Free The Family by David Laskin Page B

the grain fields that in a decade would cease to be Russia. As the land flattened and the trees grew stubbier, they could sense the pull of the sea. And then, all at once, through the train windows, there itwas—the Baltic—430 miles across from Stockholm to Petersburg, tinged with gray even at the balmy cusp of summer, as if winter were curled beneath its surface.
    No time to marvel at the miracle of horizonless water or explore the beckoning chaos of the dockside streets of Libau. The Russian-American Line’s
Russia
—a sleek black barracuda of a ship—was waiting to carry them to New York.
    It was the season of lingering twilight and the heavy perfume of fruit trees. But no flower’s scent could penetrate the acrid smoke rising from the
Russia
’s funnels or the reek of oil, wet cloth, rancid food, and vomit that permeated its steerage. Europe faded to a brown smudge. The continent had been the family’s home for a thousand years—probably more. None of them ever again set foot on Russian soil.

CHAPTER FIVE
LOWER EAST SIDE
    G ishe Sore thought she knew about America from her children’s letters, from the bits and pieces that appeared in the Yiddish and Russian newspapers, from the gossip she picked up in the store and the rumors that spread from neighbor to neighbor. But now she saw that she hadn’t understood the first thing. Who knew that New York was islands—one tiny island for the colossal statue, another for the immigrants, a long narrow blade of an island for the millions of people who had come before her and the new ones pouring in beside her from every corner of the world?
    The crossing in the
Russia
’s third-class compartment had made them all sick. The ship stank; the food was worse than anything she cooked. But now that they had trudged up and down the endless stairs in the palace of the immigrants, had their eyes and hair examined, sworn they were neither bigamists nor anarchists, received the coveted stamp on their papers, found their luggage, piled through the door marked “Push to New York,” and fallen into the arms of their American children, Gishe Sore’s insides had settled at last. Now, on the morning of June 1, 1909, with her shoes touching American soil for the first time, she was terrified.
    Her American children—not children anymore but glossy adults in expensive clothes—took charge of everything. Gishe Sore let herself beguided to the dock at the edge of Ellis Island, where a ferry was waiting to take them across the harbor to Manhattan. She looked where the American children pointed. She listened to them explain: that was New York City—Manhattan—their new home. She stared at the treeless forest rising from the point of land surrounded by slopping brown water. To her it didn’t look like a place where people lived, but she submitted. What choice did she have? One hour in America and already everything was topsy-turvy: the children led, the parents shuffled along behind.
    The ferry docked at the Battery and all the new immigrants spilled out with their luggage, their baskets, their screaming children, their heavy reeking foreign clothes. Gishe Sore waited and sweated while the American children found a taxicab. It took an eternity to cover the couple of miles from Ellis Island to their flat. She gazed through the cab window at the shadowed canyons where dark-suited people milled on every corner and rushed along the margins of every street and disappeared into or emerged from gaping holes in the pavement. The canyon walls shrank block by block as they inched their way across the tip of Manhattan—but as the buildings became humbler, the life on the streets grew denser. They passed beneath the ramps leading up to the Brooklyn Bridge and crossed into the Lower East Side. East Broadway, Catherine Street, Allen Street, Henry, Madison—
their street
. Instead of houses set in fenced gardens, there were just