Putting Down American Roots

Pearlie Brayman was 4 years old when Joseph, preceded by the clop-clop-clop of her grandfather’s horse and buggy, came for the first time to her family’s house in Lowell, Mass.

He was wearing clothes from the old country, but he was cleanshaven, not like her grandfather with his goatee or men from the synagogue with their long beards. The whole family came out to see him. Minnie, the oldest girl, was 18, with dark hair and dark eyes.

It was New Year’s Day, 1914. Joseph had arrived the day before, his last name changed from Vodonos to Saltsman by an impatient official at the port of Boston.

The Brayman house was the central gathering point for a clan that included Jacob and Ida Brayman, their three daughters and Ida’s father and his second wife, Joseph’s aunt Esther. “It was always open house at our house,” Pearlie would recall years later.

It was a palace compared to Joseph’s family home in Belogorodka, a small, partly Jewish town between Kiev and Chernobyl. There were five bedrooms and a garden big enough to grow sweet corn, tomatoes, beans, carrots and beets--food for the family to eat year-round.

There was a root cellar underneath the house, where the family buried carrots and beets in sand to keep them fresh all the way through the winter--right up to Passover each spring. Sugar pear trees and plum trees provided sweet fruit to be eaten ripe or canned, and rhubarb grew wild.

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Joseph began coming over every Sunday for family dinners and card games that would last into the night. Minnie often played, when she was not looking after the younger girls or helping prepare the meal.

He got a job in a mattress plant for $3 a week, 50 cents less than factory owners had paid American farm girls in Lowell nearly 100 years earlier, when some of the nation’s first textile mills were set up there. Every year, it seemed, there were new immigrants willing to work for less pay.

Still, it was enough money to get through the week and to put a little away to send back home. He hoped to save enough to begin bringing his parents and 10 siblings to America, starting with his brother Shuki.

He worked 10 hours a day, six days a week. In his spare time, he read--the Tageblatt newspaper in Yiddish, novels and even medical journals in his new language, English. On Saturday nights, he allowed himself to spend 25 cents on a haircut, shave and movie. After a while, he began taking Minnie to the movies with him.

Lowell in 1914 was a busy mill town of about 100,000, situated along the Merrimack River about 25 miles north of Boston. Since 1820, when farm girls were brought in to spin cotton from the South into thread, textiles had been the town’s mainstay.

In recent years immigrants, many of them Jewish and Irish, had been recruited from the big cities like New York to work there. Some even knew of Lowell before they left the old country. The town’s 500 Jewish families supported four synagogues, including a Russeshe Shul for Russian immigrants like Joseph and the Braymans.

Jacob Brayman went there every morning, sometimes before dawn, to light the potbellied stove that kept the place warm for daily prayers. The synagogue was simple in its construction, like shuls in the old country. Like many of the buildings in Lowell, it was made of wood.

Here, Yiddish was spoken with a Ukrainian accent, and the praying, or davening, was done in the Russian style. After shul, Jacob, a shoemaker, hurried down to a small shop he rented in town. The landlord, an Irishman, had befriended him years earlier and taught him English, and ever after Jacob spoke the language of his adopted country with an Irish brogue.

Pearlie and her sisters often brought Jacob lunch in a pail sent by their mother. The pails were steaming hot inside with chicken or beef with gravy, and bread in a little container on top.

Sometimes Pearlie would swing the pail around and around on the way down to the store, and everything would get mashed together.

Minnie and her mother kept house, making the traditional Jewish egg bread, or challah, for Sabbath dinners on Friday nights and preparing specialties like cheese blintzes and gefilte fish. On Saturdays, when it was forbidden to cook, the house was filled with the smell of a slow-cooking cholent, a beef and bean stew baked slowly overnight in an oven that was lighted before the Sabbath began.

Joseph had to work the Sabbath day, but he came on Friday nights for dinner. After awhile, his Aunt Esther made a match between him and Minnie, and on June 22, 1916, the two were married. That year, Joseph, who had moved into the Brayman home with Minnie, got a letter from his parents in Russia. A new brother, Ikhel, had been born.

With a sister, Feiga, who was born soon after Joseph left three years earlier, there were now 13 Vodonos siblings. Joseph wrote to them whenever he could, and dreamed of helping them. His own son, Louis, was born the next year, in 1917.

The United States declared war on Germany in the spring, and Joseph got a job in a munitions plant, making cartridges for small caliber guns. The war, which had been raging in Europe for three years, brought immigration to a halt.

For now, at least, there would be no more midnight treks, no more slipping into Austro-Hungary, as Joseph had done, to find a ship bound for the United States. And there would not be for a long, long time.

In Belogorodka, Isaak wore Joseph’s old hat until it was threadbare and fell apart. Life continued, as life does; its little joys were flashes of light on blacker and blacker days.