We numbered many in the ship,
Some spread the sails, some pulled, together,
The mighty oars; ’twas placid weather.
The rudder in his steady grip,
Our helmsman silently was steering
The heavy galley through the sea,
While I, from doubts and sorrows free,
Sang to the crew …
—
Pushkin
September 16, 1920
Somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean
Dear Tovah,
The ship is excellent. I have a little room with a bed bolted to the floor and a table that folds out. A small round window looks out over the sea.
But who wants to stay shut up in a cabin when there is so much to do? Such a lounge there is, with a player piano and polished wooden counters. The lounge reminds me of your salon back in Berdichev, only much larger.
There are dances at night and the passengers whirl about on the parquet floor. During the day, a young sailor named Pieter puts brushes on his feet and he dances all alone, polishing and waxing. As he works, he sings and tells jokes to me.
Out on the deck are chairs for days of reading. They are bolted down like my bed so they won’t shift in heavy seas. Of course we’ve had nothing like heavy seas since we boarded. Just clear skies and a gentle breeze.
“Sometimes,” Pieter says, “there are storms so fierce I think the ship will break apart.”
Pieter is such a joker. I am never certain whether to believe him or not.
We trade songs and Pieter teaches me little dances when he is not on watch. He is like another brother to me. Only he is better somehow than a brother, though he teases every bit as much as Saul does. But it doesn’t annoy me when Pieter teases. I like it.
If I sit down in one of these chairs with our Pushkin, Pieter rushes over and tucks a blanket around my legs.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Miss Rifka?” he asks.
He treats me like a little czarina. Me, Rifka Nebrot. Sometimes I pinch myself. Only in Hannah’s
games did I feel so special. How Hannah would love this. Tovah, you would too.
The ocean is so big; everywhere you look in every direction swells this dark, billowing water. It rises and falls as if it were breathing, and the ship skates over the surface.
I worried that perhaps I would feel seasick. I heard so many stories, and some others on the ship complain, but I do not feel the least bit ill. I feel healthier than I have ever felt in my entire life—even if I don’t have any hair on my head.
Today I had the most interesting conversation with Pieter. He had a few minutes before he went on duty and we walked around the deck, talking. He told me he had nine brothers.
“No sisters?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Mama kept looking for a girl, but we kept coming out boys.”
I told him about Isaac and Asher and Reuben and Nathan and Saul.
“And then there is me,” I said.
“All those sons and then a daughter,” Pieter said. “You are a treasure to your mama and papa. And to your brothers.”
“I’ve never met my brothers Isaac and Asher and Reuben,” I told Pieter. “They left for America before I was born. So I don’t know if I am a treasure
to them. But I assure you I am no treasure to my brother Saul. To Nathan maybe, but not to Saul.”
Can you imagine, Tovah? Me, a treasure? I told Pieter, “Really, I don’t believe anyone in my family thinks of
me
as a treasure.”
Pieter said, “If this is true, then your family is blind.”
I lowered my eyes for modesty’s sake, but I couldn’t help the smile that tugged at my lips, Tovah.
Pieter said, “You are such a brave girl, Rifka. And so clever to have managed on your own.”
I had told him about our escape from Berdichev, and about the typhus, and how Mama and Papa had to leave me behind.
“I would not be so clever,” Pieter said. “To learn so many languages. You speak Flemish better than I do and I have lived in Belgium all seventeen years of my life.”
Again with the languages, Tovah. Why do people always make such a to-do?
“Pieter,” I said. “You are full of nice words, but I am not certain I deserve them. You call me brave, but I will tell you what is brave. My aunt Anna is brave, and my little grandmother. They are brave to stay in Russia and live with the hatred for the Jews. They are clever, too, so much more clever.
In Berdichev, you must be clever simply to stay alive.
“For me, since I’ve left Berdichev, life has been easy, except that I have been apart from Mama and Papa. I have met with such kindness. No, I am not so brave, Pieter. If I were brave, I would have stayed in Russia.”
“Maybe,” Pieter said, “maybe they are very brave, the ones you have left behind in your homeland. But are they clever?”
