by Lois Ruby
Erich and I thought about staying warm and dry, and filling our bellies constantly. Tanya seemed to be thriving and shared treats with us every Friday night—sometimes half a melon, or baby bok choy that she handed to Mother upright, like a pale green bouquet.
Mother had three English students, who paid almost nothing. Mr. Shulweiss from downstairs was at least eighty years old and as dense as a rutabaga. Sputtering through the ABC’s was his greatest accomplishment. He’d rub his elbows and pat his bald spot and treat us to three or four honking nose blows, then struggle to his feet for a trip down the hall to the water closet at around m-n-o. Though we’d miss the money, Mother politely released him from the torture, after which she said, “Ilse, I will give you an American expression you can add to your collection: ‘You cannot teach an old dog new tricks.’”
Mrs. Mogelevsky, Tanya’s mother, was her second student. She had dancing brown eyes and a small, heart-shaped face framed by a mass of brunette hair. Whereas Mother was lumpy here and there, Mrs. Mogelevsky had curves you couldn’t help noticing. She made Erich very nervous. In the Ukraine she’d been a seamstress to rich ladies who’d sneered at anything less than the most elegant fabrics. Here in Shanghai, she had a knack for transforming any old cloth into stylish frocks that clung to her.
Mother loved teaching Mrs. Mogelevsky, who began each lesson with a sentence like a prayer: “I vant learn. I make English sewing business.”
The third student was Dovid Ruzevich, who was a year or two older than Erich. The first time I opened the door to this boy, late in 1941, something odd happened to me—it was like touching the top of a radio and feeling the sounds hum through my hands. I backed away from the door as he asked in fractured English, “Meezis Shpann, de Anglish ticher?”
Behind me Mother said, “Ah, yes, Dovid, please come in.” They sat down at the table, and Mother asked her usual first question: “Tell me, why do you want to learn English?”
He was from Poland, and in his own language, Yiddish, he explained, “I will not forever be in China. I must learn quickly so I can work in New York, America. Many jobs there for bookbinders. That is my trade.”
Mother tested him to see just how much English he knew. “Meezis Shpann, de Anglish ticher” was his entire grasp of the language. Mother plunged right in, while Dovid’s face struggled with the awkward sounds and his lean hands rolled around as if he were trying to wave the words right into his brain.
I tried to be home when Dovid appeared in our apartment each Wednesday at four. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday—these were just the days leading up to his lesson. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were the disappointing days after. As I shivered in my useless blanket each night, Dovid’s face—his chin with its small tuft of wiry dark hair, his blue-black eyes so intent on learning—was the last thing I saw before sleep wiped it from my mind like jottings from a blackboard.
Father barely noticed the cold because he was playing with a string quartet that practiced in a ramshackle warehouse and eked out one paying concert a month at a Shinto temple in Hongkew. “Chamber music,” Father told us, “balm to my frayed soul.”
Well! All our souls were frayed as more and more war news reached us. Our beloved Austria hadn’t been ours for three years already. I wondered what it was like for Grete and her family—if they were still alive. I don’t know how Erich heard things, but one night he told us that ten thousand Polish Jews had fled for Lithuania before Hitler had gobbled it up. I wondered if they were still safe.
“Thank God we are alive, children,” Father said over and over. Me, I wasn’t at all convinced this was life.
“Tanya,” I asked one especially cold, hungry night as we huddled together out on our porch, “is this the way life is meant to be?”
“Maybe. For Jews,” she replied.
I’d been wanting to ask her a very personal question, but the time had never been right. Yet, tonight I took the risk, though I couldn’t look at her as I asked, “I’m wondering what happened to your father.”
She squirmed beside me, offering a mild wave of warmth under our thin quilt. “In Vinnytsia he stayed. Our town is about 250 kilometers from Kiev.”
“And he let you and your mother go, just like that?” I couldn’t imagine Father allowing such a thing to happen. “Oh, but maybe he couldn’t get papers to leave. Is that it?”
Minutes passed before she said, “Papa isn’t Jewish.”
