Adopted By America  

By Edith Schloss Jacobs

At the break of dawn on November 9, 1938, four Gestapo officers disturbed our sleep. They had orders to arrest my papa. A German Consul General had been murdered by a disaffected Jew in Paris and the arrest of all Jewish men in Germany was ordered by Hitler. My father’s service during World War I and his country’s award of the Iron Cross were irrelevant in the new regime. 

Papa, as well as many other Jewish citizens, were certain that the good German people would revolt against the persecution of their fellow citizens, but there was only a loud silence. My father was released with most of the other men after seven days, but it had been a wakeup call. Papa feared that the mass arrests had been a mere appetizer and that the silence of the German people would only whet Hitler’s appetite. 

He immediately wrote to our American cousin, Norman. My father had never met him, but he knew of our existence from his deceased father. Papa informed Norman that our lives were in danger and pleaded for help in obtaining American visas for our immediate family, namely my parents, brother and me. 

Cousin Norman promptly responded that the visas would be a costly sacrifice on his family. There was a Depression in the U. S. and mass unemployment. We would be arriving with only the clothes on our backs, as the Nazis confiscated all property and money from émigrés, and the visas made him responsible for our welfare. 

Desperation fueled my father’s perseverance. He sent weekly diaries of our life under Nazi rule. Cousin Norman reluctantly agreed.  

After two years, on a cold windy March morning in 1940, we sighted the Statue of Liberty. The passengers silently crowded around the deck of the ship. “We had arrived; in the land of the free.” The skyline of the gray city of stone was covered in mist. I had never seen a building higher than three stories, and after ten days of endless ocean vistas, the city appeared to be a strange and wondrous apparition.  

Our new life began in a six-story apartment house on the uppermost tip of Manhattan in a section named Inwood. Our cousin had rented and furnished our two bedroom, one bath apartment with bits and pieces of what is now referred to as antique furniture. The building had seen better days, but it boasted an elevator and was considered the jewel of the neighborhood. I had never rode in an elevator nor shopped in a supermarket. America was a magic world, and my parents had been right; there were no signs in shop windows that read Jews forbidden.

My father registered me in public school on our third day in the U. S.  My education had been aborted when I was seven-years-old. Jewish children were excluded from school and I had a lot of catching up to do. After class was dismissed that day, I realized I had a serious problem. My father may have assumed that I would remember my way home. Or perhaps he supposed that children communicated in a secret language of their own, since I didn’t speak a word of English. I looked around me after we were discharged and all I saw were strange streets and high, forbidding buildings. Somehow, I made my way through that urban jungle. By the time I arrived at our apartment, I was so grateful and so exhausted that I silently went to my room and collapsed on my bed. I never mentioned my father’s lapse of filial responsibility.

Within three months I spoke English and was translating for my parents. Life in our neighborhood was informal; few could afford the luxury of a telephone.  Neighbors communicated by shouting from their windows in short abrupt e-mail-like sentences, but I felt cozy and safe. The apartment house swarmed with kids, and I became one of the gang. 

Along the front of the houses on the block were small Pop and Mom stores. The hub for the kids was the corner candy store. If we were flush with twelve cents, we ordered an egg cream; there was no egg in the concoction of chocolate syrup, milk and seltzer swished together into a foamy concoction. We would sit on the stores six stools and slowly savor our treat while browsing through the latest comic books. If the store became crowded, the owner let us know by saying in a resigned tired voice, “C’mon fellas, I gotta make a living.” 

The neighborhood library was a storefront on the next block. There were a few worn chairs in the back. It was there that I met Charlotte Bronte’s heroine Jane Eyre and fantasized myself as a future heroine with a love of my own. Two blocks south was Dyckman Street. There were two cinemas on that street and on Saturdays most of the kids clutching a dime attended a double-feature film with a few cartoons thrown in. I seldom had a dime. The elderly ticket-taker understood, and waved me in with my friends. 

In l941, my childhood came to a screeching halt. As I returned home after school, I saw an ambulance in front of our house, with its motor running. I joined the crowd of onlookers on that gray March day. It was my father they carried out on a stretcher. I felt as if my whole world had shattered. Papa had been a strong young man, but in the last few months he’d lost a lot of weight and seemed to be shrinking into old age.  

He didn’t see me among the throng, but I saw the humiliated expression on his face at being the center of a spectacle, and hid myself among the onlookers. I couldn’t let him see the hopelessness and despair in my eyes. The ambulance door closed and with its sirens shrieking took off. I never saw Papa again. He died of leukemia within two weeks, at the age of thirty- nine. 

Mama took to her bed and neighbors who hardly knew us came with food and solace. Each month our cousin Norman visited and surreptitiously left a check. It was months before my mother was able to rouse herself out of bed. Mama had been the spoiled daughter of one of the richest men in town and never worked. She now had to earn a livelihood for our family. She was taught to operate an electric sewing machine at a free vocational school.

The school placed her in a corset factory, and she was a piece worker, paid by the rapidity by which each item was completed. Mama never became quick enough to meet expenses, and my brother had to be placed in an orphanage.

After Mama fainted twice in one month at the machine, we decided she needed a different career. She didn’t immediately quit her job, but was no longer intimidated when the forelady screamed into her ear, “Speed up, Schloss.”

She began her career change by registering for evening English classes at a nearby free public school. Within a few months Mama was ready for further action. She applied for a job in the neighborhood as an alteration hand and corset fitter. Mama had zero experience with that kind of work and was promptly fired. She was subsequently fired from so many jobs that we lost count. In the beginning we cried over the loss of each one. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, they all turned out to be learning experiences. She finally had sufficient experience, confidence, and money to become an entrepreneur. Mama rented a small store and specialized in undergarments. I was her first employee and I resented that I had to work in the store after school. There was seldom time for me to finish my homework. But Mama had made a choice between good grades for me or a successful business that fed us all and enabled her to bring my brother home. 

Our cousin had been a reluctant partner in our lives, but he continued his support until my mother was able to take care of her family. He never in any way made us feel we were a burden. In the ensuing years, I became very close to my cousin Norman. I asked him to walk me down the aisle in my father’s place on my wedding day. Before the ceremony, we spent a few minutes alone together in a tiny room. He had saved our lives, but there were memories of love lost and love born on that joyous day. My father had died and most of our family had perished in the madness abroad, but now a new life and love was waiting for me at the altar. I took my cousin’s hand in mine and we proceeded unhampered by our tears toward the ceremony. 

 [Edith Jacobs lives in Sarasota. She’s a newspaper columnist and an award-winning short story and features writer. Her work has appeared in several anthologies. Edith is enrolled in the Master Writer’s Program at Skidmore College in Saratoga, New York.