Jew Store Read Online Free PDF Page A

to hatching one, as if he saw himself as the designated hatcher of plans.
    Still, at the end of the journey, when he landed in New York and was dumped into the immigration scramble at Ellis Island, his apparatus for problem solving labored in vain. Though in addition to Yiddish my father could speak a little wobbly Russian, the immigration officials were competent in neither, and he was all at once in a muddle, which was on one memorable moment embodied by a man in a white coat coming at his eyes with a small pointed stick. As my father bobbed and weaved, he managed to ask what it was all about of a nearby fellow passenger, who, he knew, had picked up a little English somewhere and might therefore have learned something.
    The man had learned very little, only that it was some kind of craziness—
meshugass
, he called it—and that the white-clothed assailants were doctors looking under eyelids for something. The man told my father, “If you got it, you don’t go nowhere but back.”
    My father apparently didn’t have it—signs of a communicable disease called trachoma—and he could go forward. This took him as far as a man at a desk who was looking with no discernible enthusiasm at my father’s papers. “Name?” the man asked my father.
    My father had not even understood the question and so simply stared back.
    It came again. “What’s your name?”
    Some of my father’s wits returned. “Droskowitz. Avram Droskowitz.”
    The official pushed at the papers in a show of irritation, wrote a line on a card, picked up a rubber stamp, brought itdown, hard, and authorized the entry into America of a man called Avram Plotchnikoff, a name no doubt already mastered by an official not eager to work on yet another one. It looked as if my father’s good luck had not made the trip with him after all.
    Actually, it was getting ready to show. As he searched the cavernous hall for help in getting to the
mishpocheh
, there appeared under a stairwell a sign—not an omen kind of sign, but a cardboard one with letters that were unmistakably Hebrew. This was miracle enough. My father put to use the Hebrew letters learned for his bar mitzvah and decoded the words— MIR HELFEN MENSCHEN —as a Yiddish phrase meaning assistance was offered. The man behind the sign, speaking Yiddish, which, my father reported fell on his ears like balm, told him to first take the ferry to Manhattan, then wrote EAST BRONX on a paper, and advised him to take the streetcar that had those words on the front. He wanted to know if my father had any money.
    My father held out the coins earned on the boat—several pennies and some dimes.
    The man, no doubt surprised, said, “Well, well,” took one of the dimes from my father’s hand, held it up, and told him to give it to the streetcar conductor and wait for change.
    Waiting for change from the streetcar conductor was not a walk in the park (not that my father had ever walked in a park, there being no parks in his shtetl). The conductor, perhaps an early example of the legendary New York streetcar and bus conductors who treated passengers—especially non-English-speaking passengers—as creatures sent to earth for the purpose of vexing them, spat words at my father as if they had been sores on his tongue. But my father had heard angry men before, so he stood quietly until the tirade subsided, got his nickel in change, and sat down.
    In the East Bronx he found plenty of Yiddish speakers. They led him to the very apartment he sought, and, after identifyinghimself to the
mishpocheh
he found there, he followed the poor Russian-Jewish practice and rented the corner of one of the rooms. A few days later he got a job.
    It was not a job as a salesman in a store, though he had at first gone looking for such a job. He had looked in the Jewish stores around Delancey Street on the Lower East Side because naturally he could work only in a