Trusting Calvin (12 page)

“I understand your concerns, Max,” she said. “I just don't share them.”

Now he knew where she stood.

At a lakeside resort that spring, he decided it was time to thrash out the details. “If we're going to get married,” he said, “we have to do it soon. We have to start the process of immigration.”

It would be an ordeal. They had to apply and go through many procedures with great speed. The American Congress had passed laws allowing an extra number of refugees and Holocaust survivors into America, but applications had to be made by June 30, 1951, two months away. Jack and Violett had already filed; Sig and Marianne hoped to do so, but they were waiting to see what Max would do.

Max and Barbara had additional complications. Barbara was German Catholic, and immigrants had to have sponsors to guarantee that the immigrant wouldn't need public assistance for at least two years. Since neither had relatives or friends in America to sponsor them, they had to rely on an organization to do the sponsoring. The Hebrew Immigration Aid Society sponsored Jews, while a Catholic organization sponsored Catholics. Getting two sponsoring groups to coordinate and meet deadlines was a prospect few wanted to count on if it was possible to avoid it.

She hadn't actually been proposed to in the way most women are, but Barbara knew Max well enough to realize these discussions were as close to some version of an invitation to share his life as she was likely to get. She agreed that they needed to take immediate action. She would, she told Max, convert to Judaism.

Max didn't ask her that night why she decided to marry him. In fact, he never, even in subsequent decades, put that question to her, regarding it a breach of privacy to ask. He accepted that once her mind was made up, she was at peace with her choice, and he should be as well.

They married at noon on May 5, 1951, at city hall in Munich. After the ceremony, they boarded a train for Amberg, where Jack and his wife hosted a newlyweds' dinner attended by Barbara's parents, sisters, and brothers, as well as the landlady-matchmaker, Mrs. Eichenmueller. The festivities were high-spirited but brief. The couple had to dash back to Munich to appear at the immigration office to fill out applications as a married couple.

Because the time for processing applications was so short, the chief rabbi excused Barbara from the usual conversion classes, but she had to go to the
mikveh
(ritual bath), where she stripped and submerged three times in the indoor pool. The rabbi signed the
ketubbah
(marriage contract), and Max and Barbara were officially a Jewish married couple.

Max had almost no attachment by then to the part of being Jewish that related to religion, but he considered himself a Jew by culture and heritage, and there was always the chance, he imagined, that they might move to Israel someday.

He continued working at the hospital, Barbara received a transfer to the Munich office of her insurance company, and the two awaited word of where they would be sent. They had no say about the city, since immigration officials believed that if everyone could declare a preference, all foreigners would descend upon New York City, snarling the systems there. Sponsoring groups existed in many cities, prepared to assist arriving Jews in certain numbers, so assignments depended on what those groups could handle at a given time.

The couple found it easy to settle into married life with each other, efficiently settling differences and respecting preferences, relishing the extra time they could spend at home with each other rather than on trains. But now that Barbara was spending every night in bed with Max, she realized that the nightmares she had witnessed during their courtship were as regular as they were severe. Nearly every night her husband awoke, panting, sweating, often screaming. He would get up, strip out of his drenched pajamas, wash, and return to her. Both of them would be restless and wakeful for the rest of the night.

While they were courting Max hadn't said much about the details of the nightmares that haunted him, and Barbara had been reluctant to press him to relive during his waking hours the things that poisoned his sleep.

Now she asked. He told her—but only very little. Hearing everything would sadden her too much, he thought. Also, he was sure that denying the images was the most effective way to move ahead and live life, so he kept most of it to himself.

In October of 1951, Sig and Marianne and Jack and Violett sailed for America—Jack assigned to New York, and Sig to Cleveland, a city Max had never heard of. Days later, Barbara and Max found that they, too, had been assigned to Cleveland.

In early December the couple boarded a military transport aircraft, the first time either had been on an airplane, with two suitcases and fifty-eight other people who had various disabilities. After refueling stops in Scotland, Iceland, and Newfoundland, they arrived two days later in New York City, to spend a week with Jack, acclimating to this new country—the odd cadence and strange sounds of this language they had to master, foods and spices so different they hardly seemed edible, and a dizzying wealth of goods and options.

Too few days later, Max and Barbara boarded a westbound train and the next morning, December 12, 1951, disembarked at Union Station in Cleveland.

A burly woman approached, confirmed in Yiddish their identities, escorted them to a taxi, thrust their suitcases into the trunk, and gave the driver the address and the fare. The couple slid into the back of the cab and weaved in and out of traffic, coming to a stop at a small apartment building on East 86th Street.

The woman who met them at the door introduced herself in passable German as Mrs. Foote, and presented the key to the apartment that they would be sharing with Sig and Marianne.

“Welcome to Cleveland,” she said. “Sig and Marianne are coming home from work at five. Go ahead in and make yourselves comfortable.”

The two-bedroom apartment was small, drafty, and musty; the furniture was old and wobbly; and they felt more than a little uncertainty. But it was a start.

Six

The Jewish organization that sponsored them paid the couple's rent for one month and provided $17.50 a week for bus fare to search for work and to buy food.

