“Off,” he shouts and turns to his assistant. Without the need for further instruction, the underling closes in and sweeps Avram’s cap to the ground.
Disha glares at the doctor and quickly retrieves it just as it touches the floor. Scowling, she boldly brushes off the dust and hands it to her brother with a determined flourish. Unfazed by the child’s gesture, the doctor pursues his quest for ringworm, lice, or any other creature making uninvited residence in Avram’s scalp. He then surveys Leib and Marya and Bessie and then scrutinizes Disha’s scalp and, like the child who finds the missing half of the afikomen, holds up a specimen with tweezers, as though expecting a reward. “Aha, lice!”
Once more, at the snap of the Jewish medical man’s fingers, his assistant materializes. They exchange foreign words, and Disha is dragged away—screaming, kicking, biting. The doctor, now speaking Yiddish, reassures Henya that, without treatment, her daughter will not be allowed to enter the country but that there is a remedy.
Petrified, Disha is taken to a large room on the opposite side of hall, where she witnesses other victims in various stages of “hair styling”—men, mostly stoic; women, some hysterical; others in a somnolent stupor. There are kids howling for their mamas.
A woman doctor begins the process of removing Disha’s lush hair, at first smiling at the child. She then lifts several curls and cuts them with scissors, handing one curl to Disha as a keepsake. Disha smiles and takes the submission. One by one, curls fall to the floor. Disha is now calm, but when the doctor begins the final shearing process—shaving her entire head with a razor—Disha’s ear-piercing screams echo throughout the chamber, encouraging all the children, and a few more of the women, to join the choir.
In the meantime, the doctor turns to Henya and asks her to remove her sheitel, the mandatory wig worn by Orthodox married women.
“No, I can’t do that. You see, I’m not allowed to take it off. Only my husband can see me that way. No!”
“I must insist,” he asserts.
The doctor recalls his own mother who, a mere fifteen years ago, had been similarly detained by a doctor making just such a demand, and so he understands what Henya is feeling. In part, his impatience has to do with the painful memory of his mother’s humiliation and shame and with his need to distance himself from “these people.”
As a German Jew, and one who worked hard to fit in, he considers himself far superior to these Jews from Eastern European stock, who are so uncultured, loud, and, for the most part, embarrassing. He feels they give all Jews a bad name—wearing wigs and yarmulkes, and with filthy lice! Anger and shame overtake whatever empathy he fleetingly felt for the small family before him.
He insists, once again, that Henya remove her sheitel. Just as his assistant reaches to remove her wig, Henya sheds the passivity that she, and all Jews, had to assume to survive the tyranny of the czar and his minions.
“Don’t touch,” she admonishes. Impetuously pushing his hand away, she removes her sheitel. Henya is stunned by her own reckless gesture and the commanding sound of her voice. She is reminded of Faigel.
The humiliation of being forced, or touched by a man, feels more degrading to her than revealing her natural hair. What could be bad or wrong about what God has given me? And yet, once removed, in spite of her justifications, generations of tradition are etched onto the tablets of her soul, and she feels queasy with guilt. She automatically covers her hair with both hands. I look the way I looked before I married Mendel, she thinks.
Could this be any worse than the cross-examinations she endured with the Russian regime? She thinks not. Henya vows never again to wear a sheitel. Never again to follow any authority’s rules, unless they are also consonant with her own. She determines to toss it in the first trashcan she encounters after she leaves the station. Or maybe into the ocean. The same ocean that took me to my new life and new customs will be the same ocean that drowns the old, she thinks. “So much for Jewish doctors,” she whispers to Bessie.
“In America, they do things differently,” she reasons to Bessie, trying to convince herself of her newly forged perspective. “And now I’m an American. I can think for myself. I’m a slave to no one. Not to doctors, not to czars, and not even to my husband. Well, maybe a little with him. But an American wife, no?”
Chagrined, the doctor does a perfunctory examination of Henya’s head and, eager to rid himself of this unusual woman turned a ferocious tiger before his eyes, he quickly dismisses her with a wave of his hand, without a word.
