Sex Wars Read Online Free PDF

making the paper soft, she was sweating so. Shesmoothed out the crumpled paper. It was dated eight months ago, August 1867. In Yiddish it said,
Dearest Sister Freydeleh,
    I have the worst news for you, forgive the messenger, but you have to know what came down on us. First our brother Eliyahu went off to the new lands where the czar is promising much land and seeds to plant, if Jews will go, so he took his wife and their little boy and he went. We have written and written to him, but we have heard nothing and we fear the worst.
    Mama and Papa got cholera in the epidemic this summer. Mama got sick first and Papa caught it from her, trying to save her and little Yakov. I was away because Mama had apprenticed me to a seamstress. But I never learned nothing about sewing because she had me taking care of her twins and cooking and cleaning and treated me like a servant. So I didn’t get the cholera but everybody else did except Sara and her family, who are fine.
    Mama and Papa were going to emigrate this fall on what you sent them, but we used up some of the money burying them all so there was just enough for one. Sara said I should be the one to go. She has taken over Mama’s vodka business and her husband is working for a miller so she says she is set and I should go to America and live with you and make money and then I can send back enough for all of them to come over or else Eli and his family if they came back from that place where the czar sent them. As for Shlomo, nobody has heard of him since the czar took him for the army and maybe we never will, it’s in the hands of Hashem.
    So I have made arrangements to get out of the Pale the same way you did. I am traveling with a family from Minsk so I should be safer than if I went off alone. Papa had betrothed me to the Sibivitz middle son but he got taken by the czar too, so they called it off. So I got no ties to keep me here and I want to go and be useful and have a good life there.
    I am leaving in time to get a ship from Hamburg 20 October before the winter comes and the seas get too rough and dangerous. The ship I am supposed to go on, it’s called Die Freiheit. I think its name is a good omen. Things have been so terrible here, people ate their shoes, cooked them in water for soup and got deadly sick. Wehad to eat our last cow. There was no choice. We were dying of hunger. But we did that and then the cholera came, so what was the use sacrificing Daisy to survive when nobody did?
    So I expect to be in New York around the end of October to embrace you and let us blend our tears for all the troubles of our family and the loss of Mama and Papa, who worked so hard and gave us so much love.
    Your loving sister, Shaineh
    Freydeh put the letter down in shock. Her mother, her father, her little brother, all dead. All gone from her forever. It had been hard enough to leave them, knowing as every emigrant knew, that she might never see them again. But now they were truly gone and she had not been there to nurse them, to bury them properly, to mourn them. Her father had been such a force in her life, working in any weather, risking his skin to bring them enough for bread and fuel. Her mother worked from before dawn till long after dusk. Her mother was the fire in the hearth, the light of the house. Singing at her work, always singing, and the children learned those songs as early as they could mouth the words.
    Then Freydeh groaned aloud. Shaineh had presumably arrived at the end of October and there had been no one to meet her. She had probably made her way to the address she had from before, but Big Head would not have helped her. Freydeh had taken care that Big Head didn’t know where she moved, because she didn’t trust him, because she wanted nothing to do with him and his gang of thieves.
    She had sent more money in the last letter and her new address, but Shaineh must already have left. She opened her own letter carefully. It looked as if it had been rained on, dropped in