The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,81
craziness would soon, like the bonfires of books, burn itself out.
“Shouldn’t the German Jews be allowed to go to Palestine?” Danny said.
“If they want to, sure. But I bet they’d rather come to America.”
“Wake up, Elaine! Haven’t you seen For Rent signs in Los Angeles that say ‘No Jews or Dogs Allowed’? You know how many hospitals here don’t allow Jewish doctors to practice?”
“Do you want to go to Palestine?”
“I … yes.”
I seized on his flicker of hesitation. “You want to be a farmer?”
“I want to live someplace where I don’t have to apologize for being a Jew. Where a Jew can be free and safe and proud of who he is.”
“That’s America!”
America, not Palestine, was where our relatives from Romania wanted to come—and they wanted it desperately. The world might be keeping nervous eyes fixed on Germany, but things had gotten every bit as bad for Jews in Mama’s native country, where two of her brothers and two sisters still lived, as did most of their children and a growing number of grandchildren. In letters that made Mama weep, they wrote about the harsh restrictions on Jewish employment and mentioned a popular political party that actually stated in its platform, “The sole possible solution to the kike problem is the elimination of the kikes.” One of my uncles was kicked and punched in the street by uniformed thugs called the Iron Guards. A girl cousin escaped the Iron Guards by diving into a pile of trash, and she had to stay there for three hours until she felt it was finally safe to emerge from her hiding place. Mama and the Chicago relatives had agreed that each of them would file papers with the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society to sponsor one Romanian family member to come live with them—a young person, unmarried and healthy enough to take any kind of job. Mama and Papa had applied to sponsor the son of one of Mama’s brothers, a boy named Ivan who was two years older than me.
“The point is,” I told Danny, “they don’t want to go to Palestine, they want to come to America!”
I made this point often, since Danny and I had the same argument again and again. And he always replied, “Jews from Romania, you think America’s going to let them in? Jews need a place where, if they say they want to come, they’re in.”
Danny, I suppose, wouldn’t let the subject drop because Zionism became a mission for him. He got involved in the Boyle Heights chapter of Habonim, a Zionist youth group, and he was constantly after me to join. And I railed against Danny’s Zionism because I experienced it as a betrayal. I was the all-American girl that Papa had raised me to be, and I felt free and safe and proud living in the United States. How could Danny reject that? How could he feel more loyal to some abstract “Jewish people” than to America? I battled Danny over Zionism as if I were defending the law of gravity and the world would fly apart if I lost. And I battled well. Mollie had been the first to see the fighter in me, and she’d been right. I was actually developing a taste for combat, and Danny, persuasive and impassioned, made an ideal adversary.
There was another reason I persisted in these debates: to hang on to my friendship with Danny now that we’d entered the confusing terrain of adolescence. Instead of playing together in the park the way we’d done as kids, now he invited me to Habonim programs; I grumbled but went anyway, and we argued afterward. Just the two of us, since Barbara refused to have anything to do with Zionism. Which didn’t seem to diminish her attractiveness to Danny. My sister and Danny found another way to preserve their childhood connection: they became sweethearts.
At first, when we got into our teens and there started to be dances and boy-girl parties, Danny asked both Barbara and me to dance, to the extent that he or any of the boys got on the dance floor at all. Then one night, the summer after we’d turned fourteen, everything changed. At a dance at one of the community centers, I was chatting with friends, and I saw Barbara come in from outside. Danny was right behind her. Both of them looked flushed, and they were holding hands. He put his arm around her, and they wove through the crowd to the refreshment table, never