The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,101
the Old World,” Papa said. “You’re in America now. It’s time to look ahead.” He announced magnanimously that Ivan should take the rest of the week to settle in; he didn’t have to start his job at Aunt Pearl’s factory until the following Monday.
“I don’t understand,” Ivan said.
Papa repeated what he’d said, speaking slowly—assuming, I suppose, that Ivan hadn’t followed his Yiddish with its Ukrainian and American inflections.
“But I don’t really have to work there, do I?” Ivan said. “A dress factory?”
“My sister’s factory,” Papa said. “She was kind enough to—”
“I can’t sew!”
“You said in your application—”
“One says whatever the authorities want to hear.” Ivan’s mouth twisted in a half laugh, humorless and world-weary. An expression that said he found us impossibly naive.
“Well,” Papa said, “I’m sure my sister will find something for you to do. And you’ll take night classes, learn English. No reason you can’t look for another job then.”
Later I translated the conversation for Barbara, who hadn’t taken Mr. Berlov’s Yiddish classes with me.
“He’s a rat, you’ll see,” she said.
Barbara loathed Ivan’s heh-heh laugh and darting eyes and the way Mama catered to him. And she chafed at Mama’s and Papa’s insistence that we take our cousin, who was glaringly foreign even in the American clothes Mama bought him, with us to social events.
“How can you be so mean?” I scolded her.
“Elaine, you don’t like him, either. You just won’t admit it.”
I wish I could have said that Ivan was a gentle soul whom I defended naturally, out of true affection. Certainly there were times when my heart melted toward him, like the night Mama cooked a Jewish-Romanian stew, and at the first mouthful he sighed and looked as vulnerable as a child; or when he hoisted Harriet on his shoulders, as he must have done with his own baby sister. And maybe if I had grown up with a brother, I wouldn’t have minded that he—and Mama—took it for granted that his new sisters would make his bed and clean up the mess he left in the bathroom after he shaved. But there was something sneaky about Ivan. Aunt Pearl, for instance, hadn’t cared that he wasn’t the skilled tailor she’d been promised; there was plenty of lifting, carrying, and cleaning he could help with. But she had to ask Papa to speak to him because if she didn’t keep an eye on him, he handled dresses with filthy hands or crammed bolts of fabric onto shelves instead of folding them neatly. She’d caught him playing solitaire when he was supposed to be working and even smoking cigarettes he’d taken from her desk. And when I saw him displaying his crooked wrist to a girl at a party, I remembered a letter Mama had received five or six years earlier—hadn’t Ivan broken his wrist playing soccer?
Even if he’d made up the story about being beaten by the Iron Guards, though, did that blot out the essential truth that he had suffered in Romania? And he had to be miserable now, a boy only two years older than I torn from his family, a top student forced to work at a menial job, someone who spoke three languages—Yiddish, Romanian, and French—constantly feeling stupid because he didn’t know English. I tried to befriend him, but my Yiddish proved inadequate for anything beyond a stilted conversation. And it wasn’t Ivan’s fault, but his presence made our family dinners tense and constrained. Mama often spoke Yiddish to him privately, but Papa decreed that we use English at the table to augment the classes Ivan had started attending two nights a week. Our dinner conversations often sounded like classroom drills, and there were awkward patches when no one spoke, and I heard myself chewing every mouthful. Only Harriet, who seemed impervious to the rest of the family’s moods, gaily prattled to Ivan, not caring if he understood her, and he regarded her with real warmth.
Other than Harriet, the one person with whom my cousin seemed at ease was Danny. Danny had been so eager to meet our real-life victim of European anti-Semitism that he came by the day after Ivan arrived, embracing him and greeting him with a flood of Yiddish (Danny’s first language, which he and his father still spoke at home). Of course, he invited Ivan to speak at Habonim, with Danny translating. But he didn’t just use Ivan to promote the cause. A real friendship developed between them. Speaking to Danny in Yiddish, Ivan actually laughed, not the