(July 2021)
by
David Barudin
Winner of the 2022 Virginia State Prize in Fiction
awarded annually by the Virginia Writers Club.
Katz Deli on East Houston Street is near my condo in the East Village, so I go there for breakfast. Then, I walk up Avenue A to Tompkins Square Park and catch the uptown bus to the New York City Public Library’s main branch at Fortieth between Fifth and Sixth. The library is a marvelous place. A free university for someone like me, who is retired, widowed, with all my faculties and a need to be productive. Lately, I have been researching my family history online in the library’s Reference Department.
That’s where I spend most days. Not in sifting through and organizing ancestral information. Quite the opposite. I search, but find next to nothing. If it wasn’t for a Family Tree given to me half a lifetime ago, I wouldn’t even know the names of my grandfather’s family who came to New York from Russia in 1906, when he was eight years old. At the top of the Tree are my great-grandfather and great-grandmother, Chaim and Yenta. It’s them I’m looking for.
The multi-branching Tree was assembled by a granduncle who was the last of the Russian-born generation. My curiosity about it came after I retired from media sales and began writing short stories and magazine articles. One from my retirement trip to Italy began: My redeye from JFK flew over the northern Atlantic, which my great-greats crossed more than a century before, going the other way and much slower by ship. I imagined the wonder in my eight-year-old future grandfather arriving in New York with his family. An immigration agent stamped their papers and declared, ‘Welcome to America.’ Staring down from the plane over the black ocean, I felt immeasurable gratitude for their voyage that made my life possible.
When I got home, I started my search for Chaim at the library. The first document I found was the 1910 US Census for New York. To my surprise, I hadn’t fallen far from the Family Tree. My great-grandmother, Yenta (Yetta in the Census) lived at 310 East 4th Street, three blocks from my condo. She was listed as widow, head of the household, with seven children whose names matched my grandfather and great aunts and uncles on the Tree. There was no mention of Chaim.
I search on JewishGen, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, and 1,2,3 and Me with their twenty-one million records, Yizkor Book translations, KehilaLink pages, InfoFiles (imagine a Jewish genealogy encyclopedia!), and discussion groups with 10,000 subscribers organized by topic and geographical interest. I accessed Ellis Island’s extensive databases and ship manifests, at first remotely and then on-site with help from US Park Service staff. I sat on the benches in the great hall where the huddled masses waited to be interviewed by immigration clerks. I saw the dormitories where they slept, perhaps the first time on mattresses that were not straw ticking. I lifted the large tin milk pitchers and porcelain dishes that fed many their first balanced meals. I found no record of Chaim and his family.
Third-class steerage passengers were ferried to Ellis Island for intake. Second-class disembarked at the piers. First-class cleared customs on-board in New York Harbor. Chaim’s family didn’t appear anywhere. I visited Belarussian museum sites and state archives, and read “Documents on the History and Culture of Jews in the Archives of Belarus” and “Pogrom, Kishinev and the Tilt of History” and on Jewish life, generally, in the nineteenth century Russian Empire. Relatives knew as little, or less, than I did. The only ones who knew them had died long ago.
I did find a nephew with my name who had also immigrated in 1906 and wound up in Rochester, NY. The others settled in the city or Jersey City. Peter Barudin, born in 1791, emigrated from France to New York in 1826. And Bokaslav Barudin, a Polish merchant seaman, was in ship manifests in the early 1900’s. There was a Southeast Asian Bin Ali Barudin. But no trace of Chaim.
Again this morning I walk to the uptown bus after breakfast at Katz. It’s my last trip to the library, I decide. I slow my pace and think about my own life. With my wife gone, days blend one into the next. My children are spread out around the country, doing well in their careers, which brings my thoughts back to Chaim and Yenta. They made our lives possible; yet, all I know is they came to America for the same reason everyone did. The records were likely destroyed by the Nazis. Sadly, I won’t be able to visit his grave to say Kaddish or learn something about him in order to know a little more about myself.
