Finding Steerage to America

This is a story of Joseph and his brothers.

Of how they said goodbye in 1913, in the fall, as the harsh Ukrainian winds began to sweep into their little town of Belogorodka.

Of how they would not meet again until Joseph was in his dotage, the 102-year-old patriarch of a fine clan with deep roots in a city called Los Angeles. And how he would not know who lived or who died while revolution, famine and war shook Belogorodka. The Soviet Union would be born and would die before he found them.

On the day he left, Joseph took off his hat and put it on his little brother’s head. The boy, Isaak, looked like a little man in it. He kissed the 5-year-old goodbye. He kissed his mother and kissed his father and all of his 10 brothers and sisters.

It was the eve of the First World War. And the forces that would pull the globe into chaos had done their work on the Jews of Eastern Europe. A third of them had immigrated to the United States, Palestine and even South America since 1880.

Yet, in Belogorodka, life remained much as it always had been. The Vodonos family, of which Joseph was the second-eldest son, scraped by. They had a kind of general store, and two cows. Joseph delivered milk so that his older brother, Leib, could study the holy books.

Sometimes, townspeople would give Joseph tips as he made his rounds. Joseph saved them, putting away kopeck after kopeck.

Change, everyone knew, was imminent. Already, secular ways were creeping into Belogorodka. Joseph posed for a family picture cleanshaven, wearing a modern hat.

He studied the old ways, but did not follow them. At 18, he was his own man.

*

His father, Yankel, was a pious Jew of the old style. He wore his beard long and, although he could barely read or write Russian, he knew enough Hebrew to study the holy books and recite the day’s prayers. All of his sons went to the heder, the town’s religious school, and Leib had already proved himself to be a scholar.

One day, when Leib was out walking, he heard the sound of hooves pounding the earth behind him. A band of riders was advancing on the town, looking for Jews.

Leib was caught out in the open. He ran. The horses were coming closer. Leib saw a hole dug in the ground. It was an outdoor latrine filled with the ooze of human waste. He threw himself in. He heard the sound of the horses overhead as they rode over the little ditch and on into the distance.

*

It was not long after that when Joseph’s friend Moshe told him that he was leaving for America. Joseph, Moshe said, could come too.

He and Moshe and Moshe’s father would make their way across the belly of Russia to the Austro-Hungarian border. They would have to sneak across by cover of night, then continue somehow to Rotterdam.

From there, it would be steerage, the lowest shipboard passage--crowded, smelly, vibrating with humanity unlanded and uncertain, all the way to Boston, where Joseph had an aunt and Moshe had some cousins.

Do not cry for Joseph, his parents told the other children. Your brother is the lucky one. He has a chance for a new life.

In America, Joseph’s mother and father believed, their second-oldest would no longer be forced to flee from marauders who came on horseback to hunt the Jews in their pogroms. There he would be spared conscription into the czar’s army.

*

Joseph made his trip in November and December, with winter settling in. He would not miss the way the ice formed on the walls inside the wooden house in Belogorodka. But he would miss his family.

Joseph paid for his passage with the tip money he had saved. It typically took 33 American dollars to book passage across the sea, and half again as much to get to Rotterdam from Russia. Travelers often would need enough to bribe officials and possibly hire smugglers to help them over the border. And a little extra in case the smugglers decided to fleece them and threaten to call the border police unless they paid more.

It was a fortune.

Joseph saw land on his 19th birthday--at least, his 19th birthday according to the Jewish calendar. According to the Western calendar, he landed a month later. It was an oddity, like the new name bestowed on him at the port of Boston, that would seem normal after enough time.

Joseph left Russia as a Vodonos, but he entered the United States as a Saltsman.

He waited in line at the port, nervous and unable to speak English. He was poked by doctors and questioned by bureaucrats.

The English translation of Vodonos, he was told, is “water carrier,” so someone suggested a name he could tell the authorities.

Name? An official barked.

Seltzer, Joseph said. A water name.

Seltzer, he said again when the man didn’t seem to understand.

“Just tell him Saltsman,” ordered Moshe’s father.

Saltsman, nodded the official. And Joseph had a new name to go with his new life.

His uncle met him with a horse and buggy. Already a grandfather, Hyman Snider knew his way around America. He wasn’t wearing old-fashioned clothes like Joseph, although he did still wear a traditional long coat to go to synagogue.

Snider guided the buggy to the mill town of Lowell, north of Boston, where he had settled with Joseph’s aunt, his second wife.

Snider’s daughter, Ida, and her husband, Jacob Brayman, lived nearby in a big house with their three girls. Joseph went the very next day to meet them.