… And thoughts stir bravely in my head, and
rhymes
Run forth to meet them on light feet, and fingers
Reach for the pen …
—
Pushkin
October 1, 1920
Entering New York Harbor
Dear Tovah,
Today we will arrive at Ellis Island. Today I will see Mama and smell her yeasty smell. Today I will feel the tickle of Papa’s dark beard against my cheeks and see my brother Nathan’s dimpled smile and Saul’s wild curly hair. Today I will meet my brothers Asher and Isaac and Reuben.
Already I am wearing my best hat, the black velvet with the shirring and the brim of light blue. I’m hoping that with the hat, Mama will not mind my baldness. I’ve tucked Papa’s tallis into my rucksack, but Mama’s gold locket hangs around my neck.
The captain said his company notified our families and they are awaiting our arrival. I must pass a screening on the island before I can go home with Mama and Papa. Papa wrote about Ellis Island in his letters.
He wrote that at Ellis Island you are neither in nor out of America. Ellis Island is a line separating my future from my past. Until I cross that line, I am still homeless, still an immigrant. Once I leave Ellis Island, though, I will truly be in America.
Papa said in his letter that they ask many questions at Ellis Island. I must take my time and answer correctly. What’s to worry? I am good at answering questions. Even if they ask me a thousand questions, I will have Mama and Papa near me, my mama and papa.
Just one week ago, I did not think I would ever make it to America. We drifted on the sea for days, helpless, waiting for the ship to come and tow us. I assisted with the cleanup as best I could, doing work Pieter would have done if he were there.
Then, once the tow ship arrived it took so long between the securing of the ropes and the exchanges between the two ships, I thought we would never begin moving. At last, when we did, the other ship pulled us so slowly. I could swim faster to America.
In Russia, all America meant to me was excitement, adventure. Now, coming to America means
so much more. It is not simply a place you go when you run away. America is a place to begin anew.
In America, I think, life is as good as a clever girl can make it.
Very soon, Tovah, I will be in this America. I hope someday you will come, too.
P.S. As I was finishing this letter a cry went up from the deck. When I went out to see what it was, I found all the passengers gathered on one side of the ship, looking up. They were looking at Miss Liberty, Tovah, a great statue of a woman standing in the middle of the harbor. She was lifting a lamp to light the way for us.
… Give me your hand. I will return At the beginning of October …
—
Pushkin
October 2, 1920
Ellis Island
Dear Tovah,
I don’t know how to tell about what has happened. I feel numb and I can’t believe. I thought if I could tell you, maybe it would make some sense, maybe it would help.
They are holding me, detaining me on Ellis Island, at the hospital for contagious diseases. They won’t let me go to Mama and Papa. They won’t even let me see them. Tovah, I can’t go to America!
After we landed, I sat on a bench in an enormous room with hundreds of others, waiting to hear my name called.
I waited a long time. I just wanted to see Mama and Papa. I kept looking around for them, for Mama’s black hair, for Papa’s beard, but they
weren’t there. There were others with thick beards, with dark hair, but they weren’t my mama and papa. Certainly I would know my own mama and papa.
Finally a man called my name. I couldn’t understand what he said to me. I felt nervous and he spoke English so fast, much faster than the lady from the HIAS. Someone found an interpreter for me. I answered their questions, I read from a book to prove I am not a simpleton, but they kept delaying my approval.
The doctor examined me. He took off my hat, my beautiful hat. I didn’t like his taking off my hat any more than I liked the Russian guard touching my hair or the Polish doctor examining me at the border, but just as then, I had no choice.
The first doctor called over another doctor. They spoke fast. They looked at my scalp. They shook their heads. Then they called for a tall man with glasses. The nosepiece was dull with the mark of his thumbprint, so often did he shove the gold rims up on his thin nose.
“What is it?” I asked, pulling on the doctors’ sleeves, but they didn’t answer. The first doctor put a chalk mark on my shoulder and pointed me in the direction of a cage holding the detainees.
Detainees are immigrants who are not welcome in America. They remain on the island until the authorities decide what to do with them. People like
criminals and simpletons are detainees. I didn’t belong with them. I could not belong with them.
“Why are you holding me?” I cried in Yiddish. “Why have you put me with these people? I don’t belong here. I belong in America. I have come to America.”
