Hotel cuba, p.1
Hotel Cuba, page 1
Dedication
For Ethel and Morris Fishman
and all immigrants
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Also by Aaron Hamburger
Copyright
About the Publisher
One
FISH AND ORANGES. A SALTY SEA OF SOUP DOTTED WITH ISLANDS of potato chunks that Pearl can mash flat with the back of a spoon. Bread so dry, when she dunks it into her lukewarm soup, the stubborn roll remains firm. But Pearl can be stubborn too. She continues dunking the roll until it softens and melts into a paste.
It’s depressing, the food on this boat they call SS Hudson. Heavy on salt and light on pepper, parsley, or any herb to give it character, like the shaggy dill in her yard back in Russia—or what used to be Russia, because this year, 1922, their town belongs to Poland. After a good rain, those dill stalks grow so high they collapse under their own weight. Starving blue-eyed soldiers from the tsar’s army used to pull them out by the roots, mistaking them for carrots, then fling them to the ground.
“Eat,” says Pearl, offering an orange to her younger sister, Frieda, sitting with her eyes closed and squeezing her temples. “Or save it for later.”
“Don’t bother,” says Frieda. “I won’t eat it then either.”
“You can’t starve all the way to Cuba.” Maybe Pearl sounds more like a nagging mother than a sister, but she quit worrying about her own vanity years ago when Mama died, after giving birth to Frieda. Though Pearl was only nine then, people already called her Old Lady, Housewife, Empress of the Kitchen, Madame Singer Sewing Machine.
What will they call her in Havana, where no one knows her and she has no history? She might be anything. It’s a thrilling, terrifying thought.
Before the war, a girl from Turya who’d immigrated to America returned to visit—as a rich lady. Some women laughed behind her back, mimicked her proud walk, lifted their hair to imitate her short haircut, and called her New Woman, as an insult. But Pearl didn’t laugh. Maybe someday she too would become a kind of New Woman, like this shtetl girl who’d transformed into a prosperous American lady who could afford to coolly ignore the others’ jokes, as if she didn’t hear. Now there was freedom.
Frieda, who’s in one of her states, won’t eat, no matter what Pearl says. Arguing with her is like trying to empty the ocean with a spoon, so Pearl returns to her own soup. Tomorrow she’ll eat the next soup, and then the one after that, and the one after that. In this way, always looking forward, never back, she and this creaking boat will slowly cross the Atlantic, leaving Europe behind.
When Pearl finishes her bowl, she’s still hungry. She has long been cursed with a healthy appetite. Her solid, sturdy figure bulges in the wrong places for a woman who loves dainty clothes, loves looking at them and making them. Before the Great War, when people cared what they looked like, Jews and Gentiles alike paid her to make dresses sewn with fine stitches you’d need a magnifying glass to see. For each dress she made, Pearl imagined a story, the potential to put on a new outfit and become a new person. But sadly, clothes never fit her as beautifully as they do slender Frieda, who even before the boat often forgot to eat.
Pearl has never forgotten to eat in her life. During the worst of the Great War and then the Revolution and war with Poland after, her hunger was so raw it addled her thoughts, gnawed at her stomach lining.
On the SS Hudson, many passengers are seasick, like Frieda. Pearl squeezes sideways between tables, casually skims stray peas and carrot knobs from abandoned bowls of soup, scrounges a section of orange, a scrap of pinkish-brown herring.
A willowy lady wearing a dusty-pink hat watches her at work—out of pity or disgust? She’s a sophisticated city type. Jews are so desperate to leave Europe these days, they’d cross the ocean in a bathtub, so Pearl sees many grand people like her mixed with country folk in steerage. This lady has a long, lovely face, pale with a pointed chin, and shrewd gray-green eyes like a cat. Pearl noticed her when she came into the dining room on the arm of a young man who pulled out a chair for her. She stepped forward and sat, didn’t even look behind her, confident the chair would be pushed in again, and it was.
