“He would have been six, or seven, or nine, or ten years old,” was the refrain with each passing year. The flame of the candle was Avram’s detested reminder that he was a flawed stand-in for the idolized brother he never knew, but hated.
The questions come from all directions, and after a time, Henya stops trying to answer them. Not because she doesn’t know the answers, which she doesn’t, but because she finally understands that her children don’t require answers. Like the chimneys that begin to belch their black smoke from deep within their core, Disha, Leib, and Avram need to exorcise their barely containable flood of excitement and agitation.
They cannot know that one year hence, this very ship, the HMS Lusitania, with its four funnels and two masts, making its one-hundred-and-first round trip voyage, will be blown to bits by torpedoes fired from a German submarine, an event that will launch America’s entry into World War I. They cannot know that one thousand and one of the ship’s passengers will go to their black watery graves.
The snaking lines of the immigrant army begin to move. Towering Goliaths of men—or so it seems to Disha and Leib—issue orders in German, directing them into a mammoth room with two doorways, the left for men, the right for women. Avram, because he is large for his fourteen years, is forcefully parted from his mother. He looks to his mother like a frightened little boy as he is shunted into the men’s queue, but not before grabbing two of the three suitcases.
“Mama!” he whimpers. “Don’t let them take me, Mama.”
“Dear God! Gottenyu! He’s only a boy,” she pleads to the guards, to no avail.
“Be brave, Avram,” Henya yells over the cacophony of frightened voices. She is helpless to rescue her man-child and so, in default, sternly instructs Disha and Leib to hold each other’s hands tightly and to hang on to her skirt no matter what, and she grabs the remaining suitcase. She puts Marya down, awakened by shouting, and instructs Disha to hold on to her sister’s hand tightly.
“Macht shnell! Quick!” exclaim the uniformed men. “Men to the left. Women and children to the right.”
Henya tries once again to explain that her son is a mere child, but she is silenced with a glare and a grunt.
“Move on! Macht shnell!”
Henya enters the women’s quarters, with its scent of freshly painted walls, and inhales the distinctive odor of disinfectant fumes rising from monstrous kettles of boiling water. She and the other women and girls are herded, like cattle to the execution block, to adjacent cubicles no bigger than large closets. She and her children are instructed to remove their clothing, all but their underwear, to put it in the mesh container provided, and to give it to one of the German-speaking women dressed in white, who then place it into one of the nearby caldrons. Without any comprehension of the German language, but for those few words that resemble Yiddish, she mimics the actions of the other women and yields to the demands barked by the attendants. When she views the captured clothing thrown into the stinking brew, she takes a deep breath, relieved to know it is the clothing that will be steeped, not the people.
Bewildered and frightened, Disha and Leib, for once, submit to Henya’s commands to comply with the instructions. Marya, seeing her mother and siblings nude but for their underwear, thinks the whole situation quite amusing until the white-clad woman rubs her little body with a slippery, foul-smelling substance that burns and then subjects her to a shower of cold water, which feels like a salvo of hail stones. Marya joins the refrain of other children, including Leib and Disha, who howl in protest. One guard, a small woman wearing an abundant cross on a chain around her neck, takes pity on Henya, who endured the ordeal in stony silence, and offers to hold Marya while Henya dries and dresses. She is relieved to see her familiar clothes returned, now well washed.
“Hurry, hurry,” the harsh-sounding directives echo around the walls of the cavernous room.
“What is this quarantine they are warning about?” a sturdy young woman wearing a colorful babushka asks Henya.
“I’m a bit fermisht. I don’t know quarantine?” Henya responds.
“Good, you speak Yiddish. Well, someone said that the doctors would examine us to see if we have anything catching, may God forbid it, like cholera or the Jewish disease, tuberculosis. And if we don’t pass, they will keep us here or maybe even worse, send us back to Russia, nisht duggehdacht, may it never happen,” the young woman explains. “See those people in line—over there—the ones with chalk marks and numbers pinned on their jackets? I think they are the ones who have something the matter and will be sent back,” she continues. “They look so frightened. I know it’s selfish, but I just hope it’s not me. I have no one. So my name is Bessie. Here, I can carry your little one. Or your suitcase? You look like you have your hands full. So what’s your name?”
