The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel Read online

Uniformed men on the dock were motioning at us fiercely, barking, “Move up! Move up!” Crowds were surging behind us, pressing in at all sides with their bundles of rags; their rope-tied suitcases; their lone framed wedding photos; their ornately carved, chipped jewelry boxes containing every sad, woeful, pawed-over keepsake; their chunky brass candlesticks and heirloom lace tablecloths. Some, having heard about a dearth of kosher food on board, were loaded down with tins of sardines, herring wrapped in newspaper, loaves of hard brown bread that the rats and mold would soon get at.

  Swept up in the desperate pandemonium, my mother continued to glare at my father and me with furious disbelief. Then Papa reached out and grabbed her about the waist. My mother screamed. For a moment I thought Papa was going to sling her over his shoulder like one of his bundles. But before he could, she elbowed him low in the ribs and shrieked, and he set her down.

  “Fine, you don’t want to go, don’t go!” he shouted. I’d never seen Papa so angry before, and it was terrifying. Grabbing me, he reached into my coat, yanked out some of the tickets, and thrust them at my mother. “You want to go to Cape Town, go live in the desert with that shmegegge brother of yours, listening to his kvetching, letting him tell you to go this way and that? I’m off to America. Who’s with me? Malka? Anybody else? Bella? Rose?”

  I started to wail. All my sisters were crying.

  My mother looked first at Papa, then at me, as if she wanted to strangle us both. She tore at her own hair, rent her skirt. “You mamzer!” she cried. “And you! You little gonif !”

  The crowds pushed in around us. People were shouting. Baggage was spilling open, hats were being whipped off in the wind. I didn’t know which way to go, what to do. Papa seized my hand furiously and pulled me toward the gangway. “Mama, please! Don’t be angry!” I wailed. My mother swore and raised her fist at Papa, but the surge of the crowd was overwhelming, and she grabbed my sisters and pushed in behind us, carried helplessly toward the enormous maw of the ship. Papa dragged me up the gangway, into the crush that was suspended precariously over a dark slice of water rainbowed with oil. Then we all spilled onto the deck. My sisters were crying. Mama red-faced. A man with a great clipboard pushed through the crowds, shouting for tickets over the sonic belch of a horn. “What’s your name?” He scribbled frantically on his pad. “Where are you from?” A deafening cheer erupted around us. Hats flew into the air. Confetti of torn newspaper—gray, black, and ivory—rained down into the water.

  And that was it. We were off.

  But my mother gripped the railing. Her hands shook. Slowly, she turned toward my father.

  “So help you God, Herschel,” she whispered venomously, “I will never, ever forgive you.”

  My sisters experienced the hardships of the voyage across the Atlantic in physical terms. The maggoty bread, the meager soup with bits of gristle and cabbage floating in it like refuse. The scratchy blankets, thin as old felt, which offered us no warmth; we had to sleep in all our filthy clothes, mildewed with perspiration or stiff with dried salt. The smell of wet wool, fermenting vegetables, and sour milk that emanated from 530 bedraggled passengers in steerage who hadn’t a place to bathe.

  The berths were claustrophobic, damp, and heaving; it was like being in the interior of a tubercular lung. Men and women were separated. Mama and my sisters and I lay moaning on our bunk or keeled over in the corridor, sweating and vomiting profusely in a great mass of choking, sobbing misery, which only grew worse as the toilets clogged and the rancid-cheese stench of excrement and bile filled the deck. Around us women cried and prayed in Yiddish and Hebrew, in Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and German, some of them saying the Shema, their voices often drowned out by the thundering of the ship’s engine. I remember a mixture of seawater and vomit sloshing beneath us on the floor and awakening in the middle of the night, sandwiched between Bella and Flora, terrified of the darkness and the violent pitching of the ship.

  There was typhoid and consumption, too; the coughing went on all night.

  Yet my own misery had little to do with the conditions. For the entire voyage, my mother refused to say a single word to either Papa or me. She refused to even look at us. Each time she turned her back to me, it felt like an incision.

  I tried to win her back. I gave her bits of soap I’d found in one of the lavatories. I composed little songs: “How Beautiful Is My Mama” and “I Love You More Than Flowers.”