I’m in no hurry to get to Tompkins Square. It’s past rush hour and the next uptown bus doesn’t come for a half-hour. The bus stop is empty when I sit down on the bench. The sun is warm on my face. I close my eyes and soak it in.
“May I sit.” The voice comes from an old man with a full beard leaning over me. “You seem so peaceful; I don’t want to disturb you.”
“Not at all,” I say, motioning for him to sit, which he does.
“A pleasant morning for late in September,” he comments, waving a big hand in front of him. His black suit coat lifts with the gesture and falls back around him, emitting the pleasant musty scent, like when a summer cottage is opened for the season. “This time of year would begin to get cold where I was from,” he says, settling on the bench.
I ask, “Do you live in the neighborhood?”
“Not far,” he says.
I remark, “I’ve lived here a long time. I don’t recall seeing you before.”
“It’s not surprising. So much is timing. Turn the corner a few seconds too late, or too soon.”
If he looked familiar, I attributed it to the number of old Hasidic men with beards in traditional suits on the Lower East Side. Unlike most of them, my bench mate lacks their braided sideburns, or payot, and the black beaver hat.
He remarks, “We called this the New York Jerusalem. Di Goldeneh Medina.”
“The Promised Land,” I observe.
He nods “Baruch Hashem” and a grin enlivens his dark eyes.
The Lower East Side was a mythical place to those who followed after the thousands and then tens of thousands who flooded in at the turn of the century, when it was desperately overcrowded and unsanitary. Cholera and tuberculosis were epidemic. Seventy and eighty-hour work weeks in deplorable factories and sweat shops. In cold, dark cellars, seltzer-makers risked their lives bottling safe drinking water and meeting the craze for fizz drinks and New York egg creams.
His hands come to rest in his lap. “Here, you can be somebody. My son, Leyser, is a floor-polisher. His own company. My girls are secretaries in the garment district. Ovsey-Shmuel, my youngest, went to PS 188 and got an education.” He looked at me, wistfully. “They spoke American before me. My wife, ha’shalom, just Yiddish.”
I pass PS 188 on Houston Street occasionally. It’s a Community School Model with four hundred students, converted from 98 classrooms and five thousand students before the neighborhood changed.
He sighs. “What life would they have in Russia?”
The old man leans back on the bench, strokes his beard, and gazes across the park. He looks at nothing, in particular. “My father leased a grain mill near Disna in Vilna Guberniya. I forget whose estate it was. In America, they would call such an arrangement share-cropping. I joined him in the mill when I was old enough.”
I ask, “How old are you, if I may ask?” I fumble for my notepad and a pen. From the library, I know the region. It was a center of Jewish culture and commerce for five hundred years before millions emigrated under the Czars and Soviets. The area, once the Pale of Settlement where Russian Jews lived, now is Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova. In Russian archives, I’m informed, demographic information is kept at a person’s birthplace and not where they actually live and work. I had been searching for Chaim in the wrong place.
He takes no notice of my scribbling. When he does glance over, it’s to say, “Etka and I had to go a hundred miles by horse-drawn cart to lease my own mill on the Usyska River, in Gorodok Uezd. Our two younger daughters, Malka and Estra, and two more boys were born there.”
I’m hunched over my notepad when he says, “You’ve lived in the neighborhood a long time?”
I look up. “Yes. My condo’s on East Fourth.”
“I know the block. But it’s not where your parents raised you?”
“No. But I’ve always felt at home here. But, you were saying?”
“Ach, it’s so long ago now.” He folds his arms and exhales.
“Please, I want to hear.”
“You’re a parent,” he shrugs, “you know. And one brother had already come. In the countryside, we avoided the worst of the attacks but with eight children, making ends meet as they say in America…”
Shipping companies had agents throughout Eastern Europe. Passage was a few months’ wages. Immigrants were their most profitable business.
“Like a dream,” says my bench companion. “Di Goldeneh Medina.” His black coat sleeves trail in the air. “On Ellis Island, we got American names. I’m Bernard.”
“Who were you before that?” I ask him.
