Sholem Aleichem - The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor's Son

I’d rather go to America. Pesye and her gang must have arrived there long ago. I’ll bet they’re already making a living. Bumpy must be walking around with his hands in his pockets, as happy as a nutcracker. Yoyneh, Riveleh, and their kids, including my fiancée Alte, decided not to wait for us either. They’ve sailed to America too.

Was that a day! We didn’t let my mother go to the ship because she was sure to cry her eyes out. A lot of good that did! It just made her cry harder. We were robbing her of her only pleasure, she said. Crying is the one thing that does her good.

No one was even listening.

Do you know who’s glad that Yoyneh the bagel maker’s family is gone? You’ll never guess. Goldeleh! She nearly jumped for joy when she heard the news. That’s because she doesn’t like Alte. She said, her face burning like an oven: “I don’t want to see your red-braided bride again! She’s stuck-up.”

“Since when are Alte’s braids red?” I said. “They’re brown.”

That just made her angrier. She burst into tears and shouted: “They’re red! Red! Red!”

When Goldeleh loses her temper, watch out! Usually she’s sweet as sugar. I feel like a brother to her. She tells me how hard she works to pay for her room and board. She cleans the rooms in her hotel, feeds the chickens, and puts the landlord’s twins to bed. (First his wife couldn’t have children, now she has two.) Every day she goes to the doctor. He treats her eyes with the same calamine he gives everyone.

“If only I had my own. I’d see my mama and papa again.”

It breaks my heart to see the tears in her infected eyes. I tell her: “You know what, Goldeleh? When I get to America and make a living, I’ll send you calamine from there.”

“You will? Swear to me by all that’s holy!”

I swear to her. If all goes well and I make a living, I’ll send the calamine.

It’s final. We’re sailing for London on Saturday. We’re already preparing for the trip. My mother, Brokheh, and Taybl have been going from hotel to hotel, saying good-bye to the emigrants. They’ve had some heart-to-heart talks.

Compared to some people, we’re not doing badly. You wouldn’t believe the down-and-outers we’ve come across or how they envy us. To listen to them talk, they all were once rich, lived in the lap of luxury, fed every beggar in the neighborhood, and married their sons and daughters to the upper crust. Now they’re a sorry bunch of drifters, every one of them.

I’m sick and tired of their stories. Once, if I heard about a pogrom, I listened to every word. Today I run the other way. I’d rather hear something funny. There just isn’t anyone to tell it. The last person was that bull artist Beeber. He’s in America now.

“Lying his head off,” Pinye says.

“Don’t worry,” says Elye. “He won’t get away with it. Americans don’t like types like that. A liar is worse than a pork eater there.”

So Elye says. “What makes you so sure?” Brokheh asks. That’s when the shouting match begins. Pinye sides with Elye and Taybl sides with Brokheh. Whatever the two men say, the two women say the opposite.

The Men: America is a land of unvarnished truth!

The Women: America is a land of barefaced lies!

The Men: America stands for truth, honesty, and compassion!

The Women: America stands for theft, murder, and skulduggery!

It’s a good thing my mother is around. “Children,” she says, “we’re still in Antwerp. Why fight over America?”

She’s right. We’re in Antwerp. Not for long, though. In a few days we’ll be in London. Everyone is moving on, all the emigrants, the whole gang.

How will Antwerp manage without us?

No place has been as hard to leave as Antwerp. It’s not so much the city as the people. I mean it’s not the people either, it’s the emigrants — especially my gang of friends. Some have left before us. Bumpy, Alte, and Big Motl are all making a living in America by now. Only Goldeleh and Mendl (Brokheh calls him “the wild pony”) are still here. Who will Ezrah have to help when we’re all gone?

I’ll miss Antwerp. It’s a swell city. Everyone here deals in diamonds. They carry them around in their pockets. Everyone cuts them, faces them, polishes them. Some of our gang have decided to stay on and become diamond cutters. They wouldn’t go to America for the world. They want to make a cutter of me, too. My brother Elye thinks it’s good work. So does Pinye. If they were younger, they say, they’d learn it themselves.

Brokheh laughs at them. She says diamonds are for wearing, not for cutting. Taybl agrees. She’d love to own a diamond herself. She spends her days looking at the shop windows and saying how the stones are cheap as dirt. That’s all she and Brokheh talk about. They’re so diamond crazy they see diamonds in their dreams. Pinye thinks it’s a big joke. He thinks all jewelry is. So is anyone who cares about it. You can bet he’s written a poem. It goes:

Antwerp’s your true diamondland!

Diamonds gleam on every hand!

Everyone a millionaire!

Not a poor man anywhere!

Diamonds on such clearance sales

They’re even in the garbage pails!

Diamonds glitter! Diamonds flash!

All that’s missing is …some cash.

I can’t remember the rest.

You would need the brains of a genius to remember all of Pinye’s poems. Elye scolds him. He says that if that poem about Antwerp reaches Ezrah, we’ll be thrown out the door. We’re counting on Ezrah to finance the next leg of our trip.

We go there every day. It’s our second home. Fraulein Seitchik knows us all by name. She loves me like a son. She’s a sister to my mother. You can see why even Brokheh admits she has a Jewish soul. All the emigrants are in love with her. Best of all, she speaks Jewish. Everyone else in Antwerp talks a kind of German called Flemish. You couldn’t beat it out of them with a stick. Pinye can’t understand why, with so many Jews around, people don’t learn a Jewish language. But not even the beggars would agree to that. They’d rather die of hunger as long as it’s in Flemish.

Brokheh has had it with Flemish. She’s itching to get to London. She just wishes someone would drop a diamond in the street before we leave. Just one little stone from a hole in someone’s pocket! Her eyes shine when she talks about it.

It beats me why she’s so wild about diamonds. I’d trade all the diamonds in the world for a paint box and a brush. Not long ago I drew a ship with a pencil. I drew a gang of emigrants on it, each with his own face, and gave it as a present to Goldeleh. Goldeleh showed it to Fraulein Seitchik, who hung it on the wall for all to see. Elye saw it too and whacked me. “More doodles! Are you going to stop your doodling or not?” He hasn’t hit me so hard in ages. I told Goldeleh, who told Fraulein Seitchik, who came out of her office to bawl Elye out. She gave him a whole speech about my drawing. He listened and went home and hit me harder. He says he’ll beat every last doodle out of me.

We made our last visit to Ezrah today. Don’t ask me what we did there. Elye got into an argument. Pinye talked with his hands. Brokheh butted in and my mother began to cry. The people at Ezrah tried talking to us, mostly in that German of theirs. There were three of them, all trying to see who spoke it better. May I hope to die if I knew what they were saying. My mind was already aboard ship — at sea, in London, in America. Suddenly Goldeleh comes running, all out of breath.

“You’re going?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“To London.”

“And from there?”

“To America.”

“And I’ll be left behind with my bad eyes! God knows if I’ll ever see my mama and papa again.”