At times, when I was recognized, I became embarrassed by the difference and tried to figure out a way to hide. I decided early on I’d learn to pretend to be like everyone else. But I couldn’t seem to get a bead on how to respond spontaneously and still remain certain. When I could rehearse communication with other people, I felt fine, but in a situation where I had to improvise I became lost and grew quiet, which I’m sure made me appear even more unusual. I compared myself to my family members. Wendy seemed to have been born with an innate understanding of the dark side of human nature, while I grew into my teens needing a field guide for intention. My older brother, David, let everything roll off his shoulders. He hardly noticed and seemed to never get upset by the things that happened. Moses preferred to hide in his closet. I couldn’t tune it out like David. I became angry and acid-tongued around my family. I needed to fight. I didn’t believe anything could change otherwise, and I needed it to change.
I never believed my family made me different or that my difference grew as a result of my environment. I didn’t even feel like a member of a family. Our house very loosely held a group of individuals who happened to share a space but no commonality. We were solely growing up together.
In the meantime, I decided I would try to be smart and strong. These were the qualities I strived to develop through the years of my childhood, though it got more difficult as I got older.
I began to see my life in parts. When something bad, or weird, or crazy happened, like my father having a gun and threatening my mother, I’d say to myself: This is the part where my father points a gun at my mother’s head. Like in a movie or something.
I don’t know why that made it seem better, but it did. It became more about watching the weirdness than contributing to it. Also, when you see your life as crappy in parts rather than crappy as a whole, it somehow seems easier to handle.
Six
Samuel Trautman, 69years | August, 1979
BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS
YOU ASK ME to write my story. This is not a story I will want you to read now, while you are starting out your life with hope. Later, after I am gone, I think. But I will write for you, Chavalah, my little Chava.
I have three stories. I will tell the first and the third story. I don’t tell the second story. No one I know who lived the second story will tell the second story except to someone who lived it. Better to forget that story and live to tell another one.
You will find that most of the parts are lost. A few memories survive as fragments. Other parts are as whole and grounded as the earth of my Bubbe Chava’s orchards. My boyhood home. I will put down every detail of these stories I can remember before all the parts are lost.
And so you will have my truth.
I will begin at my beginning, when I am still called Szaja.
September 5th, 1923. Ivnitza, Russian Empire.
We lived near the Teteriv River in a small village called Ivnitza, which is surrounded by ancient forests. Zhytomyr, the nearest city, sat north of us.
This is the day my mater and foter left the Ukraine, which had, in recent years, been swallowed up like a pig’s dinner and become part of Russia. I am thirteen years old. Mater and Foter also left me, my two younger brothers Idel and your uncle Oizer, my two older twin sisters Ruchel and Sura, and my eldest sister, Reizel, your aunt Rose, eighteen and married to a young man named Berl. We are left on my Bubbe Chava’s farm.
That day they began their long travels to Turkey and to the eventual sailing to America. They are going to make a new life for us. My foter promised to send for us as soon as he could.
Every night, for weeks, we spent the evenings helping to pack. This involved much more laughing, singing, and making fun of my foter’s terrible dancing than actual work. The day before, we had finished the last of the apple harvesting from our orchards. It had been a good year for fruit. First the cherries in the spring, and now the apples. We made more money in the markets these two past seasons than in the years before—the years of the famine.
Since they are leaving before the Rosh Hashana holiday, my foter said we should say the religious poems, the piyyuttim, together. Mater, Reizel and the twins made a feast of food—apples dipped in honey, rodanchas, potato latkes, and delicious challah bread, finished with a delicious Lekach cake with cinnamon and raisins. This I remember as the first time my belly felt full in nearly two years.
The three youngest children—including Idessa, still a baby of five months—would leave on the journey with my parents. I am to take charge of my two younger brothers; Ruchel and Sura would help with their care. Reizel and Berl would take charge of all of us. My foter, Abram, like most of the people in our village, spoke Yiddish, Polish, bits of Russian, German, and Ukranian. He helped to teach us all to speak these languages. You never knew who you might need to speak with. Knowing other languages could save your life.
My foter, a good-natured man and a hard worker, is also a dreamer. When he married my mater, his in-laws, my Bubbe and Zayde, gave him their orchards as a dowry. It is a good gift, but he never found happiness with his life as a farmer, and he dreamed of life as a wealthy man.
Meantime, the wars brought sorrow to our village. We lived in perpetual fear of arrest. Every day our enemies changed: the Bolsheviks, the anarchists, the White Russians, or the Poles.
The most recent local violence had been at the hands of the Cossacks. Budionny’s 1st Army destroyed the bridges in Zhytomyr, wrecked the train station, and burned buildings, including the synagogue in our village.
No one knew what could happen to us.
These are the times of the pogroms. All around us in other parts of Russia, now called the USSR, we heard of whole villages of Jews being rounded up and marched out, homes burned or taken over by armies. This had been happening for years and years.
