Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

by Bess Kalb

  When she told me the story, it was early morning, the light barely coming in through the hospital curtains. She had been sitting by my bedside all night.

  She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. “Bubbeleh,” she began, “let me tell you about when I was your age.”

  She talked about herself as a little girl in a town called Pinsk in Belarus. It was the 1880s, after the first pogrom, when the tsar sent his marauders into the shtetls to drag Jewish patriarchs out of their homes and shoot them in the streets, while their neighbors cowered with their gas lamps off, awaiting the same fate. She told me how after they’d killed the fathers, they’d arrested the sons on made-up charges and sent them to march in the front lines of the tsar’s army. Cannon fodder. Then they’d raped the daughters and left the mothers beaten and babbling and afraid of the night, waiting for the clomping of the horses’ hooves against the cobblestones again.

  “That’s how it was, that’s how it is, that’s how it always was, that’s how it always will be, Barbara,” she said. “Every hundred years they find a new reason to hunt the Jews.”

  When my mother was born, her family had already been destroyed by the tsar’s regime. She had a brother and a sister she loved, Chaim and Bertha. She had two brothers who were sent to fight for the tsar and never returned, Gedalia and Sholom. She had a baby sister, Beryl, whom she never met. She told me about them, but at this point in the story I could hardly pay attention, and I was thirsty and hot and there was a ringing in my right ear that wouldn’t stop and I missed the whole part about her siblings. She never spoke about them again. Oh well. I’m sure they were all lovely people. And now they’re as dead as I am.

  She brought me some water and I perked up.

  She told me how when she was very young, her father, Max Brazel—Brazel was her family name—would walk from the shtetl to the center market in Pinsk to rally labor organizers. How her mother, Sarah, slept in a chair by the window at night, waiting for her boys to come home. How her teachers taught them nothing but Yiddish and the Talmud, and how she memorized the stories of Abraham and Sarah and their children and told them to her mother to soothe her as they bathed together and braided each other’s hair.

  How she and her friends would walk to school past the kosher butcher opening his shop, his apron already pink, and he’d wave to the children and ask them to tell their mothers his prices couldn’t be beat. How nobody did, because the taxes the Russian government put on kosher meat made it unaffordable. How all the children would return home to potatoes and brown gravy flavored with bread and salt, while shanks of good beef were rotting in the butcher’s windows, turning for the flies.

  How after the tsar’s murder in the spring of 1881, there were rumors going around Belarus that the Jews had done it. How the revolution was a conspiracy. How there were whispers of another pogrom. How her father left for town one morning with a solemn face and did not return that night. How he did not return the next day. How, after that, every day felt like the day before a rainstorm was set to fall.

  One night at dinner her mother looked at her across the table and said, “There is no life here, Rose. Only death.” She told her mother they should go to America—the neighbor boy had called it the Goldene Medinah, the Promised Land, flowing with milk and honey. And her mother said, “I cannot go.” And she put down her spoon and said, “You must go.” There wasn’t a discussion. It was an order.

  There was a man, Otesky—her father knew him from a trip he took to Minsk. This man had taken his family to New York. Her father despised him for it; he called Otesky a traitor of the shtetl. A coward. Her father had spit at the name, but she privately remembered it, stored it away for safekeeping, chanting it under her breath as she fell asleep at night: “Otesky, Otesky, Otesky.” She combed and braided her hair and put on her clean dress and went to a Jewish refugee organization’s office and asked for sponsorship to New York. They refused—they wouldn’t send a little girl all alone. They told her they just sponsored the “heads of households.” She went outside and kicked the wall of the Jewish refugee organization so hard her toenail turned black in her boot.

  She knew she’d have to raise the money herself and she came up with a plan. She followed the kosher milkman on his route through the shtetl until he agreed to let her tag along and sell rags. She tore pieces of cloth from her father’s and brothers’ old coats and pants and shirts and peddled them to the milkman’s customers. She would give the milkman half her profits and put the rest in a jar under her bed. She did this for a year, tearing clothes to make rags and riding in the milkman’s cart every morning before school, the kopecks and rubles jangling in her pocket.

  On the day she had finally saved the equivalent of twenty American dollars, she packed a small satchel. It was just after her twelfth birthday, which nobody acknowledged. She took two brass Shabbat candlesticks she mistook for gold, a pair of wool socks, a shawl her mother had knit, and her boiled wool coat. She considered taking her cloth bunny rabbit; she picked it up and stared at it. She was too scared to kiss her mother goodbye, so she kissed the rabbit instead and left it on the bed.

  She said she regretted kissing the rabbit instead of her mother every second of every day. She told me how every time she looked at her own children and let herself fill with love for them, she’d imagine them doing the same thing she did to her mother and feel the metallic bile rise to her mouth. She grew very quiet for a few minutes, and I started drifting off to sleep in my hospital bed.

  She shook me awake and told me that the morning she left the shtetl, she waited outside her house for the milkman. He picked her up for their usual route, and she told him she would give him an extra few kopeks if he would drive her to the train station in Brest. He refused the money and instead handed her a bag with ten small tins of pickled herring. He’d been hauling it around for her for weeks. He told her all the food on the boat would be trayf and she’d starve. She said when he handed her the bag of tinned herring, she held it so tightly her fingernails dug into her palms and she bled.

