My jaunty gray Cicurel coat did little to shield me from the arctic chill of Pier 90, where the Queen Mary berthed after arriving in New York. We stood on the ship’s bow, looking down toward the dock. The entire landscape was white, and we were mystified. César decided to investigate.
“What is that on the ground?” my brother asked the passenger next to him.
The man’s eyes widened, as if he had encountered a Martian.
“Snow,” he replied, and then edged away.
After going through customs, we stood in front of the pier, our mountain of luggage piled up around us, waiting I wasn’t sure for what. Our fellow travelers were leaving us behind one by one. They disappeared into waiting arms or waiting cars or waiting taxicabs even as we continued to stand out in the cold. We had come so far, yet we didn’t know where we were going, and we had no one to take us there.
We were somewhat in shock, staring at the cars bobbing up and down the West Side Highway; they were all so enormous—so outsize: nothing like the endearing little Citroëns and Renaults we were so used to seeing on the streets of Paris. Those were my first impressions of America: the bitter cold and the large imperious automobiles that occasionally came to a full stop and picked someone up, but never me or my family.
I went over to my father and reached for his hand. He had on his thin old raincoat, which was, if possible, even flimsier than my woolen coat with its matching scarf, but he didn’t complain, though I noticed that he wasn’t wearing gloves, and his hand felt like ice. He was strangely silent: no cries of “Ragaouna Masr.” He simply stared, as we all did, at the grayness of the sky, the whiteness of the ground, the bleak horizon of low-lying buildings and the cars moving, moving along the highway.
I tugged at his sleeve, which I did whenever I wanted his attention, and he managed to dig into his pocket and remove a piece of candy. He had bonbons left over from the stash he’d collected on the Queen Mary, where every night was a feast, an occasion to shower passengers with desserts and favors and music and treats.
Our passage across the Atlantic had felt like a holiday cruise, one long luxuriant party. The sheer opulence of it all left us almost in a daze after the miseries and privations of the prior year. It was sheer luck that we had maneuvered a trip on a grand ocean liner, instead of flying coach for ten hours or more on Pan Am, the usual mode of travel for refugees. My father told HIAS that he couldn’t tolerate an extended plane ride because of his leg. We were steered toward the Queen Mary, since its departure for America coincided with the date HIAS had decreed we should leave. Before we knew it, we had tickets on the grandest ship afloat, fit for dukes and duchesses and debonair film stars.
Admittedly, we had the least expensive accommodations available—third class, modest quarters for the most budget-conscious travelers. They didn’t strike me as particularly modest, though, not compared to our recent digs—the cabin by the engine on the Massaglia, or the Violet Hotel.
The gracious, exquisitely polite culture of the Queen Mary suited us to perfection: at last, a world outside of Cairo where people weren’t rude or impatient, where they were actually solicitous, and deigned to show us some kindness and concern.
My father felt at home with the British crew. He bantered amiably with everyone from the captain to the purser, showing off his command of the language and his exquisite accent. None of us could compete with him when it came to speaking English.
We sailed a couple of weeks before Christmas, and a holiday mood prevailed. There were nonstop diversions—concerts and dances, movies, plays, games, and soirees, organized by an energetic crew that seemed interested in our well-being—making certain we were happy and enjoying ourselves.
I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had cared whether we were happy.
While I stuck close to my dad, my siblings roamed a ship that felt as vast as a city. Though first class was technically off-limits, César made friends who let him peek at its dazzling ballrooms and lounges, tall staircases and elegant carpeted suites. At night, he went dancing at the clubs that catered to teenagers and featured the latest American hits, including a jazzed-up, souped-up Latin version of “If I Had a Hammer,” sung by Trini Lopez.
After months of the greasy dishes of Le Richer, dining on the Queen Mary was the greatest extravagance of all. We enjoyed gourmet meals served by our personal waiter who boasted a command of some twenty-five languages, and had each language that he spoke stitched into the fabric of his sleeve. Every lunch and dinner, he appeared magically at our side, offering to translate the menu into the language of our choice. Unlike the lone other family on our side of the ship who kept kosher, and insisted on Yiddish translations of every entrée and appetizer, we remained mostly silent and tried to follow along in English. We ate on elegant porcelain china, using fine silverware engraved with the word Kasher.
