by Lois Ruby
“Each one has another violinist or two greedily hovering in the shadows, rosin ready. Mostly Russians,” Father said with a sneer. Obviously, Austrian musicians were the best in the world, or Mozart and Beethoven wouldn’t have spent so much of their lives in Vienna. Viennese doctors, too, and bakers and cobblers. Just about everything from Austria was better than whatever came out of Hungary and Poland and Russia.
Discouragement was beginning to line Father’s ruddy face and cloud his eyes. He took in a few students and made Erich and me continue our lessons on The Violin, the only instrument we’d been able to spirit out of Austria. Our parents liked to think of us as a musical family. Mother played the piano. Father, of course, was a virtuoso, famous all over Austria. But Erich and I—well, Father’s consolation for having such tin-eared children was that he’d never have to compete with us if a seat opened up in a Shanghai symphony.
Within a few days of our arrival, we began to notice swarms of other foreigners, and that helped us feel more at home.
Mother said, “So many from eastern Europe. No class.” She glared over the top of her glasses at the noisy Czech and Polish refugees on the streets. But I felt sorry for them because Germany had invaded their countries, and war was now raging in Europe.
Also there were French and Dutch and British and Americans on the streets of Shanghai. A most curious sight were the yeshiva boys, pale as paste in their long black coats and fur-trimmed hats, with earlocks that fell to their shoulders in curlicues. They walked two by two, never looking at anyone else on the street, talking to one another and waving their hands as though they were always in an argument.
“Make a face; see if they notice you,” Tanya said. “They’re not allowed to look at girls, much less touch.”
“What are they saying?”
“They’re Torah learners. Arguing about Bible passages. They study all day and half the night.” The pair passed, making a wide half-circle around us. “Did you notice the tall one with the ring of milk over his lip? He’s cute.”
“Oh, Tanya, be serious. They look like undertakers.”
“But I have heard that their rebbe is looking for wives for those boys. Are you interested?”
“Never!”
Lots of other eastern Europeans clogged the streets of Shanghai. A bunch of White Russians who’d escaped the Communists years ago had set up their own neighborhood, Little Moscow, in the French Concession, but Mother wouldn’t let us go there because the White Russians hated Jews. Everyone seemed to.
Oh, but good Jewish Russians lived in Shanghai, also, and some of them were refugees like us. Others had been in China for forty or fifty years and were now settled in Shanghai, the “City by the Sea.” Well, it was hardly a sea, if you ask me. We had the smelly Soochow Creek that streamed off the Whangpoo River, which itself was a fat, ugly sister of the Yangtze farther north. I never saw the Yangtze, but I knew it was huge. “Like an ocean,” I said to Erich once, and he jabbed me with a spoon and said, “Crack open a geography book if you think that caramel-colored mess is like an ocean.”
“Well, close,” I insisted.
“Best you can say for the Yangtze is that it floods a lot,” Erich grumbled. What a grouch, my brother!
Mother, who’d never worked a day in her whole thirty-seven years, found a job behind the counter of a Viennese bakery. Father was shamed, but what could we do? We had to eat something. We wouldn’t get rich on Mother’s pay, but at least she brought home fluffy loaves of bread, and every Sunday, a creamy napoleon or a thick wedge of linzer torte, which we divided and devoured even before dinner. Dinner, hah! We could finish it in two minutes or less, as there was nothing that involved actual chewing.
Across the Garden Bridge from where we lived sprawled Hongkew district, which smoldered under Japanese occupation. The Japanese were swarming all over China, but they couldn’t get their hands on our International Settlement or the French Concession in Shanghai, so we were safe.
The first time Erich and Tanya and I crossed the bridge, I sucked in my breath at the sight of the Japanese sentry guarding the entrance to Hongkew. He stood at attention, as if he had a broomstick stuck in his trousers. His rifle had a bayonet fixed at the end of it, and I was sure he meant to run it through us.
We girls clutched Erich’s arm. I said, “I thought we’d left such things behind with the Nazis.”
“Shhh, just look straight ahead and walk briskly,” Erich whispered as we crossed over into Hongkew.