  But no sooner did I begin to sing than Mama held up her hand. “Rose,” she’d instruct my sister, “tell Malka I don’t want to hear it. Not one word.”

  She shot a look in my father’s direction. “And, Bella, please tell your papa that to get into America I hear there is a test. Tell him he might have considered this before switching the tickets.”

  “Papa,” Bella said dutifully, “Mama wants to know if you know—”

  “I hear you, Tillie,” my father said wearily. “What? You think I don’t have ears?”

  “Rose, please tell your papa that of course I know he has ears. I also know that this little meeskite sister of yours, Malka, has a mouth. Now, please ask them both, if they know so much, what is their plan for America? Do they know who is this President Taft we should all know about? Do they know what is this Declaration of Independence? And do they know, pray tell, where are we going to live? How we are going to eat?”

  Papa sat stonily sipping his tea and gazing at the horizon, at the unchanging, unyielding sea. “Stop, Tillie,” he said finally.

  “President Taft?” I couldn’t help asking. “Who’s that?”

  “Who’s that?” my mother mimicked contemptuously. “Bella, tell that little sister of yours that she’s a fool and a criminal, just like her father.”

  Planting her hands on her wide hips, Mama marched over and stood before me. “Tell Malka that I asked her to do one thing, just one thing: Don’t let anybody touch that coat! Not even Papa! But did she listen?” Her voice was so loud it carried over the relentless chug of the engine. Bella glared at me. So did Rose. Flora began to weep. Other passengers regarded us nervously.

  Mama stood there, breathless. “Did she?” she cried again.

  “Tillie, leave the child alone,” my father said. “She only did what her papa asked her to do.”

  My mother glared from me to him. “Oh. You she listens to,” she spit.

  For seventeen days, my mother ignored me. Even when the boat stopped pitching and I was no longer seasick, I still couldn’t eat. Nor could I sing. All I wanted was for her not to hate me anymore.

  And then, on the eighteenth morning, Papa appeared in the doorway to the women’s berths. “Bella, tell your mother,” he panted, “there’s land.”

  When the people at Ellis Island finished readying Mama and Papa for America, my parents were almost unrecognizable. Mama had her hair shortened and arranged in a loose bun. Her dress had a faint waist and a collar with a button. Dressed in a different coat and a derby, my father looked like the men from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society themselves. His beard was closely shaven and his hair slicked back. When Flora first saw them, she started to cry. “Where’s Mama? Where’s Papa?” In their new American clothing, both our parents were suddenly stiff and tentative, moving as if they were afraid of breaking something. They smiled shyly, like strangers. Framed by their new hats and haircuts, the lines of their faces seemed to have been redrawn.

  Since I refused to relinquish my coat, I received only some navy blue hair ribbons and a new pair of wool stockings. But after this, we were fed. At a long wooden table with other Jewish immigrants. Fresh challah and rich noodle kugel and bowls of broth with pillowy kreplach floating in it.

  We ate and we ate, as we had never eaten before. The food and the new clothes felt celebratory. From across the table, my father couldn’t help grinning at my mother triumphantly. “See,” he said proudly as he slurped his soup. “Malka, tell your mother: We are not even living in America, yet already so much to eat!”

  * * *

  Like most
factory owners, Yacob Lefkowitz ran his business out of his tenement apartment. During the day his tiny parlor doubled as the cutting and sewing “floor,” while his small kitchen served as the pressing area, with an ironing board set up next to the stove. In a mere two years since his arrival from Lodz, Mr. Lefkowitz had gone from being a peddler to a tailor to a sweatshop owner, producing winter coats and “car dusters” for Valentine’s, Wanamaker’s, and Gimbels uptown.

  He made enough money so that he and his wife, Clara, didn’t have to take in boarders the way most of their neighbors did.

  But then Clara died in childbirth—along with their newborn girl. When the shiva—the mourning period—was officially over, the seamstress, cutters, and presser employed by Mr. Lefkowitz arrived on the fourth floor on Orchard Street at 7:00 A.M. to find themselves with nothing to do: No cloth had been purchased, no new orders commissioned. Unfinished coats lay untouched on the floor and strewn across the couch like casualties of war. Mr. Lefkowitz sat in his kitchen with his hands sandwiched between his knees, rocking back and forth, eyes fixed in the middle distance, murmuring the Shema. It was heartbreaking to be sure, but the workers took quick stock of the situation, saw the train of destitution rumbling toward them, and scrambled to secure work elsewhere.