A lady from the HIAS came over. She, too, was short, like the HIAS lady in Antwerp and the HIAS lady in Warsaw, but this one had a red bun on the top of her head.
“Shah,” she said. “Don’t make such a fuss. If you calm down, I will help you.”
She spoke with the doctor. She spoke with the man who wore the gold-rimmed glasses. I saw her face grow less and less hopeful. When she walked back to me, I could tell it was not good news.
She explained to me in Yiddish what the doctors had said. “You must be kept in the hospital for contagious diseases. It’s because of the ringworm you suffered from in Europe.”
“They cured my ringworm!” I cried.
“Mr. Fargate, the tall man with the glasses, says he must be certain the ringworm is gone before you can enter the country,” the lady from the HIAS said. “Perhaps it will only take a day or two.”
“A day or two. I must go to Mama and Papa now! My papers say the ringworm is cured!” I cried.
“Why don’t they believe my papers? Why must I wait?”
“It’s not just the ringworm that concerns them,” said the lady from the HIAS. “It’s your hair.” She stroked my cheek with the back of her hand. She had a brown wart on her chin, with red hairs growing out of it. I pulled back from her.
“My hair?” I asked. I tugged at the black velvet hat, pulling it down until it nearly covered my ears.
“The doctors worry about your hair.”
“Why should they worry over such a thing as my hair?” I asked.
“To them it is important,” the HIAS lady said. “Even though your ringworm may be gone, if your hair does not grow back, Rifka, the American government will have to view you as a social responsibility.”
“What does this mean? Social responsibility?” I asked.
“It means the American government is afraid they will have to support you for the rest of your life,” the lady from the HIAS said. “Your lack of hair makes you an undesirable immigrant. They think without hair you will never find a husband to take care of you and so
they
will have to take care of you instead.”
I couldn’t believe what she was saying.
“Some Jewish women shave their heads on purpose,” I said. “It is written into the Jewish law. To be bald is not a sin.”
The HIAS lady sighed.
“You mean the country will not let me in simply because they are afraid when I grow up no one will want to marry me?”
“That is right.”
“You don’t need hair to be a good wife, do you?” I asked. “Jewish women wear wigs all the time. I could wear a wig and still be a good wife.”
“You are a child,” the lady from the HIAS said. “It is not that simple.”
“It is that simple,” I said.
She said, “I can’t change the rules, Rifka. Either your hair grows or they will send you back.”
There it was. What chance did I have of my hair growing now? It had not grown in almost a year.
Tovah, I think maybe you were wrong after all. You said a girl must not depend on her looks, that it is better to be clever. But in America looks are more important, and if it is my looks I must rely on, I am to be sent back. How can this be?
… My path is bleak—before me stretch my
morrows:
A tossing sea, foreboding toil and sorrows.
And yet I do not wish to die, be sure;
I want to live—think, suffer, and endure …
—
Pushkin
October 7, 1920
Ellis Island
Dear Tovah,
I have been here a week now. It is not so bad a place, really. I am growing used to it. Crowds of people overfill the wards. When they first brought me here, they gave me a choice. I could sleep in a bed with another woman or by myself, in a crib. I said, “I’ll take the crib.”
My feet stuck out one end, but it was better than sleeping with someone I didn’t know. Someone who had a disease I didn’t want. Sometimes it is convenient I am small.
There are so many of us here in the hospital. After two days, I was transferred from one ward to another. In the new ward, I got my own bed.
Saul came to visit, but they sent him to the first ward and he couldn’t find me. No one could find me. So they sent Saul away.
Saul would have been the first familiar face in almost a year. I didn’t care that it was just Saul. I would love to have seen Saul, but they sent him away.
When they did find me, they put me in still another ward. Here a nurse has taken an interest in me.
Her name is Nurse Bowen. Sometimes she takes me to her room in a building on a different part of Ellis Island. We go in a little boat to get there. I help her clean her apartment. Mostly, though, I eat candy when I am there. She always has candy. It is not as good as Belgian chocolate, but still it tastes very good. I like going with her.
I make better sense of English now. I listen to the nurses and the doctors, following them on their rounds of the wards. I have been able, even, to interpret a little for the Polish and Russian patients; only simple things, but the nurses and the doctors seem pleased to have me help them.
