We begin with a stout woman in a Russian blouse and long dark skirt beating up a girl, slapping at her face, her arms, her shoulders, while the girl tries to protect her head and face with her arms; not crying, just covering up like a boxer in trouble. All at once the girl uncovers a very pretty face and counterattacks, battering bang-bang-bang with small fists in her stepmother’s face. Stepmother reels back in amazement and pain, shrieking, “Help! Help! She’s gone crazy! Help! She’s a murderess!” while Mama—because this is going to be my mother, this blonde red-cheeked girl of fifteen or so, with bright angry blue eyes—bats her big cringing stepmother all over the front room and follows her out into the muddy street, still pounding that fat retreating back. Stepmother goes trampling off down the wooden walk between the houses to fetch my grandfather from the synagogue, squealing like a sow chased by dogs, “She’s crazy! Help! Sarah Gitta is trying to murder me! Help!”
Mama goes back into the house, shaking all over with joyous shock at her own rash act. From a bedroom, her half sisters and brothers peep in alarm at crazed bloodthirsty Sarah Gitta. Ah, an audience! Mama marches to the table and, feigning great calm, sits down and methodically eats the PLOIKA.
Anyway, that is how Mama tells it. It is the only version of the event that I will ever know. The victor writes the history. The stepmother is gone from the earth, gone from the memory of man, surviving only in this tale. For all I know, she was an angel of patience, a perfect rabbi’s wife, the most beloved woman in Minsk. I doubt that; but then I also doubt Mama’s version.
Mama has never been easy to get along with. She once picked up a brick and went for a watchman on a Bronx construction job, who slapped my rear to chase me off his lumber pile. I fled blubbering, not hurt but scared. Mom saw it all. She belted the man with the brick, and then called a cop and had him arrested for assault and battery. I went along to the police court as a witness. The judge was sort of baffled by the whole thing, since the accused assailant’s head was bloodily bandaged while neither Mama nor I had a scratch on us. After some confused questioning he threw us all out. That is as I dimly remember it; but I recall perfectly my mother’s melodramatic cry, as she crashed the brick down on the watchman’s head: “How dare you strike my child?”
Let me not ramble, though. Mama is not going to loom large in this story. On the other hand, if not for the ploika incident I would not be here. Occurring when it did, it unquestionably led to Mama’s emigration, and hence to the stark fact that I exist. So there we start.
Okay. When you boil milk, as everyone knows, a skin or scum tends to form on top, and that, in Lithuanian Yiddish, is the ploika. In childhood I would gag on it. Mama had to remove it from my cocoa; which is how she first came to tell me this story, and I heard it a hundred times. In Minsk, or maybe only in my grandfather’s house, this ploika seems to have been the rarest of delicacies. Caviar, truffles, pheasant under glass, white peaches in champagne—mere nothings to that oozy sticky yellow ploika. Mama’s stepmother, a rabbi’s daughter from the nearby small town of Koidanov, had borne my grandfather several children, and the story is that they always got the ploika and Sarah Gitta never did. This Koidanov harpy not only showed such mean favoritism; she hated and persecuted Mama without cease for being so much prettier and cleverer than her own children. (I quote Mama. She also reports that the town of Koidanov was notorious for the nasty natures of everybody who came from there.)
Well, this ploika business really ate at my mother, and that is the one element in the tale that rings like gold. Nobody deprives my mother of anything without sooner or later regretting it. On this memorable day, it appears that Mama—grown bigger than the Koidanov woman quite realized, and evidently feeling her full fifteen and a half years, and possibly her swelling bust, too—decided by God to boil herself a ploika and eat it. The other children were smaller, and no doubt more entitled to what milk there was in the house; but Mama was redressing a long injustice. Koidanov caught her at it, ignored the larger issue, and started slapping her around.
“Why did you hit your mother?” my grandfather inquired, upon hurrying home from the synagogue.
“She’s not my mother, and I didn’t hit her,” Mama replied. “I hit her back.”
And that is how a rabbi’s daughter not yet sixteen was allowed and in fact shoved out to set forth for America alone. Mama was beautiful then—a slip of a maiden, all but cut in two at the waist by a corset. I have seen her faded shipboard photograph. I don’t know how a poor adolescent lass in remote Minsk managed it, but she really looked like a Gibson Girl: all bustle, bosom, luxuriant hair, and cartwheel hat, leaning on a rail by a life preserver. Some version of the ploika incident must therefore be true. I will say this, if any Russian rabbi’s teenage daughter could have done such a bold thing as travel to America by herself, it would be my mother. I talked to her before I accepted this bizarre job, and she opined, “Why not? Say yes! The world belongs to those who dare and do.”