“Pinye, for crying out loud! Who are you talking to, the stones? Come on, we’ll miss the ferry. Do you want to spend another night on Ella’s Island?”
We took our bundles and headed for the ferry.
But it wasn’t as quick as all that. You’ve probably forgotten that someone was left behind — my friend Mendl. The officials refused to release him and we weren’t going anywhere without him. My mother said she could never have a good night’s sleep in America if Mendl was sent back to be an orphan.
Our luck was running into an outfit called Hakhnoses Orkhim. That’s “Hospitality” in Jewish. It had a representative on Ella’s Island, a fine, friendly fellow we were told to see. Right away we told him about Mendl. Naturally, we were all talking at once. He made us stop and choose a single speaker.
We fought for a while and chose Brokheh. Why Brokheh? Because neither Elye nor Pinye can resist interrupting each other and my mother talks pretty well but too much. She can’t say a thing without beginning from the creation of the world: how I had a father, and how his name was Peysi, and on and on. No one could expect the Hakhnoses Orkhim man to sit through all that, and so we asked Brokheh to get to the point. As Moyshe the bookbinder likes to say: “Just sign on the dotted line.”
Brokheh told Mendl’s story in a nutshell and the man from Hakhnoses Orkhim got to work. He ran off somewhere, came back, and ran off again. It wasn’t easy, but the second time he came back with Mendl.
The man from Hakhnoses Orkhim took Mendl by the ear and gave him a talking to. “Listen here, young fellow,” he said. “We’re vouching for your good conduct. That means you’re in our custody for the next two years. We intend to keep an eye on you. Step over the line and you go back to where you came from!” He wrote down our names and those of our friends and acquaintances and all our addresses, and we were free to go where we pleased and do what we wanted.
I suppose you think that made an impression on Mendl. A lot you know him! He’s not the type to be fazed. That’s what I like about him. Today, when I think of him and all that happened and was still to happen in America, it seems like one of God’s miracles. But America is a place for the underdog. It lets the little man rise to the top. It all but brings the dead back to life.
Let’s get back to the ferry.
A ferry is a boat on which you put everything — bundles, bags, even a horse and wagon. While all of us were answering each other’s questions, Mendl and I went to have a look around. Although it took my mother a while to notice that we were missing, she made up for it when she did. She must have thought we had fallen overboard.
They found us at the top of the stairs to the upper deck, staring at a monster statue of a woman who looked like a wet nurse. There wasn’t much time to look her over, because we could already hear my mother’s screams and see Elye approaching. He was mad as hell. We would have been in bad trouble if Brokheh hadn’t gasped just then in a strange voice, “Oy, Mama, I don’t feel so good,” and run to the railing. You might have thought we were back on the Prince Albert. But leave it to the tailor from Heysen! (The man never left us for a minute.) Right away he starts lecturing Brokheh, “You should be ashamed of yourself, a big, strong woman like you! Can’t you tell a river from an ocean?”
Brokheh said she didn’t know it was a river. It looked like an ocean to her. Pinye told her you could tell by the smell. Only an ocean, he said, smelled of fish. “Who says?” asked the tailor from Heysen. “I wasn’t talking to you,” Pinye said. “I’m not going to argue with a fabric filcher.”
That brought in Moyshe the bookbinder. Moyshe had news for Pinye. We were in America now, not Russia. In America a tailor was as good as the biggest swank — maybe better. In America the tailors had a yunye. A yunye was a workers’ guild. It just wasn’t like a Russian guild at all.
“We bagel makers have a yunye too,” said Yoyneh. “Our yunye is as big as the tailors’.”
“How can you even compare the two?” Moyshe asked. In no time they were having a grand fight about which yunye was bigger. We were all pretty sick of yunyes by the time Pinye shouted:
“We’re almost in New York!”
We all looked at the city, which was getting bigger and bigger. Wow, what a place! What monster houses! They were the sizes of churches, every one. And the windows, thousands of them! If only I had pencil and paper.
Ka-boom ka-boom! Wham-bangety-bang-bang! Bang! Ring-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling! Hey hey hoo ha hey! Dddddrrrrrrrrrr! Whooooosh! Chakka-chakkachakkachakka-chakka! And ka-boom bangety-bang again! Plus the squeals of a trussed pig: oink-oink-oink-oink-oink!
Those were the sounds of our first minute in New York. Nothing, it now seemed, could have been more peaceful than a storm at sea. The real shock was dry land in America. A mob scene, a madhouse!
My mother panicked. Like a hysterical hen, she pecked and clucked and spread her wings over her chicks. “Motl!” she screamed, flapping her arms. “Mendl! Elye! Brokheh! Taybl! Where are you? This way! Over here!”
“For God’s sake, Mama,” Brokheh said. “What are you screaming for?” And Elye added: “They’ll send us back on the first boat to Europe if you don’t stop making such a fuss!”
“I’d like to see the day!” Pinye said, sticking his hands in his pockets and jamming his hat down sideways. “Every last Russky will croak before I do! Have you forgotten that God made America for poor, oppressed people like us?”
We were in the middle of a huge crowd. In another minute Pinye would have ended up on his back like in London. As it was, he got an elbow in the ribs. It gave him such a jolt that his cap went flying and was carried away by the wind. We spent so much time chasing it that we missed the stritkah. That’s what they call a tram in New York. But we didn’t have to wait long for another. We piled into it with our bundles, filling the empty seats, and off we went to the city.
“Thank God we’re rid of that leech of a tailor!” Pinye said.
“Don’t be so quick to celebrate,” Elye said. “With God’s help you’ll yet run into him in the streets of New York.”
THE STRITS OF NEW YORK
The ride through New York was pretty awful. The worst part was changing from the stritkah to the eleveydeh. That’s a stritkah that runs on a long, narrow bridge above the ground. It flies like a bullet. You’re sure you’re going to die.
You think that’s all? Wait, I’m not through. You crawl out of the eleveydeh and walk down some stairs to a cellar and get into another stritkah called a tsobvey. The tsobvey rushes through the cellar until you feel faint. Elye says tsobvey is short for tsobveydeh and calls the eleveydeh an elevey. Brokheh swears she’s never taking either again. She’d rather walk than ride through the clouds or the earth like a lunatic. “Spare me your ups and you can have your downs,” she says.
She’s a weird one, my sister-in-law. If I had my druthers, I’d ride the eleveydeh and the tsobvey all day long. So would my friend Mendl.
You would think that having been around the world, in Lemberg, Cracow, Vienna, Antwerp, and London, we would know what a tram ride was like. For sheer torture, though, there’s nothing like suffocating in a crowded New York tsobvey. You stand shoulder to shoulder, hanging on to a strap to keep from falling, and two new passengers get on for every passenger who gets off. You hang there until you’re stiff because each seat has plenty of takers — and if you do find an empty one, you end up sitting with a big black goy on either side of you, Negroes with monster lips and huge white teeth who chew their cud like cows. It took me a while to find out that that’s called tshooinkahm. It’s a kind of candy made of rubber. You have to keep chewing because you’re not allowed to swallow it and you’re not allowed to spit it out. Small boys, old men, and cripples make a living selling it.