One

 

THE PUBLIC PRIMARY school that I attended was a two-story complex of white stone buildings, partially offset by a picket fence and flanked by large oak trees, and named after the famous Polish leader Józef Pilsudski. There were about forty students in my class, including ten Jews. We sat at long wooden desks, about eight students packed in a row, plus there were a few two-student desks in the front. The buildings were cold and draughty, though shafts of rectangular window light warmed our arms if we sat in their direct path. Even on a day like this, a Saturday in early November 1936, most children, including me, wore sweaters.

Although the Jewish students were required to go to school on Shabbes, they didn’t have to write. Remaining with their hands folded was enough to show the others that they were different, but the Jewish kids knew they had to be quiet, too. They tried to blend in with the other dark-headed students, forming a kind of Semitic humming chorus, attending the Catholic morning prayers and religious classes.

All, that is, except for me. At seven, I was next to the youngest of the Jewish students. I was thin and pale, with blond hair and blue eyes, and the priest sometimes confused me with being Polish, as if it were a compliment. But I always fingered my silver Star of David necklace that my father buffed every Sunday night when he polished everything else in the house that was worthy of a shine. It wasn’t only my looks that made me stand out from the other Jewish students; it was the fact that I never quite learned to keep my mouth shut. And that included singing the Catholic hymns, which I only understood this morning not to do when the priest walked down the aisle, stopped in front of me, and, with his bible, slapped me on the head.

If they were lucky, students brought lunch, including dark break with butter, cheese, or a hard-boiled egg. And if it wasn’t too cold, they sometimes ate in the fenced-in yard, under the mammoth oak trees. The boys often threw acorns at each other.

On this day, one of the Jewish boys, Berl, had fallen asleep sitting on a bench in the yard after eating his lunch. He woke up when a group of Polish and Belorussian boys pinned down his arms. One of them, from a higher grade, took out a bottle of ink and a brush and painted a cross on Berl’s shirt, while another boy, whom I recognized as the bus driver’s son, Feliks, stuffed crumpled paper in Berl’s large bat-shaped ears. Berl coughed and sputtered, finally spitting on Feliks who punched him in the nose. Blood spurted down Berl’s face onto his white shirt, and the boys disappeared as quickly as cabbage-stuffed rabbits chased by a nap-awoken gardener.

I was standing on the other end of the yard and ran over to Berl. Taking my sweater that had been draped around my shoulders, I offered him a sleeve to wipe the blood from his face. Berl started to cry and snot leaked from his nose. I cringed when he rubbed it onto my brown woolen sweater sleeve. When Berl seemed able to stand, I returned to my original spot where I had left my notebook. All over the cover, there was ink, the same blue-black color that was on Berl’s shirt. Instead of the boys, though, a half-dozen Polish girls stood in a small circle, pointing at me, singsonging, “the Jew girl,” and cackling like witches.

Determined not to show them I cared, I took the sweater I had lent Berl and, with the clean sleeve, swiped my notebook cover. Now I had one sleeve red with blood and the other stained with ink. I managed to last the rest of the day, but as soon as school was over, I ran home, looking over my shoulder every few minutes, not sure if I expected the bullying boys or the girls to follow me. I knew one thing: I never wanted to set foot in that school again.

When I got home, I walked into the parlor and my mother let out a scream, “Esfir Manevich, what happened to you?” She rushed to my side and rubbed her hand over my reddened sleeve. “What is this? Is it blood?”

“Yes, but it’s not mine.”

“Not yours? Did you hurt someone?”

“No!” I screamed, and scampered up the stairs to the attic room I shared with my two sisters, Rivke and Drora. Out of breath, my mother came up behind me and peeled the sweater from my body and ran her fingers along the sweater’s grooves. “This sleeve doesn’t look like blood,” she said, holding her thumb to her nose. “Is this ink?”

“Don’t you want to know who I spilled ink on?” I said, swearing to myself that I wasn’t going to tell my mother the truth.

