although I have asked many times. Seemingly there is nothing to tell, no more
particular reason for the name I was given, no hopes or expectations connected
to it. Yet mine was an American name and that was enough.
There Sarah was permitted to attend school and completed junior high school
before she was needed by her family to assume the tasks of her mother who had
died, I imagine, in some form of epidemic that raged through the teeming
tenements of the lower East Side. Sarah raised her younger brothers and sisters
and soon also went to work in one of the sweat shops of the garment industry,
where Jewish and Irish girls sat hunched over rows and rows of identical sewing
machines, selling their labor for an American dollar.
My grandfather’s story was a little different. He came from Poland by himself at
age fourteen. He was to find work and save enough money to bring over his
mother and sisters. He did so, but was not able to get them all out before the
Nazis, supported by the modern inventions of Henry Ford and IBM, were able to
develop a smoothly running assembly line for the purpose of exterminating Jews.
He arrived at Ellis Island as Benjamin Kornetsky and emerged as Ben Cohen, a
greenhorn now easily marked as a Jew. On Ellis Island, the Americans
manufactured more Cohens than the entire tribe of Jews could produce in
centuries, such was American efficiency.
I imagine that they were eventually introduced to each other by a relative or the
local shadchan. At any rate, they married and soon moved to a small apartment
