enough to have attended only American schools and to speak unaccented
American English, although at home she spoke Yiddish, as did the rest of her
The three of them were met at the dock by her father, who had come first to
America to escape service in the Czar’s Army. They had all come to start a new
life in America, where they were not, as Jews, confined to shtetls and subjected
to the drunken whims of Cossacks and other citizens of the nation that had been
practicing anti-Semitism, albeit not as efficiently, long before Hitler ever thought
Several months before, they had walked across the border of Russia in the
protection of dark night, the same way that many of today’s immigrants cross
from Mexico. The journey really began a year before when Sonia had held her
baby brother David in her arms, silently hiding in a cellar as a drunken group of
men burned and pillaged their home and the homes of all the other Jews in the
vicinity. It was a simple, but satisfying, sport. To them. To David, it was the
end of his short life, as he suffocated and died in her arms. These days, we
would worry about the family’s post-traumatic stress. Some of us have that
luxury. My ancestors only worried about escaping to a place where they could
live a quiet ordinary life in peace, where the trauma had a chance of becoming
“post.” For them, the name of that place was America.
Once in New York, they went to live in one of the tenements on Hester Street
with Aunt Etel, for whom I am named. I know nothing more about Aunt Etel,
