Through the Eyes of an Immigrant

By Anatole Konstantin

In A Red Boyhood -- Growing up Under Stalin, we followed a child's perilous journey of survival through war-torn Eastern Europe, Nazi occupation and, as the son of an "enemy of the state" Soviet repression.  What happened to that boy, his brave and resolute mother, and his little brother at war's end? &n

• Language: English
• Publisher: KONSTANTIN MEMOIRS
• Release date: Apr 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781944784232

Anatole Konstantin

Anatole Konstantin grew up in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union ruled by Stalin. In 1938, when Anatole was ten years old, his father was arrested by the KGB and the family never heard about him until fifty years later when Gorbachev came to power and they received a letter from the KGB saying that he had been executed and was now being posthumously rehabilitated. This was an admission that he had been innocent. Upon his father's arrest, the family became "enemies of the people" and barely survived. In 1941 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Anatole with his mother and little brother escaped several days before the Germans occupied their town and they became refugees in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan in Central Asia. In spite of misery and near starvation, Anatole managed to go to school, and when WW II ended, the family escaped to Poland and then to West Germany where he became a student at the Technical University of Munich. When he graduated as a Mechanical Engineer, the United States was admitting 200,000 Displaced Persons and he came to the land of his dreams. After having worked for twenty years in several companies, Anatole started an engineering consulting company which later became the PDC International Corp. that manufactures packaging machinery. His book, A RED BOYHOOD - Growing Up Under Stalin, describes life under Communist dictatorship and his escape from it. He also taught a course on The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire at the Lifetime Learners Institute at the Norwalk Community College.

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Chapter 1

1949 – 1952

My first days in America were not very auspicious. Our ship arrived in Boston Harbor during the night of December 2nd, 1949, and docked at the customs tower. Early in the morning, we disembarked directly into a cavernous semi-dark, empty warehouse and lined up single file with our belongings, for customs inspection. The line zigzagged several times from one end of the dingy warehouse to the other.

Families with children were disembarked first, which put me towards the end of the line. For several long hours, nothing happened. We were not given any breakfast before disembarking, and there was only one water fountain and one toilet, with long lines at each. Eventually, someone explained to us that, since it was a weekend, the immigration authorities were not immediately available.

After a while, babies had begun to cry, women complained about not having a place to sit down or to warm up babies’ bottles, and soon general bedlam prevailed.

At last, after about three hours, two uniformed agents appeared and began processing us. They were very thorough and opened every single suitcase so that the line barely moved. I was starving. At about two o’clock, several blue-haired ladies in gray uniforms and with red crosses on their hats and shoulder patches appeared with a small wagon, and began handing out paper cups with coffee and one donut per person. They were immediately mobbed, and by the time I was able to reach them, the donuts were gone. They apologized profusely and promised to come back with more supplies, but never did.

By the time I reached the inspectors, the small windows high under the roof of the warehouse had turned black. I dutifully opened my large trunk and a small aluminum suitcase, and after the agent had poked around, he told me to close them and move away. He was visibly exhausted and grumpy. Another tired agent took away my German identification and a young woman from NYANA — the New York Association for New Americans, that sponsored me — gave me a train ticket and two dollars to buy something to eat on the train to New York. She also told me to take only the small suitcase and that the trunk would be delivered to me the next day.

I asked her, And how about my papers that they took from me? I don’t have any other identification.

You don’t need any, she said. It will be sent to you in a couple of weeks.

That’s strange, I thought. In the Soviet Union or Poland, or even in West Germany, one did not leave the house without an I.D. Then I realized that this was America. I was accepted here and no one is afraid that I might do something untoward. And, in spite of my rumbling stomach and hunger pains, I felt that I was finally at home!

The train was just outside the door of the warehouse. As we began to move, I tried to look through the window at the passing scene, but it was pitch dark and other than the quickly receding lights at small stations where we did not stop, I could not see a thing.

