Ellis Island & Other Stories (23 page)

The men, women, and children fled from the room through a profusion of open doors and passages that led into darkness and up flights of stairs. They disappeared like water which runs down a sluice, leaving me alone to be confounded by throbbing echoes. Although the men had gone in one direction and the women in another, they had vanished through so many doors that I did not know where to go myself. But then a skinny, bearded young man with Jewish lost eyes peeked crookedly around a beam and gestured for me to follow. I hesitated at first, but when he said, “Come to dance for the honor and blessing of the
Dvorah,”
I followed, as dizzy as a loon, through a maze of wooden stairs and hallways so rich with age that you could have boiled them in a pot and made a delicious broth. At the end, we emerged into a bright and Oriental vaulted space washed with milky white light.

Though night had fallen hours before, in this room—as long and wide as a seagoing ship—the sun shone through a mosaic of translucent honey-colored tiles. White rays shot down from a high dome, generating the fume of light in which a circle of black-coated men danced under webs of golden chains. To me, they looked like black bees swarming in a flour mill. The white light was blinding and full of thunder, as active as surf, laced with gold, and so thick that the dancers were sometimes lifted off the floor in its froth.

All these men in round hats or fur hats, beards, and silken black coats were packed together in the vastness of the hall as close as the grain in wood. Several hundred rhythms came from several hundred groups, arms linked, pressed together—the smell of sesame oil. It was powerful; a caldron, a crucible, a furnace. And I trembled when I saw that in the galleries the women were pressed against the grilles, a thousand or more, pushing as in labor, so that their extraordinary energy could rise in a straight beam through the turbulence above them. The dancing was an engine, drawing light through the eyes of each soul into a cylinder of tightly bound rays that went up past the dome. I had heard of this in the East. They used to say that the great synagogues of Asia were like this. But I had never seen it.

I do not know how long it lasted, but, in the abbreviated motions of the dance, I was taken back to my family—who had long since perished—and I was grateful to God for shattering time and allowing souls to rise and float in the air like boats upon the water. I could not stay there, for I had things to do and a promise to keep. However, when I left, I carried the memory of that place as if it were a diamond in my pocket.

After passing through many villages in Brooklyn, the trolley came to one of the great Manhattan bridges, and started up the ramp. The roadways were entirely taken up by Hassidim. We were nearly floating on a sea of black coats and fur hats streaming across the bridge, and as far as one could see tens of thousands of the strictly orthodox were inching into Manhattan.

“Is it like this every morning?” I asked the conductor.

“I’ll say not,” he replied. “It’s quiet now, almost dead, because last night they had a feast and danced until the light. Couldn’t you hear? All Brooklyn shook.” (I repeated that phrase to myself after he said it:
All Brooklyn shook.
) “They’re tired now, so they walk slowly and pray. And Rabbi Figaro and his bunch aren’t here, either—they’re the troublemakers. You should see what it’s like after they’ve got a good night’s sleep. They link arms—tens of thousands of them—and they
dance
across the goddam bridge, hopping from one foot to the other. They block traffic completely, and sometimes they lose themselves in the dancing and stay up here until noon. The cables stretch and zing, the towers start to bend, and the roadway gets like a rubber whip.”

I was not too impressed by this, for I knew that they were wry dancers, entirely capable of shaking a big bridge. With the picture of God opening the Red Sea emblazoned upon their memories, why would they be afraid of falling into a little river?

“The Mayor sometimes comes out here and pleads with them through a megaphone. ‘Please, don’t do that!’ he says, but they just applaud him and continue to dance. What a tactic! They know that he’s a politician. Ten thousand people start to cheer him, and he melts like butter, forgetting what he came out to do in the first place. And they send him gifts of honey. They always send honey. I see the trucks in front of City Hall, with bucket brigades of Hassidim conveying the honeypots up to the Mayor’s office. They know what they’re doing. But, if you ask me, it’s a bribe. What I say is that we didn’t get rid of Boss Tweed so we could have honeypots, you know what I mean?”

