Ilya would not leave it.
He took the Pushkin and elbowed in front of me to stand under the stern eye of Mr. Fargate.
“This,” he said, speaking English with a very thick accent. “This Rifka write.”
I’d never heard him speak anything but Russian before.
He took a deep breath and let it out. He swallowed once, hard. Then he began reciting my latest poem in English. How I had struggled with the words. Ilya had made me repeat them to him each time I stopped or changed something. Now he remembered it perfectly. He didn’t look at the book. He just held it in front of him and said the poem from memory.
“I leave to you the low and leaning room,
where once we drank the honey-sweetened tea,
and bowed our heads in prayer and waited there,
for cossacks with their boots and bayonets.”
They were all listening, even Ilya’s uncle.
“I leave behind my cousins, young and dear;
They’ll never know the freedom I have known,
Or learn as I have learned, that kindness dwells,
In hearts that have no fear.”
“You wrote these words?” Mr. Fargate asked.
I nodded, embarrassed.
“Rifka Nebrot,” Mr. Fargate said. “This is a very nice poem.”
“You think?” I asked. “That is just one poem.” I took the book from Ilya and started turning pages. “I have more, Mr. Fargate, many more. I can read to you. Do you have time? Here is one you will like, I think …”
Mr. Fargate looked at his watch. Then he looked at Doctor Askin. “No wonder the boy never talked. She talks enough for both of them.”
Now, I thought, it would be clever to keep quiet.
“Well, Miss Nebrot,” Mr. Fargate said. “After giving the matter some consideration, I think you are correct. Whether you wish to marry or not is no business of mine.” He turned to Doctor Askin. “Heaven help the man she does marry.”
Turning back to me, he said, “I have no doubt that if you wish to marry, you will manage to do so, whether you have hair or not.”
Then he looked over to Mama and Papa. “Mr. and Mrs. Nebrot. These are your daughter’s papers. With this stamp I give permission for her to enter the United States of America.”
My heart thundered in my chest.
Mr. Fargate stamped my entrance papers and
handed them to me. “Here, Rifka Nebrot,” he said. “Welcome to America.”
The nurses and doctors swept over me. Ilya, too. Best of all my family, my beloved family, Saul, Nathan, Reuben, Asher, Isaac, Mama, Papa, Sadie, and little Aaron. There was such a commotion with all the kissing and the hugging I could hardly breathe.
Then I felt something that made me stiffen with fear. In all the kissing and hugging, someone had loosened the kerchief covering my head. I felt it slipping off.
I tried to get my hand up to hold on to it, but Doctor Askin held my arms. He enfolded me in a crushing hug, and I felt the kerchief sliding down, inching away from the sores it covered, to betray me. The kerchief, as Doctor Askin let go, dropped around my neck, settling on my shoulders like a heavy weight.
With my head exposed to the air, it itched worse than ever.
Quickly my hands flew up to replace the kerchief. I swept it back up in a matter of seconds, trying to cover my head before anyone had a chance to see my scalp.
I wasn’t fast enough. Towering over me as he did, Saul had seen it. Doctor Askin had seen it too. They stared down at me.
“Rifka, your head,” Saul said.
I pulled the kerchief tightly over my scalp.
Not now, I prayed. They’ve stamped the papers. Don’t let them find out now.
“But Rifka,” Saul said. “There’s something on your head.”
“Take off your kerchief,” Doctor Askin ordered.
“Please,” I begged in a whisper. “Don’t make me take it off.”
“Take it off, Rifka,” Doctor Askin insisted.
My hands shook as I lifted them to the knot under my chin. I had difficulty untying it. Everyone stared at me, at my trembling hands, at my disloyal kerchief.
“Whatever it is,” I said, trying to talk my way out of it, “I’m certain it will go away.”
I could delay no longer. The kerchief dropped to my shoulders.
“This isn’t going away,” said Nurse Bowen. “Here, feel for yourself.”
She took my hand and guided it up to the top of my head. I stretched my hand out, expecting to feel the ringworm sores under my fingertips.
But I didn’t feel ringworm.
I felt hair!
Not very much. But it was hair. My hair! And it was growing.
Mama and Papa are sitting beside me on a bench at Ellis Island. We are waiting for my brother Isaac. I am writing on the paper Nurse Bowen gave to me.
