Inventing Memory (3 page)

Sara felt a cold knife of fear in her heart. If she took this position, would she be free to finish her dissertation, or would they find a million other tasks for her? It was true that the Council library—brimming with exactly the research information she needed—would be at her disposal, but would she find the time to use it for her
own
research? She was never very good at saying no to authority figures, and that could greatly impede her progress, but she tried to convince herself otherwise—and with a divided heart, she accepted.

That night, after she put Dove to bed, Sara couldn't get the image of that early-twentieth-century woman out of her head. Normally she was contemptuous of people who undertook a search for their roots, feeling that they were cloaking their sentimentality in history—or at least sociology. Whenever friends of hers made pilgrimages to Vilna or Prague or the East End of London, she would accuse them of tracing their "joots"—her shorthand for Jewish roots.

But a picture is capable of hypnotizing as few other artifacts can. There was something in that face—defiance mixed with an undeniable prettiness—that made Sara feel she was encountering a reflection of herself. Back in that vanished world of bowler hats, hobble skirts, sawdust saloons, tenderloin parlor houses, rattling trolley cars, horse-drawn wagons, and brand-new subways, there was a woman who might have been her twin.

What brought this Sarah to America? Did she come alone? Did shesucceed or perish? Create a dynasty or become dust in a potter's field? Where was the rest of her story? Would it somehow predict Sara's own?

2

Sarah in the Golden Land

1906

It's not as good with money as it is bad without it.

—YIDDISH PROVERB

I
t started on the boat—my American life, I mean. The boat was called
Der Goldener Stern
, its home port was Hamburg, and from the outside it looked like a floating palace, strung with lights. But within, you descended a ladderlike stair to the very bowels, past half-naked coal-dusted demons with contorted faces who shoveled black nuggets into a fiery furnace, and you discovered a stinking steerage, full of tightly packed bunk beds, the roar of ventilating fans, and the stench of seasick humanity.

I can still close my eyes and see the darkness of that hold, hear the creak of the ship's sides, and smell the monkey-house smell of poor people packed together. It has been the curse and blessing of my life to have a better smeller than other people.

"I smell, therefore I am," I used to tell my daughter, Salome, Miss Smarty-Pants, the avant-garde writer. And she would say: "Mama—you
inhale
, therefore you are…otherwise it seems like
you
stink."

"Forgive mine greenhorn accent, dollink," I'd reply. "To me it sounds fine to say: 'I smell, therefore I am.' It's a
double entendre
, nu?" And Salome would throw up her hands with exasperation and shout: "
Mama!"

"So your mother is a greenhorn—get used to it," I'd say, but really it made me mad. What else are daughters for but to make you mad?

Back to the ship: There I am in steerage with the smelly people. I escaped as often as I could, wandering the decks, gazing at the sea, sketching in my notebook everything I saw. At first my fiery auburn hair remained tucked up in my twin brother's cap, but eventually I let it down and allowed myself to be a girl again. Eventually I found my way through a passage where steerage intersected with second class, and then I stumbled upon the secret place where second class led to what they called "saloon" class. Fearlessly I opened the unlocked gates, ignoring the warning signs. After what I'd been through, no warning signs could keep me out. And on one of these walkabouts, I met a pale young man with startled blue eyes, faded brown hair parted in the middle, a stiff collar, and a flowing silk tie. I thought his face was kindly. (Later I learned it was weak.) He introduced himself as Sim Coppley.

I said, "How do," which was probably the only English phrase I dared say at the time. And then I gestured for him to sit down, and I did a pencil sketch of him right there and then. In five minutes, I had a telling likeness—I could always get a likeness—and he was amazed. I tore out the sheet of paper, curtsied, and gave him the portrait. Then I ran away.

Back in steerage, I wondered what on earth was
wrong
with me? Was I so afraid to make an American friend? Mr. Coppley seemed nice enough. Why was I so terrified? "The entire world lies on the tip of the tongue," Mama would have said. (She would, of course, have said it in Yiddish:
Af der shpits tsung ligt di ganse velt
.) For the lack of speech was the whole world lost. Was I so ashamed of my ignorance of English that all I could do was run away? Yes!

For the next two days, I searched everywhere for the blue-eyed Mr. Coppley but could not find him. Despair! Self-loathing! I reproached myself for my cowardice.

