The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel by Susan Jane Gilman Read Free Book Online Page B

By the end of the week, two more women from Lodz had been hired and installed in the tiny parlor as well. All of them labored in silence. Not knowing what else to do, my sisters and I headed downstairs to the streets.
    The dawn of the twentieth century had seen, among other things, the inventions of structural steel and electric elevators. Nothing at the Hilfsverein’s detention center or Ellis Island had prepared us for this. On the ferry to Manhattan the day of our arrival, we’d gazed upon a skyline rising above the harbor like a colossus of stalagmites. The afternoon sun lacquered it in brilliant gold light. As the ferry churned closer and closer and the city bore in, Flora, Bella, Rose, and I stood beside our parents, bedazzled and stunned. My father and the Jews back in Hamburg—they had been exactly right: Buildings soared to the sky covered in gold and crystal, as ornate as Torah scrolls! Papa was smiling. His cheeks were wet. Mama’s, too. Everyone around us was gasping, weeping, applauding. The scale of it! The unspeakable beauty!
    Straining against the railing, my sisters and I squealed and shouted and pointed up at the spires, their filigreed façades, their diamante windows. My God! They went to the clouds! Who’d ever seen such a thing?
    “How do the people get in there?” said Rose.
    “How do they not fall down?” said Bella.
    “Is this where we are going to live?”
    “Let’s live way up on the very top!” I shouted, twirling. “Above everything!”
    Now, however, blinking into the dusty morning light, my sisters and I found ourselves on cramped, crowded, low-lying Orchard Street. It sounded more like Vishnev than America. Yiddish everywhere. Pushcarts, hawkers, shoppers, horses, and gangs of children clogged the sidewalks. The noise was incredible. There was nothing left of the Manhattan skyline. It had vanished behind us as quickly as it had appeared, like a mirage. All we had now was this .
    The immigrant experience on the Lower East Side—oh, how people go on about it! Such nostalgia. The pickle men, the peddlers’ wagons, the children playing marbles on the stoops .… Now, apparently, there are even “cultural walking tours” for tourists: Some schmuck with an umbrella points out a knish store to a bunch of Japanese.
    Well, let me tell you, darlings: immigrant, schmimmigrant. The streets were cobblestone and asphalt, the buildings masonry. The stoops and fire escapes were iron, the rooftops tar, the ceilings pressed tin. There were no trees, no breezes from the river, no respite from the sun. Can you imagine? We roasted. My sisters and I—four little Russian girls—we had never experienced such heat in our lives. As we linked arms, the four of us, and stepped carefully off into the gutter, the crooks of our elbows and the backs of our necks instantly became wet.
    And the stench!
    Manure, hay, chicken shit, urine, beer, frying grease, chalk dust, coke, coal—even decomposing animal carcasses. Crossing Forsyth Street, we had to step over a dead horse lying in the gutter, infested with maggots. All of these odors hung noxiously in the air, mixing with the pierce of kerosene, camphor, and turpentine from the cobblers and the tanneries. Fumes of queasy-sweet gasoline billowed from new cars rattling noisily up the avenues. And since none of the tenements had bathtubs, these odors, in turn, mixed with the gamy smell of thousands of strains of human perspiration. Yeasty, fungal skin. Rose water. Decaying teeth. Dirty diapers. Sharp, vinegary hair tonic. The New York Post recently made a ruckus about how I spray Shalimar in my bathrooms, my trash cans, even Petunia’s doghouse. The “Spritz Witch,” they called me in a headline. But since when is it a crime to deodorize? You grow up in a tenement, darlings, then tell me what you’d do.
    As we wandered through the neighborhood that first morning, Bella pinched her nostrils and rasped, “So, Malka, this is the promised land? Did anyone ever