Golden Medina

true.

Chapter One

I am what I am, but I was what I was. I will be nothing on earth. Who knows where God will take me after? When I look at the white foam they make for a ceiling in this home not my home, it looks like worms crawling, ready to drop on my blanket. Sometimes I see God up there, so help me. Why he should want to come out of the worms, I don’t know, but they push Jesus on me so much in this place and his hair hangs too straight and his beard needs a washing and his eyes should be brown, not blue, so he’s not my Messiah, my Hashem who talked to me when I was screaming with each child, six times, and when I was dying in the automobile accident and all the tsorris, the tortures in my life, when I was yelling help. Now I say, who cares? If nobody cares, nobody cares. Why do we live in the first place? Because Momma and Pa lived and Bobbeh and Zaydeh, and back and back to the beginning, to Ahdam and Chava. When we know what happened, then we care. My children and their children should know who I was, and I should know, also. Who was I? What I remember. But I remember only when I talk or put words in my head. When the words can’t come anymore, I will be nothing on earth.

My life in Russia, I wrote already, in Yiddish and my son, Jackie, he made it in English. I sat with him and explained what it was and then he made it up like I was talking, but he put in more, what he remembered in all the years I talked with my sister Sophie at the kitchen table. My children, my grandchildren, from Yiddish, what do they know? I talked to them in Mommeh Loshen and they answered back in English, so on both sides we learned mixed up. Another hundred years, what will be? Another hundred years, how many Jews will be left in America?

Now I got to let it out, what I didn’t say to Jackie, my life after I left my town in Russia, my David-Gorodok, to go to America. I got to save myself, what I was. Please God, let me live to finish.

How did it happen? Like living, it happened. On the day the Cossacks came again—let onions grow in their belly buttons!—I went early in the morning with my sister Chaya to our lesson to read. We saved up sugar cubes to take to Tante Frumeh and she taught us, a good change. We jumped, Chaya and me, splash to splash, the cold rain in the fall morning, our shoes in one hand, handkerchiefs of sugar cubes in the other one, the puddles pinching our toes underneath the thin mirrors of ice, like a prickling when we walked in the woods outside our shtetl, David-Gorodok—ah, bigger than a shtetl, almost a town already, almost coming up to Luminets and Minsk with patches of trees, woods, along the river by the necks of wheat stubbles, that the scythes didn’t reach. I hoped the muzhik chazzerei, the peasant boys, wouldn’t come in our way to make bad noises with their fists in their armpits or to sing Jewbird, Jewbird, whistle through your nose, or to call out, Lay me down to sleep and I’ll lay you like a chicken in the coop, my dear! Chaya and I ran all the way, almost to the fields past the brown and grey houses with heads of straw, all like old people benching, praying.

Finally, we came to Tante Frumeh’s front door. She was an aunt to everyone but not to anyone. I loved to visit her, to have the lessons in reading and writing Yiddish she gave for payment of sugar cubes, yes, but also for the books and newspapers and photographs of scowling rabbis on the walls and for the use of the Singer sewing machine; I could pump the treadle that put the needle in a blur. I even made Chaya’s wedding dress here.

I don’t know why I’m giving up sugar for my tea, Chaya said. When I’m married, am I going to be reading books?

You love the romances, I said. How could you live without them?

"Oh, you’re the one who believes in all that kasha, that mush."

"Kasha makes you strong."

Or gives you a bellyache.

Tante Frumeh was waiting in the doorway, her black wig almost falling off, her hands up as if she were surprised, her face as wide as a Russian’s, like her smile. My darlings! she said. I thought today you wouldn’t come, such a tumult in your house.

Maybe it’s Chaya’s last chance, I said, a joke. Who knows what her husband will allow?

He will allow what you will allow him to allow, Tante Frumeh said. When my husband, may he rest in peace, taught me, he said it was a gift to himself that I should read and write.

Everything was doilies, even the window frames white against the brown boards. Inside, lace curtains hung like a stage scene I saw when I sewed buttonholes for Uncle Jacob in Minsk: white lace held apart by blue bands, a piece of gauze over a picture of Rabbi Triebwasser, Tante Frumeh’s husband, a white beard around his chin, and a photograph from a newspaper of the Czar, may he suffer a pogrom himself—Tante Frumeh put him on the wall: who knew?—maybe when the Cossacks saw him there they wouldn’t harm her. Another thicker cloth draped across a door, a narrow but long table beneath it with lace on top, all touching, a crowd of lace in the tiny room, the walls in blue plaster, the smell of clay. At one side lay a thin bed, a lace cover over it; on the other side, a small oven, tile on top, twigs there to burn. The windows couldn’t open so even on the cool day it was hot inside.

