by Joseph Roth
At that moment the sirens sounded. The engines began to rumble. And the air and the ship and the people trembled. Only the sky remained still and blue, blue and still.
IX
The fourteenth evening of the voyage was illuminated by the great fiery balls shot by the lightships. “Now,” said a Jew, who had already made this journey twice, to Mendel Singer, “the Statue of Liberty appears. It’s a hundred and fifty feet tall, hollow inside, you can climb it. Around her head she’s wearing a crown of light. In her right hand she’s holding a torch. And the best part is that this torch burns at night and yet can never burn out. Because it’s only lit electrically. That’s the sort of trick they do in America.”
The morning of the fifteenth day they were unloaded. Deborah, Miriam and Mendel stood close together, because they were afraid of losing one another.
Men in uniform came, they seemed to Mendel Singer a little dangerous, even though they had no sabers. Some wore sparkling white garments and looked half like gendarmes and half like angels. These are the Cossacks of America, thought Mendel Singer, and he watched his daughter Miriam.
They were called according to the alphabet, each received his luggage, no one stuck sharp spears through it. Perhaps we could have taken Menuchim with us, thought Deborah.
Suddenly Shemariah stood before them.
All three of them were startled in the same way.
They saw simultaneously their little old house again, the old Shemariah and the new Shemariah, known as Sam.
They saw Shemariah and Sam at the same time, as if a Sam had been pulled over a Shemariah, a transparent Sam.
It was indeed Shemariah, but it was Sam.
There were two of them. The one wore a black cap, a black robe and high boots, and the first downy little black hairs sprouted from the pores of his cheeks.
The second wore a light gray coat, a snow-white cap like that of the captain, wide yellow pants, a bright shirt of green silk, and his face was smooth, like an noble gravestone.
The second was almost Mac.
The first spoke with his old voice – they heard only the voice, not the words.
The second slapped his father on the shoulder with a strong hand and said, and they only now heard the words: “Hello, old chap!” – and understood nothing.
The first was Shemariah. But the second was Sam.
First Sam kissed his father, then his mother, then Miriam. All three sniffed Sam’s shaving soap, which smelled of snowdrops and also a little like carbolic acid. It reminded them of a garden and at the same time of a hospital.
Inwardly they repeated to themselves a few times that Sam was Shemariah. Only then were they happy. “All the others,” said Sam, “go into quarantine. Not you! Mac arranged it. He has two cousins who are employed here.”
Half an hour later Mac appeared.
He still looked exactly as he had when he had appeared in the little town. Broad, loud, ranting in an incomprehensible language and his pockets already bulging with sweet cookies, which he immediately began to hand out and to eat himself. A bright red tie fluttered like a flag over his chest.
“You have to go into quarantine after all,” said Mac. For he had exaggerated. His cousins were indeed employed in this area, but only in the customs inspection. “But I’ll accompany you. Don’t worry!”
They actually didn’t need to worry. Mac shouted at all the officials that Miriam was his bride and Mendel and Deborah his parents-in-law.
Every afternoon at three o’clock Mac came to the fence of the camp. He stuck his hand through the wires, even though it was forbidden, and greeted them all. After four days he managed to free the Singer family. How he managed it he did not reveal. For it was one of Mac’s qualities that he told with great enthusiasm things he had made up; and that he kept things secret that had really occurred.
He insisted that they view America thoroughly on a wagon belonging to his firm, before they went home.
He took Mendel Singer, Deborah and Miriam on a tour.
It was a bright and hot day. Mendel and Deborah sat facing forward, Miriam, Mac and Sam opposite them. The heavy wagon clattered through the streets with a furious power, as it seemed to Mendel Singer, as if it intended to shatter stone and asphalt for eternity and shake the houses to their foundations. The leather seat burned under Mendel’s body like a hot stove. Even though they stayed in the dark shade of the high walls, the heat blazed like gray melting lead through the old cap of black silk rep on Mendel’s head, penetrated into his brain and soldered it up, with damp, sticky, painful intensity. Since his arrival he had scarcely slept, eaten little and drunk almost nothing at all. He was wearing his native rubber galoshes over his heavy boots and his feet were burning as in an open fire. Tightly clamped between his knees he had his umbrella, the wooden handle of which was hot and couldn’t be touched, as if it were made of red iron. Before Mendel’s eyes wafted a densely woven veil of soot, dust and heat. He thought of the desert through which his ancestors had wandered for forty years. But they had at least gone on foot, he said to himself. The mad haste in which they were now racing along aroused a wind, but it was a hot wind, the fiery breath of hell. Instead of cooling, it blazed. The wind was no wind, it consisted of din and noise, it was a wafting din. It was made up of the shrill ringing of a hundred invisible bells, of the dangerous, metallic roar of the trains, of the blaring calls of countless trumpets, of the beseeching screech of the tracks at the curves of the streets, of the bellowing of Mac, who explained America to his passengers through an overpowering megaphone, of the murmur of the people all around, of the raucous laughter of a strange fellow passenger behind Mendel’s back, of the incessant talk that Sam flung into his father’s face, talk that Mendel didn’t understand, but at which he constantly nodded, a fearful and simultaneously friendly smile around his lips like a painful clamp of iron.
