Surviving Remnant: Memories of the Jewish Greenhorns in 1950s America

By Hanna Perlstein Marcus

How does a young girl search for a benevolent father figure and suitable husband for her single mother among a group of Holocaust survivors? Set in the deteriorating north end of Springfield, Massachusetts in the 1950s, Surviving Remnant is Hanna Perlstein Marcus' sequel to her award-winning memoir, Sidonia's Thread. Surviving Remna

• Language: English
• Publisher: Buttonhole Publishing
• Release date: Mar 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9780997971217

Hanna Perlstein Marcus

Hanna Perlstein Marcus was born at the Bergen Belsen displaced persons camp after World War II and later immigrated to Springfield, Massachusetts with her mother. She is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and University of Connecticut and is a licensed clinical social worker in Connecticut. Her first book, Sidonia's Thread, her memoir of growing up with her Holocaust survivor single mother, was the winner of the 2014 Best Kindle Book Award for nonfiction and a nominee for the Sophie Brody Medal and Sarton Memoir Prize. She is the winner of a first place short story prize from the Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association for a short story adapted from Sidonia's Thread. She is a popular public speaker at libraries, colleges, synagogues, churches, organizations, and community programs.

Book preview

Prologue: The Show

Da show vill start in ten minutes, announced a woman in broken English while banging on our door. Before we could even open it, we heard her loud footsteps as she sprinted down the stairs. I was not interested in seeing the show again. What’s to see? The boy had performed his act many times, and while it was true that it was always a big hit in our community, I did not need to see it another time.

But Hanele, my mother groaned in her still ­thick Hungarian accent, ve have to go or else everyvon gonna tink ve are stuck up!

Okay, okay, I’ll go, but this is the last time, I said, while pouting and rolling my eyes.

We went down the three flights of stairs that reeked from the mouse cemetery amid its treads. Then we walked outside to the rear section of our building, where the apartments on Osgood Street were quite a bit smaller than our two-­bedroom unit. The warm, breezy mid-­summer day had already turned into near dusk when most of the adults were home from work and families had already eaten their supper. It could not have been more convenient or economical to see a free show right in our own building and, at the same time, one suitable for adults to take their kids.

As we walked into the Landsmans’ tiny kitchen, we observed that about twenty people, adults and children, had already crowded into the room and spilled out into the adjacent hallway. Almost every inch of space was occupied, some people seated at the kitchen table, some on folding chairs, and many just standing wherever a piece of floor was still available. After our arrival, five or six more eager attendees opened the screen door and inched into the over­ flowing crowd. They must have been standing on one foot or floating on air.

The mother and father were roaming the small, packed room as best they could, chatting with each person about the wonderful show they were about to see, so proud of their only child’s ability to elicit the raucous laughter they had seen at previous shows. Just vait, his mother said, It’s gonna be even better den last time. You tink Milton Berle is funny? Dis is just unbelievable!

Soon, the boy came out of his bedroom, which was also the family dining room, and gave his enraptured audience a big smile. I wondered how the spectators could be so excited about a show many of them had seen several times before, but they hooted and hollered at him as though he were, in fact, Milton Berle.

He was a tiny, dark-­haired boy with big brown eyes, smaller than most boys his age, which was seven, the same age as me. As he stood in front of the kitchen sink wearing a short-­sleeved, multi-­colored shirt that hung outside his brown pants, he looked around without saying a word, smiling at each person.

Then, with no introduction, while the audience was fervently shouting his name, he proceeded slowly to unbutton his shirt, finally ripping it off to reveal a naked chest and torso underneath. He stuck out his chest as far as it would go, revealing not much more than skin and bones. He was so skinny that when he did this, each bone was clearly delineated; the audience could see his full rib cage as though it were an x-­ray image. He might have been even skinnier than he had been at his earlier performances.

Despite my initial reluctance to attend this bizarre event, the intense laughter of everyone in the room seemed to rub off on me. We all remained laughing for the next few minutes as the boy turned from side to side and front to back displaying his emaciated upper body. Some of the adult attendees were even pointing at him with awe and loudly talking to each other in Yiddish about the phenomenon they had just witnessed, as though they had never seen anything like it before in their lives. Oy, er iz azoy moyger [Oh, he is so skinny]!

