III
IMPRISONED
A.
Our friend Pinni really hates Ellis Island. He’s ready to write a poem about it or fight with my brother Elyahu, but he keeps his anger to himself. Pinni doesn’t want the Heissen tailor to know that he, Pinni, is dissatisfied with America. He keeps quiet, but inside he’s boiling. “How can they take people and lock them up like cattle, like prisoners, like criminals!” he complains quietly to my brother Elyahu after they’ve brought us here.
The Heissen tailor was right. Oh, he exaggerated a bit — he said they’d lock us up in prison cells. Actually they led us into a large, brightly lit hall and give us free food and drink. They seemed like good, kind people, so what’s the problem? Then we finally reach the hall — oh my! We have to walk single file across a long bridge. At every step we’re greeted by a new nuisance of an official who considers, scrutinizes, and prods us.
The first thing they do is to turn our eyelids inside out with a white card to examine our eyes. Then they examine our arms and legs. Each examiner leaves a chalk mark on us and directs us where to go next, left or right. Then we enter the great hall I told you about. Only then can we look for one another. Until then we’ve been confused and separated. We’re as frightened as calves led to the slaughter.
B.
What do you think we’re so afraid of? Our fear is about my mother’s eyes. What will happen when they see her red, weepy eyes? But it turns out her eyes are examined less than anyone else’s.
“You can thank your father for this, may he have a blessed paradise!” My mother embraces us all and weeps tears of joy. She doesn’t know what to do with so much happiness. My brother Elyahu too becomes another person. Usually when we’re upset and rushing around, he takes it all out on me. His slaps fly right and left, and Bruche helps him out with a curse. But now it’s as if he’s grown a new skin. He pulls from his pocket an orange left over from the ship and hands it to me. On the Prince Albert they distributed an orange every day. Whoever wanted one ate it, and whoever didn’t hid it in his pocket. I never hid mine. How can you see this fruit and not eat it up?
But Pinni expresses his delight the best. He says to us: “Nu? Who’s the smart one, I or you? Didn’t I say that our enemies told lies about America, that they wouldn’t let in people with weepy eyes? They’re idlers, liars, gossips, bad-mouthers! They’ll soon be saying that America will force us to convert. Where is that Heissen tailor, a curse on his father’s bones?”
Our Pinni has made peace with America.
C.
In all the excitement one of our company goes missing — my friend Mendl. Bruche notices it first. She gasps and claps her hands together: “Oh my God, where’s that Colt?”
“I can’t believe it!” says my mother, and we all go looking for Mendl. He’s gone, as if he’s been swallowed up.
It turns out he got himself into a mess. During the examination he got confused. First he pretended to be mute, as he had in Germany. Then he spoke, but in crazy nonsense. He said he was ten years old, and then he said he was already a bar mitzvah and was putting on tefillin. Finally he told the officials the whole story — that at the German border his parents had somehow lost him and we had befriended him. He didn’t know his parents’ address or the name of the city they lived in. If he did know, he wouldn’t need anyone’s help finding them, he’d do it himself. So they placed him, along with some others, in a separate room to be sent back later.
D.
When we hear this story, we all come to the defense of the unfortunate Mendl. My mother makes a fuss. She’ll have to explain things to his parents if she ever meets them, she knows.
“Wait a second, you aren’t even out of the woods yourselves,” the Heissen tailor tells her.
“Haman is heard from!” Pinni looks angrily at the tailor, ready to grab him by the throat.
The tailor acts dumb and goes on lecturing as if he had been asked, really piling it on. He lists all the problems and woes that we have yet to endure. First, he says, they’ll take the addresses of our friends or relatives. Then they’ll take money to send them a telegram. We’ll have to wait until someone comes. And only when someone says he knows us, and can promise that we’ll be good and devoted to God and mankind, will they release us from confinement.
As you can well imagine, our friend Pinni flares up like a match. He looks at my brother Elyahu, but he’s really speaking to the tailor. How does he know so much about the laws of Ellis Island? he asks him. The tailor tells him he made the acquaintance of another emigrant on the ship, a man who had traveled back and forth three times. He must be speaking of the old sea dog. From him the tailor learned about all the rules and regulations — and many more things about America, so many that he felt he was an American already. He even knew how to speak the American language — for example: chicken, kitchen, sugar, mister, butcher, bridge. What those words meant he wouldn’t say.
“When we get there,” Pinni says, “we’ll find out for ourselves what they mean.” He dismisses the tailor with a wave of the hand and steps aside, as if to say, You might as well listen to a dog bark.
E.
Don’t you think it happens exactly as the Heissen tailor predicted? Not a hair’s difference! Once we’ve passed through the seven stages of hell administered by the doctors, they ask us who we have in America. My mother steps forward. “Better ask who we don’t have here,” she says, and gets ready to name all our friends and relatives. It’s a pleasure to look at her now that they’ve let her through with her weepy eyes. She’s no longer a young woman, but she’s still charming. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen my mother glow as she does now.
But my brother Elyahu won’t let her speak — the addresses, he says, are written on a piece of paper. Then Pinni interrupts and says they’re asking for names, not addresses. Bruche cuts him off, saying that for all intents and purposes Pinni has no one in America. All the friends and relatives are ours. Pinni gets exasperated. “How are Fat Pessi and her husband Moishe the bookbinder more your friends than mine?” he says. Bruche says Pessi can go to hell — when she speaks of relatives, she means her father Yoneh the baker. Maybe my brother Elyahu is right — they aren’t asking about friends but about relatives. And a to-do begins about their addresses.
F.
For reading the list of their addresses aloud, understandably, Pinni is the most qualified of us all. He takes the paper from my brother Elyahu, brings it up close to the tip of his nose, and reads the addresses with the same singsong that you use at wedding ceremonies. But no one understands what he’s saying. Every word comes out wrong. My brother Elyahu tears the paper with the addresses from his hands and gives it to an official.
The official says two words: “All right.”
We don’t know what that means. The Heissen tailor says he knows what it means. Those two words, when spoken together, he says, mean that things will go as we wish.
Then the officials collect our coins and send off two telegrams, one to Moishe the bookbinder and his wife Fat Pessi, the other to Yoneh the baker. In the meantime we treat ourselves to a meal. It isn’t that good. The little bit of tea they serve, Bruche says, you could cut with a knife. But the meal doesn’t cost us anything. On Ellis Island everything is free. Having satisfied our hunger, we settle in to wait for our friends and families.