Even if he’d had the courage to remain earnest, as befitted his situation, he wouldn’t have been able to remove the smile. He didn’t have the strength to change his expression. The muscles of his face were paralyzed. He would rather have wept like a small child. He smelled the sharp tar from the melting asphalt, the dry and desiccated dust in the air, the rancid and greasy stink from sewers and cheese shops, the acrid smell of onions, the sickly-sweet gasoline smoke of the cars, the putrid swamp smell from fish halls, the lilies of the valley and the carbolic acid from the cheeks of his son. All the smells mingled in a hot vapor that struck him, along with the noise that filled his ears and wanted to burst his skull. Soon he no longer knew what was to be heard, to be seen, to be smelled. He was still smiling and nodding his head. America besieged him, America broke him, America shattered him. After a few minutes he fainted.
He awoke in a lunchroom to which they’d brought him in a hurry to refresh him. In a round mirror wreathed with a hundred little light bulbs he glimpsed his white beard and his bony nose and thought in the first instant that the beard and nose belonged to someone else. Only by his family members, who surrounded him, did he recognize himself. He felt a little ashamed. He opened his lips with some effort and apologized to his son. Mac grasped his hand and shook it as if he were congratulating Mendel Singer on a successful trick or a winning bet. Around the mouth of the old man the iron clamp of the smile settled again, and the unknown power moved his head again, so that it looked as if Mendel Singer were nodding. He saw Miriam. She had tousled black hair under her yellow shawl, some soot on her pale cheeks and a long straw between her teeth. Deborah sat, broad, silent, with flared nostrils and heaving breasts, on a round chair without a back. It looked as if she would soon fall.
What do these people have to do with me? thought Mendel. What does all of America have to do with me? My son, my wife, my daughter, this Mac? Am I still Mendel Singer? Is this still my family? Am I still Mendel Singer? Where is my son Menuchim? He felt as if he had been cast out of himself, he would have to live separated from himself from now on. He felt as if he had left himself behind in Zuchnow, near Men
uchim. And as his lips smiled and his head nodded, his heart began slowly to freeze, it pounded like a metal drumstick against cold glass. Already he was lonely, Mendel Singer: already he was in America . . .
Part Two
X
A few hundred years earlier an ancestor of Mendel Singer had probably come from Spain to Volhynia. He had a more fortunate, more ordinary, in any case less noticed fate than did his descendant, and as a result we don’t know whether it took him many or few years to settle into the strange land. But of Mendel Singer we know that he was at home in New York after a few months.
Yes, he was almost at home in America! He already knew that “old chap” meant father in American and “old fool” mother, or the other way around. He knew a few businessmen from the Bowery with whom his son associated, Essex Street, where he lived, and Houston Street, where his son’s department store was, his son Sam. He knew that Sam was already an “American boy,” that one said “goodbye,” “how do you do” and “please,” if one was a refined man, that a merchant from Grand Street could demand respect and sometimes might live on the river, on that river for which Shemariah too yearned. He had been told that America was “God’s own country,” as Palestine once had been, and New York actually “the miracle city,” as Jerusalem once had been. Praying, however, was called “service,” and so was charity. Sam’s small son, born scarcely a week after his grandfather’s arrival, is named nothing less than MacLincoln and in some years, whoosh goes the time in America, will be a “college boy.” “My dear boy,” the daughter-in-law calls the little one these days. She is still named Vega, strangely enough. She’s blond and gentle, with blue eyes that reveal to Mendel Singer more goodness than intelligence. Let her be dumb! Women need no intellect, God help her, amen! Between twelve and two it’s time to eat “lunch,” and between six and eight “dinner.” Mendel doesn’t observe these times. He eats at three in the afternoon and at ten at night, as at home, even though it’s actually day at home when he sits down to his evening meal, or perhaps early morning, who knows. “All right” means agreed, and to give assent one says “yes!” If one wants to wish someone something good, one wishes him not happiness and health, but “prosperity.” In the near future Sam already intends to rent a new apartment, on the river, with a “parlor.” He already owns a gramophone, Miriam borrows it sometimes from her sister-in-law and carries it in faithful arms through the streets, as if it were a sick child. The gramophone can play many waltzes, but also Kol Nidre. Sam washes twice a day; the suit he sometimes wears in the evening he calls “dress.” Deborah has already been to the movies ten times and to the theater three times. She has a dark gray silk dress. Sam gave it to her. She wears a great golden necklace around her neck, she’s reminiscent of one of the women of pleasure who are sometimes mentioned in the holy scriptures. Miriam is a salesgirl in Sam’s store. She comes home after midnight and leaves again at seven in the morning. She says: Good evening, Father! Good morning, Father! and nothing more. Here and there Mendel Singer hears from conversations, which stream past his ears as a river flows past the feet of an old man who stands on the bank, that Mac goes walking, dancing, swimming, exercising with Miriam. He knows, Mendel Singer, that Mac is not a Jew, the Cossacks aren’t Jews either, it’s hasn’t yet gone that far, God will help, we will see. Deborah and Miriam are living well together. Peace is in the house. Mother and daughter whisper to each other, often, long after midnight, Mendel pretends to sleep. He can do it easily. He sleeps in the kitchen, wife and daughter sleep in the only living area. One doesn’t dwell in palaces in America either. One lives on the second floor! A stroke of luck. How easily they might have lived on the third, on the fourth, on the fifth! The staircase is steep and dirty, always dark. One illuminates the steps with matches even during the day. It smells, warm, damp and sticky, of cats. But sourdough with rodent poison and glass shards ground into it still has to be put in the corners each evening. Deborah scrubs the floor each week, but it’s never as saffron-yellow as at home. Why is that? Is Deborah too weak? Is she too lazy? Is she too old? All the boards squeak when Mendel walks through the room. Impossible to tell where Deborah now hides the money. Sam gives ten dollars a week. Nonetheless Deborah is indignant. She’s a woman, occasionally something gets into her. She has a good gentle daughter-in-law, but Deborah claims that Vega wallows in luxury. When Mendel hears that sort of talk he says: “Be silent, Deborah! Be content with the children! Are you still not old enough to be silent? Are you no longer able to reproach me for earning too little and does it torment you that you can’t quarrel with me? Shemariah brought us here so that we can grow old and die near him. His wife honors us both, as is proper. What more do you want, Deborah?”
