food—a half loaf of bread, some eggs, two jars of her mother’s delicious plum preserves (but only one to eat on the journey; the other was a gift for Meyr). She had offered to take the fusgeyers some provisions, so neither the missing food nor her absence would raise an immediate alarm. Finally, there was the note she’d written, telling her parents she loved them and that she was going to Meyr. She slipped the note under the challah cover, which was used only on Shabbos; that was two days away, and she calculated she’d be far enough by then that no one would force her to come home.
As she crept out the door, the first light of dawn burned the sky. Every rooster for miles around started crowing. Had they ever made such a racket?
“She used to tell me,” Mollie said, “she was sure the roosters were calling, ‘Catch Zipporah! The little bird is getting away.’ ”
Pursued by the roosters’ cries, Mama ran past the barn where the fusgeyers had slept and continued for two miles down the road they would take that morning. There she hid in a copse of trees, trembling with excitement and with the terror of getting caught.
Hadn’t Avner Papo called her lucky, though? She’d never felt very lucky, but maybe God had saved all her good fortune and poured it into this one morning, because every instinct she had, every small choice she made, saved her from being discovered. I came to see my mother’s luck that day as emblematic of her immigration to America. In the small details, she would succeed. It was the big things that would break her heart.
Soon the first fusgeyers came along, singing. She longed to join them. But these were the young people, their resilient bodies and spirits able to feel refreshed from eating a few crumbs of food and spending the night on a barn floor. Lively and sharp-eyed, the young people would notice in an instant if she appeared out of nowhere. She hugged herself to keep from running to them, and remained hidden.
A second group followed ten minutes later. Still she bided her time. She waited until she saw a clump of people of all ages, the adults looking exhausted already and the children fussing. No one even blinked when she slipped out of the woods and became one of them.
When everyone stopped at midday to eat something and rest a bit, Mama approached one of the girls among the young people and offered to share her food. “Plum preserves! Manna from heaven,” the girl said. She and her friends ate quite a lot of the first jar of preserves, but the sacrifice was worth it, because they invited Mama to walk with them. And although these weren’t theatrical fusgeyers, the young people planned to put on a play about a young girl who worked for a cruel factory boss, and who better than Mama, the youngest among them, to play the innocent girl? (I’d heard from Mama about her theatrical triumph, how she brought audiences to tears.) Striding down the road with the young people that first afternoon, Mama was bursting with happiness.
When the fusgeyers reached the town where they were going to spend the night, her joy changed to fear. A leader of the Jewish community gave a speech welcoming the travelers—and surely he was going to announce that a girl had gone missing from Tecuci and ask everyone to look for her. She hid, but she was afraid they would find her just by hearing her pounding heart. It was all right, though; no one said a word about her.
“Wait,” I said. “Even if her parents didn’t find her note, they must have suspected she’d gone with the fusgeyers.”
“Of course they did. In fact, they sent a wire to Avner Papo, asking him to let them know if he found her, and would he look out for her? And when they heard she was there, they sent a little money, whatever they could spare.”
“But she was only twelve!” My age. If I ran away … I could hear Mama’s howl of anguish. And Papa would move heaven and earth until he found me. “Weren’t they worried something bad would happen to her? Why didn’t they try to make her come home?”
“Oy.” Mollie sighed. “In Romania, children younger than twelve are still sent away from home to be apprentices and learn a trade. Right here in America, there are twelve-year-olds working in sweatshops.