Odessa, Odessa

by Barbara Artson

  “Yes, you keep telling me,” he says, putting his heavily veined hand to his good ear, as if trying to block out her words.

  “Look at Faigel and Joe, working so hard they can live in a mansion—eight rooms in Brooklyn. All our children work hard, take care of their families, put food on the table, and live in a nice place. And even Dora’s Saul—he gives us ten dollars a month. And they don’t have much themselves, what with their two girls. Mendel?” Henya’s words, once again, fall on deaf ears. She thinks that maybe all his fulminating helps to diminish his frustration—to make him feel alive.

  “Look at that shtarker,” Mendel protests. “I saw him in synagogue this morning. Goes to shul and then, on the street, puts his yarmulke in his pocket. With that face, no beard, he thinks he looks like a goy.”

  He leans toward the open window, “Hey, maybe you fool some of the people, but God can see you, big shot!” he rants, shaking his fist. The stranger circles his ear with his index finger, calling out “meshuga” as he walks away.

  “Some new world, huh, Henya? We should have stayed in Russia. So we were poor, but we knew how to honor HaShem and how to obey the commandments and celebrate the Sabbath. We knew who our enemies were—the goyim and the czar—not Jews! Here we are, again with nothing, bubkes. Nothing has changed.” His voice trails off to barely a whisper. “And there . . . there I was a somebody.”

  Henya feels her heart breaking for her husband. He looks so old—his blue eyes dulled with cataracts, a wispy beard dappled gray and black, though his hair is still abundant. She pours him a glass of strong black tea from the blemished brass samovar, one of the few possessions she insisted on taking from the old country, a wedding gift from her Aunt Beulkah, her mother’s youngest sister. She loved her Tante Beulkah, the one with yellow hair and blue eyes, like Marya.

  It was her tante who taught her to make black bread with its thick, crusty casing and how to make borscht rich with the flavor of beets and cabbage and, when they could get it, meat. And teiglach. Her mouth waters when she recalls that childhood delicacy. She can almost taste the ginger and raisins and feel the warm honey dripping down her chin. Absentmindedly, she licks her fingers. She reminds herself to make it for the little ones. She desperately wants them to have good memories of their bubbe. Warm, loving memories. Sensuous memories.

  Traditionally, on Friday evening, before kindling the Shabbos candles, Henya fires up the samovar by igniting a small piece of coal and pouring two quarts of water into the center cylindrical urn. She places the teapot—stuffed with Russian black tea leaves she buys at a small Russian grocery store several blocks away, whole cloves, and a pinch of cinnamon—on the crown of the samovar to keep it hot and ready to drink until Shabbos ends, marked by the lighting of the blue-and-white braided Havdalah candle.

  “Better in Russia? Mendel, what do you talk? Come away from the window; have a sit by the samovar. Thank God those hoodlums on the ship didn’t steal the suitcase with the samovar. Drink a bissel tea. I’ll cut you some bread. Come, you’ll feel better.”

  She pours herself a glass of tea, places a cube of sugar between her teeth, and drinks—her glass an empty jam jar—savoring the heat of the thick black liquid as it warms her throat. She drinks and relives the hardships she and her younger children endured after Mendel left for America in 1913 with Levi and Shmuel, leaving her to care for their youngest children and to make arrangements for their ocean passage the following year.

  Henya thinks of that time, when she and her little ones boarded the teeming railroad car that took them from Odessa to Hamburg, and then on to the ship that would transport them to America. She can still feel the dread and the hope, as if it were happening today, that she experienced crossing the Atlantic to join Mendel in the New World, with all its promises.

  Chapter 4

  HENYA: AN INDEPENDENT WOMAN

  November 1913/1914

  It is to be a golden province, its streets paved with riches—a goldene medina—a place where her dreams of contentment will be fulfilled; where her children will be safe and she won’t have to scrimp the week long to set a festive Shabbos table; where Mendel will have noble work and a chance to study Torah undisturbed, maybe with his own synagogue and young scholars to teach; where it won’t be too late for the littlest ones to go to school and get a proper education, and, who knows, maybe even college. Jews were always people of the book, she muses. So maybe Leib can become a doctor. And Avram a lawyer. Imagine, a doctor or a lawyer. Not like in Russia.