The boy’s parents were beaming from ear to ear and whispered to several of the spectators, See, ve told you it vould be unbelievable. The exhibit was over in a matter of minutes, but the crowd lingered for another hour or so to continue to kibitz with one another about this extraordinary spectacle and to have a glass of tea and coffee cake baked by the boy’s mother, the best cook in the community.

My mother and I stayed for just a little while, long enough to eat a piece of the homemade cake, but then, at my insistence, we left to go back to our apartment. Okay, Hanele, ve came, ve saw. Now ve can go, my mother said, having never heard of Julius Caesar. We had met our obligation to attend the show, and my mother was satisfied we had not turned up our noses at the popular event. I have to admit, though, in spite of my resistance, we did our share of laughing along with the rest of the audience.

Nothing produced such delight among the grine as Yussie’s body exhibition. Not even Milton Berle. The irony of it all was that only a decade earlier, the same adults in the room who had erupted in wild spontaneous amusement at the sight of the gaunt figure, had each looked just like him. So what was so funny? I was not able to figure that out for some time to come.

Part One: Initiation

CHAPTER 1

The Outsiders

None of them was related to me by blood. Yet they surrounded me like the sea around a lost fish. Having no living grandpar­ents, aunts, uncles, siblings, or even a father, I would have been a very lonely child without them.

My mother and I were different from many of the other mem­bers of our community because we were not part of any nuclear or extended family. An air of mystery surrounded us pertaining to the identity of my father, who was noticeably absent, and our silence about the events that had led to our circumstances.

Although it has been more than fifty years since the greenhorns were my whole world, they remain in my memory as though my time with them were yesterday. Yet those fifty years had also caused my perceptions to become muddled, both vague and sharp. Today, recalling those faces, characters, and events, somehow I have been able to piece together the details of their first dozen years in America with much more insight and clarity than I ever could before. In the process, I have allowed myself to read between the lines of those actions and ways of behaving that I took only at face value as a child and portray the refugees in the insular world of my childhood as the sympathetic yet strong-­minded and resilient individuals they were.

Americans called them the greenhorns, symbolic of a calf ’s budding green horns, a name Americans used for any immigrant who arrived on their shores. Using the Yiddish term di grine to refer to themselves, the members of my community were outsiders in a strange land whose language they had yet to speak fluently. Most of the grine I knew had immigrated to Springfield, Massachusetts, around 1949 from myriad European displaced person camps, where for several years in the aftermath of World War II they were sheltered.

I have always felt closer to the greenhorns than to any other group of which I have ever been a part. Indeed, my attachment to many members of the grine brought about my decade­long quest to find a suitable husband and father for my mother and me among them.

Maybe all of us reflect on the community of our childhoods, the distinctive characters that populated the community, the various dwelling units, the neighborhood places and events that shaped our youth, and the dark secrets we swore never to reveal to anyone. Yet, I have always thought my community was like no other since all its adult members, and some of the older children, were survivors of one of the most heinous events that has ever occurred on the face of the earth. After the Holocaust, the survivors came to a new land, one they had only heard about in their native countries — countries to which they could no longer return.

The popular Jewish folk song written in 1921 about "Di grine Kuzine, the greenhorn cousin, describes a young Jewish European woman who, like many immigrants, arrives on America’s shores with dreams of a land of Paradise. Once she was as beautiful as gold with cheeks red as oranges." Yet after a while in America, she becomes disillusioned with the land of her dreams. In the end, she is bitter and derisive about her new home. The song exemplifies how, despite the overwhelmingly optimistic stories about the fate of immigrants in America, their lives often did not result in comfort­ able surroundings and unimaginable riches.

As it happened, my grandfather had also come to America from Hungary in the late nineteenth century as an adolescent, only to turn back to his little village after nine months in New York City, equivalent to the time he had spent in his mother’s womb. He carried with him his disappointment, which came from his observations of an immigrant’s hard life and his perceived erosion of traditional Jewish values in the new world. In a twist of fate, his insistence on returning to Hungary placed him and his family in the eye of the storm over fifty years later.