“I can't do anything about my eyesight, but I must learn this language very fast in order to be able to work,” Max said that first night, when he and Sig reunited.

Barbara spoke no English either, but she could see, and she was strong. These were the only requirements for getting hired in one of the growing number of sweatshops cropping up in immigrant relocation cities to capitalize on the many people willing to do anything to earn five or six dollars a day.

She landed a job in a factory making ladies' coats, hard, nonstop work for seventy-five cents an hour. She returned home every evening with crops of blisters snaking through her fingers, bubbling burns from operating the steam machine to press the coats. Sometimes she cried while she sat at the kitchen table at night with her puffy hands in a bowl of ice to reduce the swelling enough so that she could move her fingers at work the next day.

“This will not go on for very long,” Max said, trying to reassure her as a husband should, aching in his heart because it was probably not the truth. He couldn't put his hat on every morning and hit the streets like other men, searching for the right people and connections and half-open doors. That gnawed at his soul.

Once Barbara received her first paycheck, the sponsor's assistance stopped. That was as it should be, the couple believed: A person shouldn't rely on handouts. Still, it meant there was no chance of quitting no matter how bad her hands got, and what she earned was barely enough to get by.

Max had contacted the Cleveland Sight Center within days of arriving in the city, and he was assigned a Braille teacher so he could learn to read in English, a task he pursued with gusto. The couple went to night school on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to learn English together, and every Tuesday night they rode the bus to sit with a couple who'd arrived from Germany years earlier and who patiently conducted in English the kinds of conversations Americans all over the country were having. On Saturday mornings, a librarian for the Cleveland Library for the Blind spent an hour with the couple, doing the same.

Within five or six weeks, Max knew enough basic English to make himself understood and to understand much of what others were saying. But continuing his career in physical therapy, he had learned, was out of the question for now. The United States had no reciprocity agreement in the allied medical professions with Germany, so Max would have to return to school for a year or more, then pass the state board exam. His English, though improving rapidly, wouldn't be good enough to manage that for many months to come. He couldn't allow Barbara to continue as sole breadwinner for the time it would take to earn his license.

An ad in the daily newspaper for a health club masseur drew Barbara's attention one afternoon, and Max applied. Therapeutic massage had been part of his training in Germany; in fact, he was overqualified for this job, but if he could get hired, it could serve as a stepping-stone. Even if it didn't lead to something better, they needed the money, and it was something he could do well even with less-than-perfect English.

The health club manager had very few questions for Max when he arrived for the interview. A brisk woman with a tinny voice and an air of impatience swirling about her, she conducted their conversation with what seemed like something beyond haste, maybe abruptness. As this was his first interview in his new country, he wasn't quite sure how to read it.
Maybe this is how people in America behave,
he thought. She rustled some papers on her desk and declared that another person was applying for the job and that Max should not call her again. She would contact him with her decision.

As Max was leaving her office, she passed him something that felt like a folded piece of paper. Probably additional information about the job or the expectations, he figured.

“What is this?” he asked when he found Barbara, who had accompanied him on the several buses required to get there.

“A five-dollar bill.”

Max, furious, stormed back into the office. “I did not come here for charity but to apply for a job,” he snarled. He could not, in his anger, come up with all the right words in English, so he spoke some in German. He was sure she caught his meaning, however, when he slammed the money on her desk and stomped out of her office.

The Jewish Family Service Association arranged soon after the job-interview unpleasantness for Max to meet Lee Feldman, a counselor at the State Bureau of Vocational and Rehabilitation Services for the Blind. A visually impaired veteran of World War II, Feldman knew what kind of roadblocks would confront a blind man trying to find work, and told Max that if he was willing to undergo four or five months of instruction, he might be able to get hired as an X-ray darkroom technician.

It would be isolating work, consisting of nothing more challenging than following the same routine hour after hour, day after day, almost like being on an assembly line. But there was a demand for such technicians, he said, and Max's obvious appreciation for structure made this a good prospect for him because it involved following prescribed steps, carefully timing everything, and moving quickly when the buzzer signaled it was time to slide the film from one tray to the next.

To prepare, Max would have to learn how to use a white cane, something he hadn't learned since the Germans took a different approach to mobility training. And he would have to memorize bus lines and schedules so he could get to and from training and then the job, which might—depending on which hospital hired him (
if
one hired him)—be a long distance from his apartment.

Max was eager, he assured Feldman, to do whatever was necessary.

His mobility training began immediately.

The instructor, a blind chain-smoker named Jim, had a gravelly voice and a no-excuses approach to life. “When you walk down the street,” Jim said on their first day together, “and you bump into a pole and get a bloody nose, you have two options: Go back home, clean up, and start over again, or continue going wherever you have to go and clean up there. Big boys don't cry.”

The two got on well.

Max began his technician training barely two months after arriving in the United States—nervous because his English was still halting, and also because he wasn't sure how the techs in the hospital who were to teach him would react to having a blind man thrust into their operation. But the employees were friendly and patient and devoted themselves to helping him succeed. They spent their lunch hours encouraging him through conversations to help spur his English along, and one, thinking music might help (not realizing until it was too late that Max was tone-deaf), taught him the popular Irving Berlin song, “Blue Skies.”

