Letters From Rifka Read online

  Mr. Fargate pushed his glasses up on his nose and leaned over his desk to peer at Ilya.

  “Can you speak?” he asked in English.

  Ilya stared straight into Mr. Fargate’s eyes, but he said nothing.

  “He doesn’t understand English,” Nurse Bowen said.

  Mr. Fargate nodded. “Find someone who can translate.”

  “I can,” I offered.

  Mr. Fargate looked over his glasses at me. “Ask the boy if he can talk,” said Mr. Fargate.

  “Talk,” I told Ilya in Russian.

  Ilya glared at me.

  “Ilya, talk!”

  Ilya slowly shook his head.

  “Go get my Pushkin,” I told Ilya.

  He looked up at me and brushed his blond hair out of his eyes. His uncle looked up at me too, startled.

  “Go on, get the book,” I repeated.

  Ilya was being as stubborn as ever. He stood in his place and refused to move.

  “Ilya,” I commanded. “Go over there and get the book of Pushkin. Now!”

  I pointed toward my cot.

  Ilya stared at me with those stormy green eyes. Then he lowered his chin, brushed past his uncle, and got the book.

  “Ilya is a smart boy,” I told Mr. Fargate in English.

  I looked down at Ilya. “Read to them,” I ordered in Russian. “Show them that you are smart enough to live in America. I know how clever you are, Ilya. But Mr. Fargate needs to know. Your uncle needs to know too.”

  I looked back to where the uncle sat with his hat in his lap. The man’s eyes never left Ilya. He drank in the sight of his nephew the way a thirsty man pulls at a dipper of water.

  Still, Ilya remained silent.

  Mr. Fargate lifted the stamp, the deportation stamp.

  “Please,” I begged Ilya’s uncle in Russian. “You are losing him. He must prove to them that he is not a simpleton or they will send him away.”

  I tried to get the uncle to understand.

  “He is afraid of you. He thinks you don’t want him.”

  “He is my sister’s son,” Ilya’s uncle said in Russian. “Of course I want him. He is my flesh and blood. I sent for him to give him a better life here in America. I work day and night so he can have a good life.”

  “Do you hear, Ilya?” I said. “Do you hear?”

  Ilya turned his eyes for the first time on his uncle.

  “Doctor Askin,” I said in English. “Ilya is not a simpleton. I know he won’t talk to you. But he can talk. He can read, too. He is only seven years, but he can read.”

  I gave Ilya the book. “Now read,” I commanded in Russian.

  Ilya’s uncle got up out of his seat and came over. He put his hat down on the edge of Mr. Fargate’s desk and knelt before his nephew. “Please, Ilya,” he said. “Do what your friend says.”

  Ilya brushed the blond hair up onto his forehead. Then he began to read.

  “Storm-clouds dim the sky; the tempest

  Weaves the snow in patterns wild …”

  Ilya’s voice shook, but he was reading.

  “Like a beast the gale is howling,

  And now wailing like a child …”

  Tears filled the eyes of Ilya’s uncle.

  “Is he reading?” Mr. Fargate asked. “Is that Russian?”

  Ilya’s uncle nodded. “Pushkin.”

  “Let me see the book a moment,” Mr. Fargate said. He reached for the Pushkin. Ilya pulled it back, clasping the book to his chest.

  “Show Mr. Fargate the book,” I said in Russian. “Go on, Ilya.”

  Ilya’s hands trembled as he handed the book to Mr. Fargate. Mr. Fargate opened our Pushkin to another page. “Read this.”

  “ … I like the grapes whose clusters ripen

  Upon the hillside in the sun …”

  Ilya’s finger dragged across the page as he read the words.

  I smiled. Doctor Askin smiled. Nurse Bowen smiled too.

  “He understands this?” Mr. Fargate said. “At the age of seven?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “He understands.”

  Mr. Fargate lifted the stamp that permitted Ilya to enter the country and thumped it down on Ilya’s papers. Ilya was going to stay in America.

  “Did I do it right, Rifka?” he asked in Russian.

  “Yes, Ilya,” I said. “You did it just right.”

