Two girls stop us in the middle of the street and accost my brother Elyahu, telling him to go to a barbershop. At first we don’t understand what that means, but now we know: going to a barbershop means getting shaved and cutting your hair. What strange creatures! They go around gobbling up fried fish in the middle of the street that you can smell a mile away, their mouths dripping grease, and they hate hair. Drunks there are plenty of, but they don’t sprawl all over the street as they do at home. The English don’t allow it. “It’s quite a country,” says Bruche, “but it refuses to burn down.”
“What good will it be if it does burn down?” asks my brother Elyahu, and gets an earful from her.
When Bruche wants to, she really knows how to put you down. Sometimes she gives you the silent treatment and doesn’t speak, but other times the words flood out and you have to either stuff your ears with cotton or run away as far as you can. Here’s what she said, word for word: “Why are you defending this accursed country with its black sky and shaven snouts and its dirty Whitechapel, its fried fish, old maids with braided buns, greasy dresses, paupers who drink ginger beer, conductors who tell you to go whistle, and Jews who have yahrtzeit and begrudge you a drink of water? A city like that should burn down!”
Bruche takes a breath, crosses her arms, and says, “London, why don’t you burn down?”
God in heaven! When will we ever get to America?
PART TWO
In America
Written in 1916.
I
MAZEL TOV, WE’RE IN AMERICA
A.
Give us a mazel tov, we’re in America. Or they tell us we’re in America. We haven’t really set foot in America yet because we’re still in Castle Garden. Or that’s what it was once called — now it’s called Ellie’s Island. Why do they call it Ellie’s Island? Because it once belonged to someone named Ellie. Pinni is very angry at Ellie’s Island because they detain the poor people there but let the rich ones go the minute they get off the ship. He says that’s more like what you would expect from those Russian thieves than from this land of the free. Here everyone is equal. There are no poor, no rich. He spouts names like Columbus, Shakespeare, and Buckle and big words I don’t understand like civilization. He wants to write a song about them but has no ink, pen, or paper. My brother Elyahu tells him that if he doesn’t like this country, he can go back. You remember that these two are rarely of one mind? Whatever one says, the other says the opposite. “Summer and winter,” Bruche calls them, receiving a stern look from her husband, who calls her a cow and a busybody and other names not fit to repeat. My mother intercedes and tells her daughter-in-law that when cats fight, a person shouldn’t get in the middle because he might get scratched.
B.
What are we doing on Ellie’s Island? We’re waiting for our family and friends to come from the city so they can vouch for us in writing. They questioned us over and over before we boarded the ship, while we were on the ship itself, and when we just disembarked from the ship. And it’s always the same questions: Who are we? Where are we going? Whom do we have in America?
We tell them there was a man named Peysi the cantor and he died. He left a widow, our mother. She has a son named Elyahu, who has a wife named Bruche and a friend named Pinni, who has a wife named Teibl. And I am the youngest, named Motl. This is my friend named Mendl, and because he is large, Bruche named him the Colt.
Whom do we have in America? We know everybody in America and all the Jews are our friends. First of all, there is Moishe the bookbinder and his wife Fat Pessi — our neighbor with a whole gang of children. Each one has a name and a nickname. We tick them off on our fingers: Pinni Barrel, Velvl Tomcat, Mendl Stork, Chaim Buffalo, Hershl with the birthmark on his forehead, so we call him Vashti—
They interrupt us, “Enough — enough children. Give us grown-ups.” So we give them the grown-ups, tick off their names: Yoneh the baker, an angry man, that’s one. His wife Rivele, a woman with a fur cape — that’s two. Actually, she once had a fur cape but it was stolen at the border. The word border reminds my mother of how our things were stolen at the border. She asks if it’s possible to get these things back — and she starts crying, at which point Elyahu reprimands her. She says that now she is in America, she is no longer worried about her eyes and can cry and cry.
C.
That they allowed her through with those eyes is a miracle, as is the fact that we survived the ocean crossing. Was it not a miracle of miracles? How many times did we see the Angel of Death with our own eyes? How many times did we think our lives were over?
At first when we boarded the ship Prince Albert, everything was fine. I and my friend Mendl measured the Prince Albert from stem to stern with our strides. No one had it as good as we did. Never had we had accommodations to match what we had on the ship. It was a three-story house on the water. Just picture it — you’re sitting in your house, or walking around outside, hands in your pockets, and you’re moving! You’re eating and — you’re moving! You’re drinking and — you’re moving! And the people you see — a world of people, an entire city — are traveling with you on one ship and going to the same place, America. You can get to know all of them, and they you. You find out in one day so many things that in another place you wouldn’t learn in a year.
D.
Oh my, how many friends my mother and my sister-in-law Bruche and Pinni’s wife Teibl make among the women! But that’s nothing compared with the friends my brother Elyahu and his friend Pinni make among the men. No matter how much any of us talks, they can never talk enough. The women talk about kitchens, cupboards, linens, laundry, bedding, stockings, sheets, and fur capes. The men talk about America, business, Columbus, edicts, and pogroms.
They can’t live without talking about edicts and pogroms. As you know, I hate to talk about those things. When they start talking about them, I leave. I take my friend Mendl by the hand, and together we stroll through the streets of Prince Albert.
E.
Prince Albert is big enough — and beautiful. It has marble stairs, brass railings, and steel and iron wherever you look. And the crew — some are called stewards and nurses; others are sailors, who run back and forth like the wind. Mendl and I envy them. We promise each other that when we grow up, we will enlist as sailors.
But Price Albert has one big fault — we’re not allowed to go wherever we wish. As soon as we try to go beyond our assigned quarters, the mean sailors drive us away. The upper-class passengers are just as mean, because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t let the sailors chase us away. What harm could we do — take a bite out of them? My friend Mendl is irate. He doesn’t understand why you need to have different classes. He says that in America there are no classes. If you don’t believe me, he says, you can ask your brother Elyahu. But my brother hates to be asked dumb questions. I prefer to ask our friend Pinni, who loves to talk about such things — he can bury you in words. And if you get him started, he’s like a wound-up alarm clock — he won’t quit until the wheels stop turning.