by Carol Zoref
New Issues Poetry & Prose
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, Michigan 49008
Copyright © 2017 by Carol Zoref. All rights reserved.
First American Edition, 2017.
ISBN-13: 978-1-936970-44-5
eISBN: 978-1-936970-56-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Zoref, Carol.
Barren Island/Carol Zoref
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016930279
Editor: William Olsen
Managing Editor: Kimberly Kolbe
Layout Editor: Sarah Kidd
Copy Editor: Sarah Kidd
Art Direction: Nick Kuder
Cover Design: Kelsi Miller
Production Manager: Paul Sizer
The Design Center, Gwen Frostic School of Art
College of Fine Arts
Western Michigan University
This book is the winner of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Award for the Novel. AWP is a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to serving American letters, writers, and programs of writing.
Go to www.awpwriter.org for more information.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BARREN ISLAND
a novel
Carol Zoref
NEW ISSUES
Acknowledgments
Spend seven years writing a novel and you will have many people to thank, whether they know of their helpfulness or not. Among them:
For comments on the manuscript: Melvin Jules Bukiet and Mary La Chapelle. For homes away from home in which to write: Scott Browning (Hall Farm, Vermont), and Spyroula Konstantopoulos & Charles Goldie (Exeter, UK). For challenges as well as assurances, current and former members of the Sarah Lawrence College community, in particular Barbara Kaplan, Micheal Rengers, and IljaWachs. For all manner of the ineffable: Lola Konstantopoulos, Sue Schwimmer, Phyllis Arnold & Deidre Leipziger, Alison Kuller, MC Gee & Judy Myers, Susan Thames, and Marion Hart. And for my sister, Joan Zoref.
Gratitude as well to: The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) and author Paul Harding (Tinkers, Enon), who selected Barren Island for the 2015 AWP Award for The Novel; the staff at New Issues Press/Western Michigan University; and Mira Singer, assiduous proofreader.
For my parents
Selma Spielman Zoref & Leonard Zoref
For my wife
Pamela Walter
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Chapter 0
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
CHAPTER 0
Ask about the smell. That is what everyone asks no matter who or why or where they might be. It is the detail they want most when they hear about the horses and dogs and pigs that filled the barges; about the wake of stench when the meat markets closed for the day and the surgeries closed for the morning and the rest of New York paused in coffee shops and automats, in lunchrooms and kitchens and union halls, on curbsides and at cleared-away corners of the cutting tables in the garment factories on 39th Street to eat sandwiches made from animal parts, the ones that would not be burned that day on Barren Shoal.
Cow bone, pig bone, sheep bone, horse bone. Chicken bone, turkey bone, dog bone, cat bone. Maggot-covered cow skins, postulated hog snouts, ulcerated sheep hides, abscessed horse heads, festering dog tails, cat jaws. Wet smells settled in the creases of human skin, rose like cruel heat across the harbor, lingered on the silent curls of factory smoke. They were smells one could touch, a gummy scrim over every breathing hour. Fleas, flies, snakes, worms, beetles, lice, mites, ticks, mold, mildew, and fungus gorged on the smells that not even the furnaces on Barren Shoal burned away.
My family lived on Barren Shoal for twenty-five years, my father glad to have work to keep us clothed in something better than the rags that the pickers scavenged and stitched and salvaged and wore and sold and traded and wore down into rags again. Bones became glue, thread became cloth, and in the end everyone was different and everyone was unchanged.
About things such as these, an 80-year-old woman like me, Marta Eisenstein Lane, of sound mind and in full possession of her senses, should know.
My parents came to Barren Shoal in 1914 after who knows how many days at Ellis Island and six weeks of exhausted, listless sleep on the benevolent floor of Aunt Sara and Uncle David’s one bedroom apartment in Borough Park. My cousin, Flat Sammy, born eight months earlier, wailed every hour of every one of those weeks, a protest against the mean circumstances of his life. Sara, my father’s sister and only living relative, had been kicked in the stomach by a coal-cart horse gone crazy three weeks before her delivery date. She was carried upstairs just in time for Sammy to arrive through a confusion of spasms, his soft, fetal head irreparably misshapen. The horse, still hitched to the coal cart and having spasms of its own, dropped dead on the cobblestone, saliva rolling from its jaw like the blistering scum on a pot of boiling soup.
The coal horse, like every dead horse in New York City, was carried that night by barge to either Barren Island or Barren Shoal, where it was butchered and boiled down for glue and grease. Flat Sammy—that is what we called him on account of the horseshoe-shaped dent on the back of his head and so as not to confuse him with Uncle David’s brother who lived in Philadelphia, also named Sam—Flat Sammy did not die. Flat Sammy survived for no reason except that most of us die in pieces, not all at once. Even the horse that kicked Aunt Sara.
I have examined the history books and public documents, have read how the first garbage barge arrived at Barren Island, the bigger and nearest neighbor to Barren Shoal, in 1852. I have learned how before the word was anglicized, the Dutch called it Beeren Island for the bears they believed lived there feeding off fish and clams and crabs, though there is no record, official or anecdotal, of any Dutch settler ever sighting a bear among the pine stands and sage and white sand beaches of the islands in Jamaica Bay.