I sat, as always, at my father’s side; he was more cheerful than I’d seen him in months. It was as if the magical powers of the Queen Mary, its British culture, its deferential staff, its soothing vegetable broth prepared in the ship’s kosher kitchen, made him feel hopeful for the first time about our lives outside of Egypt.
We had felt protected the entire time we were aboard the ship, but now, on the pier, the old feeling of being lost and at the mercy of an uncertain fate returned. I noticed that my parents and siblings kept looking anxiously out toward the highway, as if some familiar face would materialize from the icy gray blur. No one could explain to me what we were doing, why we had come all this way only to be left out in the cold.
We were officially welcomed to America by an HIAS bureaucrat, who apologized profusely for being late. She handed my father $50 to help tide us over those first few days, and arranged for a taxi to transport us and our suitcases to our hotel.
The Broadway Central was a lumbering old hotel, long past its prime, perched between Greenwich Village and the Bowery. It had once housed any number of illustrious guests and visitors, from Diamond Jim Brady to James Fisk, the railroad tycoon who was shot there, to Leon Trotsky, who waited tables before hastening back to Russia to lead the Red Army.
But now, in the early 1960s, it was so down-at-the-heels it catered mostly to needy low-income families and stray out-of-towners and refugees like us who couldn’t afford any better—a forerunner of the welfare hotels that would become commonplace.
Though we were given a suite, our accommodations were, if possible, even more squalid than at the Violet Hotel. We had a small kitchenette and two large drafty rooms, where beds were lined up one next to the other as in a hospital ward. There were only five beds for the six of us, so I doubled up with my mom in a small bed, close to a wall with a large gaping hole.
We were used to balmy winters, and even Paris had been mild the year we were there, but here it was freezing cold. I went to bed every night in my street clothes—a pair of gray wool slacks from Cairo and a turtleneck sweater.
My mother thought I was being silly, as did the rest of the family. No one could understand why I insisted on sleeping in scratchy woolen street clothes instead of the soft and toasty flannel pajamas they had managed to retrieve from one of the suitcases, and I am not sure I understood myself.
We fell back into the nerve-racking rituals of people with nothing to do. I took walks with various members of my family—slow walks with my father, who was in constant pain, aggravated by the frigid temperatures; brisk walks with César, who was curious about America but not in love with it the way he had been in love with Paris; anxious walks with my mom, who seemed bewildered by the Village and New York in general; quiet walks with my sister, who took me again and again to Washington Square Park.
On the benches were people clad entirely in black, who looked like no one I had ever seen before. I couldn’t help staring at these strange creatures seated amid the snowy white splendor of Washington Square Park. “Ce sont des bohémiens, des ‘beatniks,’” my sister explained. We’d sit in one of the benches and stare at them, hoping they would approach us. They had eyes only for each other, and neither I nor my sister, all bundled up in our layers of Mediterranean garb, could possibly be part of any group. We were still outsiders, even to the beatniks, the quintessential outsiders.
When she walked alone, Suzette would occasionally find herself accosted by a beatnik, asking her for a handout. She’d shake her head no and continue walking. But she felt strangely guilty about turning them down, though she had even less than they did.
More inviting even than Washington Square Park was our local supermarket. I’d never been inside a supermarket before, and I found it dazzling, especially the fruits and vegetables, which I was used to buying loose by the pound, in outdoor stalls or from the vendors who roamed around Malaka Nazli. Here, they came packaged in green paper cartons, tightly wrapped in a layer of cellophane, so that even ordinary grapes or pears seemed remote and shiny and untouchable. I wondered why anyone would take the trouble to cover bananas or green beans in plastic, when anywhere else in the world, it was possible to simply reach for some. That must be America, I decided: a country where even commonplace items like apples sparkled and looked expensive and desirable beneath their plastic sheathing.