And then I saw him strolling the steerage deck, making notes in a little book, stopping to ask questions of a young woman with a child. Jealousy stung me! Mr. Coppley was speaking Yiddish with this cow! And she was preening and flirting and exposing bad teeth. Just then her baby—my rescuer!—started to howl.
Ven dos mazel kumt, shtelt im a stuhl
, Mama whispered in my ear. (When luck walks in, pull up a chair for him.) The cow was putting the baby at her breast—but not without coyly displaying it in all its fullness to the well-dressed American man.

"Beg pardon," I said, rushing over to him. "
Kum mit mir!
" And I dragged him by the arm to the edge of the deck railing, where my rival could not follow.

"
Kunst du lernen mir Englisch?
" I blurted out.
Why
I thought this man would want to teach me English I do not know, but there was something schoolmasterish about him. And in truth, I had him dead to rights. His azure eyes lit up with delight at the very suggestion.

"
Mit geschmecht!
" said Mr. Coppley. I thanked God for my good fortune and Mama for her good advice.

I realize now that Sim Coppley must have fallen in love with me on the spot. Or else it was the effect of my drawing, which had always opened doors that otherwise would have remained shut to me. Besides, Sim was attracted to the exotic and to compulsive do-gooding. He was writing a book, he said, on the "Hebrew immigration"—as he called it. I was his research text and he became my teacher. None of these encounters is by chance.
Beshert
, we say in Yiddish.

Soon I found out that Sim was the scion of a famous New York family—an "Astorbilt," as I later learned his type was styled in New York—who had found the rounds of debutante balls, dinner parties, and weekends at country cottages in the Berkshires not to his liking and had sought to use his wealth for more serious pursuits. He took me on like a cause. Later I would come to resent this, but at the time he was my benefactor, and I had nothing but pure gratitude.

He was never quite clear about what he had been doing in Europe. Trying to escape from something or someone, I thought. Why else would anyone leave the Golden Land?

Whoever gives you a language also gives you a window on the world. Sim Coppley had been taught to hide his emotions, to dissemble, to cloak his yearnings in intellectual garb. (That was no doubt why he was so attracted to me.) Much of what he taught me on the rest of that voyage had to do with filling the air with pleasantries that substituted for true communication.

"Nice weather, isn't it?" he would say in his role as pedagogue. The wind was howling and rain was spilling out of the lowering gray clouds. The anthracite North Atlantic was troubled by foaming white caps.

"
Meshuggeneh!
" I finally found the courage to call him. And then I found the words: "If rain is
nice weather
, I'm the czarina of Russia."

"Sophia," he said—for he had proposed that I change my name from Sarah to Sophia—"we are not talking about what we
seem
to be talking about. We are merely filling the air with words that link us in sociability."

"Feh!" I spat. "Who wants words if not to communicate?"

"Very good," Sim said of the sentence I had made. (I thought it was pretty good myself.) "But you cannot call people names in polite society even when you think they deserve them."

"You are
meshuggeh—
and this is hardly what I would call polite society!"

Sim laughed and laughed. I think he fell in love with me because I could always make him laugh. From then on,
meshuggeh
was his favorite Yiddish word. And he always wanted to hear me pronounce it. Of course, he pronounced it like a
goy: mee-sugar
. That made
me
laugh.

"
Meshuggeh
is…" I made a sign for scrambled brains. "Brains like eggs," I said.

"Like eggs?" Sim asked.

"Eggs
after
you break them," I said.

"Oh, Sophia," Sim said in his best schoolmasterly manner: "Civilized conversation means
never
commenting upon the mental state of your interlocutor." And we
both
laughed and laughed. Still, I understood that this was his
real
lesson, and that there was something in it that was
not
a joke.

My walks and lessons on the deck with Sim, our splendid teas in his saloon class suite…and then the return to the bowels of the ship—it was a long way to traverse, the jump of several generations attempted in one crossing. I knew this, and from time to time I felt a stab of guilt for my good fortune. Why was I alive when Yussel was dead? (A twin walks with you always like a shadow.) Why was I alive when Papa and Dovie were dead? (A dead father and a dead son weigh down the heart as if with stones.) And then I remembered what Mama had said as I was leaving: "A
mensch trakht un Got lakht
." (People struggle, God laughs.) And I resolved to banish guilt. All of life is a dance on a grave. The only way for a woman to get ahead, I realized even then, is to flaunt her talents and not to care about being too good. Being good is the curse of the female of the species. Even men get tired of good girls. And good girls get oh so tired of themselves. I would have to measure myself by a different standard than goodness. But what would it be? It was already clear that America and Russia were two different planets, not two different countries. And I wasn't even
in
America yet! Still, I could tell it was a place where clinging to the past meant being left behind.