Pearl imagines what it would be like to have that kind of confidence, to sit into air and know that a seat would appear below you. And that hat—it fires up her imagination. If Pearl could afford to wear a fancy pink hat like that, she could walk down the street with such a cold, blank stare that no one would dare bother her. She’s known plenty of women who aren’t strictly beautiful, but in the right hat or dress, they’re magnificent. Their clothes teach the world to treat them with dignity.
The pink lady notices Pearl staring, gives her an inquisitive look, and Pearl, who feels a puzzling itch to capture this exquisite woman’s attention, surprises herself by nervously extending a roll and asking, “Maybe you want half?”
In response, she averts her eyes.
“It’s all right,” says Pearl, fearing she’s committed a blunder but unable to stop herself. “You can have the whole thing if you want.”
“I’m afraid I’m not very hungry.” Looking as if she’s smelled something rotten, the woman rises and leaves the table, followed by her male companion.
Pearl returns meekly to her seat. What was she thinking, speaking out that way? “This food’s awful,” she tells her sister. “If they let me in the kitchen, I could do better.”
“I heard you,” says Frieda. “The way you talk, it’s embarrassing.”
“What did you hear?” Pearl suspects her sister’s right but doesn’t like to admit it. She lacks her sister’s talent—if you can call it that—for small talk.
Frieda grabs a roll and shoves it rudely at Pearl’s chest. “‘Go on, have it.’ That’s not how someone with manners speaks. Didn’t you see that expensive dress she had on? Didn’t you hear her pretty accent? Imagine what she thinks of us.”
The back of Pearl’s neck prickles with shame. I’ve gotten it wrong again, she thinks. But what if the pink lady wasn’t offended, just jealous? Because Pearl was brazen enough to do whatever she felt like. If that lady wasn’t so polite, she’d pick up scraps too. Polite people don’t survive in this world.
“We’re from plenty good stock,” says Pearl. “Father’s from Lithuania.”
“Where we’re going, they’ve probably never heard of Lithuania,” says Frieda, pushing back her chair. “I can’t sit here anymore. My stomach’s not at all well.”
“I’d better come with you,” says Pearl.
Clinging to the shaky, narrow railings, the two sisters descend three flights of metal stairs into the ship’s belly. Day or night makes no difference in the enormous room where they sleep, three times the size of a synagogue, crammed with endless rows of iron berths stacked with lean mattresses. Kerosene lamps put up a feeble fight against the darkness. Pearl and Frieda have claimed two narrow beds by the wall. They take turns holding up a blanket while changing their clothes. Not everyone is so delicate, and Pearl’s eye occasionally catches the white curve of a stranger’s breast or rump. Once, Frieda wasn’t paying attention to the blanket and exposed Pearl’s body. “Raise it higher! Higher!” Pearl hissed, imagining everyone staring at her fleshy, hairy arms, her dark-toned skin, the color of rye bread. But she wouldn’t allow herself to cry, not for all to see.
“Was it really so terrible how I spoke to that lady?” Pearl asks.
“Leave it be,” says Frieda. She climbs into her bed, pulls her knees to her chin, and faces the wall to retreat into her sullen self, silent as a widow.
It’s wearying, the engine’s eternal clanking, strangers’ anxious chatter, and days of seeing only sea and sky around their ship. Pearl’s ears ache, filled with the constant roar of ocean. Focus on other things, she thinks. A warm, freshly laid egg, or yes, a dusty-pink hat. But then the ship hits a rolling wave, someone screams or tumbles to the floor, and she’s back in the present, lost on an ocean.
Like Pearl and Frieda, many passengers are Jews fleeing the cluster of shtetls on the Polish-Russian border, which shifts east or west year to year, war to war, and sometimes disappears. The passengers from cities like Minsk or Warsaw stand out to Pearl because of their store-bought leather shoes or their gloriously impractical ladies’ hats, tight as bathing caps. She’s seen such hats in a fashion magazine she found during the short time she worked as a hotel chambermaid in Warsaw. Every day she smooths the pages, presses out the wrinkles. In America, she hopes to make dresses good enough for a magazine.
