed off and turned away, although not before grumbling: “Well! Just imagine! You would think I had stained his best suit! Dared criticize his precious America! Pshaw! Just wait a while and you’ll see …”

  IN DETENTION

  You can’t blame Pinye for being so annoyed at Ella’s Island that he’s writing a poem about it while fighting all the time with Elye. Mostly, though, he keeps his disappointment with America to himself. He doesn’t want the tailor to see it. But he’s burning up inside, even if he keeps a stiff upper lip. “How can it be?” he asked Elye in a low voice wh
en we were taken to Ella’s Island. “Where do you get off locking people up like so many criminals?” The tailor from Heysen was right.

  Actually, it isn’t as bad as all that. Not only are we not in a cattle pen, we’re in a big bright building with plenty of free food and drinks. We couldn’t be treated any better.

  Until we got here, though—whew! One by one we had to walk a long hallway with lots of doors on each side. At each door we were stopped by some grouch with shiny buttons who double- and triple-checked us. The first held our eyelids open with a slip of cardboard while examining our eyes. Then the others examined the rest of us. They marked us with chalk and signaled us to go right or left. When all the lefts and rights were finished we came to the big building and started to look for each other. We had gotten separated in the confusion and really were as scared as calves bound for the slaughterhouse.

  Scared of what? Mainly of my mother’s eyes. They were still red from crying. Wouldn’t you know that in the end they were hardly looked at!

  “That’s your blessed father helping from heaven. The light shine on him in Paradise!”

  So my mother said, hugging us and crying for joy. She was so happy she didn’t know what to do with herself.

  Elye acted like a new man. All the time we had been on the road, he took his worries out on me. The slaps flew like chips of wood while Brokheh cheered him on. Now he was a different person. He even gave me an orange from his pocket. Everyone on the Prince Albert was given an orange every morning. Some stuck theirs in their pockets for later. Not me. Who could resist eating it right away?

  Pinye was good and proud of himself. He said:

  “Well? Who was right? Didn’t I tell you all those stories about being sent back for crying were spread by America’s enemies? A bunch of fat-mouthed, lying, hot-aired, no-good bums! It wouldn’t surprise me to hear them say that all Jews in America had to be baptized. Where’s that damned tailor from Heysen?”