“I’ve been in Shanghai months already,” Tanya said, “but I never had the nerve to come over here.”
No wonder. The streets were bursting with people—mostly Chinese and Japanese, and some poor German and Austrian refugees who couldn’t afford even the hatbox we lived in. We stumbled over rubble in the streets, left from when the Japanese had bombed Hongkew two years earlier. Some of the bombed-out shells were already rebuilt, and how I loved reading their shop signs in German! There were shoemakers and sausage shops, a stationer, a hatmaker, a haberdasher, lots of cafés, a meat market, and even a kosher butcher, although we Shpanns didn’t observe the Jewish dietary laws, and anyway, we couldn’t afford meat.
In the dense Chinese section of Hongkew, beggars filled the streets. “Don’t stare,” Tanya whispered, staring at the men and children with oozing sores and empty eye sockets and stumps where hands and feet ought to be.
“How do you suppose they got that way?”
“Don’t ask,” Erich muttered, and I imagined the worst: Wretched birth defects or Japanese bombs, or worse yet, diseases like leprosy that made fingers and toes chip off like dry bark.
Smelly garbage lined the curbs. “I’m sure glad we don’t live over here.” I kept shaking my head as street peddlers slid tin pots, needles and thread, rubber shoes, and nubby blue fabric under my nose.
Tanya said, “Everyone’s selling, but no one’s buying.”
Except at the letter writer’s booth, since so many Chinese couldn’t read or write their own language. Well, if you ask me, it looked impossible to read those squiggles going up and down instead of neatly across the page like proper language.
The folding street kitchens were doing a hearty business too. Men with foot-long chopsticks stirred mysterious foods in giant pans over glowing hot charcoal—green beans as long as sticks and fish heads with eyes popping.
“Know what that is?” Erich pointed to some see-through stuff shriveling in the pan. “Jellyfish. And those rings of striped meat? Snake.”
“Oh!” I clutched my belly. Tanya was more daring. She bought a paper napkin full of snake bits. “I don’t think snake’s kosher, but here goes.” She popped a chunk into her mouth and smacked her lips. “Um, not bad. Want to try a bite?”
Erich sampled it thoughtfully and spit it out.
I am quite certain that God never intended for us to eat things that slither on the ground.
Great clouds of smoke baked the walls of the buildings around us. A million flies swirled above all the snake and jellyfish, or whatever that stuff was hissing in boiling oil. Somehow the cooks made it all smell mouthwatering.
Tanya motioned toward some spotty black ovals and introduced us. “Meet hundred-year-old eggs.”
“I’ll bet they’re not a day older than ten,” I said.
Erich shrugged. “A rotten egg’s a rotten egg.”
Chickens and ducks and monkeys squawked and poked their noses out of bamboo cages hung all over the market.
“Careful,” Tanya warned, sidestepping a pungent pile of steamy droppings. Mother would have a fit if she saw this. Fish, squid, frogs, and shrimp elbowed each other in tanks filled with murky river water. My stomach churned.
“Still hungry?” Erich asked.
Still. My stomach growled despite the horrible sights and smells. Until we watched a vendor scoop out a net full of jade-colored frogs the size of Pookie’s paws. She dropped the net, squatted indelicately, the way no Viennese lady ever would, and clubbed those poor little frogs with t
he wooden end of her cleaver until they gave up.
A toothless old woman started some high-pitched haggling with the frog murderer, which seemed to be the way business was usually conducted. Finally, when it looked like they were about to punch each other, both women smiled, and the deal was done. Fresh frogs for dinner.
Erich got a nasty gleam in his eye. “You know what they say. The Chinese eat anything with four legs except a table. You don’t notice any dogs or cats around, do you? Keep a close eye on Moishe.”
“Oh, Erich, honestly!” Tanya cried, punching his arm. She was a little sweet on my brother, who rubbed his arm and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
We darted through the crowd, running back to the International Settlement. The Japanese guard’s eyes burned into my back all the way across the bridge.
It didn’t take us long to figure out that the language of business wasn’t the one we spoke, or even Chinese. So Mother taught English to refugees and to us.