I didn’t know anyone who was married to a gentile, but blood is blood. Mrs. Mogelevsky was so gorgeous, and Tanya! How could he let them go? “Wouldn’t he come with you anyway?”
“No.”
I thought that was the end of the discussion, one sharp no, until she took a deep breath and said, “Promise you’ll never tell a word to anyone, especially not to your brother. Promise?” I nodded. “Papa was a Communist. His comrades, they didn’t know that my father had a Jewish wife and daughter. He doesn’t like Jews, you know, Stalin.”
I sighed: the usual story.
“Or Orthodox Christians, either. But mostly Stalin doesn’t like anyone who could be a threat to his power. Even his own Communist leaders in my country. But, we had a roof over our heads and enough to eat. Until the massacre.”
I braced myself for another tragic story; I was swimming in them in the sea all around me. But I listened.
“Papa was not just a Communist,” Tanya said, twisting a handkerchief into a thin pretzel. “He was a member of the NKVD, a Blue-Cap.”
“Which is what?”
“The Soviet secret police,” she whispered. “It was 1938, a terrible time in Ukraine. Before the Germans came. Stalin ordered the police to round up everyone in Vinnytsia who was an enemy of the people. Some because they didn’t go to work on a religious holiday, or they put up a fuss when the Soviets took their property to starve them, or they moved houses or jobs without permission of the NKVD. Others, no reason at all. They were shot in the back of the head. Some of the young women—don’t ask. Truckloads dripping blood came every night and threw hundreds of bodies into a mass grave. The grave was left open in the daytime. You can imagine the smell. Three years later, it’s still in my nose.”
“And your papa?” I asked, with my hands pressed to my heart.
“He was a guard, to make sure families didn’t take their loved ones out of the grave.” Tanya told me this in a calm, no-nonsense way, but a quick sideways glance revealed the tears filling her eyes.
“I’m so sorry, Tanya.”
She shrugged under our quilt; our shoulders bumped.
“One day Mama saw the bodies down in the deep grave. Some were still alive.”
“Oh, God!”
“Mama started to yell and scream and tear at her hair and beat on my father’s chest. Papa acted like he didn’t recognize her.”
“How could he do that?” I said, nearly gasping.
“Who knows, Ilse? Maybe that’s why we’re alive today. So, two men on his guard detail dragged her away from him and dropped her at our door.”
“Then what happened?” I asked quietly.
“In the dark, Papa came home. My mother spit in his face and slammed the door on his boot. He threw stones at the window to make us open up again. The NKVD had its eye on Mama, he said. She was now an enemy of the people. They’d come for her. I’d be swept along with her.”
“You must have been terrified!”
Tanya shrugged again. “Those things happened in my country. That night Papa gave us forged papers and put us on a truck into the countryside. We crossed over into Byelorussia, then to Lithuania, and to the other side of the world. Here we are. We left him behind, my father. No regrets.”
“Oh, Tanya!” There was nothing else to say so I was glad that Moishe padded up the stairs just then, with a mouse dangling from his teeth.
Tanya said, “At least someone’s eating meat these days.”
That night, when Mother and Father were wrapped around each other for warmth and snoring in their bed, Erich and I bundled oursel
ves into every towel and blanket in the house and played chess by the moonlight from his little frosty window.
I tapped my bishop a square or two. Erich said, “What kind of a move was that?”
“My fingers are numb. I can barely pick up my pieces.” Excuses. Truth is, Erich was a much better chess player. “I’m a block of ice. Feel.” I thrust my hand at Erich’s cheek. “And hungry enough to eat the whole chessboard.” No comment from my brother. “I’m so miserable. I wish I were dead.”
Erich suddenly backhanded the board, and all the pieces went flying. “Don’t ever, ever say that—unless you’re prepared to die for something beyond your own skin.”
I was shocked by his outburst and the realization that my own brother saw me as a selfish, empty-headed girl. “Die for what, then?”
“Freedom.”
Fancy word, but what did it mean in practical terms, such as food in our bowls? “What would you die for?”
“I’d be willing to die fighting the Nazi bastards or the Japs.”