My foter’s boyhood friend, Mendel, traveled to America—to New York City—and sent occasional letters filled with extravagant stories of American prosperity and opportunity. Mendel’s family had already joined him in New York.
My foter, Abram, decided he should go to America and live the good life as well. He wrote to Mendel and announced he is coming. Mendel wrote back and told him he planned to move to Brooklyn, that he’d found a bigger apartment. He wrote that Abram should come and live with them, but he couldn’t take all of us at once. My family, even in our village, where families are huge, is one of the largest.
And so, my foter, without waiting for an exact address—how big could the village of Brooklyn be?—would pack up himself, my mater, and the youngest children and begin the journey toward the paradise called America.
He’d decided a year earlier that my twin sisters—fourteen at the time—could go to America as servants to a rich American family. He saw advertisements in the Kiev market for such things. They advertised outrageous wages for young girls. This would provide passage for all of us at the same time. But, when Ruchel failed to recover fully from the typhus and Sura refused to go without her, he softened and decided to wait until he arrived in America and could secure a spot for them himself.
Knowing what I know now about those advertisements for young girls from small Ukranian villages, it would have been a bad gamble. But considering the alternative nightmare they endured, perhaps the odds would not have been as bad.
I remember being amazed he convinced my mater to leave her children and the farm she had grown up on and embark on this journey. Mater had always been the practical one.
Before they left, my foter walked me out to the apple orchard and spoke to me about his plan to go to America. I remember the sunrise that morning. The flaming orange and blood red reflections on the orchard leaves made them glow like lanterns.
“Why, Foter? Why do you have to go?” I scowled and dug my toe into a mound of leafy dirt.
“Once we are in America, we will have many opportunities. This family will be healthy and prosperous. We will find a good doctor to help your sister Ruchel. We will send for everyone to come an
d live with us.”
“I should go with you and find a job in America. I can work and help save money for everyone to come. Reizel and Berl can take care of the children.” I had become a Bar Mitzvah that year. I considered myself a man.
“Your mater and I need you to take care of your brothers, Szaja. Reizel and Berl will be busy with the farm and the girls. You need to make sure they stay out of trouble. You’re a man now, yes. I need you to be a schtark man and keep the family safe. No matter what happens, Szaja, don’t let anything separate the family further. Protect your brothers and your sisters. Now Bubbe and Zayde have gone, we are all the family we have on this earth. Iberkumen”
Iberkumen. Survive. Yes. This is most important. Abram’s parents had died long ago, and he had been the sole surviving child, all the rest taken to their deaths by disease or war.
My mater, Tailia, had two sisters, much older, who had moved away with their respective husbands long ago and not been heard from in years. They had, no doubt, been buried by hard times of their own.
My mater, ever loyal, stayed with her parents, even marrying a man who agreed to work their orchards. She bore seventeen children after marrying Abram at fourteen. She lost nearly half the children she carried to disease and famine. We had recently lost my Grandmater Chava, and my brother, Gershon, to typhus. Gershon, two years older than me, had been my best friend and ally.
Losing him, for me, is a terrible grief, but to my foter it had been devastation. Gershon, as his eldest son, had been the one he’d pinned his hopes of a better life upon. When he died, my foter died a bit as well. I think this is why, when he began to talk of leaving for America, my mater agreed. This is the first light we had seen shining from my foter’s eyes in over a year.
Survival, I think, is some part of our genetic path. We are directed by our blood. Our ancestors survived countless trials and we are coming through a difficult period of poverty and hunger. If I tell the truth of what the world is like in that time, Chavalah, you may not believe. None of your history books will tell you this story.
Under the Soviet Communist regime, we suffered a famine that, contrary to what the history books say, is not solely caused by drought and crop failures. The famine had been concentrated in the provinces of Southern Ukraine, and this area is known for its abundant grain crops. More people lived there when I am a boy than all the people in China right now, but between the fall of 1921 and the spring of 1923 over a quarter of these people died of starvation and disease.
This is an abomination. Saving this population would not have been difficult. During the two years of the famine, the Bolshevik government stole from us many times the amount of grain it could have taken to end the crisis.
I hated the Bolsheviks.
You see, most of the confiscated grain got shipped abroad: the first year to Russia, the second to Russia and the West. The Ukraine is also ordered to send additional famine relief to the Volga and to feed over two million people who came from Russia as refugees, soldiers, and administrators. Our own area had been badly affected, but not to the extent the southern regions suffered.
Where we lived, Chavalah, in the north, there are many orchards. Fruits, which ripened and grew rotten in a relatively short time, are not required as a part of the government shipments to other countries. We are obliged, however, to give up a portion of the harvest, as well as a taxed percentage of profit from our sales. Remember, we had no refrigeration. Our transportation—a cart driven by our horse, Pavolyah. We sold the fruit from our orchards, mainly cherries and apples, in the local markets and sometimes as far away as Zhytomyr. During those hard years, we grew a small crop of potatoes, which we hid in a tiny section of the orchard. Survival became possible by using our own fruit and vegetables, eggs and meat from occasional chickens, and the meager supplies we bartered for with our neighbors. Many others are not as fortunate. Families are broken. Orphans wandered the countryside trying to find food and work.
