In Bratsyana, home had been a ramshackle wooden house on a street that was barely more than a muddy strip traversing a village on the outskirts of the outskirts of Odessa.
Tateh was furious that he had to send me to America before my younger brothers. He’d wanted the boys to emigrate, as they would be more useful in the New World, better able to earn money to mail home. But after the incident in the square, he had no choice but to let me go; he didn’t think I could be trusted to stay safe, to not bring the czar’s police down upon our house. I needed to prove to Tateh I could be as good a wage earner as the boys.
Heshie, my oldest brother, was already in America. Christopher Columbus, we called him. But he lived in a house with seven men in two rooms in Brownsville, on a dirt road; it wouldn’t have been appropriate—or even possible—for me to stay with him. So instead I went to my cousin’s apartment.
Ellis Island was a crush of bodies, a mass of people, and I walked in a daze, my eyes examined, my money checked, and soon I was out on the street, standing alone, unsure of my feet on solid land, my feet, which still carried the memory of the rocking ship. Men accosted me in Yiddish, asking my trade, wanting to know if I had somewhere to go. Other girls, with no one to meet them, let the men lead them to boardinghouses and sweatshops, where I learned later they’d be underpaid until they realized their own worth. But I had somewhere to go. Yet even with that certainty, each step made my knees weak, as the tumult of Manhattan confused me.
“Ver ees Eldridge Street?” I asked passerby after passerby, a phrase I had learned on the ship, until a young woman took pity on me.
“Where are you going?” the young woman asked in Yiddish.
Relieved, I held up the weathered paper with the scrawled address.
The woman nodded. She pointed ahead to a street sign. “Walk up Broadway. At Canal Street, ask for more directions.”
“I am so grateful,” I said.
“Good luck,” the woman said. “You’ll need it.”
Walking the streets, carrying my carpetbag, which held every possession I owned in the world, I peered at each street sign, not that it mattered; the letters were meaningless. Every few blocks, I stopped someone and said, “Canal Street?” and followed their pointed fingers.
I had never heard such noise. Never seen such a press of people. Boys outside shops trying to lure customers with promises and shouts. Vendors hawking food and clothing from carts on the street. Kids running, darting, throwing balls around. When a rogue ball nearly smacked me, I stood, frozen, as a boy ran past me to get it. He said something in English, but I didn’t understand it, could only stare at him. And then he uttered the word that would soon become so familiar to me, that I would hear again and again and again: greenhorn.
I was exhausted, but I didn’t dare stop, didn’t have extra money for the food being hawked, not that I recognized much of what was offered. Here and there, a familiar sound, but mostly alien food, food I couldn’t trust to be kosher. My skirts were heavy, the thick cloth made thicker by the coins my mother had sewn into the lining. She had insisted I keep my earnings from my work as a seamstress—had hidden the money from Tateh—so I could use it to make a home in America. Little did we understand that this wealth would buy so little in the New World.
The walk was long, but I pieced my way to Eldridge. With the worn scrap in my hand, I searched for the address on the buildings. The paper was a mere formality; I had memorized the address: 27 Eldridge Street.
Finally I found the building. I pushed on the heavy door, and it gave way, leading to a narrow staircase up a dark hallway. With only the light from the small window above the front door, the corridor seemed no better than a black alley. Cautiously I entered, feeling the walls to find my way, climbing to the sixth floor.
A strange hum came from the rooms behind the closed doors, a low buzzing of a sort that I’d never heard before. The sound was constant, a background noise, almost as if a fly caught in my ear were desperately trying to get out.
When I arrived at the doorway, I knocked hesitantly. With my ear pressed against the door, the humming was louder. The sounds were definitely coming from within each apartment. No one answered, so I knocked again, with a bit more force.
A voice hollered inside and the front door was opened by a girl, no more than four years old. She looked up at me with big eyes. “I am cousin Raisa, coming from Russia,” I said. When the little girl didn’t respond, I wondered if she spoke Yiddish. A voice came from within the room in words I understood. “So? Who is it?”