Tante Frumeh taught us from a book of stories by Sholem Aleichem, her thick first finger under each word we’d seen before, many times, and I never got tired of, especially the scenes from his childhood, The Great Fair, and especially for the places of dreaming, where he’s in the synagogue and has the honor to carry the Torah and, when he comes to the cantor’s daughter, he’s astonished and bewildered—instead of kissing the Scroll, she had kissed his hand. He almost drops the Scroll—he wanted to pause, to look again into her eyes. When he gives up the Torah, he glances back. But she was no longer there. The kiss on his hand remains and, As he left the synagogue, he felt that he had wings; he was flying—Angels were flying with him. He also had to run to America to be free. The Czar drove the Jews there even though he didn’t know who we were—just Jews, the boys he put into the army for 30 years to change them to Christians. They would die first. My oldest brother, Velvel, cut off a finger so they wouldn’t take him, but they would, so he ran away to America with Louie and Abe and Jake. They went in a wagon as if it carried them the whole way, and they wrote about the ship and the railroad trains and the one that took them from New York to Detroit, how agents kept the money and flew away and didn’t come back.

Angels flying—Tante Frumeh’s brown-and-white cat leaped upon the table, its paws over the text. Oy! the Tante said. She swept up the cat, limp like a wet rag, still purring on the way to the floor. "Kayne-ahora, it means nothing—nothing! too loud. Wait, wait, we’ll see what we’ll see. Going to a shelf with stiff, white lace on it, she fumbled at a pile of cards and brought them as if they were burning to the table. She searched until she found a red queen and placed it slowly in the middle of a doily there. From the top of the pile, she took a card and placed it, a black clover with a five, next to the queen. Money, she said. Then, another, this time a black shovel with a seven. Who can tell? It comes, it goes. Again, now a red diamond with a three. She smiled and tapped her crooked, sharp-pointed first finger on it. The wedding comes in not-one, not-two, not-three days, not saying the numbers, Satan couldn’t use them to claim their souls. She kept laying the cards in a circle around the queen, each a promise or a warning. The tenth one down was a black soldier. Oy, oy, pressing her palm to her chest, pray to God He should give you naches, good luck and blessings on your head. Go. Run! Jump over the puddles not-one time but not-three times and you should spit, also, ptoo, ptoo, ptoo so the evil spirits and witches will hide from you. Hurry! It’s a life or a death! Tears coming fast. When we turned to the door, she cried, Oy! Wait! She thrust the pack of cards into my hand. You’ll lay out, you’ll see."

How can I lay out? I said. I don’t know from one to the other.

When you’ll lay, you’ll know. It will come to you. I see it in your eyes. What did she see?

We ran home as if the winner would get everything—I won, the way I always did, so fast I was, laughing and dancing for victory, for the dreams that were going to come true for me. What was I, sixteen, seventeen? Momma told me I was born in the time of the big snow on Simhat Torah, but what year? When? Who knew? In her shtetl, David-Gorodok, I waited for life to begin, for my breath to run out of me when I would see him on his white horse—who? The Right One. That night, in bed, I couldn’t get to sleep, not because tomorrow was Chaya’s wedding but because death might come instead, and on a black horse. I bit the edge of her pillow that Mommeh made from goose feathers: oh, God, would I miss everthing? The Talmud says, or maybe the Mishnah—who can remember?—that we are here as in a hotel, and when we die we come home. Would I marry a life then, like the one, I already had, another unpainted wooden, swollen frame with cracking seams and a roof of straw? Pa couldn’t afford to fix what the law would not allow him to own: like the other Jews in David-Gorodok, he bought the property through the Polish farmer who promised to keep it a secret, a threat. Ah, so many fears—wake up! I called to myself in my sleep. How many times would I die before I died? Pa said death does not knock on the door, but it did.

When muzhiks used to throw pebbles at me on the street and shouted, Christ-killer! I ran home and cried to Mommeh, Why do they call me Christ-killer? I didn’t even know him. When the Cossacks came like a storm, they yelled, Christ-killers!