“Mother!” I wailed each time she plunked Erich and me down for an English lesson. Secretly I soaked up the foreign words. I longed to speak English—not the stuffy British English that some of the rich Jews in Shanghai spoke, but American English, full of delicious slang: Toot, toot, tootsie, goodbye; razz; nifty; rolled around on my tongue like a lemon drop.
This was not the American English that Mother had learned. We were never encouraged to ask Mother about those years in America, or about her special friend, the one Erich and I nicknamed Molly O’Toole after the mysterious M.O. that appeared on the return address. Mother had been a university student in the state of California, we knew that much, and also that she hadn’t graduated. She’d returned to Vienna in 1923 to finish her studies, but then Father came along, and how could school possibly compete with true love?
True love. Oh, yes, now into my twelves, how I yearned to be in love with someone. Someone other than myself.
CHAPTER THREE
1940–1941
“Tanya, there’s that little thief I told you about!” Tanya made a point of ignoring Liu and gazed in the window of Mrs. Kazimierz’s house across the street, where a beautiful Tiffany lamp gleamed like a beacon in the shabby room.
“Why are you always following me?” I asked the boy, not that he understood a word of German.
His smile showed a bunch of chipped teeth as he said, “No ma, no pa, no whiskey, no soda.”
Ma I got, Pa I got, but whiskey and soda? Liu stumbled around like a drunk.
“Ah, schnapps.” And so we began a sort of pantomime ballet and managed to communicate a bit, at least I thought so. I motioned to my house and gestured. “Where do you live, sleep, eat?” And he jerked his grubby elbow toward a wide place in the gutter where he’d built a dwelling out of cardboard. It was smaller than Pookie’s doghouse in Vienna.
“See? Close-by,” he said. “Whistle, I come to you.” He warbled some toneless tune I didn’t recognize.
“You whistle for dogs, not people,” I said indignantly. I pointed to the jagged scar on his leg, raising my eyebrows in question.
“Big fight,” he said cheerfully, and pulled a knife out of his short trousers. Tanya spun around, eyes wide, as he faked a crisscross with the point of the knife over his scar. She pulled on my blouse, rushing me down the street. When I looked back, Liu was grinning at us, with the knife tucked back into his belt.
War news got to us slowly, and much of it was garbled. Holland and Belgium surrendered to Hitler, followed by Norway. The Germans entered Paris in June. And then Italy joined the war on Germany’s side. Yugoslavia and Greece fell in spring 1941. But it was all so far away that we hardly felt the effects.
And we were all thankfully distracted by a wonderful parcel that came from America for Mother. The box weighed a good ten pounds, twenty maybe.
“Molly O’Toole must have spent a fortune on this, Mother. Open it, quick!”
She took the box over to her bed, loosening the brown paper carefully.
“I’d tear that box open and toss the paper wrapping out the window already.”
“We can turn the paper over and use it,” Mother said quietly. She raised her glasses hanging beside the key on a string around her neck and opened the envelope taped inside the box. I inched over to catch the first glimpse of the contents.
After an endless minute Mother handed me the note—the first time I’d read a word from her American friend. Mother had told us her friend was from an Irish family, which was how we came up with the name Molly O’Toole. So I’d imagined a loopy handwriting in blue ink, the kind that fades when you blot it: To my disappointment the note was barely a few words typed on onionskin:
January 29, 1941
Frieda,
I hear that many goods are hard to come by in the Far East. I am sending some things you and your family might need during these difficult times. Be well.
M. O.
Well, it certainly wasn’t a warm note. There wasn’t a hint of the Irish brogue I’d always imagined for Molly O’Toole. And the parcel had taken months to get here!
Mother dug deep and fished out one delectable after another—coffee candies, a tube of Ipana toothpaste, a tin of Hills Brothers coffee, two bars of Ivory Soap. Also in the package were some white shoelaces, a sack of kidney beans, red ribbons, and Doublemint chewing gum.
Mother blew the envelope open to put the letter back in and found a crisp American ten-dollar bill. We were rich!
Then she pulled out of the box four pairs of ugly gray wool socks and buried her face in them. When she looked up over the socks, I couldn’t read the unfamiliar look in her eyes. Embarrassed, I reached into the box again and scooped out three packs of Lucky Strikes.