  After receiving an eviction notice, Mr. Lefkowitz drank himself to near blindness at the saloon downstairs, then came home and stumbled around his apartment, cursing his one God. By the end of the night, there wasn’t a single neighbor in the tenement who hadn’t heard his tsuris and grievances documented loudly and in great detail through the air shaft. He contemplated killing himself. Death was the only way to rejoin Clara, to see their stillborn daughter, he yelled—death and then the Messiah, of course. It could be a very long process. Why didn’t Jews make anything easy? But then, he discovered, he didn’t own a sharp enough knife. He didn’t own any pills.

  As the purple-black sky started to bleed into a sad, filmy morning, Mr. Lefkowitz sank into a chair and shouted, “Look at me, God! I’m too poor to even commit suicide properly!”

  To win back his contracts with the department stores, he’d have to produce coats again—more cheaply than ever. As he did the math the next morning, he saw the necessity of taking in boarders, too—if boarders could be found who wouldn’t drink, run off in the middle of the night with his valuables (such as they were), or steal his sewing machine.

  Two days later, when my weary father knocked on his door with a referral from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Mr. Lefkowitz ushered us into his kitchen like six answered prayers.

  He was a twitchy, spindly man, Mr. Lefkowitz, gone prematurely bald. Behind his glasses his eyes were red-rimmed and startled. He led the six of us into his apartment with a nervous hiccup. “In this room you can sleep,” he said, motioning to a tiny parlor filled with old newspapers and rags. Bolts of charcoal-colored fabric were propped against the walls and piled haphazardly atop the furnishings. By the window was a sewing machine with a wrought-iron pedal. Mr. Lefkowitz pointed to the settee in front of the fireplace. “The children can sleep on the cushions. One on the frame, maybe—”

  Most immigrant families came to America piecemeal—first a father and a daughter, perhaps, would arrive and get jobs. A year or two later, they’d send for the mother, the brothers. Lots of new arrivals were barely more than teenagers. But our family had arrived in New York intact—we were half a dozen, yet utterly alone. Six was a lot. There was barely enough space in the parlor for all of us to stand. The walls, papered with faded green and mustard cabbage roses, seemed to perspire and ripple with the heat. From the alley beneath the windows, I could hear chickens squawking, then their unearthly, strangulated cries as a butcher broke their necks with a single twist of his hands and a grunt. I ran to take a look. “Look, that butcher isn’t kosher!” I shouted, leaning over the windowsill and pointing. I felt rather proud that I could discern this.

  My mother shot my father another vicious look.

  “Mama,” said Flora, tugging at her skirt, “where’s the toilet?”

  “Ask your father,” my mother said. “And ask him, too, if you please: Is he fool enough to believe that this is better than Africa?”

  Come nightfall, the sound of chickens being slaughtered was replaced by the noise from the saloon downstairs: beer steins pounding on tabletops, stomping, singing, bullying, drunken love songs performed a cappella to the fire escapes. Bellowing men staggered into the courtyard to urinate by the chicken coop. It was even louder than Papa’s friends had been at the detention center in Hamburg. When the commotion died down late into the night, we could still hear muffled weeping coming from Mr. Lefkowitz’s tiny bedroom on the other side of the kitchen.

  Crammed together on the old velvet cushions, which buckled and grew damp with our sweat, surrounded by bolts of wool, tickled by fleas and cockroaches, my sisters and I flailed and tore at our nightdresses in the airless room until we were teary with frustration. Papa shushed us, then finally stood up. “Tell your mother I’ll be on the stoop.” Pulling on his pants, he grabbed his shoes and maneuvered his way over the detritus of us toward the door. Rose started to cry. “Papa, where are you going?” It was the middle of the night. This made Flora and me start weeping, too. Papa! Papa! Our sobs only seemed to fuel Mr. Lefkowitz’s staccato cries in the back room, which grew ever louder. Our father’s footsteps rang down the staircase.

  “Stop it,” my mother hissed. “All of you.”

  Walking over to the window, she stared down at the noisy, garbage-strewn courtyard and began twisting the frayed ends of her hem around her knuckles. “Again he leaves?” she spit. “On our very first night? That mamzer.”