We stopped at a large railroad station, which I believe was Providence, R. I., and a man with a large box that hung on a shoulder strap got on the train and walked down the aisle offering soft drinks and sandwiches. I asked about the cost of a sandwich, and when he replied that it was a dollar and seventy-five cents, I settled for a small pack of crackers for fifty cents. Since my whole fortune consisted of twenty-two dollars — the twenty hidden in the lining of my trousers, because I had been told that it was forbidden to bring money to the United States — and the two just given to me, a dollar seventy-five for a sandwich appeared unconscionably expensive.

We passed through Connecticut, a name that sounded very exotic and made me think of The Last of the Mohicans. Sometime before midnight, we arrived in New York, at what I learned later was the Pennsylvania Station, where we were met by an NYANA representative. He took our group of about fifty people upstairs and dispatched several at a time by cab to a hotel. While waiting for my turn, I noticed a newsstand and decided to buy a paper. There were two different stacks of The New York Times; one thick, selling for twenty-five cents, and the other thin, for five cents. Naturally I bought the thin one, and this is how I am sure that December 2, 1949, must have been a Saturday.

Through the window of the cab, I saw a street sign saying Broadway and could not believe my eyes — a strong wind was blowing newspapers down the rather dirty street, which was not at all as I had imagined Broadway. Instead of gleaming super modern structures, there were plain old buildings, just like the ones in old Munich.

We arrived at a hotel somewhere around 100th Street and Broadway, I believe it was called Whitehall, where we were put up for the night, two to a room. As I was going to bed, I noticed a white tag protruding from the pillow case. In no uncertain terms, it threatened that anyone who removed it would be punished to the full extent of the law, something I found very puzzling. It did not jive with my idea of freedom and democracy. How would anyone know that I have removed it? Do the police periodically come to inspect all pillows? It did not make sense, but it kept me awake for quite some time. What a country!

In the morning, we were told to go to another hotel two blocks away for breakfast, that I found quite impressive, with a choice of juice, cereals, and toast with jam. Upon returning to our hotel, we found the luggage that we had left in Boston piled up in the lobby. After a while, my twelve-year-old brother Vilya, who was now called Bill, appeared with our stepfather Solomon, and called Sam. They had arrived about a month earlier and were living a few blocks away in a hotel that was maintained by NYANA as a temporary shelter. Our mother had died in childbirth the year before, and our baby sister, now a year old, was in an orphanage. A friend of Sam’s with an unusual last name, Milioner, also came with them to see me. He, two other men and I, had together escaped from Poland by bribing a border guard, who in the middle of the night took us across the border into Czechoslovakia, from where we crossed to West Germany. Milioner was a jolly fellow and told us funny stories about people’s reaction to his name, which he pronounced with the accent on the o.

We were told to bring our other luggage from the room to the lobby and to wait for an assignment to another hotel. A young man, whose suitcases were next to mine, asked me to keep an eye on them while he went somewhere. After some time, I was told to move to the hotel where we had breakfast, and with all the excitement and tumult, completely forgot about the other man’s suitcases.

I was going to share the room with a young man who had arrived earlier. We stored the suitcases in the closet and were talking about our experiences on the ships when the phone rang. It was for me, asking me to come immediately to the office in the other hotel. When I got there, there were two NYANA officials and the man who had asked me to keep an eye on his suitcases.

Where is this man’s suitcase? asked one of the officials.

I am sorry, I said, my relatives came to see me and I completely forgot about his suitcases.

One of his suitcases is missing, and he says that you have it.

What would I want his suitcase for? I replied, feeling ill at ease.

That’s not the question. The question is that if you do not produce the suitcase, you will be deported back to Germany.

I was flabbergasted. Look, I said. I am an engineer and came here to start a new life. What could he possibly have in that suitcase for which I would risk my whole future?

The officials looked at one another and said that I could go, but I’d better come up with the suitcase, or I would be in a lot of trouble.

