She likes his loyalty to the few friends he has and the quiet devotion he shows to his mother and younger siblings. She likes that he was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, an authentic citizen of the United States of America. No greenhorn.
She is attracted to his boyish good looks, from his black hair that falls over one eye to his big, brown eyes—“as big as saucers,” she often says—and cute pug nose, like his father’s. She likes that people are always mistaking him for an Irishman. They think he looks a bit like Thomas Mitchell, she recounts to friends. When they are together, she begins to enjoy the peace his silence allows—a peace that she had never known. She admits to herself that what she feels for Saul is not what she experienced with Freddy, but she also knows that their relationship will not have the excessive ups and downs she had with him.
The wedding is to take place on December 18. Minnie and Bessie have their bridesmaid outfits, which Bessie actually makes for them. It’s her wedding gift to Dora: beautiful dresses with shoes to match. Minnie’s is a pale blue chiffon over peach silk, and Bessie’s, peach chiffon over blue silk. They plan to wear fresh violets in their hair. Dora has saved over five hundred dollars, which will cover some of the food and the rental of the hall. She puts a one hundred dollar deposit down to reserve the room. She learned from one of her coworkers that in America, the woman’s parents pay for the wedding. Saul insists he will pay for the liquor and, of course, their honeymoon. Her future sisters-in-law, Blanche and Rosalind, volunteer to make their mother’s recipe of chicken paprikash.
“It’s good and really very simple to make,” Rosalind says. “You take two tablespoons of schmalz and put a cut-up onion in together with three or four cloves of garlic, crushed, and mix it with red pepper flakes and lots of paprika. Then you cook it until the onion gets real soft and golden. Then you add the cut-up chicken with a cup of water—or if you have leftover chicken soup, that’s even better—and cook it for over an hour. Then you add tomatoes, cut in small pieces, and stir the whole thing and cook it a bit longer. That’s how Mama makes it. It’s an authentic Hungarian dish and, believe me, no caterer could make anything any better. The secret is in the paprika. It has to be genuine Hungarian paprika—smoked—very fresh. And then, at the end, you have to add a touch of Hungarian sherry. It’s Saul’s favorite dish, so you need to know how to make it.”
“Whoever heard of cooking with sherry?” Dora relates to her mother. “But what do I know of cooking?”
Henya says she’s never heard of the dish. She tells Dora that her own mother made stuffed cabbage, and that might also be good to serve. She volunteers to make it.
“Rosalind—they call her Roz—says they’ll have to make it in batches to feed thirty people, but she and Blanche, that’s her older sister, can do it. ‘It’s nothing,’ she says. Everything is easy for her. Like her brother, everything is easy. She’s a real balabosta.”
The youngest child in Saul’s family, Rosalind is the one most like her mother: good-natured, competent, independent, and down-to-earth. She has Saul’s face but with long, black hair, which she wears pulled back in a bun. She is, in spite of her youth, the little mother of the brood of six siblings—four boys and one girl beside herself.
Bessie proposes to make kasha varnishkes, and Faye will buy a wonderful wedding cake from a very fancy-dancy bakery shop, that’s what she calls it, near her new home in Brooklyn. Once Faye invited Dora and Bessie for lunch and gave them a tour of the house. They claimed they got lost. They viewed, in awe, the kitchen with its two sinks, two iceboxes, and three sets of dishes: one for milk, one for meat, and one for Passover. Bessie and Dora laughed in the retelling about all the furniture, even the lamps, that were covered with plastic so that when they sat, it sounded like they were passing gas.
Stewart and Leon plan to bring a case of schnapps. To that, Saul comments, “I can just hear their wives squawking, ‘Too much money.’” And Abe is to bring some of his friends at the cab company to play music for dancing. Although he is not Dora’s favorite brother, he turns out to be “not such a bad guy, just as long as he’s not sleeping next to me,” she tells Minnie. “One plays an accordion and a harmonica, and the other plays a mandolin, or maybe it’s a fiddle—who knows the difference? It’s going to be fun. I’m even teaching Saul to do a few steps of the foxtrot. Two left feet, he has.”