For who-knows-how-long prior to the Dutch and their imaginary bears, the Native Americans called this place by their own word, Equindito, meaning Broken Lands. It was a name that was custom fit to the small islands it contained. One of the smallest, sandiest pieces was our own small island, the flat and forsaken Barren Shoal, separated from the better known Barren Island by the merest of shallows at low tide and a few feet of water when the tide was high. Most of the natives who lived on Equindito were massacred by Dutch settlers, who chased away the survivors who did not die. This does not change the fact that Equindito was their home for a time that mattered, meaning any amount of time at all.
The last public garbage incinerator on Barren Island, according to the city records, was closed in 1918; the last glue factory, in 1933. But that was Barren Island, not Barren Shoal, about which there are no records. Not even my grandson Eric, the anthropologist, has had any luck with finding out more than I, and he knows how to find things better than anyone.
Today, on this very day, if someone searches for Barren Shoal on a map, they will come up empty-handed. If their interest outweighs t
his disappointment, they might search an atlas dating back a century or so. If they are anything like Eric, our homegrown scholar, they might sift through the New York Municipal Archives, laying their hands on once-important documents that no one has touched in years. If they are thorough—or lucky—they will come upon the name “Barren Island” in the disintegrating tax records, land grants, and minutes of the meetings of the old Common Council or the City Committee on Planning and Survey. But they will not find a single word about Barren Shoal. They can nose around the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and will have no more luck finding Barren Shoal than they would finding the places where the government buries its unwanted uranium, hoping that we will forget.
Believe what you will. Everyone does. The fact that every trace of Barren Shoal is gone does not mean it was never there.
CHAPTER 1
In the very beginning of his very first days in America, my ever-hopeful father accompanied Uncle David to Manhattan, where David had a job cutting fabric for men’s shirts. My father was waiting for someone to lead him somewhere, looking for a place where a man with no English could earn a wage. My father kept close by Uncle David, his center of gravity still rocking from the journey across the Atlantic.
The wooden floor of the factory hummed and droned, my father would later recall, with vibrations from row after row of sewing machines. There were scores of them—a choir of foot-pedaled Singers. A voice rose above the chorus: “You!” That is how it all began, my father would say when he told this story. “You!” flying bullet-like from a thin man in a white shirt with a blue tie and darker blue trousers. “You,” my father would boom, exaggerating the thin man’s trembling baritone. He told the story in English for the sake of my siblings and me, even though everyone at the factory spoke in Yiddish.
“Sort these,” ordered Mr. Gretzky, Uncle David’s boss, as he rolled a laundry hopper across the cutting room. My father threw out his arms to stop the hopper from crashing into him and Uncle David, who was hovering at his cutting table over a bolt of white pima cotton, persuading it to yield gracefully to his scissors. Fabrics are living things, Uncle David liked to tell us youngsters, because they’re the way I make a living.
“What’s he telling me?” my father asked Uncle David, whisper-shouting over the noise of the factory floor. The palms of his hands stung where the wood frame of the bin had smacked into them. He wondered if Mr. Gretzky had mistaken him for someone who worked there.
Inside the hopper were scraps of fabric discarded by the cutters, who were scissoring out arms and backs and pockets and collars for men’s shirts or ladies’ blouses. Why one is called one thing and the other called another is one of those mysteries, like the difference between slacks and pants and trousers. I know: I digress. But the mind must be allowed to wander so it can remember. Forgive me.
“Pull out the pieces big enough for rags,” instructed Uncle David, looking up from the sleeve he was cutting. “Gretzky pays by the pound. He sells them to a ragman. The more efficient I am as a cutter, the less you make, so forget about me and go pick up after the others.” My uncle rotated the fabric he was working and waved his scissors in the direction of the other cutters. “A lot of these schmucks know nothing about making the most of a bolt of cloth, never mind making a pie out of shit, which is, no kidding, what a picker does. Never mind that, Sol. Get to it before Gretzky—who some union goon should fuck up good—splits the pile with some other poor bastard.”
My father, who was a shoemaker, knew nothing about clothing. He had been trained by his own father in Zyrmuny, in the room on the side of their house that was a repair shop. Factories were the stuff that cities like Babruysk and Minsk were made of, not muddy shtetls like Zyrmuny. The Industrial Revolution went right by Zyrmuny until the Germans built a death camp at Maly Trostinec, if you do not mind my saying so. Plenty of people say I should stop already. Enough already. Soon. Soon enough I will stop forever.
On 39th Street, however, The International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the I.L.G.W.U., had already organized two factories in the same building.
“Are they communists?” asked my father.
“Sentimentalists,” said David. “Socialists gone mainstream.” He looked to see who might be listening. “Later, when you and Rachel get settled, we’ll go to a meeting. See for yourself.”
“If later ever comes,” said my father, still exhausted from the ordeal of getting from Zyrmuny to Borough Park. “The Kabbalists: they’re the ones who know better about ‘later.’ Not men sorting rags on 39th Street.”
