The Little Bride (34 page)

Ruth described the scene between Fritzi and Max, then concluded:

T
HIS was in July, again—after Minna had discovered the pleasures of boardinghouses, in particular that of moving from one to the next only to find it the same, the sharp old mistress, the chalky stains on the doorknobs from where they bumped the walls, the plain, clean, narrow bed dressed as if in bandage: the surprise, and humor, and satisfaction, in having one’s expectations so precisely met. She signed the logs as Losk. She could do anything. Mostly she sat in her various and identical rooms, reading books available for rent at the desks downstairs. In hallway mirrors she inspected the short, fuzzy hairs growing at her scalp, replacing what she’d lost in her winter hunger. The wind turned warm and the old mistresses dropped their fees and the Baron’s money lasted a little longer, then it ran out and Minna pawned her wedding ring. She expected her palms to sweat, but she was calm. She watched the dealer spin it around his thumb and declare it impure, copper stained in gold. She thought of Max, who would not have inspected the ring at all, who would have simply handed over the crystal doorknob he thought he didn’t need, accepted the ring, and walked out. The dealer looked at her with pity, and without curiosity, and she didn’t tell him that she was a widow, though it would have made her more respectable—though it was, perhaps, what she’d always wanted: the virtue of marriage, without the burden of its charge; the assumption of ruin without its shame. She found that she didn’t care what he thought, perhaps because Chicago was a big city, or because she’d given up some idea of her own goodness.

The dealer gave her a week’s board for the ring, and when that ran out, she returned her last book. She walked through Maxwell Street. She pretended to be aimless, though she knew that she couldn’t afford to be, that eventually she would find herself at the shirt factory, lined up like other girls she’d seen, girls who looked like the quiet, sick girls on the boat. And though she dreaded this moment, she decided there would be some rightness in it, in the firm brush of elbows and hips, the falling in step behind another pair of boots, the giving in to the press of the herd toward the door. She thought it might be true, what Samuel had said, that she’d wanted too much to be different.

She paused in the middle of a market square. There was the street that led to the factory. There was the American sun, making the carts and doorways and even the stones underfoot look clean, though they were as filthy as carts and doorways and stones anywhere else. There was the smell of tomatoes, as in Odessa, the summer before. There were men who looked like other men, every one of them like another. She heard her name called.
Minna!!!!
And in the seconds that followed, because she couldn’t find a single face turned toward her, and because almost no one in the city knew her name, she wondered if, by letting go of her pride, she’d found faith. She looked up. But before she could find God, or even the sky, her eyes were drawn to an open window, where, next to a tall red geranium, a thick, strong arm was waving. Faga’s arm. Faga’s enormous bust. Faga’s loud mouth opening again to shout her name.

M
INNA would stay in Chicago a long time. She stayed long enough to find work shelving books at the Public Library, and to pay her share of Faga’s rent, and to develop new debts, of her own choosing, and new habits, like that of being late, always, and of wearing hats, everywhere, and of being unusually slow at market to pick which eggs she would buy, and which bread, and which beans. She stayed long enough to receive many more of Ruth’s letters, including one that told her how the “crickets” Minna heard at the colony in fact turned out to be the firstborn of the grasshoppers, which one day that summer covered the sun and fell like a hail up to the colonists’ knees and ate the children’s clothes off their backs and devoured their crops and ran them back to towns and cities to buy and sell and bank; and another letter, the next year, which reported that Samuel had married one of the girls from the colony and made his father’s farm a success and that the old mule was still alive. Minna stayed long enough in Chicago to fall totally, helplessly, sick with influenza, and to recover, and to read newspaper headlines about the Baron de Vintovich laying tracks across the continental divide. She stayed long enough to see Little Egypt dance her belly dance at the World’s Fair Midway, and to think she saw Jacob in a clown costume only to lose him in the crowd, and to hear a man called Turner talk about the end of the frontier. She stayed long enough to see the century change, and to see her first Indians, in threepiece suits and homburg hats, outside a courthouse, and to sit in the dark of the Bijou Dream Theatre next to a man, watching Bronco Billy Anderson shoot and dance and flee his silent way through
The Great Train Robbery
. And at the end of the film this man, who sold nuts at the market and had asked one morning why Minna looked for so long but always bought the same thing, almonds roasted with no salt, and who Minna would know for many years though she would not marry him, pulled her out into the chilled air that blew off the lake that looked like but did not smell like an ocean. He said, “So that’s the Wild, Wild West,” and Minna smiled and said, “Yes. It’s just like that.”