Dora’s planned wedding day celebration comes close to the Cinderella fairy tale she had once read. Saul, her not-quite princely prince, has halfheartedly agreed to buy a new dark blue suit from Robert Hall. He refuses, even though it comes with the suit, to wear the vest. She tries on her white satin dress with lace trim and dances around her parents’ small apartment but refuses to put on Bessie’s beaded tiara, one that she borrowed from one of her teacher associates, when her friends ask her to model it.
“Are you kidding?” she says, kissing her fingers and expelling three gusts of air through her pursed lips. “Kenahora, you want me to jinx my wedding?”
But the event is not to take place, despite Dora’s refusal to tempt the evil eye. Cinderella’s fairy godmother will not appear to transform a pumpkin into a stately wedding coach, nor will she slip her size four foot into the proverbial glass slipper. Her wedding dress is to remain covered with a sheet filled with mothballs, taking up room in her cedar hope chest until her older daughter marries some twenty-one years later. Bessie and Minnie sell their dresses to a friend who will use them for her bridesmaids. Shattered are Dora’s dreams; broken is her heart.
In October 1926, two months before Saul and Dora were to marry, Saul’s mother falls into a diabetic coma. Though insulin has been discovered, it is not soon enough to reach the rural town in Connecticut where Hannah lives. And dies. She slips from coma to death with only a sigh. Just like Saul’s mother not to disturb anyone.
Saul never forgives himself for not “going to the ends of the world” to find the magic elixir that would have saved his mother’s life. He is inconsolable, as are Hannah’s other children, especially Roz, and the small community, which held her in high esteem.
At her funeral, deeply depressed, full of rage, and wracked with groundless guilt, as the final shovel of dirt falls on his mother’s pine casket, Saul explodes, “So much for God!” His older brothers must restrain him from jumping into the grave. At twenty-two, he crumbles to his knees and weeps, caring not a whit who is there to observe or who might call him a sissy. It is the first of only three times in his life he surrenders to such strong emotions.
Dora wants to go on with both the wedding plans and the celebration, but the Sussman family, with Rosalind as ringleader, threatens not to attend unless the plans are drastically revised.
“My mother is dead, and you want to have music and dancing? Not on my life! Get married, okay, but out of respect for her, no party, please. No flowers, no dancing, no music,” Rosalind threatens, “or we won’t be there.”
Mendel and Henya are in total agreement with Rosalind’s directive, and so Dora grudgingly forfeits her down payment on the reception hall. She forgoes the multilayered wedding cake, settling for a miniature version, and puts her wedding gown and silk shoes into her cedar hope chest, along with the sheets, pillowcases, and embroidered tablecloth her mother-in-law finished two weeks before dying.
On the day of the wedding, at her father’s insistence, Dora, accompanied by Bessie and Minnie, visits the mikvah—-the traditional ritual bath used to purify women. At least, Dora thinks, I’m not going to wear a sheitel after my wedding. Although she has seen remnants of that custom in the neighborhood.
Before the small group leaves Henya and Mendel’s apartment for the synagogue, Bessie and Seymour, Saul’s younger brother, witness Saul and Dora’s signing of the ketubah, the two-thousand-year-old traditional marriage contract. Saul signs with a steady hand, while Dora can barely manage her signature, her hand is trembling so. She recognizes the life-long commitment she is making to a man she barely knows.
Mendel performs the simple cere
mony at the synagogue which he attends and had hoped to lead so many years ago. Instead of her gown, Dora wears a navy blue street-length dress, and Saul, his navy blue suit, as they stand beneath the chuppah. Rosalind, Dora’s maid of honor, stands next to Seymour, Saul’s best man. Dora, at Saul’s request, holds a picture of his mother throughout the ceremony. She wonders if this means he will be married to both of them.
The ceremony begins with Dora circling Saul seven times—symbolizing the seven days of creation and the sacred space of the home they are about to build—and ends with Saul slipping a thin, unadorned gold wedding band on Dora’s right forefinger while awkwardly reading from a piece of paper his father-in-law-to-be hands him.
“Behold, you are consecrated to me with this ring, according to the Law of Moses and Israel.”
Mendel chants the wedding benedictions, ending with the seventh:
“Soon may there be heard in the cities of Judah, in the streets of Jerusalem, the voice of gladness and joy, the voice of bridegroom and bride, the grooms jubilant from their canopies and the youths from their feasts of song. Baruch ata Adonai, who makes the bridegroom to rejoice with the bride.”
