“You made us
The target of strife to our neighbors
And our enemies
Mock us.”
Psalm 80:6
When I come home from Chana’s house, Mama looks different than how I have imagined her in my head all these months. I hug her tight and tell her never to let us go anywhere again.
“We need to get Leah home,” I say when we are around Mama’s table and eating a supper of sourdough bread and a small salad. I look at the room with our bed, and I cannot wait to get in it, but only with Leah. “Chana took me to visit Leah at Lipa’s house one day, because he lives close by. All of Lipa’s kids were at the table eating and Leah was in the back churning the water to make bubbles for their seltzer business. I do not want her stay in a house like that.”
“Mamashein,”1 says Mama. “I do not have anything to give her to eat.”
“Mama. What we will eat, she will eat. She is coming home.”
Mama nods and sits down right then and there to write a letter to Uncle Lipa. Leah comes home a week later, and our house is a home again.
Our house is a home, but then it is taken away from us.
One day, a Hungarian woman knocks on our door with official papers in her hand.
“This is the property of Hungary. This house is not yours anymore. You have to leave by tonight.”
Mama just stares at her, nods, and then closes the door.
By the time I get home from work that day, Kokish Emma is helping my mother pack. She is crying but my mother’s face is stoic.
“But how? How can they make you leave?” Kokish Emma asks. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Mama doesn’t answer. She folds our sweaters and places them into the suitcase.
“Rosie, go get Kokish Emma the basket of money from the closet.”
“Oh, Chaya Necha, I don’t want the money, I want my best friend to be my neighbor. I want my best friend to have her house.”
I go to the closet to get a wicker basket that is overflowing with bills. Kokish Emma’s husband owns the butcher shop, and he doesn’t like banks, so we keep his money for him. We will not be able to do that anymore when we are all the way across town. Emma takes the basket out of my hands and puts it on the floor. She takes the sweater out of Mama’s hands, and she folds it again.
We move to a small room across town. Leah and I get jobs from the old seamstress to help pay for our rent. It is never enough so we decide to eat as little as possible and save up our money for a sewing machine so we can start a business ourselves.
After a year of stuffing our bills into our own woven basket, we finally have enough.
Mama goes to the store, and we wait to see what she will bring home. She comes through the door with a sewing machine the size of half her body with a foot pedal attached to it. She sets it down on the table with a smile and we run to it.
“It is beautiful!” Leah says and she runs her hands over the ebony white curved top.
“It looks so professional,” I say in wonder. I run my finger and thumb up and down the thin, silver needle.
“It is,” Mama says. “They gave me a little discount; this is the best sewing machine around.”
We celebrate with pickled cucumbers and a small cake. The room is small, but it feels perfect to us.
“To success we will have in the future,” Mama says as she cut us pieces of her cake. It tastes sweet already. “You aren’t girls anymore; you are young ladies,” she adds as she hands us our cake. I look at Leah, she looks like a younger version of Mama, and she is becoming so beautiful with her sharp eyes, delicate but mature nose, and ribbon-red lips. I lean back and cross my hands over my chest and wonder how we got here so fast.
Leah gets clients right away. She quickly becomes a legend with her long, nimble fingers and arithmetic brain—and how she can take one look at the customer and a few weeks later a gorgeous, perfectly fitted dress is flowing from her hands. I am always around to help Leah with the measurements and ironing and some stitching when she is busy.
A new client walks into our apartment one day and says, “I want something to make me look chinush.2 Leah, can you do that for me?”
Leah sizes up the woman.
“Do you have a specific fabric you want to use, or would you be interested in using one of ours? Because if you are, I have this gorgeous, mauve-colored fabric that I think would go beautifully with your complexion.”
“I do have something with me . . .” says the lady, but she is already looking at the rolls of fabric behind Leah.
“OK, let me just show you what I had in mind and then you will have an easier time making the decision for yourself.”
“Yes, that sounds like a good idea.”
Leah nods to me, and I go to get the roll of fabric. I know which one Leah is talking about. It is soft and almost like velvet, very light, and not quite pink and not quite purple. I come back with the roll in my hands and Leah is already fluttering around the woman with a tape measure and muttering measurements under her breath.
“Here,” Leah says as she takes the fabric from me. “Have a look.”
She wraps the fabric around the woman’s shoulders and brings her to the mirror. The woman’s eyes brighten.
“You know, I could use a different kind of dress than my regular navy ones,” she says.
“You absolutely can,” agrees Leah. “You deserve something to make you feel really good when you put it on, you know? Now I just need to write down your measurements. It will be ready in three weeks.”
The woman leaves with a flurry of thank-yous and instructions for the trimming, and I am left to wonder why there is a flurry of something unpleasant in me when I look at my sister. First in school, and now in work, she has always been better than me.
The woman comes back a few weeks later. Leah smiles at her and hands her the dress. I steamed and ironed it until late last night. It is perfect. There is not a shadow of a crease on the dress. At least I can iron well.
The woman disappears into the makeshift dressing room and comes out a few minutes later. She steps up in front of the mirror. She is a woman transformed. The dress curves and folds with her body and hugs her like a good friend, not too tight but nice and close and comforting.
“You look beautiful,” I say. Leah bites her lips as we wait for a response.
The woman has her hands on her hips as she examines herself in the mirror.
“I must say, you did a wonderful job,” she says, and for the first time since we met her, she smiles. “Thank you very much. Ah, and here is the pay for it.” She pulls her wallet from her dowdy, black bag and counts out a few bills. I am glad for what Leah is doing for our family, even though it stings my pride.
The years pass and we continue our jobs as seamstresses for the town. Gitta gets engaged one day, and it is all Leah and I can talk about.
“We need to make dresses for her wedding, you have to look good! You are 18 already, time to get married!”
“Just because Gitta got engaged the day she turned 17, does not mean we all have to do the same.”
“Ha! You are dying to get married, don’t tell me you are not.”
“I am not dying to get married.” I blush. “I mean, it would be nice.”
“I wonder who we are going to end up marrying. I just want someone who is really, really nice.”
“I want someone nice, and really handsome.”
“Ha! Handsome will not bother me either.”
We walk up to our apartment.
Yecheskel sits at the table with his book. He looks up when he hears us come in. A bruise under his eye is a deep purple with swirling bits of yellow.
“Hi Cheskel,” I say. “How are you feeling?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Just don’t tell Mama that I have been coming home from school early.”
Last week two older boys beat him up on the straight when he was walking home after dark. “Dirty Jew,” they called him. Mama marched with us to court the next day, determined to take care of those two horrible boys who touched her son.
“You foolish Jew,” the court told her. “You are looking for justice? What are you asking for? Go home lady! You are lucky we are even letting you go home.”
Mama came home that night confused and worried, but by the time we all sat down to eat and Yecheskel was feeling better, she placed the salad firmly on the table and said, “I guess you will always have crazy people in the world; it won’t happen again.”
A few weeks ago, there was a man from Poland in town. The butcher’s wife fed him at her house, and he wolfed down all the food that she put in front of him in a just three minutes. I saw him myself: he had a crazed look about him and wild, dirty hair and a half cut-off beard. He ranted about someone killing Jews in Poland. We had heard similar rumors, but rumors are rumors, and we were not about to start getting nervous about something a man who was clearly mentally unstable was saying. Anyways, this wasn’t Poland; this was Hungary. Nothing was going to happen to us in this country.
“Rosie is getting married,” Leah teases.
“He better be good to you, or he will have to answer to me,” Yecheskel says.
“Ha! You do look threatening with that black eye,” I say.
We laugh. Yes, nothing bad can happen to us here.