Shorn of the beautiful black curls that once adorned her head, Disha returns an hour later to her mother’s side. The young attendant returns, wearing a surgical dressing on his hand and a surly expression, the result of Disha’s protestations.
Before they walk away, trying her best to sound convincing, Henya tells Disha, “Your hair will grow back in a little while. My mama used to say that hair grows back stronger when you cut it. It’s important we should look happy, so make a nice face for the doctors.”
Then Bessie removes her babushka and ties it around Disha’s head and holds her briefly in an embrace. “Now you look like a real American girl.” But Disha is not to be pacified, for, in her mind, she looks more like a Russian peasant—those old ladies dressed in black, with wrinkled faces and dried-up hands, working the fields in their babushkas.
Once more, they have averted the dreaded chalk mark: SC for scalp, G for goiter, or an X—writ large—for suspected anything. Suspected of what? No matter. They are suspects and feel as guilty as if convicted of a horrendous crime. The only crimes they have committed, however, are arriving as impoverished immigrants, not speaking or understanding English, and being born in a country that spurns Jews.
Henya does worry what Mendel will say when he sees her in this unorthodox state. And Disha—what will he think about that? Her musings are interrupted when she realizes that they have successfully reached the next station. Mazel tov, she thinks.
First Disha, then Leib, then Marya, Henya, and Bessie move slowly and solemnly through the line, barely breathing for fear of displeasing the new doctor. He is a grim little man who continues the hunt with the vigilance of a dedicated agent of the czar, pursuing those suspected of harboring revolutionaries. This search demands the honed skills of a specialist in loathsome maladies, on the lookout for symptoms of venereal disease or leprosy or favus—at that time, misdiagnosed as leprosy rather than a fungal disease that modern medicine would cure with drugs. Immigrants receiving that diagnosis are immediately quarantined, hospitalized, and more often than not, deported. With a curt grunt, he waves them on and turns his focus to the next person in line.
One, two, three, four, and five proceed to the third and final medical destination, unaware they are facing the most frightening of all inspections: the so-called buttonhook test. Bessie, however, had been forewarned by her aunt and audaciously volunteers to be the first. She’s determined to show the kinde how brave she is and to serve as a model for how they should behave.
“The eye man,” as the immigrants call him, holds an instrument designed to ease shoelaces around the metal hooks of ladies’ button-top shoes—the latest fashion. As Bessie steps up within an arms reach of the doctor, his assistant holds her head firmly from behind with rubber-gloved hands as the doctor hastily flips her eyelid inside out. She screams in shock and promptly faints, which induces the very reaction in the children she was valiantly endeavoring to avoid: ear-shattering shrieks and attempts to escape.
Henya follows, determined not to faint for fear of deportation. Then comes Avram. By the time Disha and Leib reach the doctor’s gloved hands—the very gloves that have manipulated hundreds of eyelids—they are bawling, their contorted faces a mass of tears and snot. And then it’s Marya’s turn.
Henya now feels in her guts Abraham’s plight when ordered by God to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Henya tries to contain Marya’s struggling body so the Herr Doctor Specialist can administer torture by buttonhook. But there is no divine
intervention, no angel from Heaven to spare Marya from this barbaric deed. She howls for her mama.
The doctor pronounces them free of trachoma but pauses at the end of the examination, puzzled by the sounds emanating from Marya’s throat, more like whale songs originating from the depths of the ocean floor than a human voice.
“Come here, little girl. Tell me your name,” he asks, first in English, then in Yiddish.
Marya shows no signs of comprehending his appeal. She is determined to reach her mother’s side and jerks her arm out of the doctor’s grasp. When he fails to capture her attention, he orders Henya to instruct the child to say her name.
“Gottenyu, please help me,” Henya prays silently.
She explains to the doctor that her child, while on the boat, suffered from a fever and that her ears are plugged as a result.
“Please tell her to say her name,” the doctor commands. Marya responds to her mother’s instructions with the same guttural sounds. “No language,” he deduces. “Definite signs of mental disease, most likely retardation with severe hearing loss.”