The washrooms are right outside where they sleep, easy to find: just follow the stench to its source, where five faucets dispense cold salt water into metal basins. Some of their fellow passengers can’t quite make it to the washroom to relieve themselves or vomit, so to ward off the smell, people tie dried herbs or chains of garlic to the iron berths.
When they first left Danzig, Pearl tried to shield Frieda from the mess, but it’s impossible, as if this journey were purposefully des
“Frieda, let’s go out on deck, get some air,” Pearl urges her sister.
“I’m staying,” Frieda says, her voice muffled in her bedsheet. She fears the churning waves that crash over the deck, leaving behind a lacy foam.
Pearl has yet to meet a wave that would dare try to frighten her. Until this journey, she’d never seen the sea, and she recalls her surprise when she first realized that it wasn’t blue. More like a dirty gray, or when the sun shines, the color of steel.
So Pearl leaves her sister, climbs up on deck to watch the ocean—an ocean! Such sounds it makes, the rhythmic crashing of waves, or a loud moan like a mama bear protecting her cub. Some people only run up here to vomit into the sea. They’re in such a hurry they don’t check the wind, and their mess splatters back in their faces.
That’s what you get, Pearl thinks, when you try to fight the ocean.
* * *
BY SOME MIRACLE Father had saved enough for their passage.
The way he told it, Father was born in an elegant quarter of Vilna, studying Talmud, Shakespeare, and Spinoza, only to end up slaughtering meat in some backwater Russian shtetl where his intellectual life consisted of advising people who’d found blood clots in chicken carcasses whether the meat was kosher.
He blamed politics for killing his dreams. As a young man in Vilna, he lived through terrible times: strikes, food riots, protests calling for the tsar’s head. Most Jews his age were more likely to be beaten in the street while agitating for revolution than to attend synagogue. Father found a post as assistant cantor at a small but prestigious shul, where he was given thankless, unwanted duties like chanting the “Giver of Salvation” prayer for the health of the tsar and his family. One Shabbes, as he opened his mouth to sing the usual platitudes, a band of Zionists rushed the bimah and chanted revolutionary slogans, bringing the service to a humiliating halt. No one came to Father’s aid or said a word in his defense as he slumped down from the bimah. In fact, as the story circulated in the days afterward, he was blamed for his passive response.
Disgraced and fed up, he quit the shul and moved his family to the backwater shtetl where his wife had been born. In Turya, there were politics, sure, but not so much to interfere with life. A small-town cantor’s salary couldn’t support a family, so Father joined his father-in-law’s butcher shop, and this in time became his own misery. He’d come home from work exhausted, snapping at anyone who talked to him before he got food in his stomach. As a girl, Pearl dreaded both his sharp tongue and the strap dangling beside the peg where he hung his coat. Though he never actually used the strap, its threat was enough.
Father lived for Friday nights in shul. Jews traveled from the surrounding villages to hear the famous Cantor Kahn’s tremulous, melancholy vibrato. From the women’s section at the back of the sanctuary, Pearl listened to his tender, delicate voice and felt closer to him than when they shared the same table. He’d come home lit in the afterglow of his performance, bringing along for dinner half the choir, boys he’d prepared for their bar mitzvahs, now men with muscles, rough manners, and wisps of beards.
For Pearl, Friday nights were also a performance, a kitchen performance. After her mother died, Pearl took over the cooking. Who else could have done it? Her eldest sisters, Elka and Rivka, were married with their own families to take care of, living on farms with babies and animals for company. Basha spent all her time at the regional school where the non-Jewish girls called her louse and threw stones at her back. When the war ended, she left for New York, hoping to attend a ladies’ college. For now, she worked making dresses. Avram was a boy. Frieda was the baby, and even when she grew older, Pearl continued to think of her as such.
Before the Great War, Pearl roasted chicken or stewed meat for a crowd of twenty, sometimes thirty. She set the table with a red felt cloth and brass candlesticks—castoffs from wealthier relatives in Vilna, yet finer than anything on their neighbors’ tables.