  The milkman gave her advice: “When you get to the border, find the other Jews. They will show you where to go. They will care for you. Find the other Jews.” He repeated that to her and she repeated it to me, and for a few minutes I didn’t know if she was the milkman or my mother and which Jews she was talking about, so I said it back to her. “I’ll find the other Jews, Ma.” She laughed at me and I laughed with her, and then she shushed me and kept going.

  Then she began the story of the escape. In the fog of my fever and the confusion and discomfort and pain, I envisioned it so clearly I thought of it as my story. And when I told it to your mother, she’d think of it as her story. And when she told it to you, you’d think of it as your story. It’s her story, Bessie, but it belongs to us. When she stepped off the boat, we all became possible.

  It started with the train. My mother took it all day from Brest to the Russian town on the Austrian border. The train came to a stop and she started to look around for Jewish faces, when an enormous bearded man walked the aisle and stopped over her seat and asked in Yiddish, “Jewish?” and she didn’t know if her answer would kill her or save her, so she took a guess and nodded yes.

  The man took her by the arm and brought her out of the train into the night, her satchel clenched to her chest. The man walked with her for hours. They walked for so long her toe bled in her shoe. She didn’t look behind her; she just walked into the dark.

  With the man, she crossed a checkpoint. Then she was left at a “forwarding house” full of Jewish families all making the same journey, eating their bread and kosher stew in silence. The woman who ran the house called my mother “filthy,” and my mother narrowed her eyes and resolved not to be bothered by that word. Her filth marked how long she had survived, how improbable it was she had come this far.

  In the morning my mother and two other girl
s traveling alone were taken out the back door of the forwarding house and loaded into the back of a horse-drawn potato cart. The cart bounced so violently over the cobblestones, one of her knees knocked out her rotten tooth and it bled all over her coat. After hours and hours of bumping and jostling, the girls were loaded into another house, where they were given new clothes and fresh milk. They woke up in the dark to an elderly man with a kind face and round golden spectacles standing over them saying, “The boat is in Hamburg.”

  He repeated “Hamburg” over and over again until my mother said it back. Then he smiled. He took my mother’s money—all her money—and exchanged it for a currency she didn’t recognize. Then he patted her on the head with pity, and she raised her chin and puffed out her chest and broadened her shoulders and showed him she was a serious woman. The man walked my mother and a Russian family to a train station and handed them tickets.

  She told me all about the train to Hamburg. How all of Europe went by in the compartment window: thick forests, and cities with enormous and ornate buildings and factories, and endless farmland, white dots of sheep and cattle streaking by for hours. She fell asleep dreaming of milk and woke up to the sound of the girls shouting, “Hamburg! Hamburg!”

  The train came to a stop by the port on a wide river she mistook for the ocean. From songs and stories her mother told her, she had learned the sea was blue and vast, but here it was dark green and smelled of rotten fish and burning coal. It occurred to her that her mother had never seen the ocean, and the thought, “If I’m turned away, I will go back to Pinsk and tell my mother the sea is green.” She told me it was the first and last time she let herself think about her mother on the journey.

  She got off the train and was immediately separated from the other girls, and the crowd pushed toward the chaos of the ticketing agents. She stood on her toes and handed the agent her twenty dollars and shouted, “New York,” the first words she had ever spoken in English. She was handed a paper ticket she couldn’t read, and the ticket agent pointed in the direction of a moving crowd, which she joined, her feet nearly lifting from the ground as she clutched her satchel to her chest, floating toward the docks with the throng.

  Just before she boarded, a doctor combed through her hair and looked in her mouth and pulled open her coat and pulled down the sleeve of her dress and stabbed her arm with a needle as long as her hand. She told me she still had the scar, and she tapped her upper arm, which wobbled under her blouse.

  She said after the inspection hucksters tried to sell her upgrades for her passage: a private berth, a special meal ticket. All fabrications. All predators. The milkman had warned her this very thing had happened to a man in the shtetl.

  She said the ship was dark, hot, and crowded—the loudest place she’d ever been. The roar of the steam engines behind the walls, the voices bouncing off the metal all hours of the day and night. There were five people in her berth and only two cots. She said they’d sleep in shifts, and often she’d be too sick from the smell to fall asleep. The smell of the rotten meat stew served on planks in the middle of the sleeping quarters brined with the human stench of two hundred souls made her eyes water and her stomach turn. There was nowhere to wash. She relieved herself in a pot that was shared by the others in her berth. The days and nights felt like one long stretch of time.

  She told me about a sailor who was “no good,” who went into the berths at night, and her voice grew unsteady and she did not wish to discuss the sailor any further. She wiped the wet hair from my brow and stared at me for a long while before going on.

