The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,24

find out what had happened to us.

Better, perhaps, if Andrew Boyle had never found his father, because no answer could satisfy that question. No love could survive its being asked. Better to think his father was devoured by a bear in the Alaskan wilderness. Better if he had been!

AFTER AUDREY WAS BORN, ON JUNE 12, 1926, PAPA CHANGED BACK to the way he used to be before Mama got pregnant. Mama changed, too. But she became someone brand-new. Forceful, purposeful, an arrow whizzing toward one gleaming target—our first day of school, which she had circled in black ink on the calendar page for September, the day after Labor Day.

“Charlotte, it’s only kindergarten,” Aunt Sonya said. “They don’t learn anything. They just play.”

“And where does this just-playing take place?” Mama retorted.

“The elementary school.”

“See! The Breed Street Elementary School,” Mama said, as if that settled it.

“Yes, but kindergarten … Believe me, Charlotte, if you’d ever gone to school, you’d understand.” Sonya patted Mama’s hand.

Mama stood up abruptly. “Girls, we have to get home.” She didn’t even bother to wipe our fingers, sticky from the orange slices we’d been snacking on. And when we started walking, her legs pumped so fast, even as she carried Audrey, that we had to trot to keep up.

What had Sonya meant by that—if you’d ever gone to school? I wondered. Everyone went to school. We often walked by the middle and high schools that Aunt Sonya and Aunt Pearl had attended after Papa’s family moved to Boyle Heights; and Uncle Leo once drove us by the high school in the San Fernando Valley where Papa won the elocution prize. Mama had grown up in another country, Romania, but didn’t Romania have schools? Her apparent rage made me afraid to ask.

Mama’s anger didn’t stop Barbara, however. “Mama, didn’t you go to school?” she asked.

“Can your mama read?” Mama demanded as she charged down the street.

“Yes,” I said quickly. Barbara, to my relief, didn’t mention that if Mama picked up the Los Angeles Times, which Papa brought home at night, she often threw it down in disgust. I never saw her open any of Papa’s books, and she spent a long time perusing letters written in English from our cousin Mollie in Chicago. She had no problems, though, with letters in Yiddish from other relatives or with the signs, in both Yiddish and English, in shops. And Mama read to us from picture books. Still, only Papa read aloud from books with words all over the pages, like Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan.

“Can I do sums?” Mama said.

“Yes,” I said. Sums, she could do in her head. She corrected shopkeepers if they tried to overcharge her, and they always ended up shaking their heads and saying, “You’re right, Mrs. Greenstein, to the penny.”

“So.” She stopped so suddenly that I kept walking for several steps and had to come back.

“You girls know I grew up in Romania?” Mama said. “And it was very bad for the Jews there?”

We had heard Mama’s stories of how the Romanians hated the Jews, though Papa tried to stop her from telling them. “Don’t fill their heads with the idea that we’re less than anyone else. We’re Americans,” he’d say. “We’re not Jews?” Mama replied. Still, she usually told the stories when Papa wasn’t around.

I knew that Mama’s father, my other zayde whom I’d never met, used to own a tavern, but then the Romanian government made a law saying Jews couldn’t sell alcohol. They even sent soldiers to make Mama’s family, who lived at the tavern, leave. Mama did the strangest thing whenever she told that story. When she said “soldiers,” she spat. Not wet spit so it landed on anyone, but she made a sound—ptui!—so rude and shocking that if she’d said she had killed the soldiers by spitting at them, I would have believed her.

Mama started walking again, but this time at a normal pace. “In Romania when I was a girl,” she said, “they made a law that only a few Jewish children could go to their schools. We tried to start our own schools, but they wouldn’t let us do that, either.”

“How did you learn?” I asked, bolder now that she was calm.

“Ah! You think, like your silly aunt Sonya, a person’s brain only works inside a building that says school on the front of it? Is that what you think?”

“No.” Although I had thought just that.

“I learned to read Yiddish and Romanian at home, and to do sums,”