Hotel Cuba

by Aaron Hamburger

Genres: World War I; Jewish Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

“Deeply moving, compulsively readable, Hotel Cuba chronicles the early twentieth century immigrant experience with a profound understanding and crackling urgency I’ve not previously encountered. I could not put it down and I could not stop thinking about it long after I’d reached its stunning conclusion. In short: You need to read this book. Right now.”—Joanna Rakoff, bestselling author of My Salinger Year

“Thick with the humid air of a Havana summer night, rich with mesmerizing detail, Hotel Cuba will grab you and not let you go.”—Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Take My Hand, Balm and Wench

From the award-winning author of The View from Stalin's Head, a stunning novel about two sheltered Russian Jewish sisters, desperate to get to America to make a new life, who find themselves trapped in the sultry, hedonistic world of 1920s Havana.

Fleeing the chaos of World War I and the terror of the Soviet Revolution, practical, sensible Pearl Kahn and her lovestruck, impulsive younger sibling Frieda sail for America to join their sister in New York. But discriminatory new immigration laws bar their entry, and the young women are turned back at Ellis Island. With few options, Pearl and Frieda head for Havana, Cuba, convinced they will find a way to overcome this setback.

At first, life in big-city Prohibition-era Havana is overwhelming, like nothing Pearl and Frieda have ever experienced—or could have ever imagined in the rural shtetl where they grew up. As the sisters begin to adjust, their plans for going to America together become complicated. Frieda falls for the not-so-dreamy man of her dreams while Pearl’s life opens up unexpectedly, offering her a taste of freedom and heady romance, and an opportunity to build a future on her own terms. Though to do so, she must confront her past and the shame she has long carried.

A heartbreaking, epic family story, Hotel Cuba explores the profound courage of two women displaced from their home who strive to create a new future in an enticing and dangerous world far different from anything they have ever known.

Release date: May 2, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 400

Sample

One

FISH AND ORANGES. A SALTY SEA OF SOUP DOTTED WITH ISLANDS of potato chunks that Pearl can mash flat with the back of a spoon. Bread so dry, when she dunks it into her lukewarm soup, the stubborn roll remains firm. But Pearl can be stubborn too. She continues dunking the roll until it softens and melts into a paste.

It’s depressing, the food on this boat they call SS Hudson. Heavy on salt and light on pepper, parsley, or any herb to give it character, like the shaggy dill in her yard back in Russia—or what used to be Russia, because this year, 1922, their town belongs to Poland. After a good rain, those dill stalks grow so high they collapse under their own weight. Starving blue-eyed soldiers from the tsar’s army used to pull them out by the roots, mistaking them for carrots, then fling them to the ground.

“Eat,” says Pearl, offering an orange to her younger sister, Frieda, sitting with her eyes closed and squeezing her temples. “Or save it for later.”

“Don’t bother,” says Frieda. “I won’t eat it then either.”

“You can’t starve all the way to Cuba.” Maybe Pearl sounds more like a nagging mother than a sister, but she quit worrying about her own vanity years ago when Mama died, after giving birth to Frieda. Though Pearl was only nine then, people already called her Old Lady, Housewife, Empress of the Kitchen, Madame Singer Sewing Machine.

What will they call her in Havana, where no one knows her and she has no history? She might be anything. It’s a thrilling, terrifying thought.

Before the war, a girl from Turya who’d immigrated to America returned to visit—as a rich lady. Some women laughed behind her back, mimicked her proud walk, lifted their hair to imitate her short haircut, and called her New Woman, as an insult. But Pearl didn’t laugh. Maybe someday she too would become a kind of New Woman, like this shtetl girl who’d transformed into a prosperous American lady who could afford to coolly ignore the others’ jokes, as if she didn’t hear. Now there was freedom.

Frieda, who’s in one of her states, won’t eat, no matter what Pearl says. Arguing with her is like trying to empty the ocean with a spoon, so Pearl returns to her own soup. Tomorrow she’ll eat the next soup, and then the one after that, and the one after that. In this way, always looking forward, never back, she and this creaking boat will slowly cross the Atlantic, leaving Europe behind.

When Pearl finishes her bowl, she’s still hungry. She has long been cursed with a healthy appetite. Her solid, sturdy figure bulges in the wrong places for a woman who loves dainty clothes, loves looking at them and making them. Before the Great War, when people cared what they looked like, Jews and Gentiles alike paid her to make dresses sewn with fine stitches you’d need a magnifying glass to see. For each dress she made, Pearl imagined a story, the potential to put on a new outfit and become a new person. But sadly, clothes never fit her as beautifully as they do slender Frieda, who even before the boat often forgot to eat.

Pearl has never forgotten to eat in her life. During the worst of the Great War and then the Revolution and war with Poland after, her hunger was so raw it addled her thoughts, gnawed at her stomach lining.

On the SS Hudson, many passengers are seasick, like Frieda. Pearl squeezes sideways between tables, casually skims stray peas and carrot knobs from abandoned bowls of soup, scrounges a section of orange, a scrap of pinkish-brown herring.