Bread was another mystery. I was used to tall thin golden baguettes purchased fresh from bakeries all over Paris, and in Cairo, we enjoyed hot round pita bread that came from the oven. But here, the package of white bread looked nothing like the bread I knew. It was all dough with practically no crust, while I was used to crust and very little dough. We eyed the packages of Wonder suspiciously, inspecting them closely.
I was anxious to sample some, but my father seemed horrified: “Loulou, ce n’est pas du pain, ça,” he said; This is not bread. We never bought white bread from the supermarket near the Broadway Central and rarely, if ever, later on.
A few days after we’d arrived, the resettlement agency called, asking to see us. HIAS had discharged us from its files; our only remaining contact involved the debt we had incurred for the tickets to sail aboard the Queen Mary, and which my father had agreed to repay over time. Now we were in the care of NYANA, the New York Association for New Americans. Mom, who loved to Frenchify every English name, promptly dubbed it la Nyana.
My father and César made their way to the agency’s lower Manhattan office to meet with the social worker in charge of our Americanization. Sylvia Kirschner, a tough-talking veteran, seemed from the start to take an active, almost visceral dislike to my father. She offered so much advice it was dizzying. Our stay at the Broadway Central had to be as brief as possible. The family needed to find a place to live. My dad, my older siblings, and even my mom all had to go out and find work. We had to master English and meet people and make friends and lead normal lives again.
The initial meeting had the feel of a police interrogation. Why hadn’t we begun to look for an apartment? Where were my mother and the other children? Why hadn’t they come, too? Had we made any contact with relatives who could help us find work or a place to live? We had been in America all of five days; Mrs. Kirschner seemed in an awful hurry.
My father sat there, listening politely, talking only when she lobbed questions his way. He was so quiet and deferential that the social worker misunderstood—the way that she would consistently misunderstand him. She mistook his silence for contempt, and decided he was being obsequious when he was simply trying to be gentlemanly, more so than usual because he knew that this woman held our fate in her hands.
Unwittingly, Dad had incurred the wrath of Sylvia Kirschner.
It wasn’t that Mrs. Kirschner was blind to my father’s frailties—his advancing age, his deepening infirmities, his growing dependency. On the contrary, in page after page of notes that read almost like a diary, she chronicled my dad’s failing strength, observing that he “looks considerably older than his age, walks with a pronounced limp and also very slowly due to his leg fracture,” and “was obviously in pain.” Even in the relative comfort of her office, she noticed that he could barely sit still without shifting his leg or grimacing, and he was so “very tired.”
Yet, faced with a man clearly in decline, Mrs. Kirschner seemed unmoved. She found him troubling. Though skilled and vastly experienced, a professional who’d helped thousands of immigrants make the transition from the old world, making that transition had been based on the act of letting go—abandoning belief systems that were quaint and out of date in favor of the modern, the new, the progressive ideas that were so uniquely American.
That is what assimilation was all about, yet the overly polite gentleman with the vaguely British accent and the severe limp rejected the notion out of hand.
My father was by no means convinced the values of New York trumped those of Cairo. He couldn’t see abandoning a culture he loved and trusted in favor of one he barely knew, and which he instinctively disliked. He preferred being an old Egyptian to a new American. He had, in short, no desire whatsoever to assimilate. “We are Arab, madame,” he told Mrs. Kirschner.
It was a tragic clash of cultures and personalities. Both strong-willed people, my father and Sylvia Kirschner were set in their ways, and adhered to belief systems that were worlds apart and could never, ever be reconciled. Like boxers in a ring, they stood in their respective corners, determined to fight to the final bell for the principles they cherished.
And in a way, the test of wills between Sylvia Kirschner and Leon Lagnado in a small refugee agency in early 1964 presaged the conflicts my family would face for years to come in America, where our values and feelings about the importance of God and family and the role of women would constantly collide with those of our American friends. It also hinted at the larger, more terrifying and far deadlier conflict that would break out between the United States and the Muslim world decades later, when the United States would seek to spread its belief in freedom and equality only to find itself spurned at every turn by cultures that viewed America as a godless and profoundly immoral society.
