From This Day Forward (26 page)

They were married quietly, on November 14, 1956, and Irene invited only two guests, Ruth Altman and Ruth's mother. In the wedding pictures she is wearing a silk cocktail dress, with a short white veil—nothing like the fancy gown she was trying on that day, more than twelve years before, when her beloved Janek was killed. But she is clearly happy, slender and blond, beaming up at her husband who is almost a head taller. When it came to sex, she was both very innocent and deeply scarred, and as she puts it: “Bill knew my story, so he was very gentle with me.”

She was so inexperienced that when she got pregnant a few months later, she didn't know the signs. But when she started asking for some Polish food she hadn't eaten in years, a friend took her to the doctor and he confirmed her condition. Bill was fifteen years older, he already had three children by his first marriage, and Irene was nervous about how he would
take the news. He was pleased for her, but not exactly a modern, engaged father. After their daughter, Janina, was born—named for Irene's favorite sister back in Poland—Bill “never changed a diaper, he didn't know what to do, he was more like a grandfather.”

Their time together was happy but brief. Bill was stricken with Alzheimer's, and as Irene recalls: “He became a man I did not know. He would go into these rages and I thought he did not love me. It's the most painful sickness, people change in front of your eyes.” Money was running low, the family was in danger of losing their house. And then, says Irene, “a miracle happened—again.” A rabbi who knew her story interceded. The Jewish old-age home in the area took in Bill Opdyke, a Christian, without charging a fee, and he died there five years later.

Today Bill and Irene's daughter, Janina Opdyke Smith, is the mother of two sons, and the grandmother of two girls, and Irene says proudly, “I'm a great-grandmother now.” Her marriage did not last long, but it lasted long enough. The man who gave her a new home in America also gave her something else. He gave back her life.

Abe and Miriam Rogow: A Photo in the Window Sam and Norma Weiss: A Book of Poems

These are two family sagas that Steve has told for years. For this book he interviewed several elderly relatives, filling gaps and correcting mistakes, and he retells the stories here.

 

My grandfather, Abe Rogow, was always a restless person, full of schemes and dreams. As a boy, he helped his father in the textile business, running errands and collecting shipments of cloth at the train station. His hometown of Bialystok, now in eastern Poland, was then under Russian domination, and his older sister became an early convert to Bolshevism. Family
legend has it that his sister would occasionally ask young Abe to pick up a package for her, and since he was well known at the station, no questions were asked. But they should have been. His sister's packages contained copies of
Iskra,
the Leninist newspaper, that were being smuggled into Russia. If the bundles had broken, and revealed their contents, Abe would have been shot on the spot, but fortunately for me that never happened.

It was Zionism, not communism, that fired Abe's imagination, and he was still a teenager when he stole money from his father and made his way to Palestine. I have a photo of him working on the first road ever built in Tel Aviv, and his plan was to settle there and help build a new Jewish state. One problem: if a young man was drafted into the czar's army, and failed to appear for induction, the penalties on his family could be severe. So after a few years away, Abe returned home, a
chalutz,
a pioneer, with the dust and the dash of foreign lands still clinging to his clothes. He would go into the army, save his parents a problem, and see what happened.

Meanwhile, a young woman named Miriam Wasilsky had come to Bialystok from the village of Eishishok, probably to find a job and a husband. She had her picture taken by a local photographer, and he displayed it in his shop window as a sample of his work. While Abe was waiting for his draft notice, he had a lot of time on his hands, and as he roamed around Bialystok, he noticed the photo of the girl. Every day he'd pass the shop window, and gradually he fell in love. As the legend goes, he finally met Miriam one night at a gathering of young people and stammered, “You're the girl in the photograph.”