The little girl turned and yelled in a language I couldn’t understand. The only word I could pick out was my own name, although it was said in such a foreign way, with such alien intonations, that I wondered if it really belonged to me. The room was a front room combined with the kitchen, with a large coal-burning stove and three mattresses propped in a corner.
“Let her in already,” said the voice, and from behind a machine on the kitchen table, Yetta stood and walked over to me.
Setting my bag on the floor, I embraced my cousin, whom I hadn’t seen in almost five years. “Come in, come in,” Yetta said, leading me back to where she had been. “Have a seat.” She pointed to a chair in the corner. “I need to finish the work. We’ll talk while you catch your breath.”
I sat on the chair, which at one time must have been plush, but now lumped and sagged in the middle. The chair was the color of the yams we ate back home, and I was struck by a longing for Mama.
Yetta sat back down at the table, on top of which was a graceless metal machine with a large round wheel, a spool of thread atop, and cloth sticking out.
“What is that?” I asked.
Yetta said, “This? A sewing machine. Can you believe it?”
I got up to look at it more closely. The wheel of the black monstrosity was wound with thread, and a giant needle punched up and down as Yetta pumped a pedal with her foot.
“What do you do with it?” I asked.
“I rent it. I do piecework. The store owner sends a runner with the cut cloth—someone else does that part—and I sew it together. I get five cents an item. I’d get more if I could do the hand-sewn finish work, but I’m not so good at it. Your tateh, though, wrote me you are excellent at it.”
I nodded. At home Mama had taught me to sew, and I became a glove maker, sewing delicate pieces for Tateh to take to the market in the next town to sell to the fine women.
“It is good you came. We can make more money.”
I sat back down and looked around the room. The sewing machine rested near the only window, which gave barely enough illumination to see the work. I didn’t understand at the time what an incredible luxury this window was, how others longed for a sliver of light in their rooms. All I could see was that the glow was dull and the room crowded, with the chair and a settee that someone clearly slept on at night—a blanket and a pillow clustered at one end—and a stack of mattresses. A few photographs, of relatives back home, dotted the meager flat surfaces: the top of the buffet, the side table. An ironing board leaned in a corner. Gaslights remained unlit—gas being too expensive, apparently, to waste during the day, no matter that the apartment didn’t seem to allow any light.
“Are you thirsty? Jeanette, get Rose a glass of water.”
“Rose?” I asked.
Yetta nodded. “Raisa is Old Country. Rose is American.”
“Rose,” I repeated.
“Here I am no longer Yetta.” Was that pride in her voice? “Here I am Ida.”
“Ida.” These names twisted on my tongue. So much was changing already; I hadn’t expected my name to do so as well.
As I took in the room, Yetta—or should I be calling her Ida?—asked for news of home. Her parents, her siblings, how they were doing.
I told her as much as I knew, searching the crevices of my mind for details I might have forgotten. My head was
so full of politics, brimming with excitement at leaving the small town, escaping the village life that seemed so pointless once Shmuel had disappeared, that I hadn’t taken notice of much else around me.
After I drank my fill of water and leaned back to relax a moment, Yetta said, “Nu? You good? Ready to start work?”
“Work?” I asked. “Already?”
Yetta looked embarrassed, although her tone held no hint of apology. “I know you just got here,” she said, “but work needs to be done. This isn’t Russia, you understand? This is America. Money is the key to America.”
I knew she was right. It was my duty to earn the money to bring over the rest of my family. Plus I needed to earn my keep at Yetta’s house.
So I sewed. Every day, twelve hours a day, I sewed. At night, I shared the settee bed with the child, Jeanette, as Yetta and her husband slept on a mattress near the stove, and three boarders, women, slept on the floor—two at our end of the room and one in the kitchen. I knew I was lucky to have a bed to share.
