Love Loss and Secrets Across America and Beyond Read online

  Ann S. Epstein

  To the courageous immigrants of every generation who cross land and sea to begin a new life for themselves and their children. I am indebted to all my grandparents and my father for making the arduous journey from Eastern Europe to America over a century ago.

  Part One

  Shmuel, 1917

  Chapter 1

  In the bright sky above the sooty bricks of the Navy recruiting station, Shmuel Levinson sought God’s forgiveness for violating the commandment against lying. Falsifying his age would mean giving a fake name too. There would be no way to notify his parents if he were hurt, captured, or killed. So be it. He’d take that risk to win the Great War for America, which had welcomed his poor family to its shores fourteen years ago. Gratitude to this country, along with a desire to prove his manhood, drove Shmuel‘s decision. Also, if he let himself admit it, a desperate need to escape his father.

  No celestial message of absolution appeared overhead however, only wispy clouds as insubstantial as Shmuel himself. The knish he’d eaten an hour ago to boost his weight churned in his guts like a spinning torpedo. Every man entering the grimy doors ahead of him looked twice his size, half again his age. He willed his stomach to be quiet and followed them inside.

  The recruiter’s name badge, on a chest wide enough to strain his starched regulation shirt, identified him as Lt. Giordano. “Name,” he barked.

  “Sam Lew... Lord. Sam Lord.”

  “Age?”

  “Eighteen.” Shmuel expanded his chest to make his voice sound as deep as the cantor’s at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, but it cracked on the second syllable.

  The lieutenant looked up at Shmuel’s curly side locks, making him conscious of the pale orange fuzz dotting his chin too. His Adam’s apple bobbed with every swallow.

  “You gotta be twenty-one to enlist,” Giordano said.

  Shmuel pointed to the slogan on the poster above their heads. “Join the Navy. The Service for Training and Travel. Ages 17 to 35.” The first time he’d seen it, in the window of United Drugs, he fretted he’d have to wait a year and the war might be over. That’s when he got the idea of lying about his age. After all, the Babylonian Talmud permitted lying in the cause of peace, and this war was being fought to secure a peaceful world. He decided to add an extra year to his age to be safe. Eighteen, the word “chai” in Hebrew, also meant “life,” and he wanted to show he was ready to give his in this noble fight.

  “It’s older for Jew boys. Their mamas won’t let ’em enlist until they’re twenty-one.”

  Sam forced a scowl. “Then I’m twenty-one.”

  Giordano turned to the red-headed recruiter, Cdr. Kelly, at the next table. “Hey Mick, Mr. Samson Lou Lord Almighty here says he’s full grown.”

  “What do you care, Dago Wop? Jew boy wants to die for America, sign him up.”

  The lieutenant swivelled back to Shmuel. “You know how to change your own diaper?”

  Shmuel tried to match his sneer. The best he could manage was a twitch in his left cheek.

  Giordano handed him the completed form. “Follow the blue line down the hall so a doc can check your balls.”

  Shmuel had planned to call himself “Sam Lewis.” Lewis was the last name his mother wanted to take when she and his father arrived at Ellis Island carrying him and two suitcases held together with twine. His father refused, telling the immigration official it was Levinson, and so their family name from Lemberg, Austria followed them across the ocean.

  Shmuel hoped calling himself “Lord” didn’t desecrate God, but it gave him a twinge of triumph to defy his father, an unhappy man who wanted to live through his son. Avram was a frustrated scholar, limited by poverty and his own rigidity. America would give his child a chance to become what he couldn’t. Shmuel didn’t know what he wanted for himself, but he knew that he didn’t want to become his father. America was his land of opportunity now, and Shmuel would join the fight to safeguard that it stayed that way until his own dreams took shape.

  Shmuel proceeded to a cavernous white-tiled room where men stood naked, clothes tied in makeshift bundles, waiting for the next medical examiner. Briefly, he envied their uncircumcised penises, wishing he had a foreskin to lengthen his. The sacrilegious thought mortified him. It was not worthy of someone versed in Talmud, of someone whose father dreamed his son would become a rabbi. Ashamed, he tucked the fringes of his prayer shawl, together with his undergarments, inside his rolled-up clothes. The knotted tzitzit from his tallit still protruded but there was no time to shove in the telltale fringes before a weary doctor ran a cold stethoscope over his narrow, hairless chest. Shmuel coughed to suppress a giggle. The doctor frowned and listened to his lungs again.