Who was to blame? Pa said the boys, the Cossacks, the Czar himself, should all blame the chickens. Why the chickens? Why the Jews? he said, his old joke. Like a little Moses with pink cheeks, a nose to be a nose, his beard as red as his face when he got mad over nothing.

Life is one pain after another. When you get old, it’s patch, patch, patch. When my period scared me with blood and Mommeh took me to the mikvah, the holy bath to make me clean, the old ballebosseh cut my finger and toe nails to bleeding and dipped me into the cold water like a piece of meat to make kosher. After, at home, Mommeh had rubbed butter on them. So you are a woman, she said. Two years later, time for Chaya’s wedding. I was glad for her, so it wouldn’t be for me—I didn’t see my white horse yet. Mommeh opened the shutters, the eyes of the windows to the sun, and bent over me in bed like a cloud to kiss, a schmock, soft, wet on my cheek. Wake up, she said. She pulled off the perineh, the goose-down quilt she made herself, famous in the shtetl for her covers and blankets and pillows—everybody came to buy.

Who was with me in the bed? Sarah and Rebecca so Chaya could have one night by herself before she would be there with Shlomo—a beard like a goat, eyes like stones, like a rabbit he jumped. What could she do? She said yes to the choice, the old lady, the matchmaker, made.

Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning for the wedding, the whole family cleaning—the girls. The boys? The boys didn’t clean. I scrubbed and wiped and polished—you could eat off the floor, Mommeh said—but who wanted to eat off the floor? Later in the morning, I carried a pail with dirty water to throw on the ground and I saw at the end of the street—dirt and mud—a feather floating in the sunlight. The feather changed into a curl of hair lifting in the wind, and into dust under hooves. A rider on a white horse. Oy, not the right one. Cossacks came on their black horses behind him—may they all grow onions in their bellybuttons. May all their teeth fall out except one and it should ache them in the afterlife. Ah, I gave them the worst curse: may someone name a newborn child after them and soon (you don’t name a child after a living person because that robs him of his soul. Jews have no Juniors). I couldn’t tell where the horses separated from the riders, their bodies growing from the wet, black muscles, and their arms sticking out long, silver at the tips—swords waving. Mouths looked as wide as wells to me, shouts of blood spraying from them and screams from men and women and children on the streets and from inside the houses. Mommeh ran out, flour in spots on her big apron, and she yelled for her children, thirteen of them, name by name, the whole list, even the sons in America, and she ended with Pearl, Leah, Sarah, Genesha, Meyer, Chaya, Itkeh! And for Pa, Zaidel! Zaidel! Little grandfather they called him because he was like a Zaidel. Where was he? In the barn.

To Sarah, the youngest, and to me, Mommeh said, You’re sick with the scarlet fever. Don’t say a word. Do you hear me? Yes. We had done did it before. I pinched my cheeks and Sarah’s to make them red. She was a good girl.

Like bears and wolves scratching the door, and then axes hacking—it wasn’t locked. On the bed, I pulled the perineh over our faces, mine and Sarah’s. The Cossacks were barking at their own noise and Mommeh cried, Sick! They are sick! But who stood over them all? The Angel of Death, from his white horse, his mustache a piece of black fur. He jumped down and burst into the room and yanked away the perineh from me and Sarah. His blue jaw stuck out like a hammer, knuckles for the bones in his cheeks, sparks in each eye, his cap black, his shirt red silk. Mommeh pushed between him and us. My children are on fire with fever.

A bear, a Mongol, with slits where his eyes should be, knocked, shoved against her. He raised his sword to kill her and us, mosquitoes. Mommeh cried, Scarlet fever! Who cared? But all of a sudden Shlomo fell into the room, somebody pushing him. On his knees like a Christian with his palms together—Jews don’t pray from the knees; they stand and bend and rock and turn for the whole body to praise God and for agony they beat their breast with their fists—no palms. Shlomo crawled under the bed—oy, gevaltl Chaya and Genesha and Pearl and Leah were hiding there.

Look! Mommeh said. Some flour sprinkled spots on her cheeks and arms. Already I’m dying with the scarlet fever. You want to catch it for yourselves? She pulled up her sleeve, a sin by itself, to show.

