Modern Girls (15 page)

“Hungry I’m not so much anymore,” Ma said.

“Me neither.”

And we turned and walked the two miles home in complete silence.

Friday, August 23

ON Friday morning I rose two hours before dawn to begin the dough for the
challah
. I pulled out the large tub—the only container big enough to handle the dough—and I placed a cake of yeast in it to proof. I needed to bake ten loaves: two for that night, two for the next day, four for the widower Rogalsky in the next building, and two to send with the committee that brought
Shabbes
foods to the newly landed immigrants in Battery Park. It was a light baking week.

As I waited for the mixture to bubble, I hauled out the flour and pulled the eggs from the icebox. The icebox. Such an unheard-of luxury back home. Keeping foods cold right in the kitchen. What miracles this new country brought. And what heartaches.

My hand went to my back, trying to ease out the soreness. My leg spasmed with each movement, but nothing could be done about that. When I was satisfied the yeast was good, I added the flour, salt, oil, and eggs and, using my arm, stirred it all together. When it held well, I tumbled the entire tub’s worth on the kitchen table and kneaded the dough. I pushed and pulled and stretched and punched. The apartment was quiet, but on the streets already I could hear the bustle of those going to work—or coming home—pushcarts being rolled out, the milk wagon making deliveries.

With each twist of the dough, I turned my problems over in my mind. Who was I to judge Dottie? Was I any better? How
many times had I snuck into the fields with Shmuel? Even now, twenty-five years later, I could practically feel Shmuel’s touch, the gentle caress of his rough hands. His fingers were coarse and callused—he was a leatherworker by trade—but when he stroked my breast, the inside of my thigh, it was as if his fingers were silk. Only luck kept me from the position Dottie was in now. Shmuel and I promised ourselves to each other, even if it meant marrying behind my father’s back. My father would never have allowed a love match. If he knew about Shmuel,
Tateh
would have beaten me with such fury, who knows if I would have survived it?

Shmuel’s soft blond hair and dark brown eyes filled me with heat, and his physical presence filled a space. But ultimately it didn’t matter: Shmuel was conscripted into the Russian army, and he never returned.

Not that I could complain. I had Ben. I loved Ben, intellectually, powerfully, but I loved Shmuel physically, passionately.

Beneath my fingers the dough took on a smooth sheen. I continued to knead, ignoring the way my body groaned. I had come to America to escape trouble. But it found me anyway. A different kind of trouble, perhaps, but trouble nonetheless. For this I made the treacherous journey across the ocean? For this I left my family, my home, and started anew in this strange land?

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.