I did not know what to do. The next day the same scene repeated itself, and they threatened to turn me over to the police. I was desperate and did not know to whom to appeal. Neither Sam nor my college friends Misha, Sasha, and Volodia, who had come over ahead of me and were now named Michael, Alex, and Walter, had any good ideas; all three were medical doctors and were looking for internships in a hospital. On the third day it was the same. No matter what I said, they demanded the suitcase.

That evening, in the closet which I shared with my roommate I noticed an unfamiliar suitcase that I had assumed belonged to him, and asked whether it was his. It was not.

It turned out that Sam’s friend Milioner thought that it was mine and, trying to be helpful, brought it over and put it in the closet.

I could not wait until morning and was with the suitcase at the office when it opened at nine o’clock. I did not think you looked like a thief, said the young woman official smiling as she listened to my explanation. Congratulations and good luck to you.

As soon as it became possible, I went to see my little sister. The orphanage was crowded but clean, and she looked well but was very shy. She was just beginning to walk, and we took her up to the play area on the roof, where her first steps were duly recorded by my camera. She did not yet make any intelligible sounds.

Several days later I was assigned by NYANA to a furnished room in the apartment of a stocky, masculine, old lady at 192nd Street and Broadway. Bill came to live with me. He enrolled in a local school, where he was placed according to his age, and not according to his knowledge, which would have put him with younger children. It was very difficult for him: Because of our wanderings from Ukraine to Russia, Kazakhstan, Poland, and Germany, he had never attended a school before coming here. But he was not unhappy in this school. At least here he was not constantly beaten up, as in the first one that was in a Puerto Rican neighborhood.

Our landlady sported a sparse gray beard and mustache, consisting of thin hairs of various lengths that stood straight out. She was a pre-war refugee from Germany, spoke very little English, and always wore black. I could communicate with her in German, but Bill could not. She spoke in a loud voice that tolerated no contradiction and had a married son who worked as a waiter and visited her once a week. We had kitchen privileges, which meant that we could use her refrigerator and stove, and also her dishes. The kitchen had a stale, unpleasant odor and when I opened the cupboard to get a plate, a small herd of cockroaches scattered around. I had never seen cockroaches before and felt sick. When I told the landlady what I had seen, and asked her whether there was any way of getting rid of them, she asked me what I had against these harmless little creatures that did not bother anyone. I got the impression that she considered them pets and would not even think of getting rid of them. The only positive attribute of the apartment was an old radio in a huge wooden cabinet in the lace-doily-covered living room. We were allowed to listen to it when the old lady was not listening to her German programs. The ad nausea repeated tune at that time was Music, Music, Music!

Put another nickel in — in the Nick-el-od-e-on —

Just as annoying was the repeated commercial for Flamingo Frozen Orange Juice, that for some unexplainable reason very much appealed to my friend Alex, who periodically crowed it without any obvious cause or provocation.

NYANA paid our rent and gave us a small allowance for food. To get the allowance once a week, I had to go to their office on Park Row near the City Hall and stand in a long line. We were assigned a caseworker, a very thin middle-aged man with trembling hands and a nervous voice, who was supposed to help us with any problems. He was trying to get me a job through the NYANA employment service, where prospective employers could inquire about available personnel. Also, he was trying to place Bill in a foster home, where he would be looked after when I started working, which I hoped would be very soon. I had attended a session at NYANA on how to look for a job on my own and registered with every employment agency that had run ads for engineers.

Our building was four stories high and had a superintendent, a disheveled elderly man who lived in the basement and was drunk most of the time. After he and I had several conversations he had a brilliant idea. He suggested that I should obtain a loan from an agency that helped newcomers and buy a diner, in which he would join me as a partner and cook. It’s a sure thing, he said with absolute conviction. There is no way you can lose because any meat that has not been sold can be ground up for meatballs. He kept asking me every few days whether I had already applied for the loan, and when confronted with my lack of interest, became very upset.

The job situation in 1950 was particularly bad for beginning engineers, because the soldiers who were demobilized when the war ended in 1945 could receive free education under the GI Bill of Rights, and in 1950 the country was flooded with recent graduates looking for work. Whatever jobs were advertised in the papers required, at least, some experience, which I did not have.