But the bear raised his sword again.

The other one, the Angel of Death, spat Pah! and held up a hand like a policeman to the bear. To Mommeh, he said, So give it to me, and grabbed on her breast.

She knocked away his hand—Mommeh! "I’ll give what you want better—schnapps."

You’ll give me fever in a bottle? He laughed, so the bear laughed, too—little, square teeth instead of fangs. Where is it? Death said and grabbed Mommeh and pulled her and the Mongol went with them.

I jumped from the bed to look out the window, Cossacks dancing on the street, stomping the ground to shake it—why dancing? For what joy? From the barn came two holding a bundle in the air between them—oy, Pa, kicking in their arms, his hands out to say, Why? Why not the chickens? The Mongol, a goose waddling, took from his own waist a rope and wound around Pa’s neck—oy, God help us, Hashem, praised be He, make a thunderspear, split the earth in two, come down in fire, God, God! Mommeh! She ran to hit at the Mongol but he carried Pa like a sack of potatoes to the oak tree in front and the Angel of Death grabbed her like a lover while she cried, Zaidel! David! as if his name would save him and God help me! and pounded her fists on the Angel’s chest and he laughed but he let her go and she ran into the house.

The Angel of Death yelled, Pulo! and the Mongol threw the rope over a limb and pulled and Pa was hanging, swinging, kicking, his fingers at his neck, and Mommeh came running out of the house with bottles. Death was laughing again at her—a tickle in his heart? Pulo! he called, whiskey! and the Cossacks came like bees. Pulo tied the end of the rope around the tree and grabbed a bottle and held its mouth to his mouth, straight to the sky. Pa! I wanted to run to him where the soldiers were dancing and singing—and then the Angel of Death jumped for life on his horse to make it dance so the rest of them jumped, too, the hooves digging up the ground, and Pulo caught his own horse and swung up with the bottle and leaped after the others, galloping thunder, Death’s coat shining in the dust faded, faded far away to nothing.

I pushed from the window to run outside. Mommeh was bending over Pa, the rope a snake by her feet. She had her mouth on his, kissing him with her breath. When she sat up, his face was chalk, blood for a necklace. But Pa opened, his eyes like diamonds.

Chapter Two

I felt, also, I had a rope around my neck to remember. Happiness is a short memory. If only I could change everything in David-Gorodok so I could skip like a crazy woman down dry streets and laugh and cry with all my lungs and with my sisters and brothers and friends and cousins and aunts and uncles and be unafraid, in new clothes for weddings and feasts, and I could run out of the Pale, the fences you can’t see, the prison inside the land, the town, the shtetl with its wooden houses under thatched roofs. Yet, the little river in a circle two miles away was beautiful and the wild flowers like my hair in the morning curled that way and this, their blossoms red and green and yellow like ribbons at the ends of my braids. I couldn’t change the flat, flat, trees spreading in patches, the birch trees like tufts of hair. In winter the sun couldn’t lift from the ground—even in the middle of the day it hung low, a dim, yellow light, the shadows stretching long and lonely, the snow a death over everything. Mommeh stuffed cotton into the cracks around the windows. When the melting came, chickens and geese and pigs plucked their ways in the mud of the streets. Near the market the Orthodox church stood like a Cossack with a big onion on his head—the steeple with the rusted cross—who bent it? The muzhiks, the peasants, in their high, rubber boots waded through the mud or whipped a poor horse all in ribs trying to pull a cart or a sledge, the yoke arching over its ears. From Kazakhston came Mongols with flat faces, and from far away Georgia they came with their knobs of cheekbones, their eyes wide apart, their mouths from ear to ear it seemed, and Armenians, too, who suffered like the Jews from the persecutions, the pogroms back in Turkey. And I couldn’t change the hard work of carrying water in buckets from the open wells and heating the tile oven with burning branches and pulling out the hot ashes and pushing in the bread dough (and sleeping on top of the tiles in the winter to keep warm like in heaven).

Would I die like Pa—the not second time? What did he see the not first time over there, flowers, the sun like a halo on God’s head, angels playing music? I saw nothing, he said. So, when you die, you see nothing? I didn’t see, he said. I couldn’t breathe and all of a sudden Ma was breathing for me. I held back my tears for that—but who was crying?