She didn’t know exactly what she was missing. Perhaps she had hoped to find in America a completely foreign world, in which it would have been possible to forget immediately the old life and Menuchim. But this America was no new world. There were more Jews here than in Kluczýsk, it was actually a larger Kluczýsk. Had it been necessary to take the long journey across the great water to arrive again in Kluczýsk, which they could have reached in Sameshkin’s cart? The windows faced a dark light-well in which cats, rats and children scuffled, at three in the afternoon, even in spring, the petroleum lamp had to be lit, there wasn’t even electric light, they didn’t yet have their own gramophone either. At home Deborah at least had light and sun. Certainly! She went now and then with her daughter-in-law to the movies, she had already taken the subway twice, Miriam was a noble young lady, with a hat and silk stockings. She’d become good. She even earned money. Mac was running around with her, better Mac than the Cossacks. He was Shemariah’s best friend. They didn’t understand a word of his incessant talking, but they’d get used to it. He was more capable than ten Jews, and also certainly had the advantage of not demanding a dowry. Ultimately it was another world after all. An American Mac was no Russian Mac. Deborah couldn’t make ends meet here either. Life rapidly became more expensive, she couldn’t stop saving, the usual floorboard already concealed eighteen and a half dollars, the carrots decreased, the eggs became hollow, the potatoes frozen, the soups watery, the carp thin and the pike short, the ducks meager, the geese tough, and the chickens nothing.
No, she didn’t know exactly what she was missing, she missed Menuchim. Often, while asleep, awake, shopping, at the movies, cleaning, baking, she heard him calling. Mama! Mama! he called. The only word he had learned to say he now must have already forgotten. She heard strange children call Mama, the mothers answered, not a single mother voluntarily parted from her child. They shouldn’t have gone to America. But they could still return home!
“Mendel,” she sometimes said, “shouldn’t we go back, see Menuchim?”
“And the money, and the journey, and live on what? Do you think that Shemariah can give so much? He’s a good son, but he’s not Vanderbilt. Maybe it was fated. Let’s stay for the time being! Menuchim we’ll see here, if he should recover.”
Nonetheless the thought of leaving was fixed in Mendel Singer and never left him. Once, when he visited his son in the store (he sat in the office behind the glass door and saw the customers coming and going and inwardly blessed everyone who entered), he said to Shemariah: “We still hear nothing of Menuchim. In the last letter from Billes there wasn’t a word about him. What would you think if I went over to see him?” Shemariah, known as Sam, was an American boy, he said: “Father, that’s impractical. If it were possible to bring Menuchim here, he’d recover immediately. American medicine is the best in the world, I just read that in the newspaper. They cure such illnesses with injections, simply with injections! But since we can’t bring him here, poor Menuchim, why spend the money? I don’t want to say that it’s completely impossible! But just now, when Mac and I are preparing a really big business venture and money is tight, we don’t want to talk about it! Wait another few weeks! Between you and me: Mac and I, we’re now speculating in building sites. We’ve just had an old house on Delancey Stre
et torn down. I tell you, Father, tearing down is almost as expensive as building up. But one shouldn’t complain! We’re doing better! When I think of how we started with insurance! Up and down the stairs! And now we have this business, you can already say: this department store! Now the insurance agents come to me. I look at them, think to myself: I know the business, and throw them out, personally. I throw them all out!”
Mendel Singer didn’t quite comprehend why Sam threw out the agents and why he was so pleased about it. Sam felt that, and said: “Do you want to have breakfast with me, Father?” He was acting as if he’d forgotten that his father ate only at home, he gladly seized the opportunity to emphasize the distance separating him from the customs of his homeland, he slapped his forehead as if he were Mac, and said:
