« p. 11-17: The First Morning on Board
Southampton Water
p. 17-21
The ship’s tender is bringing us some passengers from England. Some fine examples of the Anglo-Saxon race climb on board. A young lady holds a large bunch of sweet pea flowers in her hand. I recognize all the shades, the many fine hues in-between the beautiful flowers: violet and lilac, bronze-brown and orange, indigo and heliotrope. There is the lemony Clara Curtis and the lavender Evelyn Hemus, flecks of white playing around the edges. I see them all in the bouquets that the young English ladies are bringing on board. For a year I was buying in London the reports of the National Sweet Pea Society, a royally privileged company, with statutes, congresses, exhibitions and prizes. I’ve read the latest recollections of the famous cultivator Harry Thomas, and I know what decisions you have to make when choosing the soil you’ll put the roots in. I know the devices you use against mice, the terrible enemy of the soft, young peas. I know how the blooming flowers are packed up and sent -- I would be a good and loving cultivator of beautiful flowers, but I don’t even have a garden the size of my hand, and I don’t know where this garden could be, in what city, in what country, where? --
The sun is shining on all of steerage today. A concertina plays in a corner. We’ve passed The Needles and are now floating by Cherbourg. The concertina plays Hail Columbia, a waltz from a Vienna operetta and a popular melody from Berlin. The man expanding and squeezing the instrument is clearly a worldly sort. He looks like he’s already been over there. You can see which of the people down below have been over there or not. You can see it in the way he looks up at us people on the promenade deck. The concertina player has a face, which isn’t all that European, but also isn’t American. Immediately, an old Moravian peasant begins to sing. He has a round, bristled priest’s face. He stands behind the concertina, which accompanies his singing. He sings a song with the refrain:
Juchheirassa! Vallera!
The old man with the priest’s face sings one verse after another with an astonishing amount of earnestness, each of the endless verses ending with:
Juchheirassa! Vallera!
About twenty voices or so are singing along. And all of it with an unsurpassed earnestness. I don’t understand the words, but the refrain is enough for me. No church song could end with:
Juchheirassa! Vallera!
So where does all this earnestness come from? All the people traveling in steerage on the Kaiser Wilhelm the Great are now jammed together and listening reverently. Only a small group sitting to the side refuses to mingle with the other people. It is Mr. Itzig, just Mr. Itzig, and his family. (I won’t write his full name here, because it belongs in the comics.)
Mr. Itzig and family sit on a bench and turn their backs to the singing. They’re busy enough with themselves and their family affairs. Mrs. Itzig combs her false braid coram publico in the afternoon sun, while her husband reads to her eagerly out of a green-bound book. Now and then, he nudges her in the ribs to explain to her shrewdly a passage from the book. It’s clearly one of those clever religious books, the Talmud or something. Moischele and Piffl wrestle each other under the bench for an apple that is always rolling to starboard. The mother yells at them and continues combing herself. A metal samovar stands there at all times of day by the family, sometimes on the ground, sometimes on the bench, next to a glass containing light-yellow liquid, tea from the samovar. Before Mrs. I. puts the glass to her mouth, she takes a piece of sugar out of her husband’s bag, bites it in half, sticks the other half back in her husband’s bag, and then, with the half-piece of sugar between her teeth, she pours the tea over the lump of sugar into her throat. -- From time to time, our friend Itzig must run with an empty samovar into the kitchen, where he holds the metal container under a kettle filled with hot water; the jet of water, as thick as your arm, shoots like a cannonball into the container; the few shabby tea leaves must be terrified! At one point, Mr. I. comes back screaming onto the deck. What happened? The plump peasant behind him punched him, and he scalded his hand. Now Moischele runs in with the samovar and for a few days Father Itzig keeps a dirty blue cloth wrapped around his hand. They don’t worry at all about their fellow travelers, not today or tomorrow or for the entire trip. They sit forever in their same little patch of ground, turning their backs and keeping themselves busy with their own family’s affairs.
I’ve seen this kind of thing already in Bremen, in the foreign quarters. The Jews keep to themselves and make their own ghetto where they can, even if there isn’t any public anger against them. During summer, in the beautiful city of Bremen, you could have seen the other foreigners walking in the public park, down the Weser River, in front of the town hall and the Roland statue. Before departure, as the ships waited, they toured the city, the children of a hundred peoples. Women and children were recognized by the large brooch they stuck on their jackets with the logo of a ticket agent for North German Lloyd by the name of Mißler. The giant halls for the other foreigners were as good as empty in this beautiful weather, but there are still at present a couple of thousand there. It was only in the hotel To the City of Warsaw, the one with all the Jewish passengers going into steerage, where all the seats were occupied. The children of the elderly stood there in droves on the steps, in the corridors, in the hall, in the cafeteria, in the school: little Galician heads with caps or styled hair, dressed in caftans, the traditional clothing, the children nimble and dirty, the women loose and broad, the men solemnly holding reed pipes, the young ladies wearing high heels and stockings, dressed fashionably and adorned with an astonishing amount of fake jewelry. I want to see how these people will lead their lives in America. They won’t become settlers. They won’t go west. They’ll stay in New York, huddling together in dirt and despair, even when there’s still a place in the world where you can live in the fresh air, a place without a ghetto. I’m guessing that they prefer to stay in the hotel, because otherwise they would have to wear the brooch with the agent’s logo -- -- --
Screaming from a corner. A small Slovakian kid under the stairs to port was messing around with a metal box and has just let out a hoarse howl. There were some small, colored sugar drops in the box, which you can find in Polish and Russian shop windows in the foreign quarters. Because of the heat, the stuff had balled together into clumps, and because the kid wasn’t able to break one apart, he stuck the whole chunk into his mouth. He swallows, coughs, turns blue, and then his sturdy mother rushes over from behind the concertina and slaps the kid once on the back. The sugar clump pops back out into the open.
Mr. Itzig, his wife, Moischele and Piffl look over at the yelling for a moment without sympathy, and then they turn back to each other again. -- The liitle kids, Moischele and Piffl and the other steerage children . . . they have it so good! They’re getting to know this great, bitter and yet still seductive life at such a young age. Life looks out to them from the eyes of the great, endless ocean. All you have to do is ask them how their well-protected contemporaries are doing in their stable countries and their stable homes. They’ll probably answer: “Ask their teachers!”