  And Disha shall marry a nice Jewish boy, and maybe, maybe there will be a special school for Marya, her wounded bird that she loves so much. There will be no knocks on the door at midnight, unless it is the man who comes to the door to announce Shabbos on Fridays, no one beaten or killed, raped, or robbed. Whatever it offers, Henya knows it has to be better than Odessa.

  In a letter, Faigel, now known as Faye, described a world Henya could not imagine. Men driving machines—motor cars—that could take you to the next village in a matter of hours, she wrote. Young women, some married, sewing on machines in factories, making their own money. Contributing to their family’s wellbeing. Buying hats and shoes. Girls going to school to learn to read and write and become teachers. Her husband Joseph—no longer Yosef—working hard so he could own his own factory. Ice all the year round, with a metal box to store it in that keeps food fresh for days. Shops that sell kosher meat and fresh fish and vegetables. And everyone with a bathtub. And hot water. Such a pleasure, such a mechaya.

  In 1913, with the help of Levi and Shmuel, strapping young men—who now work on the docks loading and unloading dirty laundry from steamships to delivery trucks waiting nearby to convey their contents to the Hudson Valley Laundry—and a loan from the Hebrew Benevolent Society, Mendel arranges to wire the eighty rubles required to pay for his family’s journey on the Lusitania.

  A year passes before Henya can finalize the arrangements. With no husband for emotional support and protection and without the guidance of her older children she had always relied on, she is the only one to talk to the officials, to plead and cajole and barter her way to the life of freedom she envisions in America. As though it will magically infuse her with the strength and courage she needs, she chants the name of her New World over and over, like a worshiper davening at shul. With closed eyes, she even rocks as she intones the words.

  “A-mer-ee-ka. Amer-ee-ka. Amer-ee-ka.”

  The word, in spite of its jagged and foreign-sounding syllables, evokes awe and a loyal devotion to a language she will barely understand and never learn to speak. Her grandchildren will never understand her, nor she them. Documents are always missing: A nonexistent birth certificate—who ever heard of a Jew with a birth certificate in Russia? Rather, it was “she was born the year of the big fire or the flood or the blizzard or the plague.” She has a letter corroborating that her husband is presently working in America and that she possesses the twenty-five American dollars required to enter her new country. The officials also demand a medical certificate affirming their good health. No one, Henya is made to understand, with diseases one could give to others, tuberculosis or cholera or trachoma, can be admitted. Nor anyone deemed mentally defective. She hears rumors circulating around the village of some turned back at Hamburg, rejected before even boarding the boat, or some hospitalized at Ellis Island because an inspector uncovered ringworm in the scalp. Rules, regulations, and more rules. Her head swims with rules.

  Not enough health. Not enough money. Not enough courage. Always something. But she steadfastly pursues her dream with a resolve that grows out of love, longing, and dread of the increasingly virulent anti-Semitism in the Pale and beyond.

  In the little less than a year without her family, Henya discovers a previously unknown sturdy exterior joined to a stubborn, inner resilience. When she feels frightened, and she often does, she learns to make believe—to act, as she approaches an official, at times a coquette, at times a know-nothing, whatever she feels is needed to a
ccomplish her task. She learns that she too is clever and likes her independence.

  She even picks up a few words of Russian—spasibo, thank you; dasvidaniya, good-bye; niet, no—a language never spoken or heard in the Pale—in order to talk to officials, since they speak little or no Yiddish, her only language. Her resolve to join her husband and older children sustains the audacity and fortitude needed to fulfill what are great feats of daring never before envisaged by her. She never knew a woman could be self-sufficient.