Leon could have been a criminal, a jewel thief, a philanderer, a swindler: nothing could have offended our social worker more than his refusal to conform and change and cast aside those values she clearly viewed as virtually un-American and utterly repugnant.
In her eyes, my father was a patriarch in a land where there were no patriarchs. He wanted to rule over his wife and children—perhaps even his social worker—even though men weren’t supposed to do that anymore. “He is an extremely rigid person, with limited horizons, has an Oriental psychology, covered up by a veneer of manners,” she wrote. My dad and his views were hopelessly at odds with the enlightened society he had been fortunate to enter.
Or maybe not so fortunate. In one of her more insightful moments, Mrs. Kirschner remarked that my father “regards the immigration as a calamity rather than as an opportunity.”
Barely a week later, the six of us trooped down to the tip of Lower Manhattan to meet with the redoubtable Mrs. Kirschner.
She looked us up and down, taking notes, then came to me, peered closely my way, and took more notes. The only one she approved of unreservedly was Suzette. From the start, the two laughed and chatted as if they were old friends. My sister turned on the charm. “A very attractive, articulate young lady,” Mrs. Kirschner raved in her case files.
Not all of us fared as well.
César seemed to annoy her almost as much as my father. She didn’t accuse my teenage brother of being old-world; she simply resented a sense of ambition she felt went beyond his natural abilities. Mrs. Kirschner seemed troubled by my older brother’s outsize dreams, the fact he resisted taking an entry-level job as a messenger or a clerk. She stressed the need for him to be practical and start working.
Over the years, my brother would blame Sylvia Kirschner and la Nyana for the path he had taken, for the fact he had gone to work at eighteen, stuck in a series of menial and low-paying jobs, when he should have been attending school and building his career.
Instead, because of the fateful decree that he land a job, any job, the college degree that César could have earned in four years took him a decade to complete. He had no choice but to attend night school, where most students were immigrants like himself, which only underscored his feelings of apartness and alienation. His master’s degree, which should have taken two years, took five instead. By the time he was done, César was thirty-five.
Mrs. Kirschner was deeply sympathetic to my mother and anxious to help her, to change her, to help her take advantage of the opportunities that had been denied to her as a woman in Egypt.
Mrs. Kirschner became obsessed with my mother’s appearance, the fact that she was toothless and looked older than she was. The idea that a forty-two-year-old woman would walk around without any teeth struck her as almost barbaric. In the social worker’s eyes, Edith was timid, quiet, anxious, and clearly under my father’s spell. Mom “gave the impression of a frightened person,” the social worker wrote, “emphasized by her enormous black eyes which stare almost childlike for protection.” Leon was to blame. All the conflicts and problems and pathology she saw in my family were largely the result of his impossibly domineering personality.
What could America do for such a woman? It might not be able to give back her self-esteem, but it could at least provide her with a set of false teeth.
After grilling both my parents on why Mom hadn’t seen a dentist in Egypt, she ordered her to go immediately to a dental clinic to be fitted for a set of dentures; the agency would foot the bill, Mrs. Kirschner grandly decreed, along with her edict that we had to leave the Broadway Central.
Most of the other refugees from the Levant had landed in one small corner of southern Brooklyn. My family was so unmoored, it made eminent sense for us to rejoin our lost community. César and my father journeyed daily to Bensonhurst, the ten-block area where refugees from Cairo and Alexandria had fetched up in an urban encampment of low-lying redbrick tenement buildings and simple two-family homes. They walked in the bitter cold, searching and searching for signs in the window proclaiming “Apartment to Let.”
Early on, they stumbled on one promising prospect—a small apartment on the second floor of a house owned by a dentist, Dr. Cohen. My father engaged the dentist in conversation, hoping to negotiate a more affordable rent by stressing his deep commitment to Judaism, his habit of attending services every morning. Only at the end did Dr. Cohen blurt out that he wasn’t Jewish. Dad, stunned and confused, left, bewildered by this land where nothing was what it seemed, not even a doctor named Cohen.