The homesteading of Jews in the American West was part of an historical movement called Am Olam. While many aspects of this book remain true to that history, I have also transformed, discarded and created facts for the purpose of telling Minna’s story.

 

My deepest gratitude goes to those who inspired me: the original Anna Solomon (Freudenthal), to mail-order bride Rachel Bella Calof, and artist Andrea Kalinowski, whose beautiful quilts introduced me to the stories of these Jewish pioneers.

Countless books informed and inspired me, chief among them: Isaac Babel’s
The Odessa Tales
,
The Shtetl Book
by Diane Roskies and David Roskies,
Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
by Kathleen Norris,
Dakota Diaspora
by Sophie Trupin,
Sod Jerusalems
by David Harris,
And Prairie Dogs Weren’t Kosher
by Linda Mack Schloff, and
Rachel Calof ’s Story
, edited by J. Sanford Rikoon.

I was fortunate to receive generous assistance from William Lee and Dawn Stephens at the South Dakota State Agricultural Heritage Museum, David Ode at the South Dakota Game, Fish & Parks Department, Michele Christian at Iowa State University, Catherine Madsen and Dovid Braun at the National Yiddish Book Center, Patricia Herlihy at Brown University, the librarians at the NewYork Public Library’s Dorot reading room, Clare Burson, and Peter Manseau.

The “tidbits” in Ruth’s letter are quoted directly from Lydia Maria Child’s timeless
The America Frugal Housewife
. The Baron sings badly from a real folk song called “The Hebrew Clothing Drummer.” The story of the bride up on the dresser is based on a similar tale in
The Shtetl Book
. For critical details about magic, carpentry, chickens, Yiddish, and international medicine, I’d like to thank Laila Goodman, Jim Dowd, Richard Wyndham, Barbara Burger and Alfred Burger. Thank you to rancher Jim Headley in White Lake, South Dakota, who many years ago helped me see the prairie, and to Chris Ballman, for sending me out there.

Thank you to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony for time, quiet, and nourishment, and to the Brooklyn Writers Space for being right around the corner.

Thank you to my teachers, in order of appearance: Penelope Randolph, Charlotte Gordon, William Keach, Sharon Dilworth, Nancy Zafris, Chris Offutt, Marilynne Robinson, Ethan Canin, James Hynes, Elizabeth McCracken, and Andrea Barrett. To Connie Brothers, Deb West, and Jan Zenisek. To Julia Fierro at Sackett Street Writers Workshop and Jeff Bens at Manhattanville College.

Thank you to my readers, who were honest and wise: Eleanor Henderson, Amy Herzog, Edan Lepucki, Jessie Solomon-Greenbaum, Lisa Srisuro, and Sarah Strickley.

Thank you to my sisters, Jessie and Fara, for their faith and companionship, and to Austin Bunn, Susan Burton, Deborah Cramer, Elyssa East, Jeanne Shub, Kim Caswell Snyder, S. Kirk Walsh, and Gina Zucker for cheering me on every step of the way.

Thank you to Sarah Stein and Sarah McGrath, for their passion and whip-smart editing. And to Ellen Levine, for her patience and generosity.

Finally, I want to thank my grandparents, Rose and Max Greenbaum and Mildred and Walter Solomon, for the stories they told, and for those they didn’t. My parents, William Greenbaum and Ellen Solomon, who made me a writer. My daughter, Sylvia, who has taught me more than anyone, already. And Mike, who supports my work, sustains my heart, reads always and again, and brings me back.