Almonds and Raisins Read online

  Maisie Mosco

  ALMONDS AND RAISINS

  Dedication

  For my mother

  and

  in memory of my father,

  Nathan Gottlieb

  Acknowledgments

  The National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers (Manchester office), for information kindly supplied.

  Those members of the Manchester Jewish community whose recollections of times past have enriched this book.

  Samuel Woolfe, H.T. Gouldman and Ethel Bernstein, for assistance with research.

  My daughter Marilyn Selby for her help and encouragement.

  Under Yidele’s cradle stands a snow-white goat,

  The goat has been to market,

  That will be Yidele’s calling, too,

  Trading in raisins and almonds.

  There will come a time when railroads

  Will cover half the earth

  And Yidele too will earn great wealth,

  But even when you are rich, Yidele,

  Remembering your mother’s lullaby

  And the raisins and almonds.

  From an old Yiddish lullaby,

  “Rozhenkes mit Mandlen”

  Part One

  Hopes & Dreams

  Chapter 1

  Each time a horse and cart turned into the approach Yossel Lensky hoisted his belongings onto his back expectantly and put them down again when the vehicle rumbled past him. After a while, he begun doing this even when it was a carriage.

  “You think your relation can afford to hire a droshky after only two years here?” Sarah Sandberg asked him, but Yossel just mopped the sweat from his florid face and continued the charade without replying.

  “He’s making me nervous,” Sarah said to Yossel’s wife. “And I’m nervous enough already.” She shifted little Esther to a more comfortable position in her arms and glanced maternally at David and Sammy, her aquiline features shadowed with concern. Her children had not slept in a bed for more than a week and there was no certainty that they would tonight.

  “Who isn’t nervous?” Hannah Lensky answered. “On the train, I felt excited, I couldn’t wait to get to Manchester. But now we’re here, the thought of beginning again, with four kids, and hardly a penny in my pocket! Well, it won’t be easy, will it?”

  Gittel Lipkin wrapped her shawl closer about her bony shoulders and grabbed her youngest child by his coat tail as he was about to run away. “You want to get run over by a cart, Moishe! Remember on the boat how you nearly fell overboard?” She smiled at the other woman. “When was it ever easy?”

  “Yankel and me, we’re just glad to be here,” Zelda Cohen said thankfully. “Easy we don’t expect it to be.” She touched her full breasts and winced. “I’d have fed my baby on the train if I’d known we’d be hanging around this long.”

  They were huddled by the wall outside Exchange Station, waiting for Yossel Lensky’s third cousin the rabbi, who he had hoped would come to meet them.

  “What will we do if he doesn’t turn up?”, young David Sandberg asked. The October twilight was fast thickening to dusk and a yellowish mist, carrying with it a smell that reminded him of bad eggs, was making his face feel cold and clammy. There was, too, the stink of horse dung in the air, and the gas they used to light the trains was drifting from inside the station.

  Sarah licked her dry lips. They still tasted salty from the spray blowing up into her face when she staggered on deck, nauseous, during the sea crossing. She felt David tug at her skirt.

  “Mother, what will we do?”

  “Me he’s asking!” Her husband was watching a horse relieve itself, with a bemused expression on his face. “You never saw such a spectacle in Russia, Abraham?” she inquired caustically. “David wants to know what we’ll do if Mr. Lensky’s cousin the rabbi doesn’t come. It’s a good question!”

  Abraham Sandberg pushed his black fedora to the back of his red, bushy hair and thought about it. “The same as we’d have done if we hadn’t met Mr. Lensky.” He gazed apprehensively at the stretch of cobblestones in front of him, which sloped down to a main highway. He could see the flickering streetlamps and the traffic moving along and dark clumps of buildings rising against the sky. “But I hope we don’t have to. A stranger could get swallowed up here!”

  “The first Jews who came had nobody to meet them, did they?” David pointed out.

  “In those days cities weren’t as big and busy as they are in 1905,” his father said as a trainload of passengers began jostling through the station exit.

  David watched two little boys get into a hansom with a lady. Their neat jackets and knickerbockers made the clothes he and his brother had on seem like baggy old sacks and the lady’s coat was dark-green velvet, trimmed with shiny fur. He glanced at his mother’s shabby shawl and skirt and wished she could have one like it.

