Odessa, Odessa Page 8

  Mendel nods as he sits on the cot, removing his shoes and yarmulke, readying himself for his Shabbos snooze.

  “So many veins and lines and wrinkles,” Henya continues. “I laugh when I think of how I used to make fun of Papa when I was little. Sitting on his lap, I’d pull up the skin on his hand and watch it slowly sink, like a feather falling, like this. I thought it was so funny. He’d laugh, my papa. Look, it’s the same with me but not so funny now. Mendel, are you asleep?”

  “Yes, just squeezing my eyes a bissel,” he answers.

  “You looked so American then, hat and all, and a trimmed beard; I was afraid you would think I looked like a greenberg and be ashamed.”

  “Greenhorn,” corrects Mendel with some irritation.

  “Greenhorn, greenberg, what’s the difference?” Henya retorts, shrugging her shoulders.

  For a moment, Mendel sees the ghost of his younger wife as she tosses her head and makes that familiar gesture. He visualizes his wife as she stood at the landing gate, looking so small, weary, and foreign, holding tightly to Marya and their three other children. Then, he still nurtured fantasies of becoming the famous rabbi that his father had predicted. “I’m going to close my eyes for a bit.”

  “I’ll wake you when it’s time to light the Havdalah candle,” Henya tells him. “Last night I put a chicken stew in the oven before benching. Disha, uh, Dora says she might come if Saul gets home from work early. And don’t give me that face. You know he works on Shabbos. Anyway, we haven’t seen the kinderlach for a while. They grow up so soon.”

  Mendel removes his gray flannel slippers, with cutouts to make room for his overgrown toenails and bulging corns, lies down on the cot, and is soon softly snoring.

  New Jersey, she thinks. So far away. Hindel Hyah—Hannah—I know. It was wonderful that they lived with us those four years—crowded it was. And then when they moved to Fort Lee when Saul got the job in the laundry, I hardly saw them. Fort Lee. Strange names. And now even farther away. But the little one, Beulkah—Roberta—I don’t know her. She doesn’t know me. I don’t understand her, and she doesn’t understand me. Saul doesn’t like I should call them by their Jewish names, but I’m only talking to myself. So, I’ll just clear the table and put the oilcloth down. I wonder if there’s seltzer in the icebox. Saul likes it. And cream soda for Hannah. I guess Roberta will like soda too.

  Who knows love unless you’ve lived a lifetime together. Such a good man, not perfect, but . . . she thinks, glancing at her slumbering husband as she sets the table on the chance that Dora and her family will join them. The aroma of the baking chicken fills her nostrils.

  Henya feels great solace in these established rituals with Mendel, exchanges that bind people who have lived, loved, argued, and known each other’s every gesture and mood for so many years. They anticipate each other’s thoughts; they can, and often do, finish each other’s sentences. It is a predictable and reassuring routine that she relies on. She thinks she loves him more now than when they married.

  I’m a little tired myself, she thinks and sits down on the flowered upholstered chair, a gift from Faye when she bought her new set. She closes her eyes, and her mind drifts to the time two years after she first planted her feet on American soil. In reality, there is no such soil in her cement environment. In fact, there are no trees on her street, not even a shard of grass or a weed sprouting between the cracks of sidewalk to soften the bricks and mortar of her landscape.

  1916

  Abe is now a manly sixteen years old. Neither he nor his brothers wear the traditional beard of orthodoxy, nor do they observe the ways of their parents. Dora, at twelve and bleeding almost a year, looks quite the beautiful young American woman with high cheekbones, porcelain skin, and a thick mane of curly black hair. Her breasts are budding. Leib, who had been dubbed Lenny by the principal when Henya had first registered him for school, is ten. Everyone adores him because of his good looks, sunny disposition, and pleasing nature.

  “Look, Mrs. Kolopsky, first let me tell you something. Leib is no name for an American boy. Lenny! Now that’s a fine American name,” Mr. Steen had told her, “my brother’s name, in fact—a doctor and making good money, I might add. Respected. So if it’s good enough for him, isn’t it good enough for your boy?”

  Henya quietly acceded to the principal’s authority, unaware of the psychological harm that such a change leaves. “After all, he knows what’s best. He’s gone to a college,” she reasoned later with Mendel when he objected.

