Free Letters From Rifka by Karen Hesse Page A

of you instead.”
    I couldn’t believe what she was saying.

    “Some Jewish women shave their heads on purpose,” I said. “It is written into the Jewish law. To be bald is not a sin.”
    The HIAS lady sighed.
    “You mean the country will not let me in simply because they are afraid when I grow up no one will want to marry me?”
    “That is right.”
    “You don’t need hair to be a good wife, do you?” I asked. “Jewish women wear wigs all the time. I could wear a wig and still be a good wife.”
    “You are a child,” the lady from the HIAS said. “It is not that simple.”
    “It is that simple,” I said.
    She said, “I can’t change the rules, Rifka. Either your hair grows or they will send you back.”
    There it was. What chance did I have of my hair growing now? It had not grown in almost a year.
    Tovah, I think maybe you were wrong after all. You said a girl must not depend on her looks, that it is better to be clever. But in America looks are more important, and if it is my looks I must rely on, I am to be sent back. How can this be?

    Shalom,
    Rifka

… My path is bleak—before me stretch my
morrows:
A tossing sea, foreboding toil and sorrows.
And yet I do not wish to die, be sure;
I want to live—think, suffer, and endure …
    — Pushkin
     
     
    October 7, 1920
Ellis Island
     
     
    Dear Tovah,
    I have been here a week now. It is not so bad a place, really. I am growing used to it. Crowds of people overfill the wards. When they first brought me here, they gave me a choice. I could sleep in a bed with another woman or by myself, in a crib. I said, “I’ll take the crib.”
    My feet stuck out one end, but it was better than sleeping with someone I didn’t know. Someone who had a disease I didn’t want. Sometimes it is convenient I am small.

    There are so many of us here in the hospital. After two days, I was transferred from one ward to another. In the new ward, I got my own bed.
    Saul came to visit, but they sent him to the first ward and he couldn’t find me. No one could find me. So they sent Saul away.
    Saul would have been the first familiar face in almost a year. I didn’t care that it was just Saul. I would love to have seen Saul, but they sent him away.
    When they did find me, they put me in still another ward. Here a nurse has taken an interest in me.
    Her name is Nurse Bowen. Sometimes she takes me to her room in a building on a different part of Ellis Island. We go in a little boat to get there. I help her clean her apartment. Mostly, though, I eat candy when I am there. She always has candy. It is not as good as Belgian chocolate, but still it tastes very good. I like going with her.
    I make better sense of English now. I listen to the nurses and the doctors, following them on their rounds of the wards. I have been able, even, to interpret a little for the Polish and Russian patients; only simple things, but the nurses and the doctors seem pleased to have me help them.
    There is a little Polish baby here. She has no
one. Her mama died of the typhus. Because I’ve already had the disease, I help take care of her. She is such a beautiful little thing, with dark eyes taking up half her face and a bald head, as bald as mine. She never fusses. I hold her and rock her and sing her Yiddish lullabies. I tell her stories and recite Pushkin to her. She reminds me a little of the baby on the train in Poland.
    I have another responsibility. In the dining hall one night, a little boy sat across from me at the table. I couldn’t tell what was wrong with him, why they were keeping him in the hospital, except that he was very thin and pale, with dark circles under his eyes. I looked in those eyes and remembered something, someone, but I was too hungry to give it much thought.
    They served the food. It’s not bad food, and there is so much of it. Hands went every which way, passing, dishing out, spooning in. But the little boy sat, watching it all go past him.
    I helped myself to potatoes and