The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

then pleadingly, at the smug officials at the immigration office as they yawned and cracked their knuckles and cleaned their fingernails with pocketknives while she and a hundred other immigrants accumulated beseechingly in a line before them, hour after hour. After finally—finally!—getting all the necessary forms and stamps and signatures and approvals, she could nurse herself and three daughters through conjunctivitis in a cold infirmary in a foreign city that was understaffed and overextended and utterly indifferent. She could even calculate on the side of a paper bag how much the money changers had cheated us in exchanging our precious rubles and rands for German marks. She could do a multitude of things, my mother, and bravely so. But she could not tell the simple difference between a boat ticket for South Africa and one to the United States. Because my mother, of course, could not read.

Chapter 2
    I n the many interviews I’ve given over the years, I’ve often recounted what it was like to see the Statue of Liberty for the first time. As a starving little Russian girl, I’d stood in the crush of people on deck, forlorn and shivering, utterly wretched. And then, suddenly, the statue appeared before us like a mint green goddess arising from the sea, a modern-day Venus on the half shell. Always, I describe how I’d felt a bolt of elation at this moment—how I’d pointed and jumped up and down, crying, “Mama, Papa—it’s her !” From the way she’d stood sentry in New York Harbor, I’d thought Lady Liberty was some sort of American angel. For months after our arrival in New York, I’ve confessed to reporters, I actually prayed to the Statue of Liberty each night.
    And the media, oh, how they loved this story! Even today, they still quote it occasionally.
    Our customers loved it, too—especially when I told them how it was the inspiration behind our first national logo: the Statue of Liberty holding a red-white-and-blue ice cream cone in place of her torch. We’d developed this just before the war, crediting my childhood experience, of course. Nowadays, everybody copies it. I can’t tell you how many goddamn times I’ve had to go to court over trademark infringements.
    Yet—I might as well say it now, darlings—what else do I have to lose?
    The truth is, I actually don’t remember seeing the Statue of Liberty at all. Of course, we must have passed it. But I was upset at the time. And I was so little. The only details I recall from our arrival were a man beside me weeping uncontrollably—embarrassingly—and that in the commotion Flora lost her hat.
    But my legendary first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty?
    So sue me: I made it up.
    *  *  *
    Today my grandson, Jason, calls 1913 “the olden days.” But the year our family arrived in America, New York City already had its first skyscrapers, its first rickety cars, its first subway lines—the Interborough Rapid Transit—running beneath Broadway. Bridges were garlanded with electric lights. Already it was a great, throbbing, concrete heart.
    That same year, 1913, was also when the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed, establishing the income tax. Of course, there was no way I could’ve known that seventy years later this very piece of legislation would be used to persecute me— unduly , may I remind you. It was also the year Henry Ford perfected his assembly line. And I suppose it must be said, too, that it was the year Al Smith, governor of New York, pushed through a slew of labor laws. While these probably saved Flora and me from the most dangerous factory work as children, they proved to be a major pain in my ass later on. Please: You’re telling me a teenager can’t serve a milk shake?
    But most significant of all, in 1913 the first continuous freezing process was patented. This meant that ice cream could soon be manufactured in bulk, on an industrial scale. It arrived in New York at almost the very same moment that I