  Without the language of the land, but for a few English words, and only the Yiddish spoken in the tenement and at home, Dora, who renamed herself on her first day of school, and the newly anointed Lenny and Abe had been placed in the first grade in order to absorb their new tongue. They hated being banished to the lowest grade with the “little kids” in the gloomy basement of the school building. Dora and Lenny, because they were quick and because the schools were overcrowded with new immigrants, advanced a grade with each passing month. Not so Abe. Impatient and restless, he struggled to learn his lessons. At fourteen, he quit school. He could read with difficulty and write but learned very little else.

  “I don’t need nobody telling me nothing or sticking me with those little brats just out of diapers,” he justified to Joseph, his brother-in-law, when he asked for a job. Joe put him to work sweeping floors and doing handyman tasks at his flourishing bloomer factory.

  But now, when Marya turns seven and Henya tries, once more, to enroll her in school, she is greeted by more of Mr. Steen’s words of wisdom.

  “Mrs. Kolopsky, haven’t I always given you good advice? Dora and Lenny are doing well. Like I told you last year, take the girl home and teach her to do something useful. Show her how to make beds and clean house and maybe cook a little. She’ll be a help to you, and maybe she can make some money working as a maid. Let me say it plainly: she’s retarded, Mrs. Kolopsky, slow, mentally challenged. She’d be taking precious space from the other kids who can learn to read and write. And, by the way, have you thought about changing her name to Maryann or Muriel? It’s very important for Jews to blend in to this great American melting pot. To do that, we’ve got to give up our old-fashioned ways. Give up beards, yarmulkes, sheitels, Yiddish, and, for God’s sake, above all, old-country names.”

  Just one generation removed from immigrant status, Mr. Harold Steen, MA, formerly Herschel Bernstein, is desperate to distinguish himself from the most recent wave of immigrants, especially those from Eastern Europe. His favorite axiom is “Fit in, don’t make waves, swim with the tide, or you’ll sink with the swarming masses in the boat.”

  Working three jobs so his sons could get an education, Mr. Steen’s father, Israel Bernstein, a tailor from Germany, toiled daily as a janitor at their tenement residence, helping to defray the rent for their apartment in the bowels of the building. He took in needlework to finish after supper when the family slept, and taught Hebrew to the children at a neighborhood cheder every Friday and Sunday afternoon. Mr. Israel Bernstein, father of Harold Steen, MA, dropped dead of a heart attack the day after his youngest son graduated from City College of New York. With his life’s goal accomplished, he could now rest in peace at Baron Hirsch Jewish Cemetery on Staten Island. Like Henya, he spoke only Yiddish to his mortified sons.

  With the bits and pieces of language she has acquired over the past two years, Henya is puzzled why Mr. Steen suddenly talks about melting pots. She does, in any case, understand that he wants her to change Marya’s name and finds the words—a combination of Yiddish and a smattering of English—to make it known that she will never change this one’s name.

  “No. Marya good name. A shaynem dank, zol zein gezunt; thank you very much, she should live and be well.”

  She hurries out of the building, holding her child’s hand in her own as she blinks away hot tears of disappointment, humiliation, and fury. Her dreams for Marya’s education have evaporated, along with the vapor from Mr. Steen’s melting pot.

 
; “Smart, he may be,” she grumbles to Marya, who, with her limited audible range, hears her mother’s muffled voice. “But with all his brains, he is farbissener, an embittered fool. He should be ashamed. Just because he goes to school and gets fancy letters after his name doesn’t make him smart. My husband, without his learning, is wise. And who knows a child better than her mother? I know my Marya. The nerve of him calling you retarded. If only I had words to tell him.” Marya whimpers in pain and yanks her hand out of her mother’s viselike grip.

  The Kolopskys live in a three-and-a-half-room, street-level apartment in Brighton Beach, which boasts a direct view of the little beige stucco synagogue across the congested and noisy thoroughfare. Fifteen floors of similarly configured apartments rise above theirs, populated mostly by Jewish immigrants, with a scattering of Italians and Poles, their families, and boarders. Mendel and Henya are a couple of the more privileged tenants who share their flat with only their four children Lenny, Dora, Abe, and Marya.

