The Belief in Angels (7 page)

That day they began their long travels to Turkey and to the eventual sailing to America. They are going to make a new life for us. My
foter
promised to send for us as soon as he could.

Every night, for weeks, we spent the evenings helping to pack. This involved much more laughing, singing, and making fun of my
foter
’s terrible dancing than actual work. The day before, we had finished the last of the apple harvesting from our orchards. It had been a good year for fruit. First the cherries in the spring, and now the apples. We made more money in the markets these two past seasons than in the years before—the years of the famine.

Since they are leaving before the Rosh Hashana holiday, my
foter
said we should say the religious poems, the
piyyuttim,
together.
Mater,
Reizel and the twins made a feast of food—apples dipped in honey,
rodanchas,
potato
latkes,
and delicious challah bread, finished with a delicious
Lekach
cake with cinnamon and raisins. This I remember as the first time my belly felt full in nearly two years.

The three youngest children—including Idessa, still a baby of five months—would leave on the journey with my parents. I am to take charge of my two younger brothers; Ruchel and Sura would help with their care. Reizel and Berl would take charge of all of us. My
foter,
Abram, like most of the people in our village, spoke Yiddish, Polish, bits of Russian, German, and Ukranian. He helped to teach us all to speak these languages. You never knew who you might need to speak with. Knowing other languages could save your life.

My
foter,
a good-natured man and a hard worker, is also a dreamer. When he married my
mater,
his in-laws, my
Bubbe
and
Zayde,
gave him their orchards as a dowry. It is a good gift, but he never found happiness with his life as a farmer, and he dreamed of life as a wealthy man.

Meantime, the wars brought sorrow to our village. We lived in perpetual fear of arrest. Every day our enemies changed: the Bolsheviks, the anarchists, the White Russians, or the Poles.

The most recent local violence had been at the hands of the Cossacks. Budionny’s 1st Army destroyed the bridges in Zhytomyr, wrecked the train station, and burned buildings, including the synagogue in our village.

No one knew what could happen to us.

These are the times of the pogroms. All around us in other parts of Russia, now called the USSR, we heard of whole villages of Jews being rounded up and marched out, homes burned or taken over by armies. This had been happening for years and years.

My
foter’s
boyhood friend, Mendel, traveled to America—to New York City—
and sent occasional letters filled with extravagant stories of American prosperity and opportunity. Mendel’s family had already joined him in New York.

My
foter,
Abram, decided he should go to America and live the good life as well. He wrote to Mendel and announced he is coming. Mendel wrote back and told him he planned to move to Brooklyn, that he’d found a bigger apartment. He wrote that Abram should come and live with them, but he couldn’t take all of us at once. My family, even in our village, where families are huge, is one of the largest.

And so, my
foter,
without waiting for an exact address—how big could the village of Brooklyn be?—would pack up himself, my
mater,
and the youngest children and begin the journey toward the paradise called America.

He’d decided a year earlier that my twin sisters—fourteen at the time—could go to America as servants to a rich American family. He saw advertisements in the Kiev market for such things. They advertised outrageous wages for young girls. This would provide passage for all of us at the same time. But, when Ruchel failed to recover fully from the typhus and Sura refused to go without her, he softened and decided to wait until he arrived in America and could secure a spot for them himself.

Knowing what I know now about those advertisements for young girls from small Ukranian villages, it would have been a bad gamble. But considering the alternative nightmare they endured, perhaps the odds would not have been as bad.

I remember being amazed he convinced my
mater
to leave her children and the farm she had grown up on and embark on this journey.
Mater
had always been the practical one.

Before they left, my
foter
walked me out to the apple orchard and spoke to me about his plan to go to America. I remember the sunrise that morning. The flaming orange and blood red reflections on the orchard leaves made them glow like lanterns.

“Why,
Foter?
Why do you have to go?” I scowled and dug my toe into a mound of leafy dirt.

“Once we are in America, we will have many opportunities. This family will be healthy and prosperous. We will find a good doctor to help your sister Ruchel. We will send for everyone to come and live with us.”

“I should go with you and find a job in America. I can work and help save money for everyone to come. Reizel and Berl can take care of the children.” I had become a Bar Mitzvah that year. I considered myself a man.

“Your
mater
and I need you to take care of your brothers, Szaja. Reizel and Berl will be busy with the farm and the girls. You need to make sure they stay out of trouble. You’re a man now, yes. I need you to be a
schtark
man and keep the family
safe. No matter what happens, Szaja, don’t let anything separate the family further. Protect your brothers and your sisters. Now
Bubbe
and
Zayde
have gone, we are all the family we have on this earth.
Iberkumen”

Iberkumen.
Survive. Yes. This is most important. Abram’s parents had died long ago, and he had been the sole surviving child, all the rest taken to their deaths by disease or war.