  When the ship docked, she took her bag and left her coat, which was covered in sick. She said she had never smelled air as clean as New York’s. Never felt air as warm as New York’s. She waited for hours in line on the small island in the harbor, in the nervous hush of a thousand people praying to however many gods for the same fate. She remembered what the milkman had told her: “Don’t rub your eye. Don’t scratch your head. They’ll send you back.” She almost went blind in one eye because she held it open for too long forcing herself not to blink.

  She stood in the hot crowd for hours and hours, until a man wrote down her name as best he could and stamped her through to the other side.

  She told me how she had one word in pencil on a paper in her pocket: “Otesky.”

  How she had no idea that name had been changed on that island to the same name that she would later take by marriage and the name she would give me: “Otis.”

  How any of it could have happened, Bessie, is an absolute miracle. She said, “It was beshert, Barbara. It was meant to be.” And here, a hundred and thirty years later, you are.

  Your Hebrew name is Shoshanna, which means Rose. You’re named for her in the tribe.

  * * *

  · · ·

  On the morning of my wedding it occurred to my mother she didn’t have a pair of formal shoes.

  My brother Leo had tried to give her money for some new clothes two whole weeks before the wedding, but she just laughed and called him a nudnik.

  “You need a dress, Ma.”

  “I have two dresses.”

  “Come on. You need to look presentable in the photographs. They’ll be in an album.”

  “All eyes will be on your Barbara.”

  That’s what she called me to my brothers: “Your Barbara.”

  In all my life, I never saw my mother in a clothing store. She bought her shirts and skirts from a secondhand charity shop and mended them when they ripped and that was that. She was indifferent to her appearance—everything was sacrificed for us kids. She had disdain for the Italian family next door, with the matriarch in lipstick and a fur coat heading off to church every Sunday. “Who’s it for, the Holy Ghost?”

  When I was five years old, on the day of my brother David’s law school graduation ceremony, she wore her brown skirt and her stained white blouse and her ratty old hat. On her way out the door she accidentally took my father’s wool blazer, which was only about five and a half sizes too small for her. She barely noticed. The whole hour-and-a-half bus ride from Greenpoint to Morningside Heights, she sat there humming to herself, proud as anything you’ve ever seen, the circulation to her arms completely cut off.

  Leo tried to say something. “Ma! You can hardly breathe in that thing.”

  “What does it matter?” She laughed. “Who cares about the fit of an old lady’s coat?”

  I have two words for you, Bessie: Giorgio Armani.

  We got to Columbia, and I’ll never forget the columns on the big white buildings and the curling bronze arches and the grandeur of it all. How the men walked around with such importance. Everyone in suits and ties and shiny shoes and carrying brown briefcases. I couldn’t imagine anyone there had ever heard of Greenpoint. I imagined them going home to their enormous apartments with endless rooms and servants who bowed and curtsied at the door.

  We filed onto benches set up on the great lawn and waited with the other families—cleaner, more comfortable families. They all seemed completely at ease, bored even, fanning themselves with their programs and dreaming about lunch.

  My mother was humming to herself and staring straight ahead. I saw how she was sweating from her temples. I watched the sweat form rivulets in front of her ears, down her neck, pooling in her collar. Leo noticed, too. “Ma, for God’s sake. Unbutton the jacket.” She shushed him and sucked in her gut and straightened her back and jabbed him in the ribs.

  We waited and we waited, and finally a man with a funny hat called out over the whole lawn, “David…Otis!”

  She shot out of her seat and brought her fingers to her lips and whistled so loudly the family in front of us turned around and glared, and just as she applauded over her head, the damned jacket split under both arms. Zzzzzzppppp. Two huge tears, exposing the soaking wet blouse underneath for all of Columbia to se
e. I felt my face burn with a shame I had never experienced before.

  But when I looked up at her, I held my tongue. She was beaming. I had never seen my mother smile like that before. I’d hardly seen her smile at all! Tears were streaming down her face as she clutched her hands together beneath her chin and repeated, “My son, my son, my son.”

  Up in the distance, there was David in his long flowing blue robe, walking across the stage toward the dean, waving out at all of us and at the woman who got on a ship when she was just a girl so that one day, decades later, she could watch her child shake the hand of a kingmaker.

  * * *

  · · ·

  So on the morning of my wedding, my mother wakes up and doesn’t have any dress shoes.

  I had already gone over to Leo’s house down the block to prepare. His wonderful wife, Lily, had sewn my dress by hand. She took me to the Garment District and bought yards and yards of ivory satin, and she pinned it to her dress form and made the most beautiful gown. It was flowing with an enormous train.

  And all of that was happening and my mother was standing there in front of her wardrobe. And it’s a Sunday and nothing is open but the hardware store. So she walks in and buys a can of black paint and a paintbrush. She brought them home and lined the front stoop with newspaper. She took her brown work boots outside to the stoop and painted them black. Three coats, carefully applied.

  The people walking by on their way to church must’ve thought she’d lost her mind. “Oh, there’s Mrs. Otis destroying some shoes. Hiya, Mrs. Otis!” She didn’t care. She fanned them dry, put them on, laced them up, and made her way to the temple an hour early.

  When the wedding was over the rabbi’s secretary sent my father a cleaning bill for the synagogue carpet.