  The buildings that encircle their apartment—similarly crammed with émigrés—deprive them of daylight. From her small kitchen window, neatly framed with hand-embroidered curtains, Henya is inured to the sight and smell of newspaper-wrapped garbage falling from the sky. Like bombs dropped in wartime, they explode on the sidewalk beneath her window with a thump. The hundreds of stairs it takes to reach the basement where the garbage pails are stored deter the overworked housewives from negotiating them at day’s end.

  The neighbors know better than to pass the open windows, and cross to the other side of the street, thus avoiding the anticipated onslaught. Some even open their umbrellas on sunny days for protection. Not so the unsuspecting outsiders who are often pelted by the airborne projectiles that rain down on them. At dusk, when most of their household tasks are finished, the women congregate on the stoop to witness the naive visitors’ ordeal. The kids gather on the rooftop to aid and abet these air-to-ground attacks. Often, Abe is the ringleader.

  The kitchen, which houses a small stove and icebox, the latter a recent gift from Stuart and Leon, is sparkling clean, as is the remainder of the sparsely furnished apartment. Henya, with the help of Marya, scrubs, whitewashes with lime, and polishes the walls, windows, and floors, or whatever surface can tolerate their ministrations—in part, a futile attempt to keep the bedbugs at bay.

  In the small parlor, Dora’s narrow sleeping cot fits snugly against the far wall, next to the small dining-room table, used for that purpose only on Shabbos. The table is also a gift from Faye and Joseph, after their purchase of an extravagant ten-piece set made of Philippine mahogany. Always protected by a canopy of plastic, it serves as a place for Dora and Lenny to do homework. Sometimes, it accommodates a mattress when there is an overnight guest, perhaps the brother of a neighbor’s friend or a very distant relative who arrives from Odessa unannounced. Abe, when he isn’t working and when he isn’t spending his nights carousing with his new friends from Joe’s sweatshop—cutters, basters, pressers, and trimmers—sleeps on a makeshift mattress that he places under the table on the floor close to Dora’s cot. Lenny sleeps on a thin mattress on the kitchen floor.

  Dora frequently complains to her mother about the arrangement.

  “I don’t want him sleeping right next to me anymore, Mama. At times, he scares me, especially when he smells of schnapps. Sometimes, when he thinks I’m sleeping, he puts his hands where he shouldn’t. Make him sleep somewhere else,” she implores.

  “I’ll tell him to stop, but there’s no place else for him to sleep,” Henya responds. “What should I do, send him out to sleep on the street? Maybe in the kitchen, and Lenny can sleep next to you. Now don’t tell your Papa; he’ll kill him.”

  Henya and Mendel share their cramped bedroom with Marya, who sleeps on a folding bed.

  “Just like the old country,” Mendel chides. “Still sleeping with Marya in the same room. Nothing has changed since we came from Odessa.”

  “Except we don’t do it anymore,” Henya teases. “There we always did it, even with the children nearby.” Mendel is taken aback by the brashness of his wife’s words.

  “Well, sometimes on Shabbos,” she proceeds, ignoring his slack-jawed expression, and tickles him in the ribs.

  “Where do you hear such talk?” he asks, feigning shocked perplexity.

  “I hear it on the street, sometimes from your own sons. Sometimes when I sit on the stoop to pluck my chickens, the boys play their games. Abe says the bad word, your own son. But why is it bad?” she asks coyly, knowing full well that it is not a fit topic for a lady, especially an Orthodox Jewish lady. Especially the wife of a rabbi—she still thinks of him that way. Often, she tries to get a rise from her husband as a way of connecting—a shared intimacy; it makes her feel like a real American.

  “It’s not nice and especially coming from your mouth.” After an awkward silence, Mendel counters, “But I didn’t know it still matters to you. You never said.”

  “Who has time to talk,” Henya rejoins.

  Feeling chastened and uncomfortable talking about such a delicate subject, he sulks for a while and then blurts out, “It’s a duty for a husband to give his wife pleasure. So maybe I haven’t been doing my duty. I have failed HaShem. It was better when I didn’t think you cared.”

  After several moments of quiet introspection, Mendel looks shyly at his wife and declares, “But it doesn’t work the same anymore, Henya, especially with Marya there.”