My NYANA allowance for food did not always leave me money for the subway. And I frequently had to make a choice between spending 15 cents for lunch of a hot dog and an awful orange drink at the ubiquitous Nedik’s eateries and walking sometimes a hundred blocks home, or skipping lunch and taking the subway for ten cents and buying a newspaper to look at the employment ads with the remaining five.

In good weather I read the employees wanted ads while sitting on a bench in nearby Fort Tryon Park, and every week revisited the employment agencies. I still remember my first interview at an agency. It was called the Engineering Employment Agency, and the interviewer, a burly red-headed man, Mr. Duffy, was having his shoes shined while talking to me. Some years later, at the wedding of my friend Alex, I was introduced to the bride’s father, who looked very familiar. It was Mr. Duffy. He did not remember me but told me that most of his clients did not want him to send them foreign applicants, particularly those without experience.

After several months in a fruitless pursuit of a job, I began suffering from severe headaches at the back of my head, and after prolonged negotiations with NYANA received a voucher to visit a clinic. They X-rayed my head and concluded that the headaches were caused by stress and that there was nothing to be done other than to take an aspirin and relax.

I was beginning to lose hope of getting a job as an engineer and decided to take any job in a factory so that I could make some money, and began applying for any listed opening. I did not tell them that I had an engineering degree, but I wore the only clothes that I had, namely a striped blue suit. Once, a man who was interviewing me for a job as a punch-press operator looked me over and said that while the job was still open, he did not think that I would stay there long, and he needed a permanent employee. To be more marketable, I took classes in machine tool operation at the ORT trade school and bought a pair of overalls, which I wore over my good trousers, prompting the instructor to inquire whether I was planning to become a farmer.

I also bought a white nylon shirt because I had seen an ad that said it did not have to be ironed, which was true, but the ad did not say that it was not wearable at temperatures over 50 F. These purchases pretty much took care of the twenty dollars that I had brought from Germany. When my hair became unbearably long, I shopped around until I found a barbershop on a side street that charged only 75 cents instead of a dollar as in most other places. It was not exactly a good haircut but, with the application of the much advertised Vitalis hair cream, a tube of which cost almost as much as the haircut, it was passable.

One day at the NYANA office it was announced with great fanfare that a Socialist Cooperative was going to distribute to newcomers free clothing. My friends and I rushed downtown to their warehouse but by the time we got there several hundred people were already standing in a queue that ran all the way down the block. When, after a long wait, the warehouse doors were opened, we rushed in. Inside there was a counter with a large pile of yellowish knit underpants, that many years ago might have been white. Without having been asked our size, we were each handed one pair, and, once outside, had a good laugh about the generosity of the socialists. Mine were more than three sizes too large but came in handy for polishing shoes.

My friends Michael and Alex, who were brothers, had an uncle who lived in the Bronx. About three weeks after my arrival, just before New Year’s, the uncle had a party to which Walter and I were invited. There were about a dozen people, young and old, and at some point, the conversation turned to our experiences during the war. When I finished my story about starvation in Kazakhstan, one of the women said, You think you were the only ones who had hard times? Do you know that during the war we could not get any meat and had to eat chicken all the time, and there was no sugar and we had to use honey?

I became speechless. This was grotesque. Did I hear it right? But the others were nodding their heads, so I must have. The subject then changed to politics and we described the dictatorship and the gulags, to which they replied that there was no freedom in the United States either, that Communists were being persecuted and that they themselves were under constant surveillance by the FBI because they lived in a coop built by the Progressive Movement. In any event, they argued, whatever the Communists had done, they did it for the betterment of mankind, and those arrested must have been guilty. After all, the Communists had raised the literacy level and improved medical care, so that whatever problems there were, they were for a good cause.

I was very tempted to say that I was on the side of the FBI, but decided that since I was their guest it would be impolite. Then a better thought occurred to me and I dropped the bomb: As far as I am concerned, I said, I have no preference between Hitler and Stalin!