He takes his chalk and begins to mark an X contained in a circle on her back.
Henya and Bessie do not know the significance of the stigmata, but they know it is bad. Very bad! They plead with him to stop writing and erase the mark. They hang on his coat sleeves; they cry and throw themselves at his feet; they wail and kiss his hands; they appeal to him as a father, as a Jew, as a good doctor. Everyone is staring.
More out of his own need to rid himself of this mortifying confrontation rather than pity for their predicament, he puts the chalk in his pocket, rubs his marking from her back, and waves them on their way to the legal interrogation line on the opposite side of the hall, the final impediment to freedom. “Let someone else deal with this,” he whispers to the doctor on the adjacent line. “For this we went to medical school?” He looks up to find Henya still standing nearby.
“May God bless you, and may you live to be a hundred and twenty,” Henya whispers through her tears as she takes the doctor’s hand in hers. “I will remember you for the rest of my life. Thank you, doctor.”
The doctor shifts uneasily, aware of the stares from his colleagues. He clears his throat and gently pulls his hand away. He hastily turns to the next supplicant, trying to keep his emotions in check and to hide his tear-brimmed eyes. He makes a mental note to call his mother.
At the final inspection, a Yiddish-speaking young man, barely older than her Shmuel, Henya guesses, wearing eye glasses with lenses so thick they make his dark brown eyes look like ripe black olives, asks, “And so, Mrs. Kolopsky, can you tell me how old you are and the ages of your children?”
“Well, mister,” she answers, “I have forty-seven years and my little one here, she has five. Her name is Marya, and Avram, my son, has fourteen years. He’s a good boy. And Disha, mein tuchta, has about ten. She’s very unhappy because, you see, she had her hair shaved. And Leib, my youngest boy, has eight. I have two other sons already in America, working, and another daughter who’s married. Doing very well. My husband, he’s a rabbi and . . .”
“Yes, ma’am. Who is this other child?”
“Bessie? We met on the boat. She’s not my child.”
Bessie volunteers that she is twenty-three.
The inspection continues with questions—twenty-nine of them—about where they were born, whether anyone had ever been jailed or arrested, their financial and marital status, who is to meet them when they debark, how they are going to support themselves, where they would be living, whether they have the twenty-five dollars required to enter the country. He asks whether Henya has a job waiting for her. It’s a trick question, for it is illegal to have made previous employment arrangements.
Luckily, Henya doesn’t understand the question because of the inspector’s inept Yiddish.
“Excuse me,” Henya responds. “Sometimes I don’t understand. Where did you come from? Poland? Are you a Litvak?”
Clearly, his language is lifted from the past, rusty from lack of use or recently learned for this occasion. The demands of the tens of thousands of immigrants waiting to pass through this entry portal strain the New York authorities’ capabilities and tax the overworked examiners, some of whom take this job out of the need for work. By and large, they are decent people but stressed beyond their competence and forbearance.
After she has satisfied him with her answers, he says, “And now Mrs. . . . uh, uh . . . Kolopsky, I’d like you to read a passage. In what language would you like to read? Russian? You come from Russia, right?”
“Uh, mister, I’m a Jew, not Russian. So I can’t read Russian. Where we live, Jews don’t speak Russian. We speak Yiddish.
“You can read Yiddish, yes?”
“Doctor,” she sighs, “when my mama died, I was only a little girl, but I was the oldest daughter, and I had to take care of my father and brothers and sisters. My brothers went to cheder, religious school, every day, and they learned to read and write, not girls. Then I got married, and I had to take care of my family. I had seven children; one died. And my Marya is just five, as I told you. So, you should forgive me, but I never learned to read. Maybe in my new country, I could learn to read. When I was alone after my husband left, I learned some Russian words. And he is practicing English writing now so he can teach me. He’s a teacher, you know, and a rabbi.”
As the inspector picks up a piece of yellow chalk to tag Henya’s back, Bessie interrupts. “Listen, Mrs. Kolopsky is very smart. She learns fast, so give me the card with the Yiddish writing, and I’ll teach her to read it. You’ll see. She’ll read it.”