But then the tsar declared war on the Kaiser, and then the Revolution declared war on the tsar. More often than not, the butcher shop was closed. Once, to raise money, Father went out to pawn their china and candlesticks and came home in his socks, his forehead bruised, his hands trembling. Two soldiers had knocked him down, stolen the boots off his feet. A priest stopped to intervene, asking, “Why bother this poor Jew?” So the soldiers shot him. As the priest crumpled into the snow, Father ran away.
For three years, their little town of Turya was invaded by bands of Reds, Whites, and Poles, each of whom accused the Jews of sympathizing with the wrong side. Pearl and her family hid in the dark, behind locked doors and shutters, listening for soldiers, bandits, Bolsheviks—all bastards with different names and causes, though their purpose was the same.
Pearl did the best she could to go on with her Friday night dinners, her small act of rebellion. The menu was now fish balls mixed with bread crumbs as filler, or a thin soup with potatoes, chopped cabbage leaves, and any kind of root that escaped the notice of wild Gentiles on fast horses. She relied on her brother, Avram, to gather herbs and vegetables from the yard and water from their well, and to watch for strangers before opening the front door. When she found mice droppings in a small bag of precious flour, she swallowed hard, then carefully skimmed them off and used the rest to make bread.
As Pearl served, passed, then cleared plates of food, invisible as a servant, Frieda basked in admiration. Frieda, a charming, chatty girl who outgrew her baby fat and childish curls to become a precocious teenage beauty. Frieda with her high-pitched voice, who even in wartime could make sparkling conversation about nothing: delightful when you heard it, and forgettable minutes later. Frieda, who when the talk inevitably turned to serious subjects like politics, abruptly withdrew into a corner to sulk. Watching her, Pearl felt little jealousy, maybe more of an odd pride in the young woman her baby sister was becoming. Anyway, none of these teasing, boorish boys were to Pearl’s taste. The kind of man she’d want—dignified, smart, adult—good luck finding him in Turya.
During the sisters’ last Friday night dinner before going to join their sister Basha in New York, a steady procession of neighbors and relatives came to visit. The men wanted to look at pretty Frieda one final time, while the women entrusted Pearl with messages for relatives who lived in various corners of America, as well as advice.
Don’t eat what smells bad.
Poke a man in the chest and watch his reaction to see if he’s lying.
To fight the seasickness, lick a few grains of salt off your wrist.
Trust one eye more than two ears.
Pearl listened, promised to bear it all in mind, while Frieda made faces at the women when they weren’t looking.
Last to leave was old Tzeitel Feldsteyn, a well-known do-gooder, always doling out bowls of watery soup to the sick and old, though she herself was poor as dust. A soft-spoken woman, inside she was tough like old bread. Frieda found her pushy, thought she ought to take better care of herself before worrying so much about others, but Pearl supposed all that charity sustained Mrs. Feldsteyn, kept her mind off her loneliness.
Mrs. Feldsteyn gave Frieda a bag of musty-looking candy and greetings for her grandsons, Ben the Oak and Mendel, who’d gone to America two months earlier, to join an uncle in the city of Detroit. Ben and Mendel’s parents died young, leaving Mrs. Feldsteyn to bring up two boys while caring for half the indigent in their town on an income of rags. And mostly she managed it. “Tell them don’t forget me,” she said, clutching Frieda’s hand with her rough, worn fingers. “This time next year, you and Mendel should stand under a chuppah.”
“Maybe he’s forgotten his old friends in Turya,” said Frieda with a charming laugh and passed the candy to Pearl to hold.
“Maybe he forgot some,” said Mrs. Feldsteyn. “But not you.”
“Excuse me,” said Pearl, who preferred not to be reminded of her sister’s regrettable attachment to Mendel, that schemer-dreamer. In the room they shared, she tucked the candy into their wicker suitcase, along with food for the journey, clothes, and their sponsor letter from Basha, who advised them not to bring too much. They’d find all they needed in New York.