He hesitates as someone might leaning over an old attic chest. “Khaim-Berka Menakhemovich,” he says with the dust of an accent from a different time and halfway around the world.
I roll Menakhemovich around on my tongue, letting the emphasis fall in the right places. I wonder by which name, old world or new, the millions thought of themselves? By American names that signified a new life or the one of their place in the world? Is a name imprinted on your soul? I ask him.
He smiles. “Ah. Shakespeare? What’s in a name?” And considers it. “It helped to have a new name. Anything that made it easier was a blessing. Only those who knew you before used Russian names. In every other way, we tried to be good Americans, if it please God.”
If it please God echoes above a growingly insistent voice. “Mister. Sir… I think this is your bus. I’m sorry to wake you, the next one doesn’t come for a half hour.”
I look first at him and then look around. “Did you see which way he went?”
“Who?”
“The old man sitting here.”
“Mister, I’ve been here for a good ten minutes. I didn’t see anyone. Are you okay?”
The bus doors exhale at my feet. The driver gives me an impatient look. “You getting on?”
At the library, the reference librarian hands me an email she printed out for me. At the top is the official seal of the City of New York. Under it is:
NEW YORK CITY
DEPARTMENT OF RECORDS AND INFORMATION SERVICES
MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES
31 Chambers Street, Rm. 103, New York, NY
It’s a death certificate I requested months ago for anyone named Barudin, or a close spelling, between 1906 and 1910 in the Boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. The handwritten “State of New York Certificate and Record of Death” is faded and barely legible in places. In large script across the top is the name, “Bernhard Barodin.”
It reads, in part, “Birthplace: Disna, Russia. Occupation: Seltzer water-maker. Date died: February 28th 1907. Place of death: Tuberculosis ward, Montefiore Home for Chronic Invalids, 138th Street and Broadway. Place of residence: 310 East 4th Street, NYC. Internment: Mr. Zion Cemetery, Queens, NY.” Among his immediate survivors are the Americanized names of my great aunts and uncles and grandfather, Samuel.
The Disna, Lithuania, records for Berka Menakhemovitch fit perfectly with the old man’s story. It seems impossible. Millions fled. Ellis Island documents surface under a misspelling of Berka Menoctem, 51 years old. Country of Origin, Russia. Place of Residence, Disna. Race of People, Hebrew. Occupation, tailor (a trade commonly claimed by new arrivals).
He had $75 in his pocket. His wife, Etka Evseeva (new name Yetta), had $50, and the seven children they brought with them had a total of $57. Bernard stated he was joining his brother. Their intake records said everyone in the family except Yetta and my eight-year-old future grandfather, could read and write. They were on Ellis Island three days waiting for medical reports on Bernard’s hernia and the oldest son, Martin’s, cataracts. The others were in good health. They consumed nine meals each.
In thankful tribute and loving memory to those who made our lives possible starts the family history that I sent to my children and Bernard and Yetta’s descendants. It also recaps Samuel’s life and that of his oldest son, Howard Bernard Barudin, my father.
It’s raining the day I go to Queens to say Kaddish at Bernard’s grave. I place a pebble on his headstone to signify someone’s visited. As I begin the Mourner’s Prayer, Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rabo… nodding slighting toward the weathered stone, the rain lets up and the sun breaks through. A rainbow sprouts over Shea Stadium and the US Tennis Center. In the mist among the headstones and monuments, I see a figure. When I look again, it’s gone.
…O-lay-nu v’al kol yis-ro-ayl v’im-ru, Omayn. A large hand on my shoulder accompanies a pleasantly musty scent in the air. “Warm for October.”
“It’ll be cold soon enough,” I say. “I know who you are. You should be proud.”
A shaft of sunlight splits the rainbow into a double arch across the brightening sky. The ground alights in diamonds as a flock of birds take glittering flight. “Baruch Hashem,” he replies.
“I gave up on finding you,” I said.
“But you were at the bus stop. Who is to say who found who?” It’s a benediction. His black coat lifts with the gesture and falls back around us in a scent like the opening of a summer cottage.
Shared with The Together Plan with the permission of the author