Their response was a loud unanimous Ahh!!! as if someone had stuck all of them simultaneously with a big needle. Their jaws dropped and for a while did not close back. They stared at me with horror — such heresy had never been heard within the walls of the Progressive Coop! An elderly woman, whom the younger people called Aunt Dora, turned ashen and I feared that she would suffer apoplexy. Later I was told that she was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

But-but-but, stammered one woman, Hitler killed my aunt!

Well, said I, Stalin killed my father! Is that not the same?

Our host was obviously ill at ease and mumbled something about how strange it was that those who went to the Soviet Union as tourists came back with glowing reports while those who had lived there painted a totally different picture. On this somber note, the festivities ended, and, needless to say, I was never invited there again.

While spending a great deal of time looking for a job, I still managed to visit museums, and after a while knew every nook and cranny at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art and at the American Museum of Natural History. When I first visited the local public library I was ecstatic. Here were hundreds of books by writers I had always wanted to read, and I did not know where to start. I finally settled for Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night. I had read his Darkness at Noon, a book about the Spanish Civil War, in which he described how the Soviet Union was exterminating Western volunteers because they were followers of Trotsky or were socialists, rather than Stalinist Communists. Having been a former Communist himself, he understood their nature and was frustrated that so many Western intellectuals sympathized with the Communists. He wrote that these intellectuals would be very embarrassed if they did not know the name of some second-rate artist, but were not at all embarrassed that they did not know that millions of people were being destroyed by those whom they admired.

At the beginning of March, the NYANA employment office sent me to a company called Robert J. Burnham, near Union Square. It was owned by a refugee from Vienna and was making fountain and ballpoint pens that were just becoming popular. The pay was 75 cents an hour, which was the minimum wage. Of course, I did not tell them that I was an engineer, and was accepted for a trial period of one month, during which time I had to prove that I was worth the pay.

There were about fifty or sixty employees, all refugees, divided into several departments that performed different operations on molded plastic components that came in large cardboard barrels. My job was to put together a metal pen and a centerpiece and to press them into a short tube that then fit into the barrel of the pen. I sat on a high stool at a contraption called a kick press. Holding the three parts together with both thumbs and index fingers, I inserted them into a small depression under the ram of the press, then kicked a long lever with my foot, which brought the ram down and forced the pen and the centerpiece into the short barrel. Then I dropped the assembly into a box and picked up the next three pieces from separate boxes on the table in front of me.

There must have been ten or twelve of us sitting around a large table and kicking. All were immigrants, and for some of us, this was our first job in the United States. Most of the workers were women, young and old, and only four of us were men. One man came here before the war from Germany but was immediately drafted and did not come back to the U.S. until the war had ended. Seeing the kind of books I was reading during the lunch break, he commented that he would like to continue his education, but somehow could not get organized and has been working here for several years. I thought I would go batty if I had to be there that long. Another man named Henry had been in the Australian army but when the war ended instead of going back, decided to seek his fortune in the United States. The fourth was a jolly young man of about eighteen, who did not know what he wanted to do. The work was terribly monotonous, and as we kicked away, we related the stories of our lives.

Our supervisor was a dour elderly forelady with a heavily wrinkled forehead, who was a relative of the owner. She was always irritated and with a thick German accent screamed at us to talk less and to work faster. We had a hard time trying to suppress our laughter. Her countenance was such that I thought if she just walked into a dairy store, all the milk there would turn sour. For some unknown reason, she made me a special object of her wrath and picked on me much more than on anyone else.

Nevertheless, my work must have been satisfactory, because when my trial month was over, I was told that I was accepted as a permanent employee and my pay was increased to 85 cents an hour. However, this being a union shop, I had to join the International Jewelry Workers Union and for each hour worked I had to pay 10 cents in dues. Therefore, the satisfaction of knowing that I was worth more than the minimum wage was only psychological.