The exasperated inspector hands them the written passage and indifferently waves them off. “Okay, okay, but you’ll have to go to the end of the line when you return. Next!”
An hour passes before they again reach the head of the queue, all the while with Bessie encouraging, cajoling, repeating, scolding, and drilling the words into Henya’s angst-laden brain. When next they greet the inspector, Henya recites from memory the few sentences written on the two-by-four card. Bessie stands behind Henya, silently mouthing the words.
“Okay, now move on, all of you. Over there. Here is your landing pass.” He pauses and adds, “And good luck! Next!”
With such determination and persistence, is it any wonder that so many immigrants made awesome contributions in their fields of endeavor? Later, Bessie would learn of the German physicist, Albert Einstein; the Armenian painter, Arshile Gorky; Levi Strauss, the German clothing manufacturer; Irving Berlin, the Jewish-Russian songwriter; and the Italian bodybuilder, Angelo Siciliano, who, as Charles Atlas, taught a generation of scrawny American boys how to keep the bullies of the world from kicking sand in their faces.
Henya leaves the Great Hall and enters the waiting room. She feels her breath coming in spasms and her throbbing heart about to burst through her chest.
What if I don’t know my Mendel? she worries. “What if he doesn’t know me?” she cries to Bessie. “No sheitel and I’ve grown old and skinny in the year he’s been gone. It feels more like ten. And he’s a real American now; after all, he’s a regular businessman selling goods from his own pushcart and talking to American people every day.”
“Okay, okay, I know you’re nervous, but go already,” Bessie answers.
Brushing her skirt down and smoothing her wind-tousled hair, she thinks, He could be ashamed of me. She collects her family around her, and together they march to the reception platform, where she spies a small bearded man standing inconspicuously at the railing, dressed in a black waistcoat, an overcoat, and a black hat. He is looking for someone.
“Oh, it’s my Mendel,” she nudges Bessie. “There, look.”
Alongside him stand two clean-shaven young men and a stately, very well-dressed young woman wearing a black dress and a beautiful black felt hat with a long red feather. Next to her stands a real American, black-coated and wearing a fedora and black leather gloves. His expensive black sh
oes shine.
Henya’s feet are glued to the ground. Her legs and arms hang like cement, defying motion. She can barely breathe the salted New York Bay air as she comprehends that the small gathering consists of her husband and older children, greenhorns no longer. Mendel, Levi, Shmuel, Faigel and her husband, Yosef, have magically transformed themselves into all-Americans. She will learn that Shmuel is Stewart; Levi, Leon; Faigel, Faye, and the dashing man standing beside her, a good six inches shorter than his wife and holding flowers, is Faigel’s husband, the erstwhile Yosef, now Joe.
Bessie gives Henya a shove, and she walks shyly, nervously, slowly to her husband, leaving the children with Bessie. Two small people walk toward each other, then stand face to face for a moment before they spontaneously reach out to embrace.
“Henya,” he whispers in her ear.
“My Mendel,” she responds and rests her unadorned head on his shoulder.
II: THE NEW WORLD
Chapter 6
THE NEW WORLD: GREENHORNS, GREENBERGS, WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
1934
“Henya, what are you doing, vas machst du? You sit for over an hour, staring at nothing. You make tea and don’t drink it, and now it’s cold. So what are you thinking?” Mendel asks, basking in his own distracted thoughts. “Always thinking, thinking. It’s getting late; the sun will be going down, and then Shabbos is over,” he says, stretching and stifling a yawn. “Time for my nap.”
“You know, Mendel, I was thinking about the time when I first came to America. I was forty-six, maybe forty-seven. Marya was five—that I know. Maybe four. So young. I thought I was old then, but now I’m really an old lady. Look at these hands. Sixty-seven. Mama never got to be sixty-seven. She had it so hard all her life. Died before she saw her grandchildren. Isn’t that what makes old age bearable? Mendel? Are you listening?”
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