Uncle David smoothed the white cotton sleeve he was trimming while my father sorted. “I’m talking about the ‘later’ on this earth, not some later they can’t know if they’ll ever know it or not,” said David, who did not become religious until much later, when he read in Das Kapital that religion was the “opiate of the masses.” David got hot on religion out of spite, angered by what he described as the “oppression of ideologies.”
“Crazy guys anyway,” said my father, referring to the Kabbalah-reading mystics. “Like a bunch of Tibetan monks squirreled away with their prayers and...”
“Since when did you become an expert about Tibet?” teased Uncle David while he smoothed out the sleeve he had just finished.
Out of the waistband of his pants my father pulled a battered National Geographic. On the cover was a yellow-framed image of a toothless man smiling. He was, according to the caption, standing at the palace-capital of Lhasa.
“There’s stacks of magazines on the street,” explained my father. “With the garbage.”
David laughed at him. “Between the garbage and here you’re reading English?”
My father tucked the magazine back in his waistband. “I read Russian, I read Yiddish, I read pictures.” English was not just his third language; it was his third alphabet.
When the shift ended at 6:00 p.m., my father had this many bagfuls of cloth and that many pounds of scrap and had sifted more rags than anyone ever remembered a man sorting in a single day. Precisely how many bags he filled grew larger in the telling every year, until he was the exact age I am on this very day and his storytelling days, which is to say all of his days, came to an end and no one was left to tell the stories but my brother Noah and me.
“I can stay longer,” my father told Mr. Gretzky when the shift bell rang, signaling everyone to go home. There were loose pieces of fabric in the corners and on the floor and dust from the trimmings everywhere. When the light was just right, even the air was threaded with cotton fibers.
“You’ve cleaned us out,” said an amused Mr. Gretzky. Or maybe the word my father used was “impressed.” I am working hard to remember.
The tables were clearing out, the cutters setting down the backs and arms and collars of shirts they would return to tomorrow. The overhead lights were covered by lint that the heat glued to the metal and glass. The night watchman followed Mr. Gretzky down the rows, dimming the bulbs with a half-rotation of the rag in his hand so that only one lamp would be left burning through the night.
Mr. Gretzky’s fingertips traveled the piles of finished work, roughly counting the completed pieces by pressing down the stacks. More pieces equaled more pay. “Come back tomorrow in the afternoon,” he repeated.
“Morning,” insisted my father. The afternoon could be too late. Some other man, more eager or younger, or maybe some friend of a cousin of Mr. Gretzky’s wife, or who-knows-who could snap up his place as if he had never been there. Gretzky did not even know my father’s name.
“Give the cutters time to get things going, fella,” said Mr. Gretzky.
“It’s Eisenstein,” said my father. “Don’t forget.”
“Who the hell are you that I should remember?”
My father’s eyes were bloodshot, unaccustomed to the lint drifting about the cutting room. His fingertips were red and chafed from hours of sorting. How much longer could they stay at David and Sara’s, what with Flat Sammy wailing and the older girl, m
y cousin Ruthie, sleeping on the floor? The situation was impossible but for the fact that there they were, in Borough Park, living the impossible. My father trailed Mr. Gretzky, who was two steps ahead of the night watchman. Mr. Gretzky continued his inventory-taking as the room grew darker.
“For God’s sake,” Mr. Gretzky called out when my father finally walked away, “get some rest.”
Maybe this was my father embellishing again, like when he embellished the numbers of hoppers he sorted. Maybe he was making Mr. Gretzky kinder in the telling than he really was, making the story of his own life more bearable to himself and all of us.
My father returned to the factory early the next day with Uncle David, not ready yet to find his own way there through the heart of the golem that is New York. He stood by Uncle David’s side that entire morning, watching David scissor the parts of a shirt from a handsome bolt of cotton. To become a cutter in America, thought my father: that would be something.
Halfway through the shift, Mr. Gretzky appeared with a half-filled hopper. “Hey early bird,” he called to my father, “here comes the worms.” Mr. Gretzky sent the scrap-filled bin clattering across the uneven wood floorboards, the way he had done the day before. Each of the nearby cutters dipped protectively over their work as they heard the hopper approaching down the narrow aisle.
My father sorted scraps again the following day and the day after and on Saturday morning, even though it was the Sabbath. He would have rather worked by himself on Sunday for half wages than break his own father’s far away heart by working on Shabbat, but that was no more up to my father than it was to Uncle David or anyone else.
My father might have been sorting scraps forever, might have even worked his way up to becoming one of Mr. Gretzky’s cutters, had he not one day said a few words to the driver of the rag cart about needing a room that he and my mother could rent, things being so crowded with my aunt and uncle and cousins. The driver said something about there being better sorting jobs somewhere else in New York, a place where they gave a man a job and a house and the people walked to work. And how, if my father slipped him a bin of rags that also contained an unspoiled, uncut bolt of cloth, the driver would be certain to get my father an introduction.