  “I’m ticklish,” he said, humiliated, but not wanting the doctor to think his cough was a sign of tuberculosis, which would disqualify him from serving.

  The doctor snickered, then tapped the box where Shmuel’s age was written on the form. “Sure you know what you’re doing Sam? Rotting in the trenches isn’t like being tickled.”

  Shmuel nodded. He’d heard that the water- and mud-soaked trenches were worse than the filthiest tenements on the Lower East Side, where he lived. His thigh muscles clenched when his testicles were palpated and he prayed not to have an erection. Those around him squirmed in pain. Shmuel wondered if the doctor was going easy on him, thinking he was still a child. Relief and resentment mixed. How could he show he was a man if those in authority underestimated him?

  “Not many Jews in the Navy.” The doctor shone a light in Shmuel’s eyes. “Your people join the merchant marine where you can make a profit shipping supplies to the troops overseas.”

  Shmuel bit his tongue. He didn’t want to challenge the doctor, but why did people assume that all Jews cared about was making money? Calmly he said, “I aim to be a gunner or fireman on a destroyer. Someone has to protect the merchant convoys from German subs.”

  The doctor shook his head. “I can’t picture Jews on battleships. You’re a land people.”

  Shmuel knew, to the contrary, that Ancient Hebrews were seafarers. In Genesis, when Jacob blessed his sons, he said, “Zebulun shall dwell on the shore of the sea.” Once more, he resisted the temptation to correct the doctor, as his father would have done. It was foolish to act arrogant toward a man deciding his fate. Instead he quoted the Navy poster that had first lured him with the idea of replacing Torah study with adventure: “Don’t read about history. Make it.”

  “Open your mouth. Good. Now close. Do you go around the city memorizing posters?”

  Shmuel stared with dismay at the blush spreading down his body. New posters appeared weekly in the window at United Drugs, where the Shipping Board had deputized store managers to recruit half a million men. Shmuel and his friends, Yaakov and Bernie, went there for root beer on Wednesday afternoons after religious school. His father disapproved of any time that Shmuel didn’t spend studying at cheder, but his mother said he deserved a break, and snuck him pennies she saved from the grocery money.

  “Oh, you’ll travel,” the doctor sneered, “seeing the ocean before you’re cut in half by a torpedo. You know twenty-five Allied vessels are sunk for every German U-boat we take down?”

  “Our ships have depth chargers now,” Shmuel said. “We’ll destroy their subs before they can fire a shot at us.”

  “I’ve heard that kind of bravado before. You smart kids think you’re invulnerable. It’s the ignorant ones who have the good sense to be afraid of dying.” The doctor peered inside Shmuel’s ears. “Unlike us, Germans give their submarines numbers, not names. Keeps things impersonal. You’re going up again
st the most efficient and brutal fighting machine in the world.”

  Shmuel remained quiet, but testing himself against a formidable enemy was precisely what appealed to him. He was tired of using his brains to please his father, and being tormented for them by his classmates. The Italian and Irish boys who planned to join up after graduation called him a Hymie coward. “Kosher chicken, turkey, quail. Kraut just sneezes, kike turns tail,” they taunted, doubtful he’d betray his birth land to fight for America. His mother was right to want to change their last name. They should have taken English first names too, but in their cramped third-floor walk-up on Mott Street, they remained Avram and his wife Rivka, and Shmuel and his younger sister Dev, short for Devorah, the only Levinson born in this country. As American as she strove to be, she nevertheless liked her Hebrew name. Two months ago, when she turned twelve, she’d happily confided in Shmuel that her nickname made her sound, “like a little devil.”