Shyly, Saul kisses his new bride on her cheek as Seymour places the napkin-wrapped wine glass under Saul’s foot for him to break—a reminder of the sadness at the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. As Dora hears the shattering of glass, she thinks of what else will be shattered tonight. Unable to contain their typical Kolopsky gusto, Dora’s brothers break out with a raucous mazel tov, but Mendel’s frown and Rosalind’s shushing quickly restrain their ardor.
Following the ceremony, the wedding party and guests—the small gathering of brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles—having been warned to contain their merriment, solemnly cross the street to the Kolopsky apartment.
Saul and Dora retreat to her parents’ claustrophobic bedroom, where a platter of food has been placed for them to break the fast, and by unspoken consent, they put off the rite of deflowering. They sit on the bed and taste the chicken, the cabbage rolls, the kasha, the slice of wedding cake. They take a sip of sweet wine left for them. Saul takes her hand and toasts to “My wife, Mrs. Sussman.” Dora knows she married the right man.
There are no photographs to memorialize their wedding or party, and at Saul’s insistence, Dora halfheartedly agrees to postpone their two-day honeymoon to Niagara Falls. It is a trip postponed until, in 1965—when she is sixty-one—they will cruise to Hawaii on the Princess Lines. And eight years later, when Saul retires, he will move her to Honolulu, kicking and screaming.
Chapter 9
GENERAL WASHINGTON AND THE SUSSMANS OF NEW JERSEY
1939
Little does Saul know when he moves his family of four to Bergeneck in 1939 that exactly one hundred and sixty-three years before, General George Washington, riding his favorite horse, Nelson, departed from his headquarters in Hackensack, passed through Bergeneck, and witnessed the more than six thousand British troops snaking their way up the Hudson River, buoyed by their soon-to-be-fleeting success.
Neither does he know that a stone’s throw from their recently purchased black-shuttered, yellow-painted wood and red-brick home, the demoralized Continental Army crossed a nearby metal bridge in retreat from their catastrophic loss at Fort Lee—that very town from which the Sussmans were departing—wearily trudging in the mire of a freezing rain, bootless, and dressed in muddy and threadbare uniforms as they marched on to an unexpected military triumph in Trenton, New Jersey.
And neither does he know that the Lenni Lenape Indians once inhabited the area of a nearby village called Achkinckeshacky, or Hackensack, several miles from their newly acquired property. It is a region saturated with history and the lore of the birth of the American nation, one that his children will learn from their history books.
What he does know is that he has to escape the stultifying environment of his in-law’s claustrophobic apartment in Brighton Beach, with its stench of sidewalk garbage and the strident street noise of trolleys, hucksters, and hoodlums. Also, the constant babble of foreign tongues invading his monolingual brain. More importantly, he has to flee from the confinement of Orthodox Judaism’s uncompromising laws that shape every aspect of life, from birth to death: what food to eat or not and on what plate; how to dress; what shoe to put on first (the right, but do not tie the laces); when to work and when not; how to have sex—when and when not to; how to prepare and dress the body for burial; where to be buried; how long to mourn. He feels physically and psychologically straight-jacketed. Rather than a comfort, it feels more like the iron discipline meted out by his father, from which he escaped years ago. No more whistles to obey, he determines. Now I come and go when and as I please.
The advent of the Northern Railroad in 1859 and the completion of the George Washington Bridge in 1931—the engineering achievement of Othmar Ammann, an immigrant from Schaffhausen, Switzerland—provided a passageway over the Hudson River from Manhattan to northern New Jersey and to the once sparsely populated community of Bergeneck. The township of Bergeneck, six and a half square miles of meadowland—transformed itself from rural farmland and swamp into a thriving New York City rural community with a paid police force and fire department, new hospital—Catholic—library, post office, and even junior college. Saul jumps at the chance to resolve his prison-like predicament and moves his family to New Jersey. As far as Dora is concerned, it might as well be the moon.