  “Don’t worry,” Henya says, trying to sooth his distress. “It’s okay; I was just teasing. We’ve done it plenty. And sometimes,” she says, with the emphasis on sometimes, “I like talking and joking better than doing.”

  Together, the couple relishes a furtive laugh that heals Mendel’s wounded pride. Henya does enjoy their infrequent moments of closeness and would welcome a bit more “dallying,” but she refuses to further humiliate her husband.

  “Ah, Mendel, Mendel. I’ve got a big mouth. Now you feel bad. And I feel bad because you feel bad. A nice place to live, enough food, no Cossacks knocking down the door.” She considers telling Mendel about what Dora told her but fears that, with his temper, he will kick Abe out, and then what would happen? He’s had a harder time than the rest of them, she thinks, not so smart or good-looking.

  “And Faye and Joe live in a fancy house in Brooklyn with their daughter,” she continues. “And now another on the way. The last time we saw her, she was wearing a fur cape. Imagine, a cape made out of fox. In Russia she’d be like the czar’s wife. Well, she is a bit, what with Joseph having over thirty people working for him. Thank God it wasn’t his place that burned down and killed all those people. The Triangle fire, Faye called it. People trapped inside a building—even children—so many jumping out windows. Such heartbreak, I can’t think about it. So, I was saying, Dora and Lenny go to school and learn English. They read and write. There’s nothing to complain about. Soon they’ll be ashamed of their greenhorn mama and papa.”

  Bored with homework and reading, writing, and arithmetic, on the one hand, and eager to meet boys, have fun, date, and join the idealized world of young adults, with money to spend on pretty clothes, Dora quits school at sixteen. No one objects. Not Mendel. Not even Henya.

  “I can read and write, I can do my sums, and I’m pretty good at that. I can even do them in my head. So I don’t need more school. I want to start living a little,” she explains to her mother, who is in awe of her daughter’s knowledge.

  “I’m going on seventeen, and I’ll be an old maid if I stay in school with all those little kids. My friends are working, and some are even keeping company with boys.”

  Her big brothers Leon and Stewart, both married, encourage their sister to go out in the world. They tell her to work, buy pretty clothes, save her money, help out Mama and Papa. “You should have a good time, meet a nice Jewish husband, and start a family. Like Faye. Look at her,” they assert.

  Dora is five foot two and barely ninety-five pounds. Now that Abe is driving a
cab and no longer employed at Joe’s place, she accepts her brother-in-law’s offer to work at his factory on the Lower East Side. Her job is to stitch elastic to the waistband of ladies’ bloomers. She falls in with the thirty-odd other sewing machine operators who toil in the noise-filled, sooty, windowless, freezing or sweltering, claustrophobic surroundings, working five and a half days a week for twelve to fourteen hours a day. Assemblyline human machines, all.

  These women, aged from thirteen to sixty-six, are hard-pressed to produce both from within, in their need to support themselves and add to the family coffers, and from without, because of the boss’s need for bigger and bigger profits. The women earn five to six dollars a week, while the men make seven to eleven, but without labor unions to protect them, and with no notion of sexual equality, they go along because that’s just the way it is. They hear of other workers, even women, disgruntled and speaking out against the injustice of their conditions and wages, but this contingent, for the time being, seem content to collect their weekly salary.

  Dora is swift and agile. Soon she outpaces her coworkers, those with many more years of experience. And although they envy her connection to the big boss, and her beauty, and begrudge the money she earns because of her larger yield, they succumb to her fun-loving ways. She makes them laugh.

  Sadie, the older woman who sits next to Dora, takes her under her strong wings and treats her like the daughter she never had. As they share their day-by-day tribulations, gossip, and family stories, Sadie tells Dora about her favorite nephew, Saul, who works as a plumbing apprentice in the city.

  “Such a nice boy, Dora. Serious. Honest. Hardworking. Good-looking too. He loves his mother, and that’s a good sign. Maybe you’d like to meet him someday? I told him about you, and he said he’d like to meet you.”

  Dora deflects Sadie’s frequent invitations to introduce them. Who needs to get serious, especially with a serious boy? she thinks. I’ve had enough serious; for now, I want fun and laughter and excitement. I want to wear pretty dresses and hats and shoes. I want to go dancing—kick up my heels.