When Max completed training four months later, Feldman reported that he'd found him a darkroom technician position at the Cleveland Clinic. The pay would be one dollar an hour, and Max would be on probation for six months rather than the customary ninety days, because there was discomfort among some at the hospital about his ability to do the job. Max accepted the job and the terms.

Feldman arrived at Max's apartment soon after sunrise on October 20, 1952, to accompany him on the bus for his first day at work.

“There's something you must remember,” Feldman said as they bumped along the streets, shouting above the roar of the shifting gears, “and that is that you'll have to work harder than your sighted coworker. You'll have to be more loyal than your sighted coworker. Never be late for work if there's any way at all to avoid that, and don't leave at quitting time unless you've finished what you're in the process of doing. If you practice those things, your boss will say you're a good employee. He will never say you're an excellent one, but you'll have a job. This is how things are.”

Art, the first darkroom coworker Max met, a tall man with a sharp, chafing voice like a rag being ripped, immediately made it clear that Max's presence displeased him. He didn't like Jews, he said, and suggested that no one else in the department did either. Then he turned his back and said no more. Others were slightly more hospitable.

Workers had thirty minutes for lunch; Art took an hour or more every day. Max responded by eating lunch at his desk while continuing to process X-rays. Eventually Art was fired, replaced with a visually impaired employee, and, a couple of years after that, a blind one.

“The job is not one that I like or that I really wanted,” Max told Jack in a letter he typed soon after starting work at the clinic. “But at least I can work and not live only off the earnings of my wife. And when a physical therapy job becomes available, I can apply for it. I am permitted to work as a physical therapist if it's under the supervision of a licensed therapist. Or, as an alternative, once my English is strong, I can take courses to become licensed in this country.”

Barbara's English improved rapidly as the months passed, largely because she was a voracious reader who devoured best-sellers and romance novels while riding buses or sitting in the living room at night, listening to the radio, a fat dictionary at her side. This helped her to secure a new job, making parts on an assembly line for twice the salary. A few months later, she shifted to an even better job in the miniature lamp division at the General Electric plant.

The couple celebrated their first Thanksgiving in America by walking two miles through holiday-quiet neighborhood streets to the Miami Deli and ordering their first American-style turkey dinner. Less than a year had passed since their arrival, and they had ascended sufficiently that they felt it was safe to rent a slightly bigger place, buy furniture, and make Cleveland their permanent home.

Wherever they moved, they knew, it had to be on the bus line so each could get to work every day, and Barbara scoured the newspapers with a city map and bus route map in hand.Spotting an ad for half a duplex they could afford, she called to inquire. The owner asked if the couple was “safe.” She wasn't sure she understood the question or the meaning of the word, she said. He wasn't opposed to immigrants, which, he could tell by her accent, she was, he responded; he just wanted to be sure they were Christians.

“No,” Barbara said. “We're Jewish.”

“No apartment.”

The classified-ads search continued, circles in black blooming over columns of gray. The couple visited a large apartment building that sounded especially promising.

“They don't rent to the blind,” the manager declared when the Edelmans presented themselves.

When, days later, Barbara saw an ad for another apartment that seemed worth considering, she climbed on the bus and went alone. She inspected the place, signed the lease, and handed over the checks for the rent and security deposit, mentioning that she had a husband but offering no additional information. If anyone there had an issue with the blindness or Jewishness of the man who arrived with her a few days later, it was never mentioned.

The couple bought cheap furniture, piece by piece, never more than they could afford; some black metal fans to churn the swampy air, so hot and still in the city during the long summer months; and a sewing machine from Sears & Roebuck so Barbara could make dresses for work.

By now they had a few friends, and some knew about Max's background as a physical therapist. One and then another asked for therapeutic massage, or referred friends to him. Soon he had five regular customers he treated after work or on the weekends, a welcome boost to their income and to his morale.

Max had always found learning new languages easy, and he endeavored to ferret out and master every idiosyncrasy and nuance of this perplexing English language, crammed with verbs with past tenses that break convention, confounding words that sound the same but have different meanings, and contractions that don't make sense. He listened to the radio, voices of Americans he couldn't envision, perpetual background noise he monitored carefully, remembering all the new words, asking Barbara to look them up in the dictionary if his Braille dictionary wasn't nearby. He decided NBC's Edwin Newman and CBS's Edward R. Murrow were America's finest speakers, storytellers, and linguists, and he stopped whatever he was doing whenever their voices spilled from the wooden box, appreciating the rhythm and cadence and wealth of words that painted such vivid pictures. Maybe regular exposure to them would infuse the language part of his brain with a richness that reading and studying alone did not accomplish, he thought.

He also made a request of the friendlier doctors, nurses, and staff people at work.

“Please. If I ever make a mistake when I am talking, if I use the wrong word or the wrong inflection, I want you to tell me. I will not be offended. The only way I can learn is if I am corrected.”

In time he developed a vocabulary that far surpassed those of many people born and raised in this country, though he never lost his heavy accent or his distinctive flat delivery common to those who grew up in Eastern Europe.