Occasionally, the salesmen, who peddled the pens to stores and wore fancy suits, visited the factory. They were rumored to earn a hundred dollars a week, which to me appeared to be a great fortune. The owner, whose name sounded German and was definitely not Burnham, also came several times a week from the sales office. The cuffs of his starched snow-white shirt sported large gold cufflinks and extended way out from the sleeves of his jacket. Once, we were honored by a visit from the owner’s wife, an attractive woman dressed to the hilt, with a dead fox wrapped around her neck, which I did not think had been in fashion in the United States for many years. As she came through the door, the young man who sat next to me, and who knew her from before, gave a loud wolf whistle. The woman laughed, but after she had left, the forelady jumped on me. How did I dare show disrespect to the owner’s wife? No amount of denial on my part did any good. Even when after a while, the boy admitted that it was he who whistled, she did not stop ranting, and on Friday, together with my paycheck for the week, I was handed a pink slip saying that I was fired.

On my union membership card it was printed that if laid off, we were to report immediately to the Union. I was sure that since they must want to keep getting the ten cents for every hour I worked they would immediately get me another job, and on the very next Monday I went to the Local 35 of the American Federation of Labor, which was in a rather dilapidated brownstone in Brooklyn. After a long wait in a dirty waiting room, the walls of which were covered with posters urging everyone to buy only union-made products, I was ushered into the office of the boss and faced a heavyset tough-looking man sitting behind a desk. He wore dark glasses, even though the light in the office was rather dim, and another big, even tougher looking man, stood next to his chair. I became very uneasy. Somehow this scene did not fit my idea of the jewelry business. Both men had huge hands with sausage-size fingers, which I could not imagine handling tiny, dainty jewels. I did not realize that union business and jewelry business are totally different things.

The meeting was very brief. The man at the desk looked at my Union card and in the place for May 1950 dues, stamped it Out of Work. He told me that they had no openings at the moment and that they would call me if any should appear. They could obviously do very well without my ten cents.

About a month later, the NYANA office sent me to a sheet metal fabricator company named Gerber & Sons, on the West Side of midtown Manhattan, to be interviewed for a job as a draftsman. I thought that fate was catching up with me because I had been initially registered as a sheet metal worker and was supposed to go to Wilmington, DE, where my sponsoring company was located, but NYANA allowed me to stay in New York because my young brother and sister were here. When I went for an interview, Mr. Gerber, an elderly, distinguished-looking gentleman told me that he was too busy to interview me, and that I should come to his apartment in the evening.

He lived near the northern tip of Manhattan in an apartment with an elevator, which impressed me very much, because in all of Munich I knew of only one building that had an elevator. It was an office building, and the elevator was an open cage that moved continuously without stopping so that one had to jump in and out of it. It was referred to as Pater Noster because before attempting to board it, people recited the Lord’s Prayer. I had often wondered how older people ever managed to get to those offices.

Mr. Gerber ushered me into a room with walls lined with bookshelves, but did not give me time to look at them. He sat me down at a table and gave me several columns of fractions to add up, which I did. He glanced at the answers and told me to show up for work on the following Monday. My pay was to be one dollar an hour which, being a third more than I was making before was very satisfactory. He ushered me out without even offering me a glass of water, which I found rather peculiar, but then, he did not ask me about my education or where I came from, either.

On Monday morning, I was there before the doors were opened and when people arrived, a bald, heavyset bookkeeper who wore thick glasses asked me a few questions without shaking hands or even once cracking a smile. I was told that I would be working in the upstairs office in the mornings and in the fabricating shop downstairs in the afternoons. He showed me to a drawing board and gave me a T-square, a triangle, a pencil and a pad of paper. He then brought a blueprint of some kind of housing that was to be welded from sheet metal pieces, told me to make detail drawings of each component, and walked away. He did not even introduce me to the people sitting on each side of me.

There were no explanations of any kind: not to what scale to draw, what symbols to use, or what notes to make. Since I had no experience, I was at a total loss as to what to do and decided to ask my neighbors.

