My father brought me to this country from the Ukraine, where our people were murdered merely because of our faith, our blood marking the snow. All across the countryside there were pogroms, which in our language means devastation, a storm that devours everything in its path. When the horsemen came, they left nothing behind, not breath or life or hope. My mother died in that far-off place. She was alone in our small wooden house when the wild men on horseback came to burn our village to ashes. There was no one to bury and no body to mourn. My father and I did not acknowledge what we had lost or speak my mother’s name. When we traveled we kept to ourselves, trusting no one. I do not remember the ship or the sea, only the taste of the bitter, rusty water we had to drink, and the bread we brought with us from the Ukraine, the last taste of our past life falling to pieces in our hands. But I do remember the forest in Russia. For the rest of my life I carried that with me.
Our first residence was shared with twenty men and boys in a tenement building on Ludlow Street. The toilet was in an alleyway. There was no heat, only a stove that burned whatever coal and wood we could gather from the streets. There was very little light and the rain came pouring in through the roof. Out in the alleys people kept pens of geese, as they did back in their homelands; often the geese would break free and could be found wandering along the streets. Lice were everywhere, and it was impossible to get a good night’s sleep, for the bedbugs drove people crazy with itching as they spread from mattress to mattress, a plague we couldn’t purge.
Other men from our village who had also escaped the pogroms of the wild Russian horsemen soon befriended my father. In our homeland we called a village a shtetl, and each one was a world unto its own. The men, brothers. The women, sisters. Our brothers took pity on us and helped us find better living quarters, where we might, once again, be on our own. Farther down Ludlow Street we found a kind of salvation. A single room, but ours. My father had a bed, and I slept on the floor atop the feather quilt we had brought with us, sewn by hand by my mother. It was the only thing of any worth that we owned.
Every morning we recited the same prayers, swaying back and forth in meditation. We dressed in black coats and black hats. We were Orthodox in our practices and beliefs, as our grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been. In the Ukraine I would have been a scholar, but in New York I followed my father to work, as I followed him in all things. His name was Joseph Cohen, known in our village as Yoysef, and he took pride even in the lowliest tasks, as if he were still a scholar reading God’s commands. If he’d had a wife and daughters, they would have been employed, and, like many other Orthodox men, he would have spent twelve hours a day in study and prayer, but that was not meant to be. In the factory I sat on the floor watching his nimble fingers turn rolls of fabric into dresses and coats. In this way I learned the tailor’s trade. I was proud to bring my father needles and spools of thread. Other men murmured they wished they had a son as smart as I was, as promising and as studious. I was a worker from the time I was eight years old, and I had a gift for creating well-made clothes out of plain cloth. That was the way my fate unfolded. And yet, despite the harshness of our lives, I did not question my faith. I still carried a prayer book in my coat pocket.
We knew we were lucky to have employment. Bands of day laborers waited for work in Seward Park on the corner of Hester and Essex; when we passed by we shook our heads and said they were like pigs at the market. I was alongside my father and his friends when the bosses came unexpectedly to the factory one day and fired everyone without warning. This was the day my life changed, when I lost my soul, or found it, depending on what you believe. As garment workers, we had no rights, but at least we earned enough to survive, until the bosses decided otherwise. They’d brought in new workers, cheaper labor, men just arrived from Russia and Italy who would toil eighteen hours a day for pennies and never complain when they were locked into workrooms to ensure they didn’t take time to eat or drink or even to rest for a few moments. These newly arrived men asked for even less then we did, and the Jews, desperate for the pennies we would earn, agreed to be at their sewing machines on Saturdays, the holy day for our people, when as Orthodox Jews we could not work. It seemed we were no longer needed, and no objections would be tolerated. Men who looked like gangsters stood at the door; should anyone dare to complain, they wouldn’t hesitate to beat down the agitators. On that afternoon some of those who had been dismissed went home and cried, some looked for work, but my father went to the river.
I was tall for my age, as quiet as I was studious. My life was in the shul and in the factory, but on the day we were let go I followed my father to the docks of Chelsea, and because of this I became someone else. Something inside me grew hardened, or was it that something inside me was freed, a bird that flew from its cage? I trailed after my father, though he told me to hurry back to Ludlow Street. The docks were crowded with men in black coats, some who were clearly of our faith, friends of my father’s, but opposing them were a gang of thugs cut from the rough cloth of the docks, men who carried brass knuckles and were good and ready for a fight. I could think only of keeping up with my father. When he noticed me, he shouted that I must go home. I ducked behind some barrels, hoping he’d assume I’d done as I was told. That was when it happened. My father seemed to leap all at once, like a strange unwieldy bird he rose into the air and flew away from the pier. There was the slapping sound of flesh into water that I still hear.