“Erich! You wouldn’t know which end of the gun to use.”
He scooped up the chess pieces. “There are many ways to fight, such as the Resistance.”
“And what’s that?” I asked hotly.
He started to say something, then changed his mind. “You’re not old enough to understand.”
“Oh, really? I’m still taller than you.”
“As if brains were measured in millimeters.” Erich pulled his blanket up to his ears. At nearly sixteen his whole face looked different—wider, longer. His reddish hair, once like mine, was browning up and dry. I wondered if I looked different now. I’d avoided mirrors for months.
Erich began sorting the pieces on the board. “Start over. Your move.”
“Forget it!” I stormed off to my own dark icebox of a room. In the middle of the night, I shivered myself awake, and Erich’s words flooded into my mind: “fighting … the Japs,” “freedom,” “the Resistance,” and I was stabbed by a frightening thought: Erich was caught up in something dangerous. I could lose my brother. Lose him.
Was that what I should prepare to die for?
CHAPTER FIVE
1941
One Sunday afternoon, bored to death, I coaxed Erich into taking a walk in Hongkew. We trudged through the streets of the Chinese section, but as soon as we rounded the corner on Chusan Road, you’d have thought we were in Austria.
A sign in a window said, LITTLE VIENNA CAFÉ. We hovered around the doorway. Erich’s eyes were drawn to three young men hunched in a tight circle. Though my brother had no ear for music, he could hear things only dogs could pick up. I only caught fragments of the whispered conversation, even though it was in German.
“Midnight …” “Moral obligation …”
“What’s so interesting about those guys?”
Erich shushed me. One of them glanced up, and I could swear he recognized Erich. His eyes shifted away instantly, and Erich turned his back.
I was more intrigued by a smartly dressed couple at the next table. Their knees touched under the table, which thrilled me, but not half as much as the white starched tablecloth, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since we were on the ship bound for Shanghai. I stood close enough to feel the cool cloth brush my knees.
Though the air crackled with cold, the woman looked cozy in her red suit and shimmery silk stockings, with just a wool shawl draped over her shoulders. Suddenly I wasn’t thirteen, I was twenty-five, sophisticated, cool and composed, like she was. I took a closer look at the man across from her. He was dashingly handsome and worthy of this lady and me, both of us so genteel, with our ebony cigarette holder in the ashtray, smoke curling upward in a lazy spiral.
The man was eating ice cream. In winter. In occupied China! I held my breath as he spooned soft mounds into his mouth, and I stared at the coated spoon as it slid off his tongue. Never mind the woman; just then I was the man, mustache and all.
No doubt I was drooling on him, which was why he looked up at me and offered his cup of ice cream and a clean silver spoon. I grabbed them and let that beautiful, thick, frozen cream glide luxuriously down my dry throat.
Surely this was heaven. I’d have licked the cup clean if I’d thought Erich wouldn’t blab the news to Mother.
“Thank you,” I whispered, placing the empty cup and spoon on the table.
If only I had a job, then I could buy ice cream whenever I wanted it. But jobs were scarcer than blond hair in China, and even Mother had been cut back to ten hours a week at the bakery. Of course, no one would hire a girl my age, but Erich was promised four hours a week as a delivery boy—if he could only scrounge up a bicycle.
Somehow Erich came home with a rusty specimen of a bicycle that guzzled oil, but at least its wheels spun. “I’m calling the bike Peaches,” he announced proudly.
“That’s a ridiculous name,” I muttered.
“Ridiculous? Why? Peaches are what I miss most from home. Now I’ll have peaches every day.”
How on earth could my brother get such a treasure? The suspicion in Mother’s face mirrored my own, but we’d learned to simply be grateful for every windfall.
Indoors was nearly as cold as outside, and Mother could barely grasp the pages of her English grammar book when Dovid came for his lesson. I watched him lean across the table and turn each page for her.
In frustration she slammed the book shut and said, “Forget nouns and verbs. Today we will work on vocabulary, also comprehension. So, Dovid, please, you must tell us your story. Everyone in Shanghai has a story. Ilse, come to the table. We will have an English conversation.”