Shabbes as I knew it no longer existed. Yes, on Friday nights we lit the candles, made the blessings, ate the challah. But Shabbes was no longer a day of rest. Work must be done. Seven days a week.
I spent most of my days in that cramped apartment, doing the fine finishing details. My work was beautiful enough to garner the attention of the shop owner who commissioned my work. He gave me more intricate pieces, lace work to do. My rates rose, until I was doing elaborate pieces that would be sold at Macy’s, earning me ten cents an outfit.
At night, as tired as I was and as cramped as my back felt from hunching over the delicate pieces of fabric, I made sure to go out. I left partly to escape the bickering of Yetta and her husband—I quickly learned that time alone for a man and a woman was a luxury of the rich in America—as well as to see this new country. Two nights a week, I went to the Educational Alliance, where I learned English. Many nights, I attended free lectures and discussions—Dr. Magnes discussing his trip to Palestine; Morris Hillquit and Samuel Untermyer debating “Should the government own and operate all the trust?”; Congressmen Sulzer and Goldfogle protesting the Dillingham Bill. When I could splurge on a cup of tea and a pastry, I would visit Café Royal, where young people gathered every evening to reminisce about home, to play chess, and to discuss politics.
It was over tea that I met Ben, a young labor organizer, a union man. After giving a rousing impromptu speech, mixing both English and Yiddish, about the benefits of workers banding together, he sidled up to me.
“What do you do?” he asked me in English.
The words were basic enough that I could understand them, but I replied in Yiddish, “I don’t respond to men who don’t speak to me in the mame-loshen.” I tried to appear coquettish as I said this, when in reality, English made me feel stupid.
Ben grinned and repeated the question in Yiddish. As a union man, Ben made himself useful with his fluency in English, Yiddish, and Russian. He, and often he alone, could communicate with the various groups.
“I do piecework,” I told him.
“And do you belong to the International Garment Association?”
“I belong to no one,” I said coyly.
With that, Ben gave me a broad smile. He was a short man, perhaps even an inch shorter than me, but he had deep brown eyes and a furrowed brow that gave him an air of intelligence. I took an instant liking to him.
“In that case,” Ben said, “would you care to accompany me to the theater?”
I raised an eyebrow at him. I had never attended the theater before. I had never gone out in public alone with a man. I thought back to Shmuel. He was gone and yet I felt as if I were betraying him.
“The Yiddish theater,” Ben added, with the grin that would become so familiar to me. “That is, if your parents will allow it.”
“I am a woman of”—I hesitated for the barest of seconds, seconds in which I chose to leave Shmuel behind in the Old Country, to reinvent myself as an American—“eighteen. I require no one’s permission.” A small lie. Three years shaved from my age. I didn’t want Ben to think I was a spinster. This was a fresh start in a fresh country, and I wanted to start it as a young woman, not an old maid.
Ben and I knew each other four weeks before we announced our intention to marry. And two weeks after that, with a quick visit to the rebbe, with only the newly arrived Perle and my cousin Yetta as witnesses, as my brother couldn’t miss a day of work, we were married. Just like that, I no longer lived on the settee with Jeanette.
Ben and I lived with his parents in a one-bedroom apartment where the walls were so thin that I reddened when I saw his mother in the mornings. But Mama Krasinsky always smiled at me, saying little. She was a caring woman, but she wasn’t my mama. I dreamed of bringing Mama to America, of giving her this life where girls were expected to learn their letters and marry for love and join in the political conversation without fear. When news arrived of Mama’s death, I cried for six days. I named my firstborn, Dorothea, for my ma, Deenah.