Saul says at home there is a notebook full of paper, a whole empty notebook for me to write in. He bought it for me himself, with his own money. And at home is a pair of brass candlesticks, he said. A pair just like the ones Mama used to own. Tonight, Saul said, tonight I would give them to her.
On my head is the black velvet hat with the shirring and the light blue lining. My head still itches, but Nurse Bowen said that is normal. That often the scalp prickles when new hair grows in.
Mama’s gold locket lies softly between her breasts again, where it belongs. Around my neck is a small Star of David on a silver chain, a gift from Mama and Papa.
“Saul said this is what you would like the most,” Mama had said when she gave it to me.
“Saul was right,” I said, and I kissed Mama and Papa on their hands, first one and then the other.
My brother Isaac has gone home to Borough Park to bring his car. He said, “Never mind the trouble, my sister Rifka is going to enter America in style.”
A clever girl like me, Tovah, how else should I enter America?
I will write you tonight a real letter, a letter I can send. I will wrap up our precious book and send it to you too, so you will know of my journey. I hope you can read all the tiny words squeezed onto the worn pages. I hope they bring to you the comfort they have brought to me. I send you my love, Tovah. At last I send you my love from America.
Shalom, my dear cousin,
Rifka
When I began this book, I set out to write about my family’s migration from Russia to the United States. I recalled a story about my grandmother wearing white kid gloves as she rode through Poland in the back of an oxcart. I remembered the tale of my grandfather, denied passage on the
Titanic
because he was “only an immigrant.” But that’s all I remembered.
I phoned my mother and my aunts for help. They contributed a wealth of stories about their own childhood, but they couldn’t shed much light on the family history.
“Call your great-aunt Lucy,” my mother suggested.
I barely remembered Aunt Lucy. I pictured a frail, eighty-year-old woman. To my surprise, the voice on the other end of the line resounded with strength, steadiness, and humor.
“Certainly I’ll help you,” she said. “What do you want to know?”
I sent Aunt Lucy a list of questions in the mail. She shot me back a tape on which she spoke at breakneck speed for five breathless minutes. I remember holding on to the handle of my tape player, feeling like a passenger on a roller coaster as I listened to Aunt Lucy’s account of her journey to America. When she signed off, the hiss and crackle of blank tape taunted me.
I phoned Aunt Lucy again. “I’ve listened to your tape,” I said. “I think I need to see you.”
She laughed as if she’d known I was coming all along.
Two months later, on a steamy East Coast afternoon, with my head full of research, I arrived on Aunt Lucy’s doorstep.
Greeting me was a tiny woman with an unruly bun of snow-white hair on the top of her head. She welcomed me into her home and into her past.
Letters from Rifka
draws largely on the memories of Lucy Avrutin. I have changed names and adjusted certain details, but this story is, above all else, Aunt Lucy’s story.
In the years surrounding World War I, many people living in Eastern Europe found it difficult to feed and clothe their families. War made supplies short and conditions were often intolerable. National borders shifted back and forth, splitting families apart, increasing their suffering. These struggles led to frustration and anger.
The impoverished peasants of Russia endured great hardships while the government far above them crumbled with the ousting of the czar. To ease the mounting pressure, the government placed agents in the villages and towns of Russia. These agents intentionally stirred up trouble, diverting the peasants’ anger away from the government and directing it toward the Jews. Peasants, infected with a mob fever that produced the pogroms, swept through Jewish settlements breaking windows, looting, burning, beating, and murdering the unfortunates in their path.
During this period in Russian history, many restrictions were borne on the shoulders of the Jewish people. They were denied the right to earn a living at most professions. Travel beyond their ghettos or settlements was forbidden without proper government paperwork, which was often either slow in coming or denied altogether. Jews could not own property, nor were they allowed to have in their possession more than two of any given object.
Many Russians sought to drive Jews from the country permanently by making their lives wretched. In the Russian Army, Jewish boys were assigned the least desirable tasks. Often, if they survived the perils of their assignments, if they survived the inadequate provisions supplied them, they were tortured or killed by their own comrades, the non-Jewish soldiers they served beside.
This climate drove thousands and thousands of families from their homelands—not just Jews, but many others as well. In search of a better life, those families sought sanctuary in countries across the globe. We, today, are the beneficiaries of their legacy of courage and determination.