“When your father comes home, he will get to the bottom of this, even if he has to go to your school.”

My mother knew the right words, and I began to cry, not in a snotty, sobbing way like Berl, but in a quiet, soft manner as if my tear ducts were leaking on their own accord. My mother gave a half-smile and I told her the whole story of Berl and the boys and the witch-like girls, and even the behavior of the priest.

“I am sorry, Esfir, that you had to endure this. I am proud that you helped Berl, but the next time, you have to ignore these children. You can’t draw attention to yourself. You can’t even sing in church. You could get expelled from school, and worse can happen to our family.”

Worse? What could happen to them? Could my family go to prison if I sang glory to God, a god that wasn’t Jewish?

I decided that I wouldn’t admit to my mother that these same girls had taunted me before. I had tried to sit away from them, but last week they caught me near the trash can, and one girl reached inside and grabbed a rotten apple and smushed it into my face. The next day, the girls called me, “Apple Sauce,” and that became their regular name for me. And what I would never confess even to my sisters is that the third day they called me Apple Sauce, I hid in the woods after school and threw an apple at their feet as they walked down the road. They didn’t see me and squealed. I heard one of them say, “That must have been little Casmir.” It disturbed me that they thought they were being pursued by a boy, but I controlled myself and ran home, remembering how my uncle was badly beaten in his bakery because he spoke out against a man comparing him to “Jewish lice.”

 

On Monday morning, my father, Avrum, held my hand and took me to school, the first time for both actions. Although terrified of an adult fight, I was thrilled to have this private time with a man who usually said only a few words to me. He had planned on talking to my teacher or the headmaster. Later he described that while he waited for over an hour in a small room, a woman entered whom he thought was my teacher. Instead, it was Berl’s mother coming to complain about what had happened to her son.

“Mr. Manevich,” Berl’s mother had said, “while my husband and I are very upset over the violence toward our Berl, we are angrier at what the teacher told their class.”

“And what was that?” my father asked.

“That the gentiles should not give work to Jewish craftsmen. They should boycott Jewish stores. This teacher even called us Communists.”

“She may have well called us dirty Jews,” my father said.

After this remark, my father had excused himself, wished Berl’s mother luck, and walked to my classroom. He opened the door and there was a united murmur.

“Can I help you?” my teacher asked.

“I am Esfir’s father and I came to take her home.”

“Is there something I should know about?” she asked.

“We are late for a Communist meeting,” he said, giving me a hand-rolling motion, and nodding. I gathered my books and scurried out of the room.

On our way home, I tried to hold my father’s hand, but he shook it off. His face was red and crinkled, and I knew it wasn’t a good time to ask him anything. When we got in the door, I announced to my mother, “My father came to take me to a Communist meeting.”

“What?” she said.

“Papa came to school and announced to the teacher that he came to take me to the meeting.”

“Are you crazy, Avrum?”

“She is not going back to that school, now or ever.”

“Maybe she needs a change,” my mother said.

“Maybe we all need a change.”

 

ONLY TWO DAYS later, after I said good-bye to my sisters and my brother, Velvel, I watched my mother pack a valise, carefully layering my cotton nightgown over two freshly ironed white blouses: my fancy one with a bow and little glass buttons, and my everyday one with embroidered flowers, dots, and vines. Even at seven years old, this was not the first time I had left my home but it was the first time I needed to bring a valise.

“Now, Esfir,” my mother said in that lecturing voice, “remember Kobrin is not that far away, and you can come home whenever you want.”

“I know,” I said, afraid to say more because I might cry.

“And I don’t have to tell you to behave. Your aunt Perl has much to do, and you must help her.”

I nodded. Aunt Perl owned a boardinghouse in the big city of Brest, or Brisk as we called it in Yiddish. Perl was my mother’s older sister, and about five years ago, she had inherited a large three-story house with an attic when her husband was murdered by a crazy boarder over the weekly rent. Perl had been married by then only seven years. She never remarried and took extra care on my brother, sisters, and me because she had no children.