My mother and I also tried our luck. We ventured out to Brooklyn and wandered around, on the lookout for To Let signs. Most were beyond our means. Exhausted, we decided to pay a call on my mom’s relatives and the stepsister she hadn’t seen in five years, not since Tante Rosée and her brood had left Egypt.
I had never met Rosée, but my mom had spoken worshipfully of this older woman who had been like a mother to her. She loved to recall her engagement, when Rosée took it upon herself to sew her bridal gown. At the end, Rosée had tucked strands of her own hair inside the hem for good luck. My mother could never part with it, and there it was, lying in one of the twenty-six suitcases that had followed us to America.
My aunt lived on a staid two-way street of shops with apartments upstairs. It was the Christmas season, and the area glistened with holiday decorations. What astonished me most wasn’t the abundance of trees and lights and plastic reindeers but the lone Hanukkah menorahs with their soft orange glow on display in so many windows. I had never seen an electric menorah before; at home, we lit small wicks that floated in a pool of oil and water.
I was used to a culture where religion was practiced discreetly, behind the closed doors of one’s house or synagogue, yet here were Jews observing their holiday as openly and assertively as their Catholic neighbors with their wreaths and garlands and Merry Christmas signs.
Tante Rosée and my mother embraced, and the obligatory café Turque was brought out on a tray, but later, Rosée began to lecture Mom on the etiquette of visiting in America.
New York wasn’t like Cairo, she declared. The custom of dropping in on friends or even relatives without prior arrangements simply wouldn’t do. “Here, in America, you have to call first,” she told my mom. I noticed my mother freeze, then smile blankly.
We wandered back into the street, but suddenly, the glimmer of the holiday lights seemed a lot less hopeful. We felt far away from Malaka Nazli and the stream of relatives and friends who dropped in on us constantly, and on the long trip back to Manhattan, we were both silent. It had begun to dawn on us that this culture we were being asked to embrace, with its promise of riches and opportunity, could be as savage as the December night air that pierced our flimsy Cicurel garb.
The tough, forbidding woman we had met this evening bore little resemblance to the Tante Rosée my mom remembered from Egypt. She preferred to think of the last exchange as an aberration, a mistake, and remember her stepsister as the person who had taken it upon herself to sew her a magnificent wedding dress and had brought her back to life as she struggled with typhoid and the loss of her blue-eyed baby girl.
IT WAS CERTAINLY THE coldest winter we had ever known, but it was also one of the coldest winters New York had ever known.
Every day, César and my father trudged arm in arm through the streets of Brooklyn, humbled by the snowdrifts that were several feet high. My dad’s limp grew worse, aggravated by the perilous walks on snow and ice. My brother wasn’t faring well either. He was so thin—nearly six feet tall, he weighed only 140 pounds and suffered from a terrible cough, the result of the frigid weather and his habit of smoking several packs of cigarettes a day.
Mrs. Kirschner suggested he and my father go immediately to the Northern Dispensary, a clinic in the Village.
To help César recover, the agency also approved the purchase of a winter coat. Together with my dad—the two had become inseparable—my brother set out for S. Klein’s, the discount department store in Union Square. There was a sale, and out of a combination of prudence and panic and confusion, my brother selected an overcoat that was nearly ten sizes too big.
The days of the sleek, fitted black leather blouson were over. The dark woolen coat on sale for $17.50 was size 46—suitable for a man several inches taller and many pounds heavier. It reached past his knees, the sleeves were way too long, and the shoulders drooped, so that its style was raglan.
When César modeled his new coat, my father nodded his approval and remarked that my brother would grow into it. It would surely help him survive his first American winter. Alas, the opposite proved to be true. The coat was so large it shielded him far less effectively than one his own size.
It was as if, marooned in America, we had lost our perspective, our sense of proportion. My brother, who had always liked well-tailored, fashionable clothing, ended up purchasing a coat that was neither. My father, who had paid such meticulous attention to cut and style, was now unable to look at a garment his eldest son was buying and point out its obvious flaws.