In contrast, my grine were, indeed, newcomers to a land they may have once imagined in their earlier lives, yet unlike the grine kuzine and my grandfather, they ultimately viewed their adopted land from a kinder perspective, determined to attain success and achieve contented lives in their new country.

It was not a sad community on the surface. On the contrary, to the casual observer, they were a happy bunch, smiles always on their faces and telling funny stories. They held parties for any and every occasion. It did not have to be in honor of a monumental event or national holiday for them to get together in someone’s small apartment, set up tables and chairs for food and drink, and wish someone l’chaim (‘cheers,’ or literally, ‘to life’) or mazel tov (commonly used as a wish for good fortune) for a fifth birthday or grade school academic achievement. After observing those cheerful occasions, I needed a long time to fathom the culture shock they must have experienced upon their arrival in America.

When they arrived in the late 1940s and early 1950s from the labor and death camps of the Holocaust, they were met by America’s misguided reaction to the new refugees. People encouraged them to forget the loss of their families and the torture they had endured on the European continent. It would be best to move on, people advised, to build new futures for themselves and the children they had produced after the war. Americans urged them to try to erase the past and to focus solely on the present, supposedly as part of the healing process.

However, no human being could forget the kind of cruelty and insane violence they had suffered. Instead of finding ways to allow the survivors to process their innumerable losses, society preferred to bury them as though the events had never occurred. It was this mostly well­intentioned yet shortsighted view of the aftereffects of trauma that enhanced the bond between the grine that no one else could ever understand. Thus, their pervasive humor was, in part, a cover for their painful secrets, and partly due to their determination to live the rest of their lives in the pursuit of happiness.

The Springfield Committee for New Americans settled most of them in the north end of the city, where housing costs were lower than in other neighborhoods but living quarters were still clean and habitable. By 1950, many of these immigrant families lived in a 1920s era apartment building at 64­68 Osgood Street near the cor­ ner of Dwight Street, one of the main arteries of the city, not too far from the old Springfield Hospital.

Although their backgrounds ranged from cultured, cosmopolitan settings to rural, less educated areas, their common experiences as victims and survivors of the Holocaust brought them together. In a way, the multiple families who lived in close quarters on Osgood Street became similar to the Jewish communal environments of the shtetls, the small market towns of Eastern Europe, where Jews had lived for centuries before World War II. Everyone looked out for one another.

The delicious food they prepared ranged from savory kreplach filled with meat or potatoes to sweet kugel and blintzes, all without regard to calories or fat content. Although most of the grine were Polish, quite a few were from other European countries, including Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, and other central or Eastern European lands. Since they spoke many native languages, their best means of communication was Yiddish, the common mother tongue whose roots went back to the Middle Ages and was familiar to most European Jews.

I know now that the members of the grine were not as simple or jovial as they seemed to a child’s eyes. Undercurrents, like the memories of past lives, struggles in the new world, murdered fam­ ilies, misguided relationships, physical infirmities, mental break­ downs, and loneliness were thick in the air. These days, I wonder how they managed to adjust to being outsiders in a foreign land. Did their sorrow lead them to make serious errors in judgment after the war and even during their first few years in America? Given their common past, did they find positive ways of relating to their children, born after World War II? And did they compensate for the losses still so fresh in their minds and easily assimilate into American society? Indeed, this immigrant group was much more nuanced and complex than I had imagined.

CHAPTER 2

The Arrival

The USAT General R. L. Howze, named after the famed Spanish American War and World War I hero, was formerly a naval war­ ship during World War II, carrying American troops and Japanese prisoners to various destinations to and from the Pacific. After the war, it was converted to an army transport vessel carrying displaced persons to their new countries. The General Howze brought us from the northern port of Bremerhaven, Germany, to New York Harbor on July 3, 1949, on the eve of American Independence Day. Sometimes, when I was older, I kidded my mother about whether she thought the fireworks we observed as we approached the harbor were in honor of our arrival instead of the Fourth of July celebrations.

