The City Beautiful: Chapters 1–5

Along with housing a kingdom of rats and roaches, the walls between tenements were paper-thin, so I was constantly involved in the personal lives of my neighbors, whether I wanted to be or not.

As the sobbing continued unabated, I wheeled my bicycle into the third-floor corridor.

“Did you see the woman sitting on the stairs?” Yakov asked as he unlocked our garret room door.

“So pious, he can’t even look at a woman. A true tzaddik, that Alter Rosen.”

Yakov exchanged his broadcloth jacket for a pin-striped waistcoat and tied his cravat with deft hands.

In his low smoky baritone, Yakov would regale me with descriptions of the River Spree at sunset, spangled with purple and gold; or overgrown ruins along the Mediterranean, fragrant with the scent of honeysuckle and dappled in indigo shadows; Paris in midwinter, a white city spired with icicles and sparkling hoarfrost.

In the fireworks’ diminishing glow, the tenement houses across the street seemed precarious, as though they would collapse into ruin and rubble at any moment.

The ground was littered with rotten fruit and corn silk, their fermented scent lacing the more pleasant aromas of sizzling sausages and beer.

Music wafted through the dusk—the trill and wail of a klezmer’s violin rivaled by a woman fiddling a lively Irish jig.

In front of the dusty storefronts where the peddlers would spread their secondhand wares on Sunday mornings, the threadbare awnings had been unrolled to shade carts and tables overladen with food and drinks.

Did he think that I was too cold? Too prudish?

Ninety dollars for three steerage tickets.

But there would also be a myriad of predators stalking the streets of Manhattan, waiting for new arrivals.

My stomach turned at the thought of boiled potatoes, or mashed potatoes, or potato latkes fried in schmaltz.

“We found him in the lagoon, caught in a gondola’s mooring rope.”

He lifted his hand to placate her. “Please calm yourself.”

I passed her, but she caught up to me at the door and blew upward to stir an errant strand of hair out of her sepia-brown eyes.

With his neatly groomed white beard and distinguished features, he had the bearing of a holy tzaddik.

Grizzled and stoic, Gavril drew the shroud from over Yakov’s head.

Yakov’s skin held an ashy pallor, his dark hair a stiff bramble.

A livid bruise necklaced his throat.

We wouldn’t be interring him in the Atlantic, but a pauper’s grave was just as permanent.

As soiled water sluiced down the table legs, we transferred Yakov to a slotted board attached to the pulley system overhead.

In spite of having the sunless complexion and slight build of a yeshiva student, Sender clung onto the cord as tenaciously as a terrier, even going so far as to bare his teeth.

I thrashed around, heavily disoriented.

I fled down alleyways as dark and stifling as the gullets of dragons, through sizzling sparks and palls of smoke, under clotheslines fluttering with singed sheets.

As I went through my morning routine, the pain slowly faded, while the sense of disquiet lingered like a bad stench.

I didn’t want to rely on her kindness, especially not now, when death felt treacherously close.

After Raizel stormed out in a fury, I learned that Mrs. Brenner had spent the fifteen minutes before my arrival regaling her parents about my family’s success in the textiles industry, as if that could make up for a dead father and absent mother. Conveniently, Mrs. Brenner had omitted that by the time I was twelve, we were left destitute.

And if I worked hard, eventually we could move to one of those idyllic little villages nestled up alongside Lake Michigan, unsullied by the coal smoke.

We would persevere and make a name for ourselves, and I would go to school, an English school where Jews were able to learn right beside gentiles.

The smoke was so thick that it billowed through the roads in drifts as wide as glaciers, dimming the sunlight until it became impossible to tell whether it was morning or midday.

Mr. Stieglitz was a tall man, with a penchant for corduroy suits and ornate silver-tipped canes.

We had both made concessions for this new American life; it was inevitable.

I clammed up, my confidence deflating at the edge of derision in his voice.

We do not publish gossip. We do not publish drivel.

We certainly do not begin accusing the police of shirking their duties.

"Sir?" I asked tentatively.

Mr. Weiss’s voice came from deep in his throat, as low and foreboding as the grumbling of a bear.

“Go,” he snapped, waving his gnarled hand at me.