A willowy lady wearing a dusty-pink hat watches her at work—out of pity or disgust? She’s a sophisticated city type. Jews are so desperate to leave Europe these days, they’d cross the ocean in a bathtub, so Pearl sees many grand people like her mixed with country folk in steerage. This lady has a long, lovely face, pale with a pointed chin, and shrewd gray-green eyes like a cat. Pearl noticed her when she came into the dining room on the arm of a young man who pulled out a chair for her. She stepped forward and sat, didn’t even look behind her, confident the chair would be pushed in again, and it was.

Pearl imagines what it would be like to have that kind of confidence, to sit into air and know that a seat would appear below you. And that hat—it fires up her imagination. If Pearl could afford to wear a fancy pink hat like that, she could walk down the street with such a cold, blank stare that no one would dare bother her. She’s known plenty of women who aren’t strictly beautiful, but in the right hat or dress, they’re magnificent. Their clothes teach the world to treat them with dignity.

The pink lady notices Pearl staring, gives her an inquisitive look, and Pearl, who feels a puzzling itch to capture this exquisite woman’s attention, surprises herself by nervously extending a roll and asking, “Maybe you want half?”

In response, she averts her eyes.

“It’s all right,” says Pearl, fearing she’s committed a blunder but unable to stop herself. “You can have the whole thing if you want.”

“I’m afraid I’m not very hungry.” Looking as if she’s smelled something rotten, the woman rises and leaves the table, followed by her male companion.

Pearl returns meekly to her seat. What was she thinking, speaking out that way? “This food’s awful,” she tells her sister. “If they let me in the kitchen, I could do better.”

“I heard you,” says Frieda. “The way you talk, it’s embarrassing.”

“What did you hear?” Pearl suspects her sister’s right but doesn’t like to admit it. She lacks her sister’s talent—if you can call it that—for small talk.

Frieda grabs a roll and shoves it rudely at Pearl’s chest. “‘Go on, have it.’ That’s not how someone with manners speaks. Didn’t you see that expensive dress she had on? Didn’t you hear her pretty accent? Imagine what she thinks of us.”

The back of Pearl’s neck prickles with shame. I’ve gotten it wrong again, she thinks. But what if the pink lady wasn’t offended, just jealous? Because Pearl was brazen enough to do whatever she felt like. If that lady wasn’t so polite, she’d pick up scraps too. Polite people don’t survive in this world.

“We’re from plenty good stock,” says Pearl. “Father’s from Lithuania.”

“Where we’re going, they’ve probably never heard of Lithuania,” says Frieda, pushing back her chair. “I can’t sit here anymore. My stomach’s not at all well.”

“I’d better come with you,” says Pearl.

Clinging to the shaky, narrow railings, the two sisters descend three flights of metal stairs into the ship’s belly. Day or night makes no difference in the enormous room where they sleep, three times the size of a synagogue, crammed with endless rows of iron berths stacked with lean mattresses. Kerosene lamps put up a feeble fight against the darkness. Pearl and Frieda have claimed two narrow beds by the wall. They take turns holding up a blanket while changing their clothes. Not everyone is so delicate, and Pearl’s eye occasionally catches the white curve of a stranger’s breast or rump. Once, Frieda wasn’t paying attention to the blanket and exposed Pearl’s body. “Raise it higher! Higher!” Pearl hissed, imagining everyone staring at her fleshy, hairy arms, her dark-toned skin, the color of rye bread. But she wouldn’t allow herself to cry, not for all to see.

“Was it really so terrible how I spoke to that lady?” Pearl asks.

“Leave it be,” says Frieda. She climbs into her bed, pulls her knees to her chin, and faces the wall to retreat into her sullen self, silent as a widow.

It’s wearying, the engine’s eternal clanking, strangers’ anxious chatter, and days of seeing only sea and sky around their ship. Pearl’s ears ache, filled with the constant roar of ocean. Focus on other things, she thinks. A warm, freshly laid egg, or yes, a dusty-pink hat. But then the ship hits a rolling wave, someone screams or tumbles to the floor, and she’s back in the present, lost on an ocean.

Like Pearl and Frieda, many passengers are Jews fleeing the cluster of shtetls on the Polish-Russian border, which shifts east or west year to year, war to war, and sometimes disappears. The passengers from cities like Minsk or Warsaw stand out to Pearl because of their store-bought leather shoes or their gloriously impractical ladies’ hats, tight as bathing caps. She’s seen such hats in a fashion magazine she found during the short time she worked as a hotel chambermaid in Warsaw. Every day she smooths the pages, presses out the wrinkles. In America, she hopes to make dresses good enough for a magazine.

The washrooms are right outside where they sleep, easy to find: just follow the stench to its source, where five faucets dispense cold salt water into metal basins. Some of their fellow passengers can’t quite make it to the washroom to relieve themselves or vomit, so to ward off the smell, people tie dried herbs or chains of garlic to the iron berths.