To the left of me at a similar drawing board sat a middle-aged, light-skinned Negro, who had given me a quick glance when I first sat down. I asked him a question to which, much to my amazement, he replied in a whisper. When a few minutes later I asked him another question, he quickly glanced around the room and without looking at me, furtively whispered that he would be fired if caught talking too much and that he was sorry, but he could not help me. I was flabbergasted. Was this what it was like to work in America?

I turned to the neighbor on my right, a fine looking young man, who was busily drawing something. He did not whisper but made his answer very brief. When I asked him another question, he told me that he was too busy to answer my questions. I did the best I could, drawing each piece on a separate sheet of paper from the notebook, and wondering whether this was the right thing to do. Not only did I not know the terminology and welding symbols, but I also did not even know that thickness of sheet metal is expressed by its gauge number, rather than in fractions of an inch.

After the lunch break, I was told to go downstairs to the shop and see the foreman named Hal, who took one look at my good trousers and white shirt and asked me what kind of work I thought I was going to do in this outfit. He and most of the workers wore their old army uniforms. Then he handed me a hand drill and a drawing, and over the deafening din shouted that I should measure and mark the proper location of holes in a sheet metal housing, and then drill them. I did this the rest of the day, all the time worrying that I would get the black greasy grime on my trousers and shirt. Avoiding getting dirty or having a hole burned by the flying sparks from welders and grinders all around me was not easy because they were coming from all sides.

On Tuesday morning, I again made detail drawings upstairs and stacked them up at the edge of the drawing board. Those from the day before were still there, and it appeared that no one had looked at them. At lunch break, I changed into my overalls, which created a lot of comments from Hal and the other guys, most of whom were black and whom I had difficulty understanding. However, the comments could hardly have been misunderstood, because they all grinned and laughed. Nevertheless, at lunch time I felt much more comfortable sitting among them and chewing on my sandwich than I felt upstairs, where the silence was broken only by a middle-aged, stocky man, who all morning long ran in and out of offices waving his arms and shouting in a high-pitched raspy voice. From whatever little I could understand from his histrionics, I thought that he was perpetually complaining about schedules and deliveries, and assumed that he was a salesman.

That afternoon Hal handed me a large hand-held disk grinder which I almost dropped because it was so heavy, and told me to grind off excessive welding material so that the welds would be smooth. This was not a simple task because I had to hold and manipulate the heavy grinder almost at arm’s length, again being afraid that the hot sparks would hit my clothes while also watching out that the weld was not overheated and burned through. I did not get much instruction from Hal either.

This activity repeated itself on Wednesday and on Thursday. On Friday, when the screams of the salesman were particularly hysterical, I quietly whispered, Who is this jerk? and was flabbergasted to hear the young man on my right saying, That’s my father. He is the Vice President. I turned purple and did not know what to say. As the Russian saying goes, a word is not a bird; once it flies out, you can’t recapture it. It was stupid of me to have said that, and I thought that I would be fired on the spot, but the young man did not run to the office. The growing pile of my drawings was still there, which meant that no one had looked at them yet, and at the end of the day, the surly bookkeeper handed me my paycheck.

As soon as I came in on Monday, the bookkeeper called me into his office and handed me a slip of paper, explaining that Hal had complained that I was too slow, and I was being let go. Then he handed me another check. But you had given me one on Friday, I said. The bookkeeper froze. Oh my God, he whispered. Thank you, thank you very much! I thought that behind his thick lenses I saw a glimmer of tears. They would have taken it out of my pay! Good luck to you, good luck…. He extended a flabby hand, which I gingerly shook.

In May, Bill and my little sister Rachel were placed together in a foster home. The young couple that took them had two small children of their own and I thought that it was very courageous of them, even though there was plenty of space in their neat house in Queens.

With Bill gone, I also left the cockroach-ridden apartment where my stomach turned every time I opened the cupboard, and moved to a furnished room on 148th Street, about half a block west of Broadway. I found