“My cousin Tovah is very clever,” I told Pieter. “She has chosen to stay.”
“I’m a simple boy,” Pieter said. “I can’t learn the speech of other countries the way you can. I only travel back and forth across this big ocean. I do not know much. But to me, Rifka, you seem very brave and very clever indeed.”
Then Pieter bent over and kissed me! Right on my lips, Tovah. A warm kiss, with the soft blond hairs of his mustache tickling me.
Just for a moment I hoped the ship would never arrive in America and I could go on sailing with Pieter across this wide green ocean forever.
But when I looked up, Pieter’s face was red. “I have work to do,” he said, stammering. He hurried away, leaving me standing on the deck.
I don’t understand. What did I do that Pieter
should run away? How clever can I be, Tovah? The more I know, the more confused I get.
I returned to my cabin and opened our Pushkin. I tried to find a poem that said what I was feeling. Sometimes, when I read Pushkin’s poems, I want to write poems of my own. I wonder if I dare to do such a thing. Saul always said I talked and talked without anything to say. But sometimes I do have something to say, and I feel as if I will explode if I don’t write down what is in my head and in my heart.
Soon I will be in New York City, America. Soon I will be with Mama and Papa and all my giant brothers, Nathan and Saul, and Isaac and Asher and Reuben, brothers I don’t even know.
In America, maybe, I will write poems.
… When suddenly,
A storm! And the wide sea was rearing …
The helmsman and the crew were lost.
No sailor by the storm was tossed
Ashore—but I, who had been singing.
I chant the songs I loved of yore,
And on the sunned and rocky shore
I dry my robes, all wet and clinging.
—
Pushkin
September 21, 1920
Atlantic Ocean
Dear Tovah,
I have lost so much already, and now it seems I must lose more.
I nearly drowned at sea in a horrible storm. But I am alive. Everyone did not have my luck. But I am alive.
Our ship, which seemed so large and safe when first I boarded, barely survived the fury of this storm.
The tempest started during the night while we slept. I had dreams of pogroms, of cossacks on their horses, snapping whips at me, pointing rifles. I heard the crack of gunshot. In my dream the countryside was burning. I trembled in your cellar while the fire raged around me.
I woke from one terror into another. I had been thrown to the floor of my cabin, tossed from my bed by the rising seas.
Quickly I pulled on my clothes, tying my kerchief with trembling fingers. I opened my cabin door. Though it was still night, the sky was a sickly yellow, like an old bruise. I bashed against the ship’s walls, flung back and forth by the tossing sea as I made my way toward the deck. The ship shivered in the hateful ocean. Twice the floor dropped beneath me suddenly, and I fell.
There was so much confusion on deck. No rain yet, but a wind that roared. The seas, which had seemed so gentle yesterday, rose like hungry beasts, mouths open, hovering and crashing over the sides of the ship.
Sailors ran like spiders, back and forth in the yellow light. They yelled to each other over the wind, shouting directions. Pieter, my Pieter, clung to a pillar as a wave broke over his shoulders.
All the horrors of Russia returned to me. The
storm frightened me as much as any pogrom, when the peasants would come after the Jews to burn our homes, to break into our stores, to murder us.
My stomach twisted and I knew I would be sick, so I crawled, making my way with difficulty, toward the side of the ship. The ship rolled, my stomach rolled with it. I clung to the rail, trying to raise up off my knees so I would not soil myself with my own sickness. The ship plummeted from beneath me and I hit my head on the metal rail.
Someone came up behind me and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders.
“Pieter!” I cried.
I didn’t realize the waves had drenched me.
“Come, Rifka!” Pieter yelled over the wind. “You must come away from the side.”
I started shivering. I could taste blood in my mouth and smell it in my nose. It had a cold, metallic taste that made my stomach twist inside out. I tore away from Pieter’s grip and ran back to the rail, emptying my stomach over the side.
Before I could finish, water, a wall of water, rose up over me. Pieter grabbed me around the waist and hurled me away from the side. The water came crashing down over our heads, slamming us onto the deck.