Toward the Manhattan side, some of the Hassidim were awakened by an icy breeze, and started to snap their fingers. And then some of them began to dance, pounding their boots in the snow. But it never caught on, because they were too close to the workplace.

The workplace! That is indeed a strange description, for lower Manhattan was more like a music hall than a place to work, even though they worked from dawn until long after dusk, and they worked hard. But it was all music. There was little in the way of material things, but there was freedom. Everyone was in love with freedom, and it is one abstract quality which, somehow or other, always manages to love you back.

And it was a very holy place, too. So many wise men and scholars were walking quickly back and forth from one
shul
to another, that everywhere one looked one witnessed dreadful collisions which led to long Talmudic disputations on who was in the right and who was in the wrong, and if there were biblical analogies, and what this or that great rabbi would have said or done, etc., etc., etc. These would be reported at great length in the papers under headlines such as, RABBI SIDELMAN OF BREST LITOVSK COLLIDES WITH RABBI BALUGA OF SLOVANIAN HERMONIA, or, LATEST REPORT ON ZOGBAUM VS. GORDON: WHO TURNED THE CORNER FIRST? Most of the signs and posters were in Yiddish and Hebrew. And due to the great number of young women I felt continually buffeted by explosions of rushing beauty—even as, in passing, the Orthodox girls averted their eyes the way they had been taught to do since childhood.

“All right,” I said to myself. “I’ve been in America for almost a day and a half, and nothing has happened to me. I’ve got to find a job, a real job, not one where I get blown up and shot in an arc over Brooklyn. I know how to work with my hands, so why shouldn’t I? A pen is not the only thing in the world.” I suddenly became very sentimental about my beautiful ebony and gold pen, but, after all, in my village I had done a hundred different kinds of work. I spent six terrible months turning sheep’s intestines inside out to make sausage casings. (I will not tell you where I had to put my hand each time I did this.) To survive while writing essays and poems I had been (among other things) an attendant in the house where we kept our
meshugayim,
a “gypsy” dancer, the one who looked out for Cossacks (many hours in a tree), a baker’s helper (that was a good job), and a seller of chicken necks (we used to eat even the feet). I reminded myself not to take lodgings in back of wherever I might work, but extra money for Elise, should she need it, since I believed that she was destitute.

I soon found myself in front of a bakery. I stopped short, remembering the time I had spent as a baker’s helper, remembering the joy of stuffing hot sweet rolls into my mouth, one after another, just like King David, while basking in the heat of the oven, though not actually
in
the oven itself. The bakers used to sing when they prepared the dough; I knew these songs, and had a good voice. I also knew some excellent variations, which my cousin Leib had learned in the Caucasus, that made the bread twist around itself as it baked, forming a great variety of strange Oriental shapes according to how one sang. Before
Shabbat,
I had always sung the Caucasian songs to braid the
hallah.
In America, where they could eat as much
hallah
as could be baked, and where there was as much wheat as was needed for baking it, I thought, this skill might be highly appreciated. I decided to demonstrate to the bakers that I could sing their plain bread into fancy shapes. But, being an intellectual and an entrepreneur, I was not content with simply walking in and offering my services.

When no one was looking, I crept down the stone stairs that led to the bakery, and dashed into the back, where I hid among the sacks of flour. The bakers were busy forming thousands of plain loaves—that I would now tie into knots and coil like snakes. But I had forgotten that I had been scorched and singed in the explosion, and that my clothing was shredded into tatters. Although no one on the streets seemed to notice or care, I looked like a blackened satyr, or, better yet, a roast lamb. My hair was curled, singed, and bronzed. My eyes glowed from my face.

Those fat little bakers, all ten of them, froze and then trembled when I jumped out from behind the sacks of flour. Some were standing with their hands in dough. They did not move. Some had just pulled their wooden pallets from the ovens. They did not move. Some were bent over. They did not move. When I started to sing my Caucasian songs (which were good, but rather squeaky) and prance about for added drama, they took me for the Devil. Because they were
Galizianers,
they had never heard of singing to bread, since
Galizianers
do not bake like Litvaks (and do not sculpt their bagels).