  Shmuel could have Americanized his name to Samuel when he started school, but at age five he was too young to think of going against his father, a man he both admired and feared for his unyielding beliefs. By the time he regretted missing his chance, it was too late. Being called Sam, a plain English name, might have squelched the teasing and made him less self-conscious of the strawberry birthmark that ran from behind his right ear to just below his hairline. When he was old enough to grow payess, he wore the side locks to cover it, despite their being an Orthodox tradition even his father didn’t follow. That thin red welt was why he’d enlisted in the Navy rather than the Army. Sailors could wear their hair as long as civilians; soldiers had to shave their heads.

  The doctor checked Shmuel’s scalp for lice. He traced the birthmark but said nothing. “You might have to cut these off.” He twisted the silky blond payess around his fingers.

  At sea, with his hair grown coarse and below his earlobes, Shmuel wouldn’t need them.

  “Last chance to change your mind.” The doctor put down his examining tools and picked up the form. “I can’t prove you lied about your age, but I don’t need proof other than my say-so to reject you for a medical reason. All I have to do is check one of the disqualification boxes.”

  Shmuel hesitated. He looked at the hairy arms and muscular thighs of the men around him who were putting back on their clothes. He got dressed too, tucking the fringes of his tallit into his waistband instead of letting them hang visibly below his coat. “I’m ready,” he said.

  The doctor shrugged and signed the application. “I hope your God is a better saviour than mine. Report for duty Friday. The buses will take you to the Training School in East Boston.”

  Shmuel went back outside, trembling in the chilly November air. Perhaps he should have taken the name Zebulun, Zeb for short. Like his forebears, he was now one of the seafaring members of his tribe.

  Chapter 2

  Shmuel was still shivering when he climbed the warped stairs and opened the unpainted door to his family’s apartment. He told himself it was the nasty weather, not fear or a change of heart, causing him to shake like an unprepared student who sees the rabbi turn toward him with the next question. Rivka, saying he didn’t look well, put her hand on his forehead, but Shmuel brushed it off. “I’m not a baby anymore.”

  “To a mother, her children are always her babies.” Rivka smiled and walked back across the cracked linoleum floor to the stove.

  “It’s cold out, that’s all.” To prove it in the only way she’d believe, Shmuel said he was hungry and peeked under the lid of the pot simmering on the back burner. Inside was their typical Tuesday leftover supper, the carcass from the Shabbas chicken, picked clean and boiled with egg noodles, potatoes, and onions. It seemed the smell of onions emanated from every apartment, seeping into and out of the building’s stained walls. He sighed, wondering if sailors ate better. The Navy’s food budget must be a million times bigger than the Levinsons’.

  Dev sat at the scarred pine table doing homework. Shmuel looked over her shoulder, ready to admire his sister’s diagram of the digestive system. “Mama’s right,” Dev said, covering the page with a dishrag. “You look ready to upchuck your kishkas and you better not do it on my drawing!”

  “What if I did? It’s not up to your usual standards. The intestines are wound too tight.”

  Dev snapped back. “Flibberty, jibberty. What’s eating you?”

  “Nothing, but I need something to eat and Papa won’t be home for another half hour.”

  “I can make you a bowl of borsht,” Rivka offered, reaching out her hand again before pulling it back and tucking it into her apron pocket.

  “How about fried wasps? Crispy snake skin? Pickled pigs ears?” His sister grinned.

  “Don’t be disgusting.” The very thought made Shmuel feel like throwing up for real.

  Rivka wore a look of horror on her face. “Shush, Dev. People don’t eat those things.”

  “Yes they do. I saw them in a store window on Pell Street.”

  “What were you doing in Chinatown?” Shmuel said.

  Dev giggled. “I tricked Leah into going there after school today.”

  Shmuel raised his eyebrows. His sister’s best friend was her exact opposite. Dev loved going where she didn’t belong; Leah never stepped out of line, unless lured there by Dev.

  “I told her I needed to copy Chinese characters for my art class. We’re practicing with ink pens.” She lifted the dishrag. “See, I’m using one for my biology illustration.”

  “I can’t believe Leah went along. She’s doesn’t even like to look at pictures of trayf!”

  “Well, to be on the up and up,” Dev admitted, “she dusted out after a minute, before I even pretended to copy the letters. She said just standing outside the store was too malodorous.”

  “Leah actually used that word?” Rivka asked.

