“You think it was for nothing we came to this country? You think I would let my own daughter suffer in a factory if I thought a life in Poland or in Russia was so good?” Her open palm slapped the table. “You think I don’t wish we were millionaires that you could sit around in a fur coat or go shopping all day? You think it is easy running a household? Well, you will soon know different.”
“What is that supposed to mean, Mama? I don’t think your life is easy. I know how hard your life is here.”
“So hard here. Do I complain like you do? Compared to back home, compared to what we left, this place is Paradise. You children have no idea...”
Her mother paused, her face hard, her lips pursed together. When eventually she spoke, she switched to Yiddish, and her voice became very soft.
“When I left Kovel, I was nineteen years old...” She breathed in and out several times through her nose, opened her mouth and made a noise to begin to speak, but then closed it. Her eyes opened wide, calling to her husband for help. Sholem stopped his chewing and smiled encouragement to her.
“My parents, your bubbe and zayde, they had moved from Poland to Bechcin, in Bohemia, when they were young. They had seven children already when the pogrom came through in sixty-six. The village was devastated, and they lost their eldest child to the knife of a crazy soldier. After that, they decided to move back to Kovel. My parents decided to have another child to replace the one who was lost. But my parents still had six children. So you see, Beckeleh, I was a replacement for a dead brother.”
Rebecca leaned over to touch her mother. “Oh, Mama, I’m sure that’s not true.”
“It is true. It didn’t mean they didn’t love me, though I thought, until I got older and understood, that this was exactly what it meant. In such a village of poverty I grew up, you can’t imagine. My mother and father had potatoes, bread, and cabbage, sometimes only potatoes to eat. And we had more than most people because my older brothers and sisters worked. When I was very young I didn’t know any different, and I laughed and laughed with the other children my age. But as I got older, then I knew.
“I worked in the summertime from the age of eleven years old, bringing in six cents a day. Work in the fields, weeding, digging potatoes, planting. In the winter, I helped my mama with some sewing for a tailor. This work we had because there was nothing else. But because we all worked in the family, between us, we just had enough to eat. Most of the time. Sometimes, if one of my brothers lost work, we went hungry.”
Rebecca looked down at her empty plate, at her mother’s empty bowl. She felt a little sick.
“Your bubbe, my mother, I hardly saw her. She was up before me, baking bread and peeling the potatoes. When I came home from work, she was always in a bad mood. She spoke to my sister Rivkeh sometimes, and some to another sister, but not to me. Me, I was the baby, and another mouth to feed. And I was the last one she thought of with six older and louder children.
“We didn’t dare complain too much, because my mother wouldn’t hear of it. I remember once Rivkeh complained about her work, and my mother, whose father was a rabbi, told her a story about another rabbi who suffered from ailments known to involve great pain. He suffered without a word. When his doctor asked how he could be so strong, he said he thought of pain as the scrubbing and soaking of the soul in a strong solution. And since he thought of pain in this way, he could not do otherwise than to accept such pain with love and not grumble.”
Rebecca shook her head. “That’s crazy. Who would think like that?”
Her mother swatted her. “My mother, that’s who. This was my mother’s crazy philosophy too. Except that I would not say she accepted her pain with love. More like resignation. Once she said to a neighbour, ‘Everyone has his pack of troubles. Sure. But if everyone laid those troubles out in a row, and each person had to choose whose troubles to take, each of us would choose his or her own. At least they would be ours!’
“Your zayde, he was another story. He complained all the time. He made caps, like your papa, but he was gone a lot to other villages, peddling his wares. When I was eleven years old, your zayde went away to another village and never came back. We all said it must have been a pogrom, or an accident of some kind, but I know my mother wondered if he just ran off to a better life.
“Sometimes even now when I walk through the streets here in New York, I see someone who looks like him, and I stop in my tracks. It seems crazy, I know, but he could be here as much as he could be anywhere.”
She stopped talking for a moment. Her eyes were misty. Rebecca looked at her and said softly, “Do you really think Zayde could be alive?”
Her mother blew her nose with a handkerchief and composed herself. “Who knows?! What does it matter anyway? It was so long ago. Anyway, after he left, that’s when I started working. Until I was fourteen, I went to work without shoes. Everywhere I went it was with bare feet. In the winter, I ran from one house to another with my bare feet in the snow. Finally, at thirteen, I begged my mother for shoes. It took me six months to convince her, but at last I got my first pair.
“I wanted squeaky shoes with sugar in the soles, so they would make lots of noise like the shoes of some fancy adults in the village. But the shoes with sugar soles cost more, so I got the kind without any noise — not as good, but to me they were like gold anyway. I felt so big, wearing those shoes. My sister said they made me look like a lady.
“Because I felt big, so I started thinking like a big person. I started thinking I might soon be a woman. And within a few months of that, I was. My mama and papa, they had promised me as a baby to a boy in the village, but he got conscripted into the Russian army when I was five years old and was sent to the Turkish front. Like all the Jews who were sent to the front, he was killed, of course. If you were a Jew in the Russian army, it was a death sentence. Everyone knew that.
“So you see, Beckeleh, there I was, a child whose parents didn’t want her, whose father disappeared, and who now found herself a woman with no real marriage prospects. I’m not saying my childhood was without happiness. We did laugh and play. Maybe you would say we were too stupid to have the sense to be miserable all the time, I don’t know. But you see, kinderleh, at least I was smart enough to realize that my future was not in that Russian village.”
Her mother got up from the table and got a log for the stove. She went through to the front bedroom and made sure the window was shut tightly. Then she placed another piece of wood on the floor to hold open the door between the bedroom and the kitchen, so that the heat from the stove would reach the other rooms.
Rebecca looked at her father, and said, “Russian village? I thought you and Mama were from Poland.”
“I will explain, sweetheart,” her mother said, sitting back down at the table. “Your papa and I met in Poland, but my village was on the other side of the Russian border. What does it matter anyway? The czars rule Poland. Poland, Russia, it is all the same for the Jews. We spoke Jewish at home, and learned Russian at school. So did your father. Polish, he learned from the villagers where he grew up.
“When I met your father, at first I spoke Russian to him, because I was ashamed of my Jewish, and I was afraid I wouldn’t understand his — it was full of Polish words and expressions. Later, we taught each other the missing words from each other’s dialect and got used to the different accent.
“In those days, everyone had a story about someone who had a relative in America. In Kovel, my friend Ilana had an uncle who went to Chicago ten years before, and who wrote back about how a poor Jew could make a fortune in America. Now I realize he never actually said that he made a fortune himself, but then what were we thinking? Our lives were hunger and hardship, we were not so critical. We wanted to believe it was the Golden Land.”
“When I was eighteen years old, I told my mama that I was going to America. I had no plan, only that I would go first to Kiev, then to Krakow, and find my way from there. When I told my mama, it was the first time I saw her cry. She didn’t try to convince me not to go; she simply got up, and went to the bedroom.