  Sitting up on my cushion on the floor, I wiped my nose on the back of my wrist and coughed. My throat hurt; my arms and shoulders itched. I couldn’t for the life of me understand: Why weren’t we there yet? Perhaps there was still another ferry boat to take, or a streetcar. Perhaps we just hadn’t walked far enough into the city. “Mama? Maybe tomorrow,” I suggested, “we can go to America.”

  My mother turned and glared at me, her stare ossifying into something cold and hard, like agate. Then she gave a vicious little laugh. “Oh, you think so, bubeleh?”

  The next morning my sisters and I awoke to the sound of scissors snipping. In the anemic yellow light of the gas jets, we saw Mama’s back bobbing over a bolt of fabric. Her back bobbed at sunrise, at midday, well into the darkness of evening. As she bent over the patterns, she muttered in Yiddish. In the kitchen Papa stood over the ironing board. As soon as one garment was finished and Mr. Lefkowitz handed him another, Papa heaved the heavy iron off the stove top with a grunt and smoothed it, hissing, over the fabric. He paced about constantly in between jobs, but in the tiny kitchen there was almost nowhere to move. Several times, Papa excused himself and headed out into the streets for a “break.” These were almost unheard of in those days, but Mr. Lefkowitz didn’t seem to notice. Seated at the sewing machine, he stared out the window in a sort of trance while my mother’s piecework piled up on the floor before him, waiting to be stitched. When he finally remembered to pick up a piece and begin, he often forgot that his foot was on the pedal, and he’d let the needle run clear over the edge of the fabric so that he’d have to redo the seam entirely. We could see why he needed the help. By the end of the week, two more women from Lodz had been hired and installed in the tiny parlor as well. All of them labored in silence. Not knowing what else to do, my sisters and I headed downstairs to the streets.

  The dawn of the twentieth century had seen, among other things, the inventions of structural steel and electric elevators. Nothing at the Hilfsverein’s detention center or Ellis Island had prepared us for this. On the ferry to Manhattan the day of our arrival, we’d gazed upon a skyline rising above the harbor like a colossus of stalagmites. The afternoon sun lacquered it in brilliant gold light. As the ferry churned closer and closer and the city bore in, Flora, Bella, Rose, and I stood beside our parents, bedazzled an
d stunned. My father and the Jews back in Hamburg—they had been exactly right: Buildings soared to the sky covered in gold and crystal, as ornate as Torah scrolls! Papa was smiling. His cheeks were wet. Mama’s, too. Everyone around us was gasping, weeping, applauding. The scale of it! The unspeakable beauty!

  Straining against the railing, my sisters and I squealed and shouted and pointed up at the spires, their filigreed façades, their diamante windows. My God! They went to the clouds! Who’d ever seen such a thing?

  “How do the people get in there?” said Rose.

  “How do they not fall down?” said Bella.

  “Is this where we are going to live?”

  “Let’s live way up on the very top!” I shouted, twirling. “Above everything!”

  Now, however, blinking into the dusty morning light, my sisters and I found ourselves on cramped, crowded, low-lying Orchard Street. It sounded more like Vishnev than America. Yiddish everywhere. Pushcarts, hawkers, shoppers, horses, and gangs of children clogged the sidewalks. The noise was incredible. There was nothing left of the Manhattan skyline. It had vanished behind us as quickly as it had appeared, like a mirage. All we had now was this.

  The immigrant experience on the Lower East Side—oh, how people go on about it! Such nostalgia. The pickle men, the peddlers’ wagons, the children playing marbles on the stoops.…Now, apparently, there are even “cultural walking tours” for tourists: Some schmuck with an umbrella points out a knish store to a bunch of Japanese.

  Well, let me tell you, darlings: immigrant, schmimmigrant. The streets were cobblestone and asphalt, the buildings masonry. The stoops and fire escapes were iron, the rooftops tar, the ceilings pressed tin. There were no trees, no breezes from the river, no respite from the sun. Can you imagine? We roasted. My sisters and I—four little Russian girls—we had never experienced such heat in our lives. As we linked arms, the four of us, and stepped carefully off into the gutter, the crooks of our elbows and the backs of our necks instantly became wet.