My mother often reminded me of the rough ten­day crossing from Germany to America, marked by the boat’s pronounced, tur­ bulent rocking, which produced ubiquitous seasickness, filling the air with a pungent, putrid odor. As a woman and young child, we were accommodated in the third cabin of the ship, where perhaps quarters were roomier, but also closer to the bow, where odors and movements were even more pronounced. Originally built to hold more than three thousand military personnel during wartime, as a transport vessel its cargo dropped to about seven hundred immigrants sailing to new harbors. Only twenty­two months old at the time of the voyage, I could not remember it, but my mother’s keen storytelling skills always brought it to life.

Sidonia’s Prisoner of War/Displaced Person (PWX/DP) card, cover, and contents

As a child, it was easy for me to identify the things my mother had brought with her on the ship. They included only the few items she had acquired during her four­year stay at the Bergen Belsen displaced persons (DP) camp, such as her two goose­down com­ forters; a few pieces of Rosenthal china; enameled pots and pans; photographs of her time at the DP camp; candelabra to light the Shabbos candles; and most precious of all, her Köhler console sewing machine. It was this last item that would prove to be the most vital during our next fifty years in America. Noticeably absent were any items from her homeland, Hungary. They were all left behind when her family was wrenched from home.

Her brown­leather clutch purse held many of the documents she had carried with her during four years as a displaced person. One of the primary documents was her Prisoner of War/Displaced Person (PWX/DP) Registration/Identity Card, stamped multiple times by the Displaced Persons Assembly Centre Staff, and marked EMIGRATED in big bold letters at the time of her departure. She held her clutch bag tightly as though to safeguard her identity papers to prove at any time her and her child’s status as eligible per­manent residents of the United States.

Just as we had come in July of 1949, many other immigrants arrived during the same year aboard various transport ships des­ tined for numerous cities around the world, primarily in Australia, Canada, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, and the United States. Since President Harry Truman had signed the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 (Public Law 80‒774) into law, many DP’s saw the United States as finally lifting its long­held quotas and welcoming the victims of persecution into the land. We were among about a hundred of those families that had immigrated to Springfield, Massachusetts.

My mother’s first letter to her wealthy Beverly Hills relatives, sent even before she left Germany, had asked for their assistance. It fell on deaf ears. Discovering their address through an interme­ diary who helped survivors link to relatives in America, she had received a response, but also a stern refusal of her request for aid. Yet, my mother felt the need to try again to appeal to their sense of charity and sympathy. Their second response to her pleas, written by my mother’s cousin’s wife, received after our arrival in America, produced the following strange, ethereal letter, in Hungarian:

April 17, 1950

Dear Szidi:

In the meantime the spring has come. Since the last time we heard from each other nothing has changed around here. I’m struggling to survive.

I hope I will get good news from you soon. How did you spend the Easter holidays? How is the child? My son turned 17 on the 14th of this month. May God help him to grow up strong and healthy and able to be independent shortly.

I wish you all the best together with the little girl.

I embrace you with love,

Elsa

As with her first letter, this cousin seemed to completely deny the gravity of my mother’s situation in life. With an ill husband and young son, she refused to give in to the reality of my mother’s request for financial help. Notably, she referred to the Easter hol­iday rather than the Jewish Passover, both of which occur during the same spring season. Could she have deliberately inserted this to imply that she had totally assimilated to another culture and could no longer identify with my mother’s religious beliefs? In any case, it was perfectly clear that my mother’s search for familial support from this relative, one that was the subject back home of countless stories of having made it big in America, had been futile. My mother would never write or attempt to communicate with her wealthy cousins again. She was too busy settling into America by then to pound on unwelcome doors.

Therefore, with no identifiable relatives in the United States to act as our sponsors, we could have been sent to any city or town, but the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and International Refugee Organization randomly assigned us to this particular west­ ern Massachusetts city along the banks of the Connecticut River with a population of about 160,000. Apparently, some members of Springfield’s Jewish community had expressed their willingness to take in the refugees, give them a temporary home, and help them ease into the American way of life.