Free Inventing Memory by Erica Jong

revolution.
    "I bet your sitters could be useful to the cause," said one of Levitsky's cronies, a dapper little droopy-mustached man in a Russian peasant blouse whose name was Aaron Plotnik. (I have learned, in my much too long life, never to trust people named Plotnik.)
    "Bite your tongue!" Levitsky admonished Plotnik.
    It was all an act. He was as obsessed as any of them with the idea of changing history with a gun. More, perhaps—because his own gun was so useless. He read books on daring assassinations and hungrily followed all the news of anarchists at home and abroad.

    I tried never to think of the slaughters that had brought me to America, the little bodies laid out in the shul after the pogrom , the dead fathers, the weeping mothers. Usually I was so busy with my work that I had no time. But when I dreamed of Dovie, all the past would come tumbling back—the sour smell of Russia, the fear, the time in Odessa when the photographer came to my narrow cot in the dark.
    If you are innocent and expect no harm, it is not easy to be protected against evil. I used to fall into my bed exhausted from retouching pictures all day. My hands and feet were always numb with cold and my tush was numb with sitting. So when the big, smelly, vodka-breath bear came to my cot, all I felt at first was heaviness and warmth and fear of reprimand. He was my master after all.
    A rough hand groped between my rags. Sandpaper skin, and a sour mouth muttering, "No harm will come to you." I pretended to be asleep because I was so afraid of resisting, and I prayed for Mama—who was hundreds of miles away—to save me. Here is the strange thing: I was ashamed of what was happening as if I were at fault, not he! Even after it was over, I was not sure what had occurred. Separated from myself, I believed my virginity had not been breached. So when Dovie came, I thought of him as the Messiah and rejoiced in him as if he were sent by God.
    Attended by ghosts, I came to America. They were always there with me, whether I painted or prayed. Dovie, my father, my brother—they choired around me like cherubim as my brush made its dry sounds on the canvas.
    I had discovered that most of my fellow immigrants in der fremd , the foreign world, dreamed always of the wretched homes they'd left. And the Yankees dreamed always of Europe, as if it would civilize them and make them whole. Those who could afford it sent half of Europe's brica-brac home by ship. I had seen this plunder at Fontana di Luna: stainedglass windows from France, altarpieces from Italy, statues from Greece—the furnishings of Europe transported across the seas to civilize the Americans. It didn't work. The Americans murdered each other even more often than the Europeans—especially on the rough-and-tumble Lower East Side.
    "I dream of seeing my darling daughter again once more before I die," my mother writes to me, along with gossip about people I have almost forgotten. Everybody is dreaming. When will we all wake up?

    When I didn't have a sitter, I would take my sketchbook and charcoal and roam the poorest sections of the city, with Sim as my guide—Jewtown, Chinatown, the foundling hospitals, the tenements, the tumbledown houses on back lots and the desperately poor children sleeping in back alleys, the Polish-Jewish families who subsisted on pickles and black bread, the Irish cops who cudgeled the barefoot boys on the street for stealing apples, the Italians who grew tomatoes in soup cans, and the Chinese who deadened their pain in opium dens. I would sketch the "sweaters" (whom I had so lately escaped) as Sim interviewed the pale girls coughing their lungs out with consumption, the skinny boys of eight or nine pretending to be older when the inspectors came.
    The poverty of New York gave the lie to those who thought of it as the Golden Land. (My mama had a friend at home in Sukovoly who always said: "People tell me that in America the sugar is not sweet," and on dark days I was tempted