  Ilya’s uncle still knelt on the floor beside us. His arms opened up to take Ilya in. Oh, Tovah. You should have seen the way Ilya and his uncle embraced. In all the times he clung to me, Ilya never held me in such a way. Never.

  Ilya had attracted a lot of attention on the ward. No one but myself had ever heard his voice. Now there he was, reading Pushkin. Other nurses and doctors came over. They stood around in wonder at Ilya, now jabbering in Russian as he led his uncle back to his cot.

  I could not listen to what they were saying. The time had come for my review. My family waited tensely, some sitting, some standing, waiting for a decision about me. If only I could melt into their tight strong circle, but now, as I had so often over the last year, I stood alone.

  Mr. Fargate was talking with Doctor Askin about me. He wanted to know about the ringworm.

  “She arrived fully cured,” Doctor Askin said. “They made sure she was clean in Belgium before they sent her.”

  Please, I prayed. Don’t let them check for the ringworm now.

  They hadn’t checked in over a week. I’d shown no sign of being infectious for so long, they believed the ringworm was gone.

  I bit the insides of my cheeks to keep from scratching my itchy scalp. In my head, I repeated Sister Katrina’s prayer; I repeated a few Hebrew prayers too.

  Mr. Fargate turned to Doctor Askin. “What about her hair? Is there any sign of growth?”

  I slipped my hand up to my kerchief and gave a quick scratch. I tried not to, but I couldn’t keep my hand away from it. It itched so badly. It had been itching all morning.

  “Here, Rifka,” Doctor Askin said kindly, starting to unknot my kerchief. “Let me look once more to see if there is any sign of hair.”

  I pulled away.

  Oh, Tovah, if ever I needed to be clever, it was now.

  “You know,” I said. “What does it matter if my hair grows? A girl can not depend on her looks. It is better to be clever. I learned to speak English in three weeks, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” Mr. Fargate replied.

  “I help here too,” I said. “I am a good worker.”

  Mr. Fargate’s eyeglasses slid down to the tip of his nose and he stared over them at me. “Not very modest, is she?”

  They all laughed.

  “It is true!” I cried. “I am a good worker!”

  “You are, Rifka,” Doctor Askin agreed. He turned to Mr. Fargate. “With the right opportunity, the girl could study medicine. She has skill and talent.”

  “In your opinion, then,” Mr. Fargate said, “she would not end up a ward of the state?”

  “Who can tell?” said the doctor. “But the opposite is more likely. I have seen her care for the patients. Compassion is a part of medicine you can’t teach, Mr. Fargate. Compassion is a quality I have often seen in Rifka. Look what she did for the boy.”

  “I still worry about her hair,” Mr. Fargate said.

  I looked Mr. Fargate right in the eye. “I do not need hair to get a good life,” I said.

  “Maybe right now you don’t,” Mr. Fargate answered. “But what about when you wish to marry?”

  “If I wish to marry, Mr. Fargate,” I said—can you believe I spoke like this to an American official, Tovah?—“if I wish to marry, I will do so with hair or without hair.”

  I heard Mama gasp. This much English she understood.

  Mr. Fargate leaned forward to study me. He stared at me through the glasses balanced at the bottom of his nose.

  “You have plenty to say, young lady,” Mr. Fargate said.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “I do.”

  “Oy, Rifka,” Mama
whispered.

  I turned toward Mama. What I saw, though, was my brother Saul kneeling beside Ilya. Ilya and Saul were looking at the book of Pushkin together. Then Saul stood and took Ilya’s hand and they approached Mr. Fargate.

  “Yes?” Mr. Fargate asked.

  Ilya looked up at me. “Read to them,” he commanded in Russian.

  “Ilya, that will not work for me,” I told him in his own language. “They already know I can read. My case is not the same as yours.”

  “Read to them your poetry,” Saul said. “The words you have written in the back of this book.”

  I looked hard at Ilya. “You had no right to show that to anyone,” I said. “Those are my words.”

  “They are good words, Rifka,” Saul said.

  “They are nothing,” I answered. “Simple little poems. They don’t even rhyme. What good would it do to read such things aloud? Leave it be.”

  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

  Author’s Note

  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.

  Historical Note

  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.