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store where Yiddish was spoken. At the first store he had given the owner a rundown of his experience only to be greeted by scorn. “Forget about it,” this owner said to him. “All those years you put in in your pipsqueak town is
bupkis
over here.” Just goat dung in America.
    The job he got was delivering coal from a wagon, a job for which a grasp of English was a very low priority. But from the first day he knew that as his new name was terrible, so too was his new job. He was never out of the cold, and with the coal dust around his eyes holding fast even after a scrubbing, he knew most surely that this was not a job he would grow to love. Soon he felt burdened by the whole idea of New York. “Too big,” he said to the extended family, “and no future here. I feel like I’m walking around in somebody else’s coat. It don’t fit and it don’t keep me warm neither.”
    After a couple of years, he began to plot a getaway. Daily, in the very early mornings before work, his quest took him down to the docks. He was not choosy; he would go anywhere. He went into one hiring hall after the other, working his primitive English to the limit. He had no luck. The hiring bosses scarcely looked at him.
    Desperation looming, he one day plopped down on a bench next to a man he had seen around the docks. He wanted to talk to him, but since he was in New York, he first had to find out if the man would talk to
him
.
“Bist du ein Yid?
” he asked, having some confidence that the man
was
Jewish, there being, as my father told the story, something Jewish about him. He always declined to say just what this was, but I would guess that it was notthe possession of a hooked nose or kinky hair, because he would have discovered that any number of Mediterranean types also showed these characteristics. It was more likely that he saw the look of anxiety and uneasiness unique to the pale, pale faces of Jewish immigrants—the same looks that I saw in my mother’s photographs of my immigrant ancestors.
    At any rate, when the man said that he was indeed Jewish, my father asked, rather more rhetorically than purposefully, “
Nu
, so what’s it take to get a job around here?” The man took this as a serious request for information and after calling my father a “greenie,” informed him that he had to slip the hirers some money.
    When my father wondered how much, the man said that a five-dollar bill was the least.
    My father stared at the man. “So?”
    â€œSo I ain’t got it yet,” the man admitted.
    My father had to admit he didn’t have it yet either. But he thought that if he skipped meals, he might be able to get it. And before too long he had passed a hirer a bill and was put on a boat going to Miami. Ah, Miami. Good-bye Russia, so long New York. By the time the boat got to Savannah, the air was mild and in fact balmy, the wharves looked warm in the sun, the black men as they unloaded the freight were laughing and calling out to one another, and he decided he didn’t have to go all the way to Florida after all, that Savannah warmth was good enough. On the wharf he asked one of the Negroes the way to town. The man looked at him in an interested way and said, “Just walk along the river, look away pretty soon, and you be there.”
    My father made his way in, assessing the town’s size by the number of houses he was passing. He thought with satisfaction that it looked like a good-sized place, meaning that it would have a real shopping street and maybe a job with his name on it.
    In a few minutes he found himself on Broughton Street, exactly the kind of street he had anticipated. He strolled up anddown it, then went into Whitaker Street, where he made out a sign that said BRONSTEIN’S READY-TO-WEAR AND HOUSEHOLD . He recognized Bronstein as a Jewish name, walked in to see what was what, and after a few words with the owner, got himself