Soon word got around that land was almost in sight. Mendl and I were the first to spread the good news that we had spied it. At first it was a yellow speck on the horizon. Then the speck grew bigger and clearer. Ships appeared in the distance. Lots and lots of them with tall, thin masts.
All our troubles were forgotten. The passengers hurried to put on their best clothes. The women made themselves up. Elye combed his beard. Brokheh and Taybl went to get their good scarves. My mother put on her silk shawl. Mendl and I had nothing to do. But there was no time anyway. We were docking in America. All eyes shone with joy. The Jews who crossed the Red Sea must have felt the same way. That’s why they started to sing.
“Hail to thee, Columbus! The Old World greets thee, O land of freedom — O blessed, golden land!”
That was Pinye’s hello to America. He even doffed his cap and made a deep bow. Being half blind, he crashed nose first into the sooty head of a sailor. It’s a lucky thing the sailor was a decent goy. He just looked at Pinye’s bloody nose, grinned, and grunted into his mustache. It must have been one swell American curse.
Suddenly there was a commotion. The steerage passengers were requested to return to their places. At first the sailors were polite. Then they weren’t. Whoever didn’t move fast enough was made to.
There we were, young and old, men, women, and children, Jews, Christians, Gypsies, and Turks, with an iron chain on the door and no air. All we could do was stare through the portholes. It was worse than being seasick. We looked at each other like prisoners. “Why now? Why us?” my friend Mendl demanded with blazing eyes.
The first- and second-class passengers were being let down a long gangway that must have had a hundred steps. But what about us? Didn’t we get off here too?
“The likes of us can be made to wait,” said a Jew, a leech of a tailor from Heysen.
As leeches go he wasn’t a bad sort, a snazzy dresser who wore fancy glasses, thought a lot of himself, and liked chewing your ear off. He liked to argue too and had already had a few fights with Pinye. It was all Elye could do to break them up. In the end the tailor had declared himself so insulted that he stopped talking to Pinye entirely. Not only had Pinye called him “Needle Pusher,” “Thread Eater,” and “Seamsterman,” he had thrown in “Fabric Filcher” too.
Now that we were behind bars, though, the tailor talked nonstop even to Pinye. Half of what he said was in Hebrew:
“Meh onu umeh khayeynu—what do folks like us count? Moshul kekheres hanishbor—we’re just so much scrap in their eyes. Except that real scrap isn’t thrown away so easily …”
Did he get it from Pinye! What kind of comparison was that? He should wash his mouth with soap, the tailor should, for talking that way about America! He really gave it to him, Pinye did. You can’t say a bad word about America when Pinye is around. Not that the tailor thought he had said anything bad. All he had said, said the tailor, was that America was a fine place but not for us. We were going nowhere fast.
That was too much for Pinye. He shouted: “What do you think they’re going to do, salt us away in a herring barrel?”
“No,” said the tailor from Heysen with a triumphant sneer. “They’re not going to salt us away. They’re going to take us to a place called Ella’s Island and pen us up there like calves until someone comes to get us out.”
Pinye didn’t let that pass in silence: “Get a load of this tailor boy! He’s a regular fountain of bad news. There’s nothing he doesn’t know. Who hasn’t heard of Ella’s Island? And who doesn’t know it’s an island and not a cattle pen?”
The hotter under the collar Pinye became, the more the tailor from Heysen feared for his life. In the end he backed off and turned away, although not before grumbling: “Well! Just imagine! You would think I had stained his best suit! Dared criticize his precious America! Pshaw! Just wait a while and you’ll see …”
IN DETENTION
You can’t blame Pinye for being so annoyed at Ella’s Island that he’s writing a poem about it while fighting all the time with Elye. Mostly, though, he keeps his disappointment with America to himself. He doesn’t want the tailor to see it. But he’s burning up inside, even if he keeps a stiff upper lip. “How can it be?” he asked Elye in a low voice when we were taken to Ella’s Island. “Where do you get off locking people up like so many criminals?” The tailor from Heysen was right.
Actually, it isn’t as bad as all that. Not only are we not in a cattle pen, we’re in a big bright building with plenty of free food and drinks. We couldn’t be treated any better.
Until we got here, though — whew! One by one we had to walk a long hallway with lots of doors on each side. At each door we were stopped by some grouch with shiny buttons who double- and triple-checked us. The first held our eyelids open with a slip of cardboard while examining our eyes. Then the others examined the rest of us. They marked us with chalk and signaled us to go right or left. When all the lefts and rights were finished we came to the big building and started to look for each other. We had gotten separated in the confusion and really were as scared as calves bound for the slaughterhouse.
Scared of what? Mainly of my mother’s eyes. They were still red from crying. Wouldn’t you know that in the end they were hardly looked at!
“That’s your blessed father helping from heaven. The light shine on him in Paradise!”
So my mother said, hugging us and crying for joy. She was so happy she didn’t know what to do with herself.
Elye acted like a new man. All the time we had been on the road, he took his worries out on me. The slaps flew like chips of wood while Brokheh cheered him on. Now he was a different person. He even gave me an orange from his pocket. Everyone on the Prince Albert was given an orange every morning. Some stuck theirs in their pockets for later. Not me. Who could resist eating it right away?
Pinye was good and proud of himself. He said:
“Well? Who was right? Didn’t I tell you all those stories about being sent back for crying were spread by America’s enemies? A bunch of fat-mouthed, lying, hot-aired, no-good bums! It wouldn’t surprise me to hear them say that all Jews in America had to be baptized. Where’s that damned tailor from Heysen?”
Pinye and America were friends again.
In all the commotion no one had noticed that one of us was missing. That was my friend Mendl. The first to realize it was Brokheh. She clapped her head and said:
“Oh my God! Where is Teeny?”
“Lord almighty!” cried my mother. We jumped up to look for him, but Mendl was nowhere to be found. He might as well have fallen overboard.
Later we learned it was his own fault. He had been tripped up in the questioning. At first he played deaf and dumb the way he had in Germany. Then he talked a lot of malarkey. One minute he said he was ten, the next thirteen, and the next he broke down and told the truth — which was that he was lost. That is, his parents had lost him in Germany and we had adopted him. He didn’t even know their address. Not that he was asking for any favors. He would find them himself. He knew what they looked like and he would recognize them.
Now Mendl was being held in a room with some other boys who would all be sent back to Europe.
As soon as we heard the news, we rallied to Mendl’s side. My mother raised a cry. The immigration officials, she said, would be responsible for making Mendl an orphan. What would they tell his parents when they met them?
“Take a deep breath,” advised the tailor from Heysen. “You’re not out of the woods yet yourselves.”