Worse still, Dad had become oblivious to his own appearance. For the first time in his life, he was dressing sloppily, and paying almost no attention to the way he looked. Mrs. Kirschner was struck by my father’s battered, impoverished garb. Once the essence of style as he ambled through Cairo in his immaculate white suits, he was described in her notes as “shabbily dressed.” What about all the clothes in the twenty-six suitcases? she wondered.
My father was silent, both when he sat in Sylvia Kirschner’s office and back at the Broadway Central. He had always kept his own counsel, and he wasn’t about to start confiding in her or us or anyone his despair over finding himself stranded in a hotel room in Greenwich Village in winter, with no means and no prospects and a little girl asking for white bread and fruit wrapped in cellophane.
And so the only sign of his inner struggle was in his clothes—frayed, careworn, slightly askew.
One morning, we woke up to the sound of clanging bells. We could hear people shuffling in the hallway, then more bells. It was barely five o’clock—we had no idea what was going on. We were only days before Christmas, yet my mother sat up and cried out delightedly, “Ce sont les cloches de Pâques”; They must be Easter bells. There was furious banging outside our room, and then the cry, “Fire!”
The Broadway Central was in flames. We had to evacuate immediately.
Since I had gone to sleep in my usual gear of wool slacks and a sweater, I sprung out of bed, fully dressed. But no one else was ready. Everyone seemed either frozen, unable to move, or scurrying around in a state of panic. My mother still couldn’t believe what she’d heard was a fire alarm. My sister fretted about what to wear. My father moved more slowly than usual, unsure what to take with him: Precious papers? One key suitcase among the twenty-six? César recovered his composure and grabbed his wallet along with odds and ends—travel papers, photos of childhood friends, a few American dollars, and, for good measure, a couple of Egyptian pounds.
I kept yelling out to everyone, “Allons, allons,” Let’s go, let’s go, my survival skills finely honed even at age seven. There was smoke and pandemonium in the hallways, and people in bathrobes and hair curlers were crying and hurrying toward the stairs and elevators.
Finally, after what seemed like ages, we were all ready, except my sister, who was still fussing by the closet. My father shuffled out, taking nothing except his wallet. My mother, my brothers, and I followed; Suzette threw her winter coat over her pajamas and hurried after us. We left the room and walked across a hallway filled with smoke, muddied with the foam and water firefighters were using to extinguish the blaze, and rode the elevator down to the lobby.
It was 17 degrees outside, with a wind that tore through our clothes.
My father took us to a coffee shop at the corner for hot chocolate and coffee, where we waited and wondered. Had we lost another home? Would we have to move again to a new hotel? Upstairs were all of our worldly belongings. It seemed unthinkable that the little we still owned could be destroyed.
After several hours we were told we could return to our rooms, which miraculously had suffered little damage. I was in an oddly chipper mood. I’d been completely vindicated in my habit of going to sleep with my clothes on.
In my mind, it was prudent to be on guard in this country.
AT LAST, OUR MEANDERINGS through Brooklyn paid off, and we found an apartment: four rooms, including the kitchen. It was far smaller than Malaka Nazli, hardly enough to accommodate six people, but at least it was ours, and after nearly a year of hotel rooms, it seemed almost palatial. It was on a street where families were either from Italy or the Levant.
Our elderly landlord, Basil Cohen—no relation to the dentist—traced his ancestry to Aleppo exactly as my father did. After negotiations worthy of two Syrian bazaar merchants, my dad and Mr. Cohen agreed to a rent of $95. It was over our budget, but we felt under so much pressure to move, we had no choice. Mrs. Kirschner wanted us out of the Broadway Central immediately. She had threatened to stop paying our bills, which would have effectively left us homeless.
We would be like normal people again, with a real address. It was, as far as I was concerned, our most exciting day in America: we were going shopping for furniture. We would have our own beds, chairs, couches, tables—all that we’d missed for so long.
As we trooped to Macy’s in single file, I noticed the cold didn’t bother me a bit. I spotted the sign from blocks away: “Macy’s: The World’s Largest Store.”
I was in awe. But once upstairs, as we wandered through the vast showrooms, we realized there was nothing we could actually afford.