Until Dottie was born, my primary concern was earning enough money for my family back home, and Ben’s was saving enough for our own apartment. In the summer, the work wasn’t so bad. I was extremely mindful not to let a drop of my sweat taint the fabric; I was expert enough to keep my cloth pristine. In the winter, though, the work was miserable. The sewing was too intricate for me to wear gloves—I couldn’t make fine stitches if I didn’t have complete movement of my fingers—so while the rest of me sat bundled in coats, my fingers were bare. Fingers that were icy hurt that much more when accidentally pricked with a needle. And my fingers were constantly raw from the chill, so I had to take great care not to snag the wispy fabric. Heat was nonexistent. A tiny flicker of warmth seeped out of the stove, but it didn’t make much difference. Visiting the toilet meant a trip down a dark, dank hall to the unheated room that was shared with the other three apartments on the floor. It was almost as bad as the outhouse back home, even if I didn’t have to go out in the rain or snow.
My fingers never recovered from the work, and I was still a youngish woman in my twenties when they first felt the pain of arthritis. Never, I promised myself, never will my own children work with a needle and thread. My children would use their wits to make their way in the world. And true to my word, I made sure I never taught my children—especially Dottie—more than the basics, kept from them the skills that helped me to survive in this strange New World.
While our days were backbreaking, we enjoyed all the East Side had to offer at night. We continued going to speeches and cafés, and on a few occasions, Ben was the lecturer. How proud I was to sit in the audience and listen to his inspiring talks on the labor class and the capitalist machine. A Jewish man speaking politics in the open with nothing to fear! It amazed me. I strutted like a peacock on those evenings. Yet as much as I believed in the theories he espoused, I worried about Ben’s day-to-day involvement with the union—people were known to get hurt doing what he did. But Ben brushed off my concern, and went out from early morning often until late at night, canvassing workers, imploring them to unite, joining picket lines, occasionally coming home with a bruised eye or a sore rib, which he would dismiss with a wave of his hand. But I was not a woman to be easily dissuaded, and after few years of marriage, I convinced Ben he must think of our future, of the second child we were expecting. Ben needed a job that paid better. So Ben borrowed money and purchased a garage with his cousin, who had recently returned from Detroit, where he’d worked at an auto factory. They made good money housing and fixing the cars that were rapidly taking over the streets—enough to repay his debts and for us to move into the apartment we live in today—and although they often stayed late washing and servicing the cars, I stopped fearing for his safety. By the end of many years, Ben and I had saved up a nice bundle of money, and we sent over enough for various members of both our families to make the journey to America. My tateh, thou
gh, refused to come, as his own mother was too ill to travel. Besides, he didn’t want to leave Yussel alone—Yussel, who would be denied an international passport until he passed the age of the draft.
I continued to do garment work during the day, but Perle and I—with children in tow—always found a few hours every week to visit the cafés to discuss the garment union with new immigrant women or to distribute flyers outside the sweatshops. We spent many hours marching for suffrage and were disappointed we couldn’t attempt to vote, as we were not yet citizens. We were prepared to be arrested with the other women. Ben’s garage was successful enough that I was poised to leave the needle trade behind and take a lower-paying position in the union. “In the office, where it’s safe,” I’d say testily to Ben, when he teased me about entering the world that I had made him leave.
And then the twins became sick. Nothing else mattered. Alfie, thank God, recovered quickly, and even the telltale polio limp disappeared in a year or so. But Joey. I spent every day with Joey even when, toward the end, he was taken to the hospital, which had the new machine, the iron lung. But for Joey, it was too late. And by the time he passed, I felt it was too late for me. A spark had been extinguished. I buried myself in the children, focused my efforts on procuring a visa for Yussel, tried to do good works in the neighborhood. My life was filled, too much for me to reflect upon my place in the world. But every now and then—when the children were sleeping, with Ben at the garage and the bread baking in the oven—I thought of Russia; of Tateh, toiling to care for my grandparents; of my mama, who died without me by her side. I longed for my older sister Eta, who had left Bratsyana shortly after I, headed for Palestine. “I’m a halutz,” she wrote when she arrived, a pioneer. Her big ideas and sturdy frame were exactly what the country needed, but selfishly, I wished Eta had chosen America.
Modern Girls Page 15