Chaya. She couldn’t stop sobbing, her face wet from her eyes and her nose. Shlomo! She wasn’t crying over him so much, such a goniff, but for her shame, the upside-down change in her plans for a husband and children. She hated to go through all of it again. Where could he be? Where did he go? Where can he go? Pa said. Where is a Jew safe?

I said, America.

America? As if he never heard of America—already, my brothers Jake and Louie ran away from the Czar. They wrote, Pa, we are working hard and saving money to bring you to America and you can work here, also and make enough with us to send for Mommeh and the children. America? Pa didn’t want to leave his business—business! He cut ice from the lake in the winter and covered the blocks with sawdust and stored them in the earth cellar he dug. And he bought fish to sell—nu, Mommeh carried them to the market to peddle so he could doven, pray, with his friends in the shut, the synagogue.

Maybe Louie and Jake will see Shlomo in America, I said.

You think in America is one city, Detroit?

Let me go there, Chaya said, her hands like butterflies. Mommeh didn’t even like to make her carry a pail.

You think you’ll find Shlomo? Pa said.

If I found him, I’d kill him. No—I want to get out of here, everybody clicking their tongues over me, the bride left at the altar. I want to go to America.

When you have a husband you’ll go to America, Pa said.

A husband? Her hands like leaves in the wind. Is somebody in the kitchen waiting for me?

"The shadkhen will find somebody better this time."

"The shadkhen. So why is she herself an old maid?"

"Shah! To your father you don’t talk like a lemon in your mouth," Mommeh said.

Chaya knew what to do—she cried more, now the butterflies at her face. I don’t want another wedding without a groom! I’ll die first!

First you’ll marry—then you’ll die, Pa said. He laughed but Mommeh didn’t, so he stopped.

I’ll die, I’ll die! Like a song, a howling.

You won’t die, Pa said. I’ll die here in David-Gorodok! Let the Cossacks kill me, too!

You won’t die! his temper like a branch exploding fire, his face turning red, his fist shaking near her nose. He shook plenty of times but he never hit anyone so we weren’t afraid of him—but we were when Mommeh beat her own fist on her chest and cried out, "Oy, I’ll die from you, a needle in my heart!" Right away, Chaya was quiet.

But she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, her mouth upside down, so, all right, Pa was red in his face but he wrote a letter to Louie and Jake and they sent money and Pa bought a passport from a man in the middle of the night—like an artist, he made passports—and a boat ticket from where he got it I didn’t know. In a month, Chaya would leave for America. America! The whole town came to the house to drink mazel tov and to give her tzedakahs, kopeks, pennies, to make a safe journey—she would hand them to the first poor person she saw in America. But nobody is poor in America, she said. So give to a child. From Turov and Luminets and even from Minsk and Kiev they came, a blessing and a jealousy—going to America, to the Golden Medina, the streets paved with gold! Came a young man, a cousin from an uncle, a boy yet but stooping over like an old man, his business to sell books in Russian, in Hebrew, in German, and in Yiddish. To Chaya he gave a romance book. She read it like eating a peach (I, also, three times—an orphan boy in love with a girl from a different class—her father a famous rabbi. He picked out for her a cantor, an honor to marry, so the boy and the girl ran off in a rowboat but a storm tipped them into the water and they drowned but they came back as ghosts, crying). Chaya with me went to Golda Fox’s house where the book salesman was staying and he gave another book and in two weeks another one and he came to read to her another one and after a while they didn’t read anymore. Now she didn’t want America.

God forbid, the passport and the ticket shouldn’t go to waste. Me! I cried and jumped up and down and I talked—I could talk!—how I would go to Louie and Jake and work my fingers to the bone in America—I sewed buttonholes for Uncle Max in Minsk and now I would in America and I would send money for everybody to come and make a life in America and, who knows? I would find in America a doctor for a husband—maybe not on a white horse, but the Right One.

Pa was laughing. You’ll find a butcher in David-Gorodok.

"Mommeh! Let me go! Let me go! Let me go! I’ll sew and for Jake I’ll work in the grocery store in Detroit where he’s working and with Louie I’ll work in the junkyard where he’s working and I’ll keep the house shining like glass for them, for their wives—I’ll cook and bake and mop and wash and make dresses and coats and whatever they want—gold in America they’ll pay me—I’ll send to you to come also to live, to be happy—no more pogroms! No more Cossacks!