As long as I had a charcoal in my hand and I was drawing, I did not suffer moral dilemmas. I felt that all those deaths were
beshert
, as was my own departure. The idea of destiny is always strangely comforting. "You need some luck even for
bad
luck," Mama used to say. (
Tsum shimazel darf men oych haben mazel
.)

The arrival at Ellis Island—the island of tears—was as awful as everyone has said. The nakedness, the clothes carried in a bag, the smell of disinfectant, the eye examination, the waiting, the waiting. Some people were marked with chalk on the shoulder and set aside like baggage. H meant heart trouble, F was for a suspicious rash, E signified eye trouble—and with a chalk letter on your shoulder, you had to go in a wire pen, like an animal. But I was spared. Some children became ill on the ship and came to Ellis Island only to die. Their mothers saw their little bodies wrapped in sheets and buried in the so-called Golden Land. I was glad I had buried my baby in the old country and had come unencumbered except by memories. They weighed enough.

People had died on the ship, too, and were buried at sea. One young woman tried to jump in after her dead mother. The splash of a corpse hitting the water is a splash you never forget.

The truth is, I never saw anyone kiss the ground at Ellis Island. Mostly they looked lost, confused, uncertain: maybe they should return to the troubles they knew. Some of the people who were sent back for trachoma of the eyes actually looked
relieved
. (Nobody ever talks about the people who went back.) At least they avoided the crowds of sharks and
starkes
who waited at Castle Garden for the immigrants to come ashore. Pimps, sweatshop owners, policemen, madams, all set upon the innocents.

I still laugh when I remember the salesmen with their cartons of alarm clocks! An alarm clock was the
symbol
of America—a place where the ticking of the clock was drowned out by the sound of the cash register. Or were they both the very same sound? I thought so. "Time is money" was the motto of the Golden Land. I thought this was stupid even then. Time is not money; time is priceless. I had never seen people
move
so fast in my life. You may think those old silent movies were speeded-up for fun? Not at all. People
walked
that way! America in Charlie Chaplin's time was the country of "Time is money." "The Land of Hurry-Up," we called it. The land of dollars.

Where was I? Ellis Island. So much mythology has grown up around those immigrants, because America
needed
a myth of huddled masses yearning to breathe free…. In fact, the boats were filled with all manner of humanity—swindlers and innocents, rebels and sheep, whores and virgins—and the same sort awaited them. Afterward, you could lie to your American-born children and make it appear that all the immigrants were saints. Far from it.

Sim had already been dispatched in a little boat with the other saloon class passengers. Our parting had been melancholy. Would I ever see him again? Oh, he had given me an address on Madison Avenue—as long as I lived on the Lower East Side, I thought it was pronounced
Medicine
Avenue—and urged me to contact him as soon as I was settled. (I had made it seem that the America to which I sailed was full of rich relations who would look after me—nobody likes a
schnorrer
.) But I knew I would be too shy to contact him. I had used up all my
chutzpah
on the boat. So I was not certain I would ever lay eyes on him again. Perhaps all his benevolence was just shipboard loneliness, I thought, feeling myself totally abandoned when he waved goodbye with a handkerchief from the little boat, saying, almost singing,
Sophia, Sophia
, and blowing a phantom kiss.

Who was Sophia? I wondered, not responding to the name. And then I realized it was me—the new person I would become in America.

I was sent, of course, to a relative, a huge woman with a crooked wig and many chins with as many wens, who called herself my aunt Chaya and would only ever call me greenhornish
Soora
. She was the one who rented me a slab of a bed in the cellar by the coal vault, which I shared with three other boarders. Chaya was a "sweater"—she ran a sweatshop in which newly arrived girls from Russia sewed knee pants for a few pennies a pair.

"Sleep faster, we need the pillows," goes one of Mama's favorite sayings (
Shlof gicher, me darf di kishen!
), and "Aunt" Chaya took it literally, rotating the girls who worked on different shifts in that very coal cellar and letting three beds serve for six boarders. The bedclothes always reeked of someone else's underarms or monthly blood. Bedbugs—bursting with the blood of immigrant girls—were constant companions. There were also fleas and roaches. And rats as big as lapdogs. Remembering, I shudder. I was resolved to get out of there as soon as possible.

Whose relative
was
Chaya anyway? I had only a scrap of paper with her name, but even then I wondered whether Mama could have been mistaken, for Chaya didn't treat me like a relative at all.