He had previously experienced his wife’s tortured dread of change when, in 1931, he found a top-floor, four-room garden apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey, thinking that his wife would appreciate having a bedroom just for the two of them and one for two-year-old Hannah. She cried and pleaded not to leave the now familiar environment she had known since her arrival from the old country and not to separate from her parents and siblings. Saul disregarded her tearful protests—a practice he would repeat many times over as the years passed—and with the help of Seymour, moved his family out of the Kolopsky apartment.
“What do you want from my life, Saul? How can you do this to me—take me away from Mama? Who do I know here? You go to work but I remain here. Alone.”
And once again in 1933, after securing a substantial increase in salary in his new job as production manager for Hudson Valley Laundry in Jersey City, he moved his growing family to a ground-floor, five-room apartment in the same complex. This move brought fewer protests from Dora. At that time, she was pregnant with their second child and welcomed the convenience of more room and no stairs to climb.
The move to Bergeneck is not a happy event for Dora; rather, she experiences it as a tragedy. Although a mere six miles from Fort Lee, her response is tears of remorse. She doesn’t speak to Saul for days and continues her grievances for months.
“I have to take one bus and two different subways to go to Mama’s. Our neighbors hate us. They hate Jews. I hear them talking about the kikes who have moved onto the block. No kosher butchers, and I have to get on a bus with my hands full, schlepping groceries and, all the while, keeping my eyes on the kids. I have only two hands, you know, and I don’t drive. You just drive away, but me, I’m stuck here with no one but stuck-up neighbors who look at me like I’m a freak—I mean it—like I have horns. And don’t tell me to learn to drive. Roz tried to teach me, and look what happened. I could have killed the guy on the sidewalk and myself.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Dora, how long ago was that? You didn’t step on the brake, that’s all.” Saul interrupts. “You gotta step on the damned brakes. And as far as the neighbors go, let them all go to hell! Who do they think they are anyway? A lead-footed cop that pounds the beat! An assembly line worker at Ford! An elevator operator who puts on a suit, like he’s working at a bank, and then changes into a monkey uniform when he gets to work—cap and all! He looks like the midget calling for Phillip Morris. They’d be on the bottom of the dung heap if they didn’t have Jews and colored to kick around. They even hate Roosevelt—call him a Jew. A bunch of ignoramu
ses. Well, they can just kiss my sweet ass.”
Shortly after they move in, Dora tells Saul that a little kid on the block approached Roberta, thinking she was a shiksa because of her blond hair and blue eyes, and whispered in her ear that there were Jews on the block. “Imagine, Saul, he called her a dirty Jew when she told him she was Jewish. He could only have heard that from his parents. She ran home and asked if we are dirty.”
Saul had not informed Dora that before moving in, there had been a little Jewish matter to be reckoned with when he put down the asking price for the home, the remaining sixteen thousand of his hard-earned dollars—all of their savings, except for Dora’s hidden stash secreted out of her weekly food allowance. He knew then that Jews were as unwelcome as the colored folk in this community of working-class Christians, at least in this area near the swamp.
The developer, Antonio Inganamort, made it very plain, when he not so subtly persisted in pressing Saul to reveal the origin of his name.
“So, what kind of a name is Sussman, eh? Sounds German? No, can’t be German; that’s with two n’s. Yours is with one, right? So where are you from?”
For once, Saul ignored the advice he gave to his children to “hit first and ask what they mean after” and made the disingenuous retort to Inganamort, “My people came from Connecticut and before that, Hungary. And before that, who knows? Do you have a problem with that?” Inganamort said he had no problems with Hungarians and that Saul needn’t be so thin-skinned.
Inganamort did have a problem, though, not only with “kikes,” but also with “niggers,” “Chinks,” and “Pollocks.” Fortunately for the Sussmans, Inganamort also needed to sell the last remaining home in the small development he had built on an abandoned baseball diamond near the swampy marshlands, populated with mosquitoes and cattails—so named for their foot-long brown spikes, which kids break off to puff like make-believe cigars. He wanted to get on with his next and more lucrative upscale project on the other side of town, the prosperous area where the council members lived, as well as the mayor and the wealthy businessmen and professional men—those who commuted to their skyscraper jobs in Manhattan. They were bankers, lawyers, stockbrokers. Inganamort was drawing up plans for his own Tudor-style brick home on that side of town as well, so he accepted Saul’s check, despite the n missing at the end of his name.
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