  “No, but it’s a good one, don’t you think? It means stinky. Or you could say something smells noxious, odious to the olfactory system, fetid, or frowsty. That last one is British.”

  Shmuel smiled. Dev’s obsession with words drove most people crazy. He found it lovable, except when she showed off. Then she was irritating in the way only a younger sister could be. Rivka went out of her way to ask Dev questions. Shmuel suspected she did it to encourage his sister to use her brains. Avram, on the other hand, pointedly ignored her, which only made Dev work harder for his attention, even if it entailed using doubtful slang expressions she’d picked up from the racier kids at school. Half the time Shmuel suspected Dev didn’t know what they meant, and occasionally neither did he. If Avram sniffed even a hint of impropriety, he ordered Dev to be quiet and help Rivka in the kitchen. Then their mother would play peacemaker and ask Dev to teach her the new word while they washed the dishes. Avram would grunt and wait impatiently for the women to clear the table so he and Shmuel could talk Torah, man to man.

  As if beckoned by Shmuel’s thoughts, Avram walked in. Despite the chill, he looked like he’d stepped out of a steam bath. In a sense he had, after bending over a pressing machine at the dress factory for twelve hours. The heat had untwisted the fringes of his tallit, rendering them as wilted and lifeless as his thinning hair. The sight made Shmuel wonder how he would hide his strawberry mark when he got older and lost his hair too. Maybe he wouldn’t live that long.

  Side by side, Shmuel and Avram washed their hands in the enamelled basin and Avram said the blessings as Rivka and Dev dished out the food. Shmuel barely had time to slurp a spoonful before his father began the nightly ritual of quizzing him on what he’d studied at cheder that day. Since Shmuel had skipped religious school to go to the recruiting station, he had to think quickly to fake it. Fortunately, the class was reading Genesis, whose familiar stories were less fraught to discuss with his father than later books of the Torah with their nitpicking laws.“We read the passage where Laban, Rebecca’s older brother, tries to dissuade her from leaving home to marry Isaac. The rebbe asked us why Laban wanted his sister to wait ten days before decidin
g whether to go.” Too late, Shmuel realized that biblical conflict was uncomfortably close to the ongoing rivalry between Gershon, his mother’s big brother, and his father. Onkel Gershon hadn’t wanted Shmuel’s mother to marry his father either.

  “And what did you say?” Avram looked directly at Shmuel, sitting on his right, but Shmuel glanced at his mother, sitting on his left, before returning his father’s piercing gaze.

  “I said one interpretation is that Laban was being protective. Rebecca was young. She was being asked to travel to a strange land, far away, and to marry a man she’d never seen before. In all likelihood, she would never see her own family again.”

  Avram objected. “The servant who came to fetch Rebecca brought jewels and other presents. Laban was simply trying to extort more gifts before letting his sister go.” At last he began to eat in earnest, spooning soup with a steady hand, as though the matter were settled.

  “You could see it that way.” Shmuel spoke hesitantly.

  “Could?” Avram put down his spoon. “No. Torah makes it clear in later chapters that Laban is deceitful. He cheats Jacob again and again, tricking him into marrying Leah, making him work an extra seven years to marry Rachel, and then stealing Jacob’s livestock.”

  Shmuel bowed his head to his own bowl. He was no longer hungry, but let his father take it as a gesture of acquiescence. An hour ago, he’d have welcomed the hot soup to get rid of his chills. Now, the argument with Avram had inflamed his desire to leave. Joining the Navy was not only a means of fleeing his father’s expectations, but also a way to trade the petty squabbles at home for the real war overseas. He chafed at Avram’s assumption that he’d take his side against Gershon. His father and uncle fought more than he and Dev had as children. Shmuel knew Rivka tried not to put him in the middle, but he feared their lifelong rivalry would shorten hers.

  The Navy should make a new poster, he thought. “Join a family united in its mission.” It sounded good, although surely even military families fought. Suppose the Navy fuelled rivalries more intense than Avram’s and Gershon’s, ones that risked men’s lives? His decision was made, but when supper ended, Shmuel’s intestines felt as tight as those he’d accused Dev of drawing.