Keeping Secrets Read Online Free PDF

pants holding on to his mother, Riva’s, hand. They were in a tremendous open hall jammed with thousands of people all jabbering in languages he couldn’t understand.
    A fat woman on the bench next to them whispered rumors into his mother’s ear.
    “They won’t admit you if you have more than four children…. They send you back if you have lice…. You have to have a job…a relative who can vouch for you.”
    Then, finally, up the long stairs they marched, his father, Isidore, straight-backed and stern, his mother Riva, with Rhoda, Moe and Jake holding hands between them.
    “Hurry,” Isidore urged them. “Take the stairs in big steps and don’t stumble. It’s a test, to see if you’re strong enough to make it.”
    They’d streaked up the steps and soon were on the ferry headed toward buildings taller than he’d ever imagined, even in his dreams.
    As the breezes blew his hair, Jake looked up at his stern-faced father with pride. Isidore was a macher , a mensch . He knew his way around. Two years earlier, he’d made the journey alone. Now in this place called Battery Park he waved away the flailing arms of men shouting their offers: “Rooms…” “Over here, jobs…” “Work papers, I’ll get you work papers…” “Trains, where do you want to go?”
    Isidore knew where he was going. The first time, a greenhorn, he had almost ended up on a train for Houston, Texas, rather than on a trolley for Houston Street and the Lower East Side. But he had found his way, had worked in a kitchen, behind a pushcart, in a boiler room, to earn the dollars with which to bring over his family.
    This time, with them firmly in tow, he stayed on the trolley until it reached Grand Central Station. He had moved up and out of the city already. There was an apartment waiting for them, six rooms at a respectable address in New Haven, Connecticut. There the family would live and three more children, Joseph, Ruth and Sidney, would be born.
    Jake smiled as he thought of that first apartment’s kitchen, the kosher meals his short, round mother prepared, the kasha, the borscht, the chickens yellow with fat. What kind of food was there going to be in West Cypress?
    Outside the bus windows, the lights of Cypress were beginning to flare through the flat blackness like Friday-night candles. Jake could see himself in the mirror of remembrance in a yarmulke, serious-faced among the children as they watched Riva light the Sabbath candles. Were there synagogues in the South? Were there even any Jews?
    The city lights grew brighter, and his pulse quickened. It wouldn’t be long now. He thought about friends he’d left behind: the Goldbergs, who had lived next door in New Haven. They’d come over a couple of years earlier, and their kids were already as proud and as street-smart as the natives. They taught the Fines more English than the Cedar Street School. And they taught them stickball, how to order in the candy store, how to fit in.
    It was their father, Nathan Goldberg, who taught Isidore the fine arts of distilling and bottling. The smell of their homemade hooch, rich and ripe and yeasty, filled the whole neighborhood until Riva put her foot down.
    “What are we going to do, Isidore, when they lock you in prison and send you back to the other side for this little bit of extra money? Are you going to be happy then, when the children and I starve to death?”
    Where was Jake going to find another friend like Herb Goldberg, who had stood under the wedding tent with his sister Rhoda? Rhoda and Herb—they had been the first, when the family had started to grow smaller, yet larger; Rhoda, then Ruth, then Moe, and on down the line, the children had married and left. Except for Jake. Jake had stayed at home.
    “You’ll find someone, Jakey,” his mother hugged him and said. “The right girl will come along.”
    But Jake knew that she wouldn’t.
    He was the one who had dropped out of the Cedar Street School the earliest, after the sixth