There is a little Polish baby here. She has no
one. Her mama died of the typhus. Because I’ve already had the disease, I help take care of her. She is such a beautiful little thing, with dark eyes taking up half her face and a bald head, as bald as mine. She never fusses. I hold her and rock her and sing her Yiddish lullabies. I tell her stories and recite Pushkin to her. She reminds me a little of the baby on the train in Poland.
I have another responsibility. In the dining hall one night, a little boy sat across from me at the table. I couldn’t tell what was wrong with him, why they were keeping him in the hospital, except that he was very thin and pale, with dark circles under his eyes. I looked in those eyes and remembered something, someone, but I was too hungry to give it much thought.
They served the food. It’s not bad food, and there is so much of it. Hands went every which way, passing, dishing out, spooning in. But the little boy sat, watching it all go past him.
I helped myself to potatoes and meat and carrots and bread. The boy stared at my plate, but he took nothing for himself.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked in Yiddish. “Why don’t you eat?”
He didn’t answer.
“Eat,” I said in English.
Still no answer.
“Take something to eat,” I said in Russian.
Now he looked up at me, straight into my eyes.
“Russian you understand?” I said. “But not Yiddish?”
Then I knew. The boy was a peasant. A Russian peasant. Here, sitting before me, Tovah, was the reason we had fled our homeland. He was the reason for my being alone for so long, separated from my family. The reason I had had typhus. The reason I had lost my hair. The reason Uncle Zeb was dead and all your lives were in danger. I had him sitting in front of me in the dining hall of the hospital at Ellis Island.
I tried not to look at him. I did not want anything to do with him. But there he was, in front of me. A little Russian peasant.
He stared at his pale hands, folded in front of him at his place. Then he looked back up at me with those eyes.
I remembered then. He looked like a small version of the soldier at the train station, the one with the eyes of green ice. I didn’t want anything to do with him. Nothing.
But no one should starve to death, Tovah. Certainly not a little boy, maybe seven years old.
“Is there something wrong with you that keeps you from eating?” I asked in Russian.
He shook his head.
“If you don’t eat,” I told him, “they will send you back.”
He nodded.
“You want to go back?” I asked.
He nodded again, and this time tears filled his eyes.
“Well, just tell them you want to go back!” I cried.
If I go back, they will kill me. His father or his uncle, his cousin or his neighbor, they will make a pogrom, and they will kill me.
Crazy Russian peasant! He could stay here. He could stay here in America. There is nothing wrong with him. He could live in either place, Russia, America, and no harm would come to him. But no, he is starving himself so they will send him back.
People were eating all around us. The boy sat at his empty plate, tears rolling down his cheeks.
I hated him. I hated what he stood for.
I also hated seeing him cry. He was just a little boy.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Ilya,” he answered. His voice came out thin and high and frail.
“Ilya,” I said. “If you don’t eat anything, you will grow so weak that when they do send you back,
you will die before you reach home. You must eat a little.”
I stood up and looked for food to spoon onto his plate, but by now all the food bowls were empty.
What could I do? He was just a little boy, a hungry, frightened little boy. I lifted my plate and slid some of my own food onto his dish.
“Now eat,” I said. “Or I will be hungry for nothing.”
He put a little piece of carrot in his mouth and chewed. Then faster and faster he pushed the food in.
“Slow down,” I said. “You’ll get sick.”
He finished everything on his plate, so I gave him a little more.
Maybe it is not very clever to feel what I felt about this Russian peasant, this enemy of my people.
But Tovah, he was just a little, hungry boy. Taking care of him made me feel better than I had felt in a very long time.
Ever since then, I have a shadow. He follows me everywhere, holding on to my skirts. He sits by me when I rock the Polish baby, though I will not let him come too close. He follows me around the buildings, he sits under my elbow at mealtime, he is always under my feet.
The nurses call me the little mother. I don’t mind so much.
What do you think about your cousin taking care of a little Russian peasant? You will probably think me the most foolish of all, to befriend such a child. I know Mama will not be happy, not the way she feels about everything Russian. I must figure out a way to explain to her when she comes to visit.
Oh, Tovah, how I hope she comes to visit soon.