The salesman showed us magnificent king-size beds that looked as if they were out of a movie set but weren’t even remotely within our budget. Noting our dismay, he escorted us to a corner where Macy’s kept its least expensive merchandise. He pointed out several spartan metal cots. The low-lying folding beds were small and forbidding, with thin striped foam mattresses barely a couple of inches thick.
“C’est comme dans l’armée,” my mom remarked acidly; It’s like the army.
We walked out of Macy’s having spent our entire furniture budget on six folding steel cots.
Mrs. Kirschner blanched at the bill—$254—and accused my father of being a spendthrift. Why Macy’s? she demanded to know. Why not a neighborhood shop?
She continued to see him as the cause of all our mishaps. A feminist before the flowering of the feminist movement, she viewed my father with such suspicion and hostility that even his attributes in her eyes turned into flaws. Why did a refugee from Egypt shop only in first-rate department stores? Why did he speak with an upper-crust British accent? she wondered. Surely it was an affectation.
My father had lived his entire life by a code of honor. In Egypt, he had been respected and admired precisely for his principles. Yet the chasm was so immense between him and our social worker she found almost nothing to admire—not even his lovely English. His insistence on tradition made him obdurate in her eyes. His devotion to faith and ritual was hopelessly quaint. She cast a wary eye on the religious passion that had always defined my father; because she was so secular, the product of a secular society, she didn’t share that passion and dismissed it as superficial and devoid of sincerity.
There was also the notion that he was unemployable—or at least, that was the verdict rendered by la Nyana within weeks of our arrival. The agency simply couldn’t envision a place for my father in the vast and abundant land of opportunity known as America.
“I have always worked, madame,” he told Mrs. Kirschner. Though he had always been secretive with us about his business dealings, he spoke at length with her about his experience as a grocer, an investor, and a pharmaceutical and chemical salesman.
He was desperate to work. When Mrs. Kirschner pointed out his physical limitations, he exclaimed, “Le bon Dieu est grand.” But this only led her to complain in her case notes about Dad’s tendency to always invoke God. My father, she wrote, “resorts to denials, distortions, and evasion, and his philosophy is that ‘God is Great,’ which he constantly expresses in French.”
She cast a cold eye on his impassioned plea that he needed to work to support all six of us, as he had always done. The social worker suggested he apply for welfare, instead. It was, again, a quintessentially American idea, certainly for the early 1960s. But nothing she said could have offended him more. He didn’t want charity, he told her coldly. Besides, he had a better idea.
In his walks around Manhattan, he’d noticed the hundreds of little stalls and stands that were everywhere, in the subway stations, on street corners, by bus stops, near any crowded venue, manned by one or two people selling cigarettes, newspapers, chocolate bars, candy, chips, cookies, magazines. Now there was a business that seemed manageable. It reminded him of the old days when he and Oncle Raphael had peddled groceries together.
He was prepared to start small, and besides, in his mind, these micro-businesses had enormous potential: New Yorkers wanted their morning paper and their Almond Joy and their pack of Camels in the same way that in Cairo, the typical Egyptian could be counted on to purchase a bottle of olive oil and a can of sardines.
My father decided he was going to open a candy store.
He started combing the classifieds for newsstands and tobacco stalls that were for sale. If no one in America would hire him, it seemed the ideal solution. He decided to appeal to Mrs. Kirschner and la Nyana to help him. A loan of $2,000 would do the trick, and then he would be able to support my mom and the rest of us entirely on his own as he always had.
Mrs. Kirschner wouldn’t hear of it.
She didn’t think she was being arbitrary or unkind. On the contrary, she felt she was being solicitous of my father, whose limp had gotten worse in the months since we had arrived. Prominent doctors the agency consulted said he should stay off his feet and give himself time to heal, yet there he was, proposing a venture that would require him to stand all day. Besides, he didn’t even have a coherent business plan—only supreme self-confidence that he could support us.
My dad’s impossibly modest wish was turned down. The man who had done business with Coca-Cola couldn’t be trusted to sell cigarettes and bubble gum.