Tentatively, Henya hands Marya over to this friendly stranger, a woman who, although more than half her years, will shortly feel as if she’s been a friend for a lifetime. She trusts her open and intelligent face.
Bessie, it turns out, lived in a village not far from Henya’s. She tells Henya how her parents and brothers were killed in the 1905 pogrom, leaving her an orphan at fourteen. Her neighbors took her in, and now an aunt in America—her mother’s sister, who immigrated out of fear in 1905, following the failed revolution in which her uncle had participated—has sent money to cover her voyage. Bessie tells Henya that in her aunt’s last letter, in which she described life in New York, she raved about her husband’s successful business as a cloak maker, and although the business is housed in their apartment, they will soon be looking for larger quarters.
“I’m going to live with them. I’ll sleep on the couch, and my uncle is going to give me a job,” she tells Henya. Henya, proudly, and with not a little competitiveness, reveals that her daughter’s husband will soon have a factory too. As they stand in line, waiting for hours to board the ship, the women exchange personal histories and quickly forge a friendship, one based on loneliness, language, fright, and old-world familiarity. It will sustain them in the wretched days to follow.
“Already I think,” Henya murmurs, “what would I do without you? Look how you know things about America. And look how you help without asking. You are a mensch. A shaynem dank. Thank you.”
Bessie replies in kind with lavish kisses on Henya’s hand. “Well, you’re like a mama, the one I hardly remember, Henyala. So we’re lucky to find each other. Yes?”
Henya panics as she is prodded to walk the swaying gangplank to join her fellow landsman in the steerage compartment level. Distraught beyond words, she frantically searches the faces of the multitude for Avram.
“My son! Where is my son?” she screams to no one in particular. “I can’t get on the boat without my son. Avram! Avram!”
In spite of her intractable unwillingness to move, the force of the crowd propels her forward. Bessie steadies her as she stumbles in her determination to resist. Shouting above the babble of voices speaking strange-sounding languages, she valiantly attempts to reassure Henya that he will show up. Then, like a miracle, Henya hears Avram’s distinctively raspy outcry.
“Mama, here I am. Wait on me, I’m coming.” Somehow he manages to inch his way to their side through the swarm of immigrants marching slowly along the walkway.
“Mama.” Avram exclaims, breathing heavily, “Two men grabbed one of our bags and ran with them. I tried to hold on, but they hit me and I had to let go. Look, here, the bump on my head. Don’t be mad at me. I couldn’t help it.”
“Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter. It’s only things. I was so worried, but you found us. Sha, don’t worry,” Henya says, trying to mollify her sobbing son.
“But Mama, the doctors made me do bad things. They made me unzip my pants and pull out my pee-pee in front of everyone.” He breathes deeply and continues, “And then one came and touched it and looked all over on it. Pulling it here and there. They did it to everyone, though. I had to let him touch it. Then the doctor left, and that’s when the me
n came and tried to take the bags, those ganefs, but I held onto one and gave them such a big clop you know where. They ran away. Don’t be mad!”
“My boy, my poor boy. Shhhhhh, it’s okay now. You couldn’t help it. They did something bad, not you. And I’m not mad. Shhhhhh.”
Now that they were all reunited, the newly reconfigured family, Henya, Avram, Leib, Disha, Marya, and Bessie were pushed along, their hearts lighter, as they descended the narrow stairs leading to their sleeping quarters, but their carefree mood quickly paled when they saw their accommodations.
Steerage passage makes the rail ride from Odessa to Hamburg seem fit for the czar. With two tiers of wooden bunks located in the dark, dank, filthy underbelly of the ship; with the never-ceasing trembling of the ship’s engines; with the lingering smell of disinfectant and urine and feces and vomit mingled with garlic, moldy bread, maggots, onions, potatoes, herring, seasickness, spoilt meat, and stale tobacco; with typhus; and with a scarcity of washrooms and water, Hell could be no worse. Ten days of roiling, rocking, pitching, stormy, stinking, airless, noisy, dehydrated, hungry Hell.
