Free Hitler Made Me a Jew by Nadia Gould Page B

too was good at throwing things out. It bothered me to see bottles or jars used only once trashed out. And everybody in America had a telephone—even children. People also had cars and every house had a garage. The newspaper boy throwing the paper on the porches was a surprise: young people in France didn’t have regular paying jobs. Porches were new to me—the houses I knew in Chatenay didn’t have porches.
    I kept discovering different things about life in America. Everybody had a bathroom. I was astonished to see that my friends took a bath any time they wanted and washed their hair and brushed it one hundred times a day. The movie magazines told them that the stars in Hollywood did that.
    Parties and kissing games were strange to me. I was too proud to kiss anybody and I thought there was something odd about those games. I felt too inadequate anyway. My reluctance made me unpopular with the boys I would have wanted to kiss me.
    Because of his job, Sasha had to move to Reading, Pennsylvania, and I went along with his family. Reading was a much bigger town than Concord and where Concord was white, Reading was red with stately Victorian brick houses. Sasha had rented one of these with a wraparound porch and a dark interior of paneled walls. The built-in furniture was sculpted with elaborate decorations. Two rocking chairs faced a fireplace. It was the first time I was seeing a rocking chair.
    Neighbors came to introduce themselves and give presents. That was the tradition. Gaby and I were immediately invited to join the social activities in our new school. I made a few friends and I led a typical American child’s life playing Monopoly, jacks and pick-up sticks. In France, we didn’t play any of those games. I also learned to write cards and letters to the movie stars to get their autographed pictures. I learned the songs from the Hit Parade, but I didn’t dare sing in English.
    After seven months, which seemed an extremely long time, my mother received her visa and arrived in Reading, blond and chic. I had forgotten how pretty she was. Even Luba agreed she looked good. My mother told us about her boat trip to America. They were in the middle of the Atlantic when they were stopped by the Germans who wanted to search the Portuguese ship and had the passengers disembark in lifeboats. This turned into a nightmare. As the people were going down the ropes to the lifeboats, a woman tried to throw her baby to a person in the boat, but she missed and the baby went into the ocean. My mother said that the chaos and horror of it were the worst thing she had ever experienced. After the inspection, the Germans let them continue their trip to America. But they were traumatized, and no one was the same, unable to shake the image and sounds of the baby striking the ocean and his mother’s screams as she watched him go down.
    Once I was with my mother I felt normal, and it took me no time to become insufferable. I didn’t give her time to adjust. She had exactly twenty-six dollars to her name, and I was impatient for us to settle into our own place and leave Luba’s house. She took the first job she could find in Reading, sewing piecework men’s shirts in a small factory. The pay was too low, and she decided we would move to New York where the wages were better. I was thrilled to go to New York, the biggest city in America.

Chapter 11
    New York City/High School 1944-46
    In New York we moved into the Hias, a shelter for Jewish immigrants, and I was mortified. I had expected better surroundings. The Hias was in the building on Lafayette Street where later Joseph Papp’s theater was located. Then, it smelled of Clorox and its floors were shining and smooth. We had a cubicle with partitioned walls open on the top. The sound of our voices reverberated and made us feel self-conscious even though we were the sole occupants in the shelter. Living in this perfectly adequate setup, room and board gratis,