Reisa and Jacob are waiting to get off the boat. As they say goodbye to their fellow nautical prisoners from the last few weeks, Reisa tells some of the nice Russian Gentiles to look her up "in the Jewish part of New York." Maybe this is supposed to be humor from Morris? Who knows.
On their way off, the leader of the Russian prayer circle comes over for a chat.
He hesitated for only a moment and then nodded as if coming to some sort of agreement with himself. "God spoke to my heart last night and told me to do something."Which other organs of yours does God speak to?
A little disconcerted by this, Reisa blinked. She was not accustomed to meeting people who heard directly from God.Reaction 1: Yes, as Reisa is not accustomed to meeting crazy people.
Reaction 2: So is this like a "Christians speak to God but Jews are too far from the Lord to hear him" kind of thing?
Anyway, Russian clergy guy gives her a copy of the Gospel of John, and as usual, Morris never bothers to tell us what language anything is in.
Reisa, Jacob, Petya and Dov leave the ship and immediately discover that, to their total surprise, America is full of people. Including people not like them!
There were Greeks, Albanians, Germans, Englishmen, some wearing costumes such as none of the small party had ever seen before.My God, not Englishmen! They're the most exotic of all!
Jacob worries that they won't be able to find the hilariously named Laban Gold, their contact and host in New York. Reisa has an idea:
"Perhaps we can find a policeman," Reisa said timidly.This coming from the lady who just lived through a pogrom and near-rape? Sorry Morris, I just don't buy it. Maybe if she had spent her life living in the fun La-La land of Little House on the Prarie, her naiveté and optimism would make sense here. But the lady saw her friend get slaughtered in front of her and witnessed most of the village getting massacred. At best, she's got some heavy PTSD issues to work through. Add the fact that she's been tossed into a series of totally unfamiliar situations and is now completely out of her element in a foreign country where, by all rights, she should be next to incapable of speaking the language, and this "There are no Cats in America" mentality seems ridiculous.
"I don't much trust soldiers," Petya said. "They haven't been kind to us at home."
"This is America," Reisa said quickly. "The police and the soldiers here will be good."
Anyway, they all make it through the Castle Garden inspections and promptly get lost in the Manhattan streets. Luckily they run into a Hasidic Jew (really? In 1871?) and Jacob strikes up a conversation with him:
He moved forward and said in Hebrew, "Greetings, sir."Ok, fine. So maybe he said Shalom Aleichem or something. Sure.
The guy takes them to the Lower East Side and leaves them to find Laban Gold. Petya goes off to try to find him. The other three decide they're hungry.
The three made their way the cafe. When they looked up at the sign which was in Yiddish, Reisa said with delight, "Good. They speak Yiddish."This suggests that the conversation Jacob just had with Mr. Hasid took place entirely in Hebrew. Oy.
"Indeed. I think most people do in this place. Haven't you heard the people as they pass?" Jacob said.
In keeping with Morris' terrible naming streak, the owner of the cafe is named Micah Pankoff. Sure, why not. As long as we're culling the Bible for random character names, maybe he can have some kids named Nimrod or Ahijah.
They eat their meal and it turns out that Micah is good chums with Laban Gold (maybe they run a support group for Jews with silly anachronistic names). As the party leaves, they have a parting chat.
"I will see you on the Sabbath day." Micah said.Why does Morris think Jews talk like the Amish? Why is their dialogue so stilted if they're speaking their native language?
"Yes. God be thanked. We will be there." Jacob replied.
They find Casa de Gold, but say they have no money to pay rent. Luckily, Laban Gold is a charitable fellow:
Gold threw up his hands in a gesture of disain. "We will work it out. We must stick together, we Russians."Yes, because if there's anything the immigrant Jewish experience taught us, it's that when push comes to shove, common Russian nationality is what keeps people together.
The Golds invite them all to have dinner (which is weird because they just had lunch, but whatever). Jacob, in keeping with saying random things out of nowhere, decides to compliment their hostess.
"I am a little tired. It was a wonderful meal. Absolutely kosher and delicious, Mrs. Gold."Yeah, I know whenever I have Shabbos dinner with someone, the first thing I always say at the end is, "Hey, this was really kosher. Good job! You've come a long way since that pork chop incident."
Reisa goes to bed and reads the Gospel of John the Russian preacher gave her:
Opening it, she saw that it was in English, which pleased her.Um...
1- She already opened the book at the beginning of the chapter. Morris wrote,
It was a small, thin book, and when she opened the first page, she read the title The Gospel of John, It meant nothing to her, but she turned a few pages rapidly and saw the name of God mentioned many times.Ok, if she flipped through the book and saw that the name of God was in there, and if the title was Gospel of John in English, then she already knew the book was in English! (Which would also mean, I suppose, that the "name of God" she saw was "God.") This was only ten pages ago; is Reisa just so damn fluent in her two-dozen languages that she forgot what language she was reading?
2- Why is a Russian Protestant who isn't even in America yet reading an English translation of the Gospel of John, much less passing it along to a Jewish girl whose English is even worse than his? I know it's convenient for where Morris is going, but come on! Someone really needs to get on printing some Cyrillic pamphlets or something.
Anyway, Reisa goes to sleep meditating on the line that the Lamb of God will take away the sin of the world. FORESHADOWING!
Gold threw up his hands in a gesture of disain. "We will work it out. We must stick together, we Russians."
ReplyDeleteYes, because if there's anything the immigrant Jewish experience taught us, it's that when push comes to shove, common Russian nationality is what keeps people together.
I do have to say that this might have some basis in fact. My parents gre up in the big-city Jewish immigrant milieu in the 1920's and 30's and there was a definite social split between the "German Jews" who by then were mostly American-born, and the "Russian Jews." In fact, they called themselves "Germans" and "Russians." Thus "Russians," being the newcomers, were, of course, the riff-raff, and the Germans, while feeling a obligation to help their fellow Jews, were somewhat embarrassed by their poverty an "crude" foreign ways. This social split didn't really go away until the 1950s or so. New immigration from Europe dried up in the 1920s, so by the 50's, the entire new generation of American Jews, whether Russian or German, were American born, everybody was foing pretty well in the psot WW2 economic boom, and so such differences didn't means as much as they used to.
When viewed within the context of charity and mutual aid, CA, you've got a point. I've definitely spent time researching the cultural split between the established German "Yehudim" and their cousins, the Russian-Polish "Yidden." I suppose it's possible that this was Morris' nod to that. On the other hand, given that we just ran into a random Hasid wandering around 1870s New York, I'm not betting on it. (Though again, this winds up being a case where Morris may very well be accidentally correct.)
ReplyDeletePersonally, I'd attribute the remark to Morris' total ignorance of the identity fault lines of most Jews 100-plus years ago. As I understand it, most Jews from Russia, Poland, etc., did not consider themselves to be Russians or Poles, but Jews first and foremost. They usually only used modifiers like "Russian Jews" when they were being contrasted with Jews from somewhere else (not unlike "Russian" Israelis today).