Chapter 5
FROM SHTETL TO TENEMENT
November 1914
Rising above the din of the ever-droning ship’s engines, the cacophony of human voices jolts Henya awake from her dream. It sounds to her like the caterwauling of felines in heat—low, urgent, guttural yowls that rise to a chorus of wailing. She finds the tightly stacked and stained wooden bunks empty but for Marya, who remains peacefully asleep by her side, snoring lightly, thumb suspended from her half-open mouth. Gone are Avram, Disha, Leib, and Bessie. Henya is reluctant to awaken, for she is sad to forsake her dream of an Odessian Shabbos.
Too quickly, she sits up and strikes her head on the bunk above but pays little attention to the resulting swelling. More compelling is the buzz of activity she hears emanating from the upper deck: the scrambling of feet, the excited voices, the oohs, aahs, the clapping of hands.
Dressing hastily, she wraps Marya in her quilt and carefully climbs the narrow metal stairway, slippery with cold morning mist, to the rain-polished platform, where she faces hundreds of congregated immigrants. A choir of voices babbling words in the hall, Italian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hungarian, Greek, and Armenian, the crowd now stands transfixed as if witnessing the face of God. It is not God they behold but the Statue of Liberty aglow in her regal copper façade.
Some are weeping, some genuflecting and making the sign of the cross, others covering their eyes with their palms, but most are exuberantly embracing, laughing, dancing, or standing silently in awe of the symbol of tolerance and freedom that stands before them. At the sighting of this miraculous vision, Henya looks at her daughter.
“Look, Marya. Maybe you don’t hear the tumult, but you can see that magnificent vision. Look how tall and proud. Such a beautiful face. She’s wearing a crown, not like the czar’s, an American crown. She’s our queen of America and you our princess.”
As if she intuits the significance of her mother’s words and the symbolism of the giant before her eyes, Marya emits an owl-sounding, “Hoooooo.”
“We’re here. We’re here in America,” Henya says. “No more being afraid of bad things happening and bad men. No more doors knocked down or windows smashed. And look at that beautiful castle. Oh, what a sight. Nu, it looks like a palace with its fancy curlicues and archways and the water all around. May I live to see the day that you will hear the sounds of your new country and learn to speak good English. Come, bubbala, we’ll find your brothers and sister. And Bessie.”
While still in the harbor, medical examiners board the ship to inspect the privileged passengers traveling in first-and second-class cabins. Most are ushered out, free to exchange their now useless money for new currency and to greet their waiting relatives at the “kissing post,” then to board the ferry that will take them to Ellis Island and then to their new lives. Not for them, those with money, public humiliation. Only a few are detained and marked for further examination once they reach Ellis Island.
Not so Henya and her fellow steerage adventurers. They wait. And wait. Tagged with their names and the ship’s manifest number, they are unceremoniously discharged on Ellis Island’s landing slip, disoriented and deranged by the long journey and the eight days of shipboard misery and now further bewildered by the bedlam of the scene they are witnessing. They’ve never glimpsed so many perplexed people gathered together.
“Bessie, can you walk? It feels like the boat is still rocking and the engines still roaring under my feet,” exclaims Henya as she grabs Avram’s shoulder to steady herself.
“Ah, Mama! Don’t shove. I can’t hold myself up. Everything is moving like I’m going to fall down,” Avram blurts out and then bursts into gusts of laughter. “Hooey, I’m so dizzy. Look at me, Mama, I’m walking crooked.”
Jumping up and down and whooping, Disha and Leib are oblivious to the others’ complaints, so thrilled are they to have escaped the dank coalmine environment of the past eight days. “Sha!” pleads Bessie. “Don’t look shaky, Avram! And Henya, don’t hang on Avram. My aunt told me people look to see if you’re crippled or crazy or sick, and then they send you right back to Russia. And Avram, stop laughing like a hyena or they’ll send us all to the lunatic asylum.”