Soon they agreed to be married, and I have a set of photographs taken at about this time. The date on one is stamped 1912, and it shows my grandparents gazing straight into the camera, their heads tilted toward each other, barely touching, as they faced a very uncertain future. She's wearing a dark
dress, with a lace panel at her throat, and a slightly saucy expression. He's wearing a white shirt with a banded collar, in the Russian style, and looks a bit nervous. There's another shot, of Miriam alone, that shows why Abe fell in love with her. Her huge dark eyes leap through time and space, looking directly into mine. And as I look back at her, I find myself thinking, “Oh, Grandma, if you knew then what I know now…”

Under Russian rules, once you were drafted you were the responsibility of the army, not your parents, so Abe hit on a scheme. After he joined up, he'd escape as soon as possible, get back to Palestine, and send for Miriam. His mother aided the plan by making him a special cap. On one side it looked like an army cap, but when you flipped it over, it became a civilian hat. As he left for training camp, he put on a layer of his own clothes under his uniform, and as best I can tell, he spent no more than a couple of hours in the service. The first time the train stopped, he leaped out, stripped off his uniform, flipped over his cap, and took off.

Abe wound up in Odessa, a Black Sea port where ships left for Palestine, but since he had no papers and was a deserter from the army, he couldn't sail legally. As he used to tell the story, he met a family with twelve children. And when the youngest one died, he stepped in as the oldest child and everybody else moved down one rung. Of course, the genders on the papers no longer matched, but the customs officials were too lazy to check. They lined the kids up on a bench, counted twenty-four knees, and allowed the family to board.

When he finally got back to Palestine, Abe realized it was not a good place to bring a young bride. The Arabs were rebelling, World War I was approaching, and he decided to switch course. He wrote to Miriam and said, meet me in New York, not Tel Aviv. She already had a brother in America, who would take her in until Abe arrived, but Grandpa did not make a good first impression when he landed in his new
country. Getting off the boat, he tried to look debonair by twirling a cane. My mother says Miriam's brother was so incensed at the greenhorn that he took the cane, broke it in half, and snapped at Abe: “In the United States, we don't use canes.”

Grandma's brother tried to break off the relationship as well, but he didn't succeed. These two young people had risked too much and come too far to be kept apart. After they were married, my dad was born a year or two later, in 1916, and the family settled in Bayonne, New Jersey, not far from where my mother's family, the Schanbams, were also living. In fact, Abe Rogow and Harry Schanbam met long before their children married—and never liked each other. Harry's family owned a dairy farm, and one story has it that Harry fired Abe from a job delivering milk. Years later, after Abe became quite successful, Harry would brag that he gave Abe his start in this country. But he'd usually leave out the part about firing him. My parents were still living in Harry's house by the time I was born in 1943, and Abe and Miriam lived just a few blocks away. I have from those years another photo I cherish: my brother Marc and I are three or four, dressed in our Sunday best, white shirts and navy blue short pants, and sitting on a couch with our grandparents. Miriam is much grayer and heavier than in her earlier pictures, but you can still see flashes of the girl Abe first noticed. The girl with the slight smile and smoldering eyes. The girl in the photographer's window.

The other family fable starts back in Eishishok, Miriam's home village. As a young man, her father, Max, was a bookbinder, hardly a lucrative trade, and as my mother remembers the story, Max “spent more time reading books than binding them.” He fell in love with Bodonna, a girl from a wealthy family, which looked down on the poor bookbinder. I always heard that Bodonna was sent away to break up the romance but her granddaughter, Norma Weiss, says that Bodonna and
Max were actually engaged, and that she went to America assuming he would follow her. “He never got here,” says Norma. Whatever the details, we know this: before Bodonna left, Max bound a book with his own hands, inscribed it in Yiddish, and gave it to her as a going-away present. My father always said it was a book of love poems. Norma insists it was a Bible. I'll accept her version, grudgingly, but I prefer my father's.

In any case, Bodonna took the book to America, and the two young lovers never saw each other again. They both married others and had many children. I have a photo of Max and the woman he did marry—my great-grandmother—a rather stern and unappealing person, to tell you the truth. Surrounded by his family, Max wears a skullcap and a full beard, and there's my grandmother Miriam in the back row, as always looking fearlessly forward. After Miriam came to America and married Abe, she was joined by her other brothers. One of them was a monument carver by trade and his life was shadowed by tragedy. In 1925, while his wife was pregnant with their seventh child, he died in a flu epidemic. The first two children, twins, had died at birth, a son had died in an accident, and the latest blow was too much for his wife. She suffered an emotional and physical collapse and could no longer care for her children. The four surviving kids were sent to the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum, where they remained until they went to work or were taken in by relatives.