Since I was the youngest, and maybe the neediest, Perl liked me best and tried to get me to stay by her, even if she had to come and take me back to Brest herself. This time, one of her former boarders, a cigarette factory owner who went to Kobrin for business, drove Perl to my house in a classy black car, of all things.

Perl opened our front door, and I flew into her arms. Although she was heavier than my mother, with stout legs and meaty arms, she looked glamorous in a tan pinstriped suit with her sandy hair in curls hanging from a brown wide-brimmed felt hat. Unlike my mother who, according to my sister Drora, the fashion queen, wore shmates, Perl pranced around the room, showing herself off like a magazine model. But Perl didn’t take herself seriously; she was laughing the whole time, saying, “Esfele, shake your feathers. We have a man outside ready to step on the gas.”

Perl pecked my mother on the cheek and shoved me out the door before I could give my mother a big hug. Instead, I waved. My mother scuttled to the backseat, where I was sitting, and kissed the window in the same spot where my face was pressed inside. Maybe it’s good that I didn’t get a chance to hug my mother, because this way I didn’t have to spend the car ride crying like a baby.

As the car pulled away and I turned to look at my mother’s tall, slim frame and soft pink cheeks, I almost yelled, “Stop!” What was I doing leaving her? But my mother waved once, her hand jerking into a fist as if she was tightening a faucet. She quickly turned around. Walking back toward the house, she lifted a stray linden branch from her path and tossed it to the side field. I watched her shrink to a speck and sat back, pulling at the chapped skin on my lips. I almost expected my mother to yell at me, but a heaviness in the air pushed down on my chest as the car made a right off Pinkser Street.

 

EVEN THOUGH HIS business was cigarettes, this man—I never got his name—smoked cigars nonstop. He would puff even when he spoke and insisted we keep the windows closed because he didn’t want to get dust in his brand-new car. The air was cloudy, and it stank like a pile of old burning leaves. I didn’t know if I was going to choke or throw up, and when I told this to Perl, the man screamed through an extra plume of smoke, “Open the window this instant!” He must have realized vomit would look worse than soot on his shiny black leather seats.

I loved going to Perl’s. Her house was a wonderland. There was a big pantry off the kitchen with shelves and shelves lined with jars of pickles and homemade preserves; ceramic canisters of flour, salt, and sugar; a barrel of potatoes; and burlap bags of garden cabbages, beets, turnips, carrots—all for her boarders, but enough for my family to eat in a year.

Part of Perl’s pantry was closed off to make a private space for a bathtub, made of tin instead of the usual wood. In her kitchen, there was a sink. It had a plug leading outside the house. Standing nearby was a barrel with a faucet that held four or five pails of water. No one I knew but Perl had a sink in their house! And in some of the rooms, you could pull a string or chain and the lights went on. This was miraculous.

Best of all, Perl would put me in whatever room had a free bed. At home, I shared one bed with Rivke who was two years older; and sometimes the eldest, Drora, about to become a teenager with the bleeding and all, would plop part of her body on us as our beds were squished close to each other.

Since Perl’s house was close to the Tarbut Hebrew Gymnasium, like a high school, Perl usually boarded Jewish students during the school year. Not to make the parents worry, she took only female students; and if she had a male boarder, it was usually an older businessman whom she kept on the first floor, away from the girls. I hadn’t been to Perl’s since the summer, when the students went home, so I didn’t know what to expect, who would be there, or where I would sleep.

So for most of the ride, I stuck my head out the window. As the air whipped my hair into a blinding thicket, I thought of what I was leaving and going to, feeling as exhilarated and burdened as a fluttering butterfly weighed down by a rainstorm. Mostly, though, I was relieved that I saved my family from going to prison for pretending to be Communists.