  “We wouldn’t get lost if we took one of those, would we, Father?” he said as the hansom moved away. “They’re smaller than the Russian ones and they’ve only got two wheels, but we could manage to squash ourselves in.”

  “A plaster for every sore, my son David’s got! An answer for everything! What can you do with him?” Abraham exclaimed exasperatedly. “Also he thinks I’m made of money.”

  Shloime Lipkin let go of little Moishe whom he had caught by the scruff of the neck as he was about to make off again and wagged his forefinger solemnly at David. “What you’ll spend on a droshky today, my lad, you won’t have in your pocket to buy bread with tomorrow. None of us can afford to say no to a free ride.”

  “You still think we’ll get one?” Sarah asked doubtfully.

  “My cousin the rabbi will come,” Yossel Lensky insisted as if the honour of the clergy was at stake. He heaved his bundles aloft again as another vehicle turned into the approach. “Didn’t I send him a message with that other rabbi, the one who caught the boat before ours? Ministers don’t let people down. Have patience everyone and you’ll soon be taken to where you’re going.”

  “To tell you the truth, Yankel and me we don’t know where we’re going,” Zelda Cohen hee-hawed edgily. Her laughter always sounded like a donkey braying.

  Gittel Lipkin stopped slapping little Moishe. “You came without an address, Zelda? How could you do such a thing when you were pregnant?”

  Zelda gazed tenderly at the infant cradled against her. “I’m not pregnant now.”

  Her burly young husband put his arm around her. “And a live child with no place to go is better off than a dead one. They were setting fire to the houses when we left.”

  “Ours also,” Gittel said quietly.

  “So what do you mean, how could we do such a thing?” Yankel demanded. He tied another knot in the piece of old rope which belted his patched coat, as if he must do something to busy his hands.

  A single tear coursed down Zelda’s pale cheek and splashed onto her baby’s face. “I saw my mother squelching through the mud in the marketplace, everyone was running for their lives.” She looked at Yankel despairingly. “God knows where she is now.”

  Shloime Lipkin tugged at the peak of his heavy cap and tried to hide the anguish in his eyes. “Our parents died at Kishinev. So we don’t need to worry about them anymore,” he added in a hard voice.

  “If Moishe hadn’t had a fever we’d’ve been there ourselves,” Gittel whispered. “They went to spend Pesach with my niece who married Shloime’s nephew and we were going also. Sheba’d just had a baby and she wasn’t well enough to come home to the family for the Passover.”

  Sarah’s heart skipped a beat, but whose would not at the mention of Kishinev? The pogrom there two years ago had been the worst yet, with Jews torn from their beds and tortured, nails driven into their flesh, their eyes gouged out, left
in their agony to die. A special prayer had been said for them in the synagogue in her townlet and everyone had wept. She saw Zelda clasp her infant closer to her breast and remembered hearing that many babies were tossed out of upstairs windows during the three-day slaughter, that the pavement in the Jewish quarter had been spattered with their splintered skulls. Zelda must have heard about it, too.

  “So what can you do?” Gittel shrugged breaking the pensive silence. It was a question to which there was no answer and one they were all accustomed to hearing.

  Zelda sighed and went on with her story. “I must’ve fainted after I saw my poor mother. The next thing I knew, I was wrapped in a blanket, shivering with cold and Yankel was pushing me across a field in a handcart, with all our things crammed around me, bumping me up and down till I thought the baby would burst through my stomach.”

  Her husband tapped the enamel pail which was slung around his neck by the handle. “Before she fainted, she reminded me to bring this. My Zelda thinks they don’t make pails in England!”

  “It was a wedding present, why should I leave it behind? And can you give me a guarantee they do?”

  Sarah stroked the infant’s fuzzy, dark head. “Pr’haps being bumped about in the handcart brought on your labour early, Zelda.”

  “Don’t remind me about my labour, Mrs. Sandberg. What a place to have your first child! When I think of the lovely clean sheets my mother prepared for my lying-in. A fine lying-in I’m having!” Zelda tried to smile, but shuddered instead. “All my life I’ll remember that filthy hold, with the boat tossing like a bobbin and you Mrs. Lipkin kneeling in front of me so nobody would see, while Mrs. Lensky delivered her.”