The oldest boy, Sam, was a real go-getter. At age fourteen, he got a job as a mail clerk at the Classy Coat Company in Manhattan's garment district and was soon taking care of his younger siblings. “He became our father,” recalls his sister Pearl Bronstein. Sam was rising quickly through the ranks of the garment trade when he went to a social club in the Bronx one evening and met Norma Kass. Norma's father was also in the garment business, but her family was not pleased with
her new beau, who had been raised in an orphanage and seemed to have no family background. Norma's grandmother was particularly upset, and today, more than sixty years later, Norma can remember the old woman complaining, “Who is he? Who's his family? What's what?”

Sam was not about to be thwarted, so he asked his aunt Miriam, my grandmother, to come with him and meet Norma's family, to show them that he did have relatives of his own, that he was somebody. So Abe and Miriam made the trek to Norma's house in the Bronx, and things started stiffly, with the grandmother sitting over in the corner and not saying much. But Miriam was a gregarious person and the group fell into conversation about the old country and where they were all from. Finally the grandmother broke in and started asking questions: You say you're from Eishishok? Your name was Wasilsky? (Weiss was the Americanized version.) Your father was Max the bookbinder? Please. Just a minute.

She went upstairs and after a while brought down a book, a book inscribed to her in Yiddish by a young man many years before. The grandmother was Bodonna, the girl who left for America and never saw Max again. She had never forgotten her lost love. She still had the book he had given her, a book he had bound with his own hands. And now their grandchildren had found each other. There was much rejoicing. All was forgiven. Bodonna gave her blessing and Sam was embraced. Soon they were married, at a synagogue on the Grand Concourse, a large boulevard running through the middle of the Bronx. After the wedding, the guests trooped to a restaurant around the corner for a meal, and Norma remembers how happy her grandmother was that day. “She was so excited, she went around telling everybody” the story. And the match was a good one. Sam and Norma were married for sixty-three years before he died in 1998.

There is a footnote to the story: Sam wound up owning
his own business and hired his father-in-law to run one of his factories. He was so respected in the garment trade that after his death, a scholarship was named in his honor at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Norma, who insists that Max gave Bodonna a Bible, not poetry, does not know what happened to the book, but that's all right. To me, his gift will always be a book of poems, and I know where it is. In my heart.

Lilly and Ludwig Friedman: A White Wedding Dress

If you buy a wedding ring from Lilly Friedman, she won't charge a commission. And sometimes you'll get more than you bargained for. “I tell them stories,” says Lilly, sitting in her tiny jewelry shop on Manhattan's Lower East Side. “When a young couple comes to me, I'm always very excited if I see that things go well.”

Lilly has quite a story to tell, but you wouldn't know that just looking at her, a shy, soft-spoken woman of seventy-five who is about to become a great-grandmother. It is a story of one woman's strength and spirit, of her refusal to give up her dreams, simple dreams, really, of a home and a husband and a white wedding dress. But they were not simple in Czechoslovakia, not in 1944, not when the Nazis were doing everything possible to exterminate her family and her future.

Lilly was born and raised in the small Czech village of Caricha, where her ancestors had lived for generations. There were only twenty-five Jewish families in the whole place, “but we lived very good,” she remembers, baking their own matzoh and building their own synagogue, where Lilly's father presided as the rabbi. Things changed in 1939, when Germany's Hungarian allies occupied the area and “made our lives miserable.” Jews were forced to wear yellow stars and barred from shopping in stores, traveling on trains, or running their own schools. Lilly's older sister, Celia, had gone to America in the mid-thirties to live with an aunt, and the fam
ily was desperate to join her. “We always wanted to go out but we didn't have a chance,” says Lilly. Celia sent tickets for her father and two brothers, but when they got to Lisbon, they didn't have the right papers for America and the boat—one of the last escape routes from Europe—left without them and they had to return home.