  And so, week after week, month after month, she returns to pander to the officials’ demands, always with the tacit understanding that, with each visit, she is to grease the hands of the interviewer by slipping a kopeck or two, sometimes a precious trinket, into a functionary’s hand. Henya quickly learns that everyone and everything has a price. Once, the price stipulated is her body in exchange for a much-needed stamped document. She doesn’t understand the words, but she understands his body language. She hides her furtive revulsion with a suggestive smile.

  Unlike some of her neighbors, who aren’t as wily and who impassively succumb to their demands of authority, she manages to stave off the inquisitor’s appeal by bartering—now a parcel of tea and then homemade marmalade, or, in spite of the shortage of flour, one of her coveted black breads, still warm from the oven. When pushed to the brink, she relinquishes her father’s precious pewter snuffbox, “the only thing I have of his,” that she holds dear. But she leaves with the required document, smiling with tears of relief, satisfaction, and sadness.

  Henya knows not how she overcomes the shortness of breath, the heart palpitations, the sweaty palms, the trembling legs and hands that accompany the panic she feels as she approaches each meeting.

  But the time finally arrives when she and her four children board the train with three cardboard suitcases held together with twine, steamer tickets, a passport with names, ages, and port of debarkation noted—the train that will take them to their ship with a strange-sounding name, the Lusitania. With Marya, Leib, Disha, and Avram dressed in their best bartered finery and her American dollars secreted in a pocket she had stitched into her bloomers, they begin the journey to Hamburg and the boat that will deliver them to their new home and to Mendel and her older children. She can barely recall his face or the sound of his voice. A year is a long time, she thinks. Much has changed with Marya and the children, and mostly with me.

  1914

  “Phew! What a smell,” howls ten-year-old Disha as she enters the railcar, holding her nose. “I want to go home.” The stench of sweat combined with the smell of garlic, onions, and herring coming from the overcrowded throng of apprehensive passengers seated in the third-class compartment with their arsenal of food for the journey is overpoweringly foul. The passengers load their baskets to overflowing out of fear they will not find kosher food to eat.

  Stifling tears of sadness and respite—respite from the arduous walk to the station and sorrow for the home she has known for some forty odd years, the home of her childhood and her parents’ graves—Henya is in no mood to hear her daughter’s protestations.

  “We should thank God,” Henya tells her children, “that we have the money to ride in a train. We are blessed, thanks to your Papa and the money he sent. Did you know when Papa and your brothers left for America, they didn’t even have the money for that? You know what they had to do? They walked for two hundred miles. Imagine, three weeks getting to the boat that took them to America and not knowing if they could even buy a ticket when they got there. Or if they could all go together. We ride on a train. So it smells a little. I don’t want to hear another word. Understand? Fershtays? Not another word!” Leib hunches down in his seat and pulls his hat over his eyes while Marya contentedly stares at the other passengers.

  “But Mama,” Disha whines, “it’s not a little, it’s a lot, and I don’t remember Papa. I hate him. I hate this train. I just want to go home now. I don’t want to go to America. I hate America too. I want to go home.”

  Henya, this gentle woman, for the first and only time in her life, slaps her daughter full in the face with a force that comes from too many years of numbing fright and privation. Disha’s head jerks back as she receives the stunning blow. When Henya sees the crimson imprint of her hand on Disha’s cheek and the look of bewilderment and terror in her daughter’s eyes, she snatches the child to her bosom and joins Disha in tears. As the train whistle announces their departure, the mother weeps tears of despair, exhaustion, and release, while the daughter sobs her rage and shame. Marya and Leib unite with their sister to form a chorus of squalls.

  “Oh, my God! Look what I have done. Forgive me.”

  Had Henya known of the trauma and misery she and her children would endure in the next several weeks, she might have listened to her daughter and returned home.

  Anxiously adjusting her sheitel, the small, middle-aged woman, dressed in the standard black garb of immigrants, stands with her children, five-year-old Marya in her arms, a small boy and a bit older girl pressed fast to her skirt, as if attached to her sides with glue. A somewhat older boy stands stiffly, as if at military attention, a short distance away. Henya, Marya, Disha, Leib, and Avram are among the thousands of “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” awaiting entry to the ship that will carry them to their destiny.