  “I was trembling all over,” Hannah Lensky confessed. Her pasty complexion flushed with pride as she eyed the child. “I never delivered a baby before.”

  “Now she tells me!” Zelda brayed and everyone chuckled with her, as if it was the best joke they had ever heard.

  It’s a wonder we can still laugh, Sarah thought. How do we do it? Up to now, there hadn’t been much to laugh about, but even at home people had kept their sense of humour.

  Once, when the dreaded marauders had ransacked her parents’ house and ripped the perinehs on the beds with a sharp knife, scattering the down filling everywhere, her mother had joked about it afterwards and said her father looked like a snowman, covered from head to foot in white feathers. She fingered the small gold brooch at the neckband of her blouse, lost in recollection.

  “Don’t look so miserable, Mrs. Sandberg!” Zelda chided her. “Listen, everyone’s got their packet.”

  Sarah looked at the seventeen-year-old girl who was counselling her like a great-aunt and smiled. Gittel Lipkin was telling her children a folk-story to keep them quiet and Hannah Lensky had just split an apple into quarters for hers, as if they weren’t all waiting to be carried off heaven-knew-where by a rabbi who might not turn up, but were having a carefree outing. The four families had been cooped-up together travelling since they met by chance on the quayside in Hamburg, but nobody had mentioned their experiences in Russia until Yankel was goaded into it just now. Why am I thinking about this? Sarah asked herself. Maybe I thought the others hadn’t had such a bad time as Abraham and me, because they didn’t talk about it. But we didn’t, either and we still haven’t. You don’t rush up to another Jew and say, “Listen, I was lucky to escape with my life.” It wouldn’t surprise him and the details don’t differ too much from place to place.

  “How much longer must we wait?” David asked. “People’re staring at us.” He glanced around furtively. “Last time I got stared at they set about me, don’t you remember, Mother?” He touched the silky, black ringlets which hung one on either side of his face, alongside his ears. “And tried to pull these off. It’s not my fault I have to wear them, is it? That our religion forbids me to cut that part of my hair?”

  Sarah wiped a smut off his nose with her fingertip. “In Russia that happened to you, David.” She smiled into the soft, dark eyes which were exactly like her own. “You’re in England now.”

  “Do they like Jews in England?”

  “How do I know when I’ve only just got here? All I know is they let us live and to live is enough.” Sarah eyed her frail younger son anxiously and pulled his muffler higher around his neck. It wasn’t like him to be so quiet. “Is your leg aching, Sammy?”

  “Only a bit.”

  “Lean against David, it’ll take the weight off it.” She averted her eyes from the crippled limb which nothing could heal. The yellow mist had settled on her shawl like a layer of moist muslin and the children’s garments were beginning to feel soggy, too. “Do something, Abraham!” she instructed her husband. “I’m very grateful to Mr. Lensky for offering us a ride, but we can’t stand here all night.”

  “You won’t have to!” Yossel exclaimed joyously. “Look! My cousin the rabbi is here!”

  David tried not to laugh. The scrawny little man was clinging to the front of the cart precariously with one hand and holding onto his big, flat, brimless streimel with the other.

  “That’s the same hat he used to wear in Rostov,” Hannah Lensky whispered to Sarah. “It always was too large for him.”

  “Oy vay!” he shouted when the horse halted abruptly and he was flung to the rear end. Then he righted his hat and his grey sidelocks, smoothed the collar of his black caftan and said what he had intended to say, “Shalom Aleichem!”

  Peace be unto you, how lovely it was to hear that familiar greeting in this strange place. Everyone crowded around the dilapidated vehicle. “Aleichem shalom, Rabbi!” their reply resounded. Unto you be peace.

  “Allow me to welcome you to Manchester,” he smiled.

  Sarah wondered if he was going to deliver a sermon, some ministers never lost the opportunity.

  But Rabbi Baruch Lensky was not that kind and it was not too long since he had stood where they were standing, he remembered how it felt. “What’re you waiting for?” he said brusquely to hide the emotion these arrivals always evoked in him. He rapped on the cart with his rolled umbrella. “Put in your things already and let’s be off. My supper’s waiting and the driver’s also.”

