“Dear, darling Goldeleh, we hope you are well!
“When we think of you here in America, our little girl who has been parted from us and lives in misery among strangers, we can’t swallow our food. Day and night we weep for the bright little star that our eyes long to see …”
Excetra. Big Motl reads and Goldeleh cries and dries her tears. Fraulein Seitchik scolds us for making her cry. She tells Goldeleh she’s ruining what’s left of her eyes. Goldeleh laughs while the tears run down her cheeks and says:
“It’s the doctor and his calamine. They’re worse for my eyes than crying.”
It’s time to say good-bye to her. I promise we’ll meet again tomorrow.
“God willing,” Goldeleh says, looking like a pious old woman.
Big Motl and I go for a walk in Antwerp.
Big Motl and I have another friend. His name is Mendl. He’s stuck in Antwerp too. Not on account of his eyes, though.
Mendl lost his family in Germany. On the train crossing Germany, he says, there was nothing to eat but salt herring. He was burning with thirst and got off at a station to look for water and the train pulled out and left him without a ticket or a kopeck to his name. Since he didn’t speak the language, he pretended to be deaf and dumb. He wandered from one end of Germany to the other until he ran into a party of emigrants who felt sorry for him and took him to Antwerp. There he turned to the people from Ezrah. They’ve written America to try finding his parents.
Now Mendl is waiting for an answer and a ticket. I mean a half-fare one, since he’s not a grown-up. Actually, he’s more of one than he lets on. He’s already thirteen, though he never had a bar mitzvah. He doesn’t even own a prayer shawl or tefillin. How could a boy his age not have his own tefillin, one of the emigrants wanted to know. “I’d rather have a pair of boots,” Mendl said. That got him a dirty look. “You little brat!” the emigrant told him. “After all that’s been done for you, where do you get the cheek?” He made such a fuss that everyone chipped in and bought Mendl tefillin.
Antwerp has everything. It even has a Turkish synagogue. Don’t think that means Turks pray in it. It’s prayed in by Jews. They just do it in Turkish. Everything is so upside down you can’t understand a word. Mendl took us there. He, me, and Big Motl are thick as thieves. We roam the streets together. This is the first place we’ve been to where my mother isn’t afraid to let me go off by myself. Antwerp is different, she says. The people here are human beings, not Germans. And everyone speaks Jewish.
That’s because there are so many emigrants. What would we do without them? It’s like living in your own home. Soon we’ll even have guests. Next week, if all goes well, Yoyneh the bagel maker will arrive with his household. And Pesye and her gang are due any day now, too. Things are looking up. God willing, I’ll tell you all about it.
THE GANG’S ALL HERE
You’ve already met Pesye’s gang. The youngest, Bumpy, is my age. He’s nine, going on ten.
I like Bumpy. The best thing about him is that he’s no crybaby. You can clobber him all you want — he takes it like a sponge. He’s bullet proof! Once he tore a prayer book that Moyshe was binding. Moyshe took his cutting board and whaled into Bumpy so hard that he laid him up in bed for two whole days. It was touch-and-go if Bumpy would pull through. He wouldn’t even eat, that’s how bad it was. Pesye gave him up for dead. Moyshe was beside himself. No more Bumpy!
No more Bumpy, my eye! Don’t think that on the third day he didn’t jump out of bed and eat like a horse. They’re big eaters, Pesye’s gang. “The hungry horde,” she calls them.
Pesye’s a great lady. She’s just a little on the fat side. In fact, she has three chins. I once drew all three on some paper. Bumpy snatched it and showed it to her. Did she laugh! Elye found out and gave me one of his lickings. It’s a good thing Pesye was around. “Don’t make a big deal of it,” she said to Elye. “Boys will be boys.” That’s Pesye! I love her.
I don’t love all her hugging and kissing, though. She was all over me from the minute she arrived in Antwerp. Pesye hugs everyone, especially my mother. You would have thought it was my father come back to life, the way my mother cried when she saw Pesye. She kept it up until Elye warned her that she’d never make it past the doctor.
Everyone in Antwerp has to see the doctor. The first question you’re asked is either, “Have you been to the doctor yet?” or, “Well, what did the doctor say?” If you don’t go by yourself, you’re sent by Ezrah. Our first time there my mother began telling her whole story — how her husband was a cantor, and how he caught cold and fell ill, all the way to our stolen linen. How could we go to America without it?
Fraulein Seitchik wrote it all down. My mother was just warming up when someone asked:
“So you’re going to America?”
“Where else?” we answered. “To Yehupetz?”
“Have you been to the doctor?”
“What doctor?”
“Here’s his address. He’ll check your eyes. That’s the first order of business.”
My brother Elye heard “eyes,” looked at my mother, and turned white as a sheet.
We hurried off to the doctor. Everyone except my mother. She’d see him another time. Elye was worried about her. All that crying hadn’t done her any good.
The doctor examined our eyes, wrote something down, signed it, and put it in an envelope. We thought it was a prescription and were scared. “What’s wrong with our eyes?” we asked, but he just pointed to the door. We reckoned that meant it was time to leave and took the prescription to Ezrah. Fraulein Seitchik opened the envelope, read it, and said:
“Good news! The doctor says your eyes are fine.”
Good news was right! But what about my mother? She was crying even now. “What are you doing?” we asked. “The doctor will flunk you!”
“Don’t I know it! What do you think I’m crying for?”
So she said, my mother, putting a hot compress on her eyes. It was given her by a barber-surgeon, an ugly puss of an emigrant with weird teeth, a dandy’s gold watch chain, and a name that sounded like the looks of him: Beeber!
Beeber came to Antwerp with Pesye and Moyshe. He met them on the way and ran the border with them. They didn’t have adventures like ours. No one tried killing or robbing them. Still, they had a rough time. You should listen to some of their stories.
Were they put through the grinder in Hamburg! It could make your hair stand on end. Why, Sodom is a resort town next to Hamburg. They treat emigrants no better than convicts there. If Beeber hadn’t saved the day, they would never have gotten out of it alive. He’s a terror, Beeber is. Did he put those Germans in their place — and without knowing a word of German! But he does speak a swell Russian. I’ve heard it said he knows more Russian than Pinye.
Pinye says Beeber’s stories would be even better if they were true. He didn’t cotton to Beeber from the start. He’s even written a poem about him. When Pinye takes exception to someone, he puts it in rhyme. I can recite it for you:
Beeber the medic
Can give you a headache
By telling a story
Ten times or more. He
Swears it’s all true,
But between me and you,
Even his small talk
Is just so much tall talk!
Beeber has promised to cure my mother’s eyes. He’ll see to it, he says, that no one finds anything wrong with them. He learned the trick of treating eyes back in Russia. And he’s been in Germany and watched the doctors there. They can make the blind see, that’s how good those German doctors are.