The next of their labors to come—labors that would have challenged the Greek warrior Odysseus, who took ten years to return to his homeland of Ithaca—quickly efface the memory of Lady Liberty and the baronial beauty of the fortress on this island of Ellis, embraced by the waters of the New York Bay that tickle its shoreline. They wait for hours before they are invited to climb the steep flight of steps leading to the inner sanctum of the great hall, unaware that the team of medical men stationed at the top of the stairs has begun the examination, carefully seeking signs of mental or physical impairment.
Who needs help as they ascend the mountain of a staircase?
Check: Too old, too sick, too decrepit!
Who is breathing heavily? Check: Cardiac or lung condition!
Who is limping? Check: Lame! Cripple! Degenerate!
Who looks befuddled? Check: Mental illness or retard.
Check! Check! Check! REJECT! REJECT! REJECT!
Henya eagerly mounts the more than thirty stairs like a woman half her age, as though in a race with Bessie, who is, in fact, half her age. Even Marya, with her chubby five-year-old legs, climbs adroitly, holding on to Disha’s fingers. As they reach the top of the stairs, Henya and her family, unsuspectingly, pass the first of the trials to come and escape the feared chalk marks—seventeen in all—that could expose them to a comprehensive physical and the possibility of hospitalization or, worse, a return ticket to Russia, courtesy of the shipping line. A uniformed man gestures for them to join the line on the right.
Henya gasps as she sees the cavernous great hall, with its high ceilings, painted white walls, and imposing arched windows. She glimpses two massive American flags hanging from outstretched poles, trumpeting their arrival in the United States of America. Time passes. And more time. The elderly rest on the hard floors, guarding their only remaining precious possessions, while infants nurse at their mothers’ breasts. Children cavort and play games of hide and seek, concealing themselves behind stacks of luggage or their mothers’ skirts. Men nervously drag on cigarettes. Couples lean on each other for mutual support. Some bicker, some eat the dregs of leftover food, and some parched souls swoon with dehydration made worse by exhaustion and apprehension.
“Oh-oh, they will definitely be marked for special medical attention,” Bessie admonishes, pointing to a bedraggled family of six.
After what feels like days, large groups are divided into smaller formations and then into dozens of lines conforming to the metal railings that separate them. Doctors impatiently stand at the head of each line, eager to finish their examinations so they can return home to recover from their sixteen-hours-or-more day. They are overworked and bad-tempered.
Henya and h
er small assemblage finally arrive at what will prove to be the first of the three medical stations.
“What are they doing?” asks Disha, who, until now, has walked through the process as though in a trance. “Why are people taking off their shirts?”
“The doctors need to look at us. We’re going to have to undress too,” Bessie whispers, her voice quivering. “But it’s okay, don’t be frightened. I’ll be right here.”
“Do we have to?” Disha asks, beginning to whimper. Bessie directs a stern, reproving glance at Disha and says to Henya, “I think our doctor is a Jew. A Jew and a doctor. Ha! Not like in Russia.”
“How,” Henya presses, “do you know that?”
“By his accent,” clarifies Bessie. “Listen to his Yiddish—no accent. Not like that other one. She nods toward the doctor at the head of the adjacent line. “He’s like a stuttering train engine. His tongue doesn’t work so good.”
“Good! So maybe he’ll take pity on us,” returns Henya, suppressing a laugh.
Bessie winks. “Smile at him, Henya, the way you told me you used to smile at the Russian guards to get your visa. Too bad you can’t make one of your breads.” They exchange knowing glances, glances that only long-time friends typically share.
With stethoscopes in hand, the examining doctors listen for heart murmurs; they search for goiters and growths and abnormalities as they palpate necks and shoulders and groins; they calculate pulse beats and inspect teeth and ears and eyes, fingernails and toenails, as though the group is about to be put up on the slave block and sold to the highest bidder.
As Henya approaches the doctor, she tries to smile as Bessie instructed, but her lips stick to her teeth, her tongue cleaves to the roof of her mouth, dry as a parched riverbed.
Disregarding Henya’s feeble attempt to replicate her earlier behavior with the Russian guards, the doctor turns to Avram and brusquely orders him to remove his cap. Paralyzed with fear, Avram is slow to respond. The doctor, without touching Avram, points to his head and shouts, “I told you to remove your cap.” Avram understands the doctor’s command but does not move.
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