In the middle of January, a major blizzard hit New York and left more than a foot of snow. It was more snow than we thought possible. A few days later, we left the Broadway Central for the second floor of the Cohens’ brick two-family on Sixty-sixth Street in Brooklyn. Mr. and Mrs. Cohen were waiting to greet us. “Etfadalou,” they cried, Arabic for welcome, and with typical Syrian hospitality, they offered us a platter of khak, salty ring-shaped biscuits covered with sesame. We hadn’t eaten them since Cairo, and biting into the delicious treats made us realize both that we were far from home and that we’d finally arrived. The cots from Macy’s were waiting for us. We still didn’t have a table, and there was one chair for all six of us.
Yet even here we couldn’t quite escape Sylvia Kirschner’s wrath.
Six months after our move, she decided to make a home visit. That morning, my father asked me if I wanted to go into Manhattan with him. I nodded yes, eager to accompany him on what seemed like an adventure. I didn’t realize that my dad was whisking me out of the house so I wouldn’t run into our social worker.
The two were now openly at war, any semblance of civility gone. He had watched as she befriended Suzette, encouraging her to flout his authority by telling her that in America, it was fine for a young woman to be independent. My sister was now threatening to leave the family and live on her own. My distraught father called Mrs. Kirschner and complained she had sent Suzette hurtling down a path that could only lead to disaster. “We will be ruined, madame,” he told the social worker. She shrugged and scribbled in her notes that he was being “extremely melodramatic.”
My father had other plans for my sister.
At the end of our block, my father had found a new home for himself—the Congregation of Love and Friendship. There it was, the old Cairo synagogue he thought was lost forever, resurrected from the dead, even down to its original Hebrew name, Ahabah ve Ahavah. The Congregation was warm and inviting, and he was reunited with several of his old friends from Egypt, who had undertaken the same sad journey. They prayed with the familiar melodies of Cairo Jewry, in the cherished cadence and rhythm of the temples around Malaka Nazli.
Many of the men had sons Suzette’s age who were eager to get married and rebuild their lives. He told the social worker he had suitors lined up for my sister. He couldn’t help boasting how skilled he was at arranging marriages—he had helped each one of his five sisters find a husband. Surely he could make a fine match for his own daughter.
Mrs. Kirschner wasn’t impressed. In America, girls didn’t have to be married off while they were young. They could leave the hearth, pursue an education, have a career. She didn’t think my sister had any obligation to get married—or to obey my father.
Dad found all of this unconscionable. On that hot summer day, he determined that he wasn’t going to let Sylvia Kirschner get anywhere near me.
I helped him carry the large brown box he carted everywhere these days. My father hadn’t found a job, but he was working. He had become a necktie salesman. Inside the box were dozens of ties, soft and silky and patterned in the most wonderful shapes and colors I had ever seen—a treasure trove that any adult male would be certain to want.
An hour or so later, Mrs. Kirschner arrived to find my mother alone. Where was my father? she asked. And where was I? She seemed dismayed we weren’t all there, as she’d specified. She was also annoyed. What on earth was Leon doing taking a little girl out on such a scorching day?
My mom tried to soothe her. She brought out a platter piled high with cakes and cookies, and some lemonade, and said I had gone with him to work.
Sylvia Kirschner was beside herself. She decided that he must be using me to boost his chances of making more sales. With my dark hair and dark eyes, I “could easily attract attention,” she scribbled furiously. She couldn’t imagine why he would take me with him “unless of course, it was for the purpose of using” me to “get a sympathetic reaction” from customers.
I was very lucky: decades would pass before the country embraced a “Take Your Daughter to Work” day and little girls began joining their dads in cubicles and at computer screens and in corporate boardrooms, and having the time of their lives.
It was clear he was struggling in his new business venture, and there were days he didn’t make any sales. But on that hot summer morning, as we walked hand in hand, he was hopeful and tender and solicitous. He smiled as he asked me, “Loulou, tu vas m’aider à vendre les cravates?”; Will you help me sell some ties?
He thought that I would bring him luck.