  “I can’t see anything,” little Moishe Lipkin complained as the horse began to tug its heavy load.

  “Peep between the slats like Sammy and me’re doing,” David advised as they rumbled past a chestnut-vendor who was stirring the glowing coals in his rusty brazier and an old crone in a man’s flat cap, shouting her wares from beside a barrow of oranges.

  The rabbi was seated on a stool the driver had provided for him. Everyone else had to squat on their bundles and boxes. “So many little boys we have here,” he said after Yossel had introduced the other families. “So they’ll say their Bar Mitzvah portions in England instead of Russia, God will still hear them.” He polished the handle of his umbrella on his cuff thoughtfully for a moment. “But will He forgive my Cousin Yossel for expecting me to meet a train at sunset, when I should be saying prayers with my congregants?”

  Yossel exchanged a shamefaced glance with the other men. The evening service had slipped their memory. He swallowed hard, it was a serious oversight. “You know how it is when you’re on the move like we’ve been, Baruch. You lose track of time.”

  Rabbi Lensky smiled, he knew it was the truth. “Even if God doesn’t forgive you, on this occasion I’m sure He’ll excuse you.”

  “What’s the difference between being excused and being forgiven?” David asked his parents, but they were too busy peering over the side of the cart to answer him.

  The bad-egg odour grew stronger as they neared the bottom of the slope.

  “We’re on a bridge, David, look!” Sammy piped. “There’s a river flowing underneath.”

  David gazed down at the rank, brown water and grimaced. “It doesn’t look like the Dvina, does it?”

  Sammy held his nose. “It doesn’t smell like it, either!”

  “The River Irwell has a perfume all its own
,” the rabbi chuckled. He turned to Sarah and Abraham. “I have in my congregation a couple who talk of the Dvina. A Mr. and Mrs. Berkowitz.”

  “It’s them we’re going to.” Sarah felt in her reticule to make sure she had not lost the address.

  “So you’re also from Dvinsk. It’s good you have landsleit here, people from your hometown.”

  “My wife isn’t happy about us going to them,” Abraham said hesitantly. “We don’t know them very well and she doesn’t like to bother anyone.”

  “We’re going to landsleit, as well. A family called Mishnik,” Shloime Lipkin said. “Do they belong to your congregation, Rabbi?”

  The rabbi shook his head and chuckled. “Wait till you find out how many there are here! Places to pray are the only thing we’re not short of.”

  “Everyone at home says over here a person from the same place as you’ll do anything for you,” Shloime told him.

  “We heard the same,” Abraham said.

  “What you heard is true.”

  “But my Gittel and Becky Mishnik never got on together at home,” Shloime sighed.

  Gittel smacked Moishe’s behind to stop him from using the slotted side of the can as a ladder. “Who could get on with Becky Mishnik?”

  “See what I mean, Rabbi?”

  “Set your minds at rest,” the minister reassured them. “You won’t stay with them forever and coming from the same place is a strong bond, believe me, when you’re miles away from it.”

  “But the Berkowitzes don’t know we’re coming, there wasn’t time to let them know,” Sarah said in a troubled voice.

  “Can they turn you away when once they were in the same position themselves? How would they have the heart?”

  “It makes sense,” Yossel declared.

  “For you it’s all right,” Shloime said enviously. “You’ve got the rabbi here, he’s family.”

  “When it comes to it, we’re all family,” Rabbi Lensky said quietly. “Aren’t we all cursed with the same inhuman affliction, which causes our blood to spill whenever a scapegoat’s needed? Who are those butchers taking it out of just now because this year they tried to throw out the Tsar with a revolution and didn’t succeed? I don’t have to tell you. Instead of counting sheep to help me fall asleep at night, I lie counting all the pogroms there’ve been the last few months and it keeps me awake. And last time it was the Tsar himself who arranged the blood-letting, we get it from all sides!” He stared into the dusk, sorrowfully. “These days a Jew who’s lucky enough to be in England never knows who he’ll find on his doorstep asking for shelter. So what can you do? It’s making houseroom hard to find.”