I thought that they were so moved by my performance that they were transfixed. But when I finished and invited them to inspect their loaves, they stampeded toward the door. Though I called to them, they were gone like a shot. Being an experienced baker’s helper, I set out to remove the newly twisted loaves from the ovens before they burned. I had to do the work of ten, so I rushed around like a madman, always with hot bread in my arms. Never had I worked with such speed, and the hot
hallah
pressing against my chest made my heart want to go to sleep.

Finishing up in a sweat, I sank down on a sack of flour, and slept. A short time later I awoke to find myself within a tight circle of a hundred rabbis, all davening with Torahs held aloft behind them or in their arms. A hundred rabbis together in one place—what an experience! I jumped up in surprise and nearly made them faint, but they kept at it. With so many rabbis about, my first impulse was to ask a question.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“You should know,” answered the Chief Rabbi. “You came from Hell to corrupt the bread of the bakers.”

“I did not. I came from Brooklyn. [‘What’s the difference?’ screamed someone in the back, before he was ejected], looking for a job.”

They all looked at one another. “From Brooklyn,” they cried with lamentatious wails, thinking that they would have to move their palaces and congregations to another borough. “Not Brooklyn!”

I soon convinced them that I was not the Devil, but the bakers would have nothing to do with me, and I was quickly out on the street again, still without a job.

It was not so easy. The Lower East Side was not only a place of wonder, but a confusion, an anarchy, a chaos of whitened sound. Walking from street to street, I felt as if I were being carried inside a breaking wave. It was cold, and the light and motion overwhelmed me in much the same way that I had been overwhelmed by Elise’s coloring, for things that are bright and deep quickly become my masters and mistresses, and lead me into dreams.

I was standing on Essex Street, warming my hands by a fire in a trash barrel, when a man tapped my arm. I thought he wanted to get closer to the fire. But, no, he waddled up with a proposition. “My name is Barvaz Gadol,” he said in Yiddish. “I’m the foreman of a sewing loft. This morning, two of our tailors resumed a fight that had started in Odessa many years before. Each asked that I dismiss the other. I begged them to forget the quarrel and go back to work. But they were adamant. The other was at fault.
He
had to go. So I fired them both. I was afraid that they would stab one another with scissors—our scissors are like swords, because we make heavy coats. You look to me like a tailor. Is that so?”

Naturally, I answered in the affirmative. And, since I had never held a needle in my hand, I upped the stakes. “My specialty,” I said, “is heavy material—greatcoats, Alexanders, winter capes, Bornholm hunting frocks, underwear for polar explorers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You see these strong hands?” I held out my hands.

He peered at them. “They don’t look so strong to me. How long has it been since you’ve worked? And how did you get so sooty and shredded? Bornholm hunting frocks?”

“I was in a small explosion—nothing to worry about. The last time I worked as a tailor was before I came to America. I have been staying with the Saromskers.”

“The Saromskers! Do you read the holy books?”

“Of course.” That, at least, was partially true.

“Then come work for me,” he said. “I’ll give you a new suit of clothes and a ticket to the baths. You’ll be paid well, and you’ll have time to study.”

I guessed from this that he was desperate for a skilled tailor. “How much time, and when?”

“As much time as you want, whenever you want. I am a religious man.”

He did give me a ticket to the baths (they were the perfect union of Rome and Jerusalem, because they were half full of Italians and half full of Jews), and when I had finished bathing he arrived with a new gray suit. I was shaved, bathed, well tailored, and warm. And though I was not a tailor, I was too tired to care.

In the sewing loft, a hundred tailors worked machines and sewed with silver needles, stitching sleeves and binding furs, and singing softly to themselves the quiet Eastern songs that Jewish tailors sometimes sing. Fox pelts were hung from beams, in long, brown, glistening rows between bolts of English cloth and cutting tables where shining steel met fragrant gabardine. I was taken to a bench, as everyone looked up, and tools that I had never seen were put into my hands, as if to mark the reunion of old friends. Barvaz told me what to do. I nodded as if I had understood, and he left. I had sewing implements and pieces of cut cloth: how I was to construct a winter coat out of these things was a considerable mystery.