Pieter held on to me as the water sucked at my
body, trying to pull me overboard. If he had not been there, Tovah, the ocean would have claimed me. He saved my life. Pieter held me until the wave lost its power and slipped away. Then he lifted me to my feet again before another monstrous wave could attack us.
“Come,” he cried, guiding me toward a hatch. “Quickly. You must stay down in the hold while the storm lasts.” Pieter shouted over the violent wind.
I descended into the ship’s hold, looking up once at my friend. His hair lay plastered against his head and water streamed from his storm clothes.
“Pieter,” I called, “are you putting me in steerage?”
Pieter laughed. “Brave and clever!” he called down to me. The wind screamed around him.
“Be careful, Pieter!” I cried.
“I will, Rifka,” he answered.
I could hear the fear under the calm in his voice. It echoed in my ears as I stumbled down the ship’s steep steps.
When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I found many of the other passengers already in the hold, huddled together. We were still equal. We were equally miserable, equally frightened for our lives.
Everyone got sick, even me. It stank worse than a flood of soured milk down there.
Women rocked back and forth weeping. Men held their stomachs and moaned. All the time I worried for Pieter and the others. I doubted, Tovah, that I would live to see my family again.
If I’d had the Pushkin, I could have read from it. I could have opened it to the pages that held my golden Star of David, woven from broom straws, and prayed for our lives on it. But the Pushkin remained above, in my cabin, and I could not go after it.
We shivered and sweated and retched for thirty-six hours, until the ship stopped its pitching. At last the hatch was opened and we climbed up out of our hole.
There was no more deck left to the ship. Everything once bolted down had been ripped away. The player piano had crashed against a wall and shattered into pieces.
Most of the deck chairs were gone too, torn right out of the floor. Twisted metal and bolts stuck up as signs of where the chairs had been.
The parquet tiles, what remained of them, were thick with filth from the sea.
A sailor lay on the deck, wrapped in gauze from head to toe, moaning. My heart jumped into my throat. What if it’s Pieter? I thought. Oh, Tovah, if only I’d known.
I ran to the sailor’s side, but it wasn’t Pieter.
I asked if there was something I could do for him anyway. He didn’t answer.
Other sailors were limping or bandaged. I looked for Pieter everywhere, but I couldn’t find him.
Finally I stopped one of the officers.
“Have you seen the boy, Pieter?” I asked. “Please, I know you are busy, but could you tell me where I might find him?”
The officer looked down at me. He steadied my shoulders in his hands the way Papa had the night he told me of Uncle Zeb’s death. “We lost one sailor overboard in the storm,” he said.
“Pieter?” I whispered.
The officer nodded.
Tovah, I felt myself smothering. I couldn’t see anything, hear anything.
Somehow I found my way back to my cabin, and for the first time since leaving Berdichev, I cried. All the tears that had collected in this year, in this enormous year, shoved their way out of my heart, and how I cried.
Pieter, who said I was so brave … what would he say to see me now?
I didn’t care. I cried for Pieter, I cried for myself. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop.
I cried until I was empty of tears. Then I was still. As still as the sea after a storm.
I sit in my cabin and wait. Our ship has sent out a distress call. It cannot move anymore on its own steam. The drum of the engines had been like a heartbeat. Now the heart has stopped. The engines are dead.
We must wait for another ship to answer our signal and tow us across the ocean to America. I pray there are no more storms between now and then. We could never survive another fight with the sea.
Tovah, suddenly I feel how defenseless we are—not just Jews, all of us. My mind fills with images of you and Aunt Anna and Bubbe Ruth and Mama and Papa. I see Bubbe Ruth at the rear of the long house, huddled beside her little stove, sipping tea from the samovar. I see Papa and Mama swallowed up by a strange country called America. I see you, Tovah, staring out the window at the empty road, the road that has carried me away from you. I realize how precious our lives are. And how brief. I want to come home.
The telegram the HIAS sent from Antwerp to Mama and Papa said I would be arriving in America today. Today I sit in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a ship that is dead.
What will happen when Papa and Mama come to get me and I’m not there? How will they know when to come back? Will I ever see them again?
I’m too tired, Tovah, too tired for all this trouble. At this moment I wish I had never left Berdichev.