My
mater,
Tailia, had two sisters, much older, who had moved away with their respective husbands long ago and not been heard from in years. They had, no doubt, been buried by hard times of their own.

My
mater,
ever loyal, stayed with her parents, even marrying a man who agreed to work their orchards. She bore seventeen children after marrying Abram at fourteen. She lost nearly half the children she carried to disease and famine. We had recently lost my
Grandmater
Chava, and my brother, Gershon, to typhus. Gershon, two years older than me, had been my best friend and ally.

Losing him, for me, is a terrible grief, but to my
foter
it had been devastation. Gershon, as his eldest son, had been the one he’d pinned his hopes of a better life upon. When he died, my
foter
died a bit as well. I think this is why, when he began to talk of leaving for America, my
mater
agreed. This is the first light we had seen shining from my
foter
’s eyes in over a year.

Survival, I think, is some part of our genetic path. We are directed by our blood. Our ancestors survived countless trials and we are coming through a difficult period of poverty and hunger. If I tell the truth of what the world is like in that time, Chavalah, you may not believe. None of your history books will tell you this story.

Under the Soviet Communist regime, we suffered a famine that, contrary to what the history books say, is not solely caused by drought and crop failures. The famine had been concentrated in the provinces of Southern Ukraine, and this area is known for its abundant grain crops. More people lived there when I am a boy than all the people in China right now, but between the fall of 1921 and the spring of 1923 over a quarter of these people died of starvation and disease.

This is an abomination. Saving this population would not have been difficult. During the two years of the famine, the Bolshevik government stole from us many times the amount of grain it could have taken to end the crisis.

I hated the Bolsheviks.

You see, most of the confiscated grain got shipped abroad: the first year to Russia, the second to Russia and the West. The Ukraine is also ordered to send additional famine relief to the Volga and to feed over two million people who came
from Russia as refugees, soldiers, and administrators. Our own area had been badly affected, but not to the extent the southern regions suffered.

Where we lived, Chavalah, in the north, there are many orchards. Fruits, which ripened and grew rotten in a relatively short time, are not required as a part of the government shipments to other countries. We are obliged, however, to give up a portion of the harvest, as well as a taxed percentage of profit from our sales. Remember, we had no refrigeration. Our transportation—a cart driven by our horse, Pavolyah. We sold the fruit from our orchards, mainly cherries and apples, in the local markets and sometimes as far away as Zhytomyr. During those hard years, we grew a small crop of potatoes, which we hid in a tiny section of the orchard. Survival became possible by using our own fruit and vegetables, eggs and meat from occasional chickens, and the meager supplies we bartered for with our neighbors. Many others are not as fortunate. Families are broken. Orphans wandered the countryside trying to find food and work.

Berl, Reizel’s husband, came to us from the south, through the famine. One day, late in the winter, he appeared in the orchard like a starving ghost and asked my
foter
for work.

A boy of sixteen, he is lame, many of his toes lost to frostbite.

My
foter
eyeballed him and shook his head. “
Oy vey,
Tailia, what am I going to do with a lame cherry picker?”

“Put him on the tallest ladder under the ripest, fullest limbs. He will be a good worker,” my
mater
pronounced. She could see already he’d be a loyal husband to Reizel. As we are giving him his life with the work, my parents didn’t have to provide a dowry, an impossibility at the time.

Berl is hard worker, despite his disability, and also a kind husband to Reizel. Reizel never complained about the match, but I know she felt unhappy. She is smart and had dreamed of leaving the orchards to go to university somewhere where they allowed girls to study. As the eldest girl, however, she is caretaker to all the other children.

Reizel is the one who mothered me. By the time I came, my
mater
is busy working in the orchards, cutting, stringing, drying, and storing the apples and preserving and storing the other fruit and vegetables we grew. Although Yiddish and Russian are our spoken languages, Reizel helped my
foter
to teach us all to read and write Hebrew, Ukranian, Polish, Russian, and German. Berl taught us the English he’d learned. We would be ready for America.

Oizer is eleven. He is the second—still-living—son in our family and he is smart with money. He figured out a way to gain our market baskets for free by secretly exchanging our produce with the market women from Kiev. Fruit baskets
are our main expense, and Oizer saved us such a great deal with this barter that my
foter
is able to buy tickets, papers, and supplies for their trip within the year.

We never told the Bolsheviks we didn’t buy our baskets anymore. For what did they have to know? They’d make us pay more taxes.