“We will sell them one by one. American cigarettes are worth a small fortune,” mother said.
“I know.”
Mother laid all eight socks out in a marching row on the bed. There was slick sweat dripping down my neck, so those itchy, nubby socks didn’t look a bit appetizing.
“Remember winter, Ilse? Winter will come again,” Mother said, “and we’ll be grateful for these homely socks.” She stuffed the ten-dollar bill under her bodice, into that handy pocket grown women have and I didn’t have much of to brag about.
That night we had a whole roasted chicken for dinner, our first in seven months. Erich hid a wing under his pillow, or it could have been something else he hid. He was always full of secrets.
Me, I refused to wash off the chicken grease around my mouth or the delicious smell on my fingers, so I could taste them all night long.
Erich brought home the news that Germany was battling the USSR, and Soviet cities were being tossed back and forth between the two powers. Then right before my thirteenth birthday in October 1941, rumors reached us that the Nazis had murdered tens of thousands of Jews in the city of Kiev.
“Barbarians!” Mother said, listlessly stirring a pot of thin potato soup. “Ach, but tomorrow is Ilse’s birthday. Life must go on.”
We pretended cheer. Erich said, “You’re anxious for us to learn English. You know what would really help? An American movie, that’s what.”
“A movie?” Mother repeated.
I quickly chimed in, “Cinema. At the Magestic Theatre. Imagine what two whole hours of hearing Americans talk to one another will do for our vocabulary.”
“Sure, it’s expensive,” Erich said. “Maybe we can have half a dollar from your Molly O’Toole money?”
“A little, too, for popcorn?” I begged. “Americans always eat popcorn at the movies. Say yes.”
“I will talk to your father,” Mother answered dubiously.
By the time these movies crept across the ocean to China, they weren’t exactly current Hollywood hits, but we didn’t care. Everything American was wonderful. I couldn’t think of a better birthday celebration than sitting in a nice, dark movie theater watching huge, beautiful Americans talk and kiss on the flickering screen.
“What is the movie they’re playing?�
�� Mother asked.
“It’s called Going Places,” I answered quickly.
“Going where?”
“Oh, Mother, I don’t know! But it’s starring Ronald Reagan. Very big Hollywood star.”
“I never heard of him.”
Erich hugged Mother. “You must have heard of a song from the movie. ‘Jeepers Creepers’.”
We bombarded Father at the door when he came home. “Please, please? For my birthday?” I begged.
“Jakob, there is a song in this movie called ‘Jeepers Creepers’. Even in America I never heard this word.”
“It’s teenage slang,” I proudly announced. “Erich and I will need to know such things when we get to the United States.”
“If,” Mother corrected me. “First we go home to Vienna.”
Erich worked on Father, who was a softer touch than Mother. “It’s a musical, Father.” Erich hummed the opening bars of something by Mozart.
Father was hooked. “This film is an opera? What could it hurt, Frieda?” Father actually winked at her. Maybe they were glad to ship us out of the apartment so they could have a few hours alone.
Mother blushed and sighed, and it was settled. “Be careful of pickpockets,” she cautioned.
All through my special birthday meal—two inches of brisket in with the vegetables, joy of joys!—Erich and I kept singing “Jeepers Creepers.” By the time I blew out the match masquerading as a candle on a wedge of Mr. Schmaltzer’s devil’s food cake, Mother was humming the song, and just before Erich and I left for the movie, Father was plucking the melody on The Violin.
CHAPTER FOUR
1941
We’d weathered two miserable winters already. Our coats were worn limp as bedsheets, our shoe leather thinned to cardboard. Supper was no more than a few tired vegetables and a cup of rice, shared four ways. Mother was never hungry, or so she said, but her hollow eyes watched each bite Erich and I put in our mouths. If it hadn’t been for the odd package that would come from Molly O’Toole, we’d have withered away. Every minute we were cold and damp, longing for spring. Then the rains came, and Tanya and I dumped bucketfuls of water out of our shoes at the door of the Kadoorie School, where we Jewish students tried to learn with steam rising from our soggy clothes.