Berl, Reizel’s husband, came to us from the south, through the famine. One day, late in the winter, he appeared in the orchard like a starving ghost and asked my foter for work.
A boy of sixteen, he is lame, many of his toes lost to frostbite.
My foter eyeballed him and shook his head. “Oy vey, Tailia, what am I going to do with a lame cherry picker?”
“Put him on the tallest ladder under the ripest, fullest limbs. He will be a good worker,” my mater pronounced. She could see already he’d be a loyal husband to Reizel. As we are giving him his life with the work, my parents didn’t have to provide a dowry, an impossibility at the time.
Berl is hard worker, despite his disability, and also a kind husband to Reizel. Reizel never complained about the match, but I know she felt unhappy. She is smart and had dreamed of leaving the orchards to go to university somewhere where they allowed girls to study. As the eldest girl, however, she is caretaker to all the other children.
Reizel is the one who mothered me. By the time I came, my mater is busy working in the orchards, cutting, stringing, drying, and storing the apples and preserving and storing the other fruit and vegetables we grew. Although Yiddish and Russian are our spoken languages, Reizel helped my foter to teach us all to read and write Hebrew, Ukranian, Polish, Russian, and German. Berl taught us the English he’d learned. We would be ready for America.
Oizer is eleven. He is the second—still-living—son in our family and he is smart with money. He figured out a way to gain our market baskets for free by secretly exchanging our produce with the market women from Kiev. Fruit baskets are our main expense, and Oizer saved us such a great deal with this barter that my foter is able to buy tickets, papers, and supplies for their trip within the year.
We never told the Bolsheviks we didn’t buy our baskets anymore. For what did they have to know? They’d make us pay more taxes.
“But how soon will you send for us, Foter?”
“Soon. Soon, Szaja. Be patient and your patience will be rewarded.”
“Will I be able to go to school in America, Foter?”
“Ye, ye, all my children will be scholars in America. Oy, we will talk many long discussions regarding important matters. It will put your sister Idessa to sleep.”
Idessa, the baby, is famous in our family for keeping us all awake with her fussiness.
“And I will learn to be a doctor, Foter? I will go to the University of America and study?”
“Ye, ye, you will be the doctor, Szaja. Reizel will study, and Oizer will be a milyon merchant. Make sure Idel stays out of trouble. The boy has marbles in his head for brains.”
“I will make sure, Foter.”
Idel, then eight years old, is a worry to me. A mischievous toddler, now he is a bit of a wild boy. He acted before he thought—if he thought at all. He is always getting into scrapes and the family is always bandaging him up.
Once, he decided to climb the tallest apple tree.
When my mater found Idel with his arm broken, on the ground and wailing with pain, she asked him, “Why did you climb the tree?”
Idel wept as he spoke. “To see the view.”
“But what were you thinking? It’s not safe,” insisted my mater. “Didn’t you think about how you might be hurt, or how you would climb down?”
“No, I wanted to see what I could see up there,” Idel cried.
“So, what did you see?”
“Nothing but more trees.”
“What did you learn?”
“I learned G-d doesn’t want me to see the view, because when I turned around to see more in the other direction, I slipped and fell.”
“G-d wants you to see, Idel. He also wants you to think carefully before you do things so you won’t become hurt.”
“Did an angel catch me, Mater?”
“An angel? Why should you ask this question?”
“Because after I hurt my arm on a branch while I fell, I felt someone catch me and put me on the ground.”
That day, Idel’s angel became a
sort of talisman to ward off anything bad and to protect us. If there is a storm brewing while we are out on the road, my foter summoned Idel’s angel to see the family safely home. Idel’s angel is enlisted for every family illness, for protection from the soldiers, and to ensure our orchards good production. My mater even used Idel’s angel to remember where she put her sewing basket.
The arm is set and healed quickly, but Idel still never listened. He is impulsive and carefree. I thought then it would take much more than a broken arm to lead Idel to reflect on his actions.
“Don’t leave me with him here long, Foter. Already he won’t listen to anyone.”
“Don’t worry, Szaja, it won’t be long. It won’t be long at all, you have my promise.”
My foter had no way of knowing that my escape from Eastern Europe would take another twenty-five years.
That life, my boyhood life, is the sweetest time. The winters are long and harsh and the work tiring, but the reward of my family, together and laughing, is all I ever needed. I knew this, even then.
But my foter is excited and happy, and it is hard not to be happy with him. Standing there in the orchard with him, the late summer sunrise lighting everything golden as the sun began its slow climb into the day, I inhaled the scent of the ripe apple trees and the damp earth.
I stood there with a smile on my face, knowing with a dreadful certainty that I would never experience that kind of happiness again.
Seven
Jules, 8 years | April 15th, 1970
RECESS
I REACH FOR a swing on the school ground at recess when something hits me, hard, on the back of the head.
The Belief in Angels Page 5