  The sight of the enormous ship temporarily erases the exhaustion and tedium of the days-long train ride from Odessa to Kowel to Dorohusk to Berlin and finally to Hamburg. Henya puts Avram in charge of overseeing the luggage, her whole life packed into three bulging, flimsy suitcases. It’s all she can do to hold Marya, now asleep in her arms, and maintain her footing with Disha and Leib leaning against her. She can barely endure the smell of her own sweat and the odor of cigarette smoke and putrid food that permeates her clothing, residue of the train ride, and of Marya’s vomit, which flecks her dust-laden skirt. The child’s forehead burns with fever, her face a flaming archipelago of red splotches.

  Henya anguishes about whether the inspectors will refuse to allow her to board the ship. What if they test Marya’s hearing? What if she has a disease? She’s heard they separate parents from their children. She closes her eyes to pray to God that when the inspectors come, Marya will still be asleep, her face and rash concealed beneath Henya’s shawl.

  “I smell like a walking herring,” the immigrants’ food of choice, she exclaims to Avram.

  “Mama,” her fourteen-year-old son asks, “what’s green and hangs on a wall?”

  “I don’t know, what’s green and hangs on a wall?” she responds.

  “A herring,” he answers, his dark eyes flashing.

  “Avram, what do you talk? A herring is not green, and it doesn’t hang on a wall.”

  “Mama, if you paint a herring green, it’s green, and if you hang it on a wall, it hangs on a wall.”

  Laughing hard, Avram holds his stomach and nearly topples to the ground.

  For the first time in what seems like years, Henya laughs until her belly aches, and tears of mirth, rather than misery, stream down her flushed cheeks. Henya and her four children are among the two and a half million Eastern European Jews who will arrive in America in the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century to escape generations of penury, persecution, and peril. Outcasts from not only Russia but Moldova, Galicia, Poland, Germany, and other lands.

  “Mama, look at the big boat,” marvels eight-year-old Leib.

  “What are those big things on the top, Mama?” asks Disha.

  “They look like chimneys,” Henya replies, trying to hide her own dearth of understanding. She tells them they make the boat run. “Like a train. With coal. Like what I put in my samovar to make the water boil for tea. See, there are four of them at the top because it’s a very big boat. So big,” she sighs. She wonders if something that big can remain afloat but reminds herself of Mendel’s safe journey. She is quietly pleased with her explanation and thinks for the moment that she’s not so dumb. With growing confidence, she reminds
Avram, “Papa was on a big ship too, the SS Bleucher. Each ship has a different name. Like people. Our ship is called the Lusitania. Isn’t this a miracle?” Disha and Leib are contentedly distracted by a finger game they are playing with each other.

  “But where will we sleep? Will we have a bed? How long will it take to get to America? How long do we have to wait here? I have to make pee-pee. I’m hungry, Mama. I’m thirsty. Are there bad men on the boat? Will they hurt us? And look, there are two other big, tall things with flags waving on them. What are they for? Do they make the boat go fast?” So many questions.

  “Mama,” asks Avram, “if the boat sank, who would you save?”

  “What kind of a question is that? The boat is not going to sink, and besides,” she says, smiling and lightly cuffing her son on his head, “I can’t swim, so I guess we’d all drown.”

  He persists, “No, Mama, just say you can swim, and just say we can’t swim. Who would you save? I mean it.”

  “Avram, don’t be a nudnik.” She warmly embraces her son, aware of his greater need to be reassured of her love for him. How could he help but feel like a disappointment to his parents when his life was a replacement for Yonkel’s? As the least loved and intelligent of the lot, he needed lots of reassurance.

  Avram had heard his parents’ whispered exchanges on each anniversary of Yonkel’s death. He saw the tears falling from their eyes as they lit the yahrzeit candle each year. Try as he might, he could never live up to the illusion Henya and Mendel harbored of how their dead infant could have become a scholar and a genius and so handsome. He wondered how they could love him so much when he lived for only one week.