I eagerly leaped off Mother’s bed and slid onto a chair across from Dovid. My hands were warm inside the white furry muff Mother had traded for a loaf of Mr. Schmaltzer’s bread too burned to sell. It was how he’d paid her that day.
Dovid cleared his throat. “Where to begin? Poland, we are Polish, my family.”
Though I knew that, I felt the familiar pang of disappointment: better if he’d been Austrian. Mother would approve of a boyfriend from Austria. But, I reminded myself, Europeans are Europeans in this sea of Chinese. And besides, he isn’t my boyfriend.
“Your parents?” Mother asked.
He shook his head, unsettling a nest of dark curls that he brushed away. “Who knows?” He searched for each word and haltingly told us, “Also my sisters … twins, Shayna and Beyla. German soldiers come. Take them away.”
Mother asked gently, “How did you find out, Dovid?”
“A neighbor, not Jewish.”
Mother supplied the word, “A gentile, yes, what did he do?”
“He put his own family in danger to tell me. Also to let me sleep in his …”
“House? Barn? Shop?”
“Where chazers live.”
“Ah, pigsty,” Mother said.
“Pigsty, yes. Two nights while I think what to do, where to go. In the end, I alone go out from Poland.”
“Without your family?” I cried.
“Worse things there are,” he said brusquely.
Mother nodded. “You expressed yourself very well. That is enough for today.”
Dovid started to get up, then slid a paper out of the back of his book. “For you, Mrs. Shpann.”
I studied the black-and-white charcoal drawing upside down—trees, a few houses with smoke swirling out of the chimneys, a gentle hill in the distance with smudges that could have been goats. No people.
“Lovely. And where did this come from?” Mother asked.
“I draw myself. My village in Poland, after they take my family.”
Tears sprang to my eyes.
Mother propped the drawing up on the bookcase behind her. “Come next Wednesday,” she said. “Ilse, show Dovid to the door.”
My arm brushed his as I opened the door to a blast of hall air even colder than in our apartment. “Stay warm out there,” I murmured.
He smiled. Crinkly half circles on his cheeks enchanted me, but I al
so saw that his lips were badly chapped. “I am used to Polish winters,” he said, tipping his cap to Mother.
Once he was gone, the apartment felt even colder. Mother lay on her bed cradling her sore hands. Gently, I slid them into my white muff.
The next morning, December 8, I was jolted out of bed by the sound of explosions. We rushed into the hall.
“They bombed Pearl Harbor! They bombed Pearl Harbor!” everyone was shouting. “Thousands of Americans dead!”
Details were hard to pin down, but we learned that the Japanese had launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which was in the American territory of Hawaii. Now they’d bombed a British gunboat in our harbor.
Then we joined the rest of the house huddled around Mr. Shulweiss’s shortwave. The static cleared every few seconds, so we heard the shaky voice of the announcer: “Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that the war in the Pacific has begun.”
America was in the war.
Suddenly, it was not just Hongkew under Japanese occupation but all of Shanghai, including us in the once-safe foreign settlements. We poured back into the frosty streets. I saw Liu hiding behind a garbage bin. I didn’t know if he was watching for pickpocket prey or whether he was just as scared as the rest of us hounding one another for information on how our lives were going to turn.
I cried bitter tears, lost in the horde of frightened people. Father was stunned, and Mother had to rush off to the bakery, so Erich tried to comfort me awkwardly. I shrugged him off. Why, I don’t know. Maybe it was because of his smug look that said, I warned you all; you didn’t listen.
Asian countries all around us were reeling under Japan’s atrocities. If before Pearl Harbor we were hungry, after Pearl Harbor we would surely be starving. In weeks we would feel the effects of the war in the Pacific right where it hurt us Jewish refugees most. Once the United States had declared war on Japan, and days later the Germans had declared war on the United States, we’d get no more American movies, no more packages from Molly O’Toole. All American money for the refugee settlement, all Red Cross money, all Hebrew Immigrant Aid money, would be cut off cold.