When they first left Danzig, Pearl tried to shield Frieda from the mess, but it’s impossible, as if this journey were purposefully designed to make them feel like animals. Despite the efforts of the crew, who hose down the floors with ammonia every few days, a musky stink has settled in the cavernous space: a mix of body odor, various human secretions, tobacco, garlic sausage and onions, damp laundry hung to dry, though nothing ever dries.

“Frieda, let’s go out on deck, get some air,” Pearl urges her sister.

“I’m staying,” Frieda says, her voice muffled in her bedsheet. She fears the churning waves that crash over the deck, leaving behind a lacy foam.

Pearl has yet to meet a wave that would dare try to frighten her. Until this journey, she’d never seen the sea, and she recalls her surprise when she first realized that it wasn’t blue. More like a dirty gray, or when the sun shines, the color of steel.

So Pearl leaves her sister, climbs up on deck to watch the ocean—an ocean! Such sounds it makes, the rhythmic crashing of waves, or a loud moan like a mama bear protecting her cub. Some people only run up here to vomit into the sea. They’re in such a hurry they don’t check the wind, and their mess splatters back in their faces.

That’s what you get, Pearl thinks, when you try to fight the ocean.

* * *

BY SOME MIRACLE Father had saved enough for their passage.

The way he told it, Father was born in an elegant quarter of Vilna, studying Talmud, Shakespeare, and Spinoza, only to end up slaughtering meat in some backwater Russian shtetl where his intellectual life consisted of advising people who’d found blood clots in chicken carcasses whether the meat was kosher.

He blamed politics for killing his dreams. As a young man in Vilna, he lived through terrible times: strikes, food riots, protests calling for the tsar’s head. Most Jews his age were more likely to be beaten in the street while agitating for revolution than to attend synagogue. Father found a post as assistant cantor at a small but prestigious shul, where he was given thankless, unwanted duties like chanting the “Giver of Salvation” prayer for the health of the tsar and his family. One Shabbes, as he opened his mouth to sing the usual platitudes, a band of Zionists rushed the bimah and chanted revolutionary slogans, bringing the service to a humiliating halt. No one came to Father’s aid or said a word in his defense as he slumped down from the bimah. In fact, as the story circulated in the days afterward, he was blamed for his passive response.

Disgraced and fed up, he quit the shul and moved his family to the backwater shtetl where his wife had been born. In Turya, there were politics, sure, but not so much to interfere with life. A small-town cantor’s salary couldn’t support a family, so Father joined his father-in-law’s butcher shop, and this in time became his own misery. He’d come home from work exhausted, snapping at anyone who talked to him before he got food in his stomach. As a girl, Pearl dreaded both his sharp tongue and the strap dangling beside the peg where he hung his coat. Though he never actually used the strap, its threat was enough.

Father lived for Friday nights in shul. Jews traveled from the surrounding villages to hear the famous Cantor Kahn’s tremulous, melancholy vibrato. From the women’s section at the back of the sanctuary, Pearl listened to his tender, delicate voice and felt closer to him than when they shared the same table. He’d come home lit in the afterglow of his performance, bringing along for dinner half the choir, boys he’d prepared for their bar mitzvahs, now men with muscles, rough manners, and wisps of beards.

For Pearl, Friday nights were also a performance, a kitchen performance. After her mother died, Pearl took over the cooking. Who else could have done it? Her eldest sisters, Elka and Rivka, were married with their own families to take care of, living on farms with babies and animals for company. Basha spent all her time at the regional school where the non-Jewish girls called her louse and threw stones at her back. When the war ended, she left for New York, hoping to attend a ladies’ college. For now, she worked making dresses. Avram was a boy. Frieda was the baby, and even when she grew older, Pearl continued to think of her as such.

Before the Great War, Pearl roasted chicken or stewed meat for a crowd of twenty, sometimes thirty. She set the table with a red felt cloth and brass candlesticks—castoffs from wealthier relatives in Vilna, yet finer than anything on their neighbors’ tables.

But then the tsar declared war on the Kaiser, and then the Revolution declared war on the tsar. More often than not, the butcher shop was closed. Once, to raise money, Father went out to pawn their china and candlesticks and came home in his socks, his forehead bruised, his hands trembling. Two soldiers had knocked him down, stolen the boots off his feet. A priest stopped to intervene, asking, “Why bother this poor Jew?” So the soldiers shot him. As the priest crumpled into the snow, Father ran away.

For three years, their little town of Turya was invaded by bands of Reds, Whites, and Poles, each of whom accused the Jews of sympathizing with the wrong side. Pearl and her family hid in the dark, behind locked doors and shutters, listening for soldiers, bandits, Bolsheviks—all bastards with different names and causes, though their purpose was the same.

Pearl did the best she could to go on with her Friday night dinners, her small act of rebellion. The menu was now fish balls mixed with bread crumbs as filler, or a thin soup with potatoes, chopped cabbage leaves, and any kind of root that escaped the notice of wild Gentiles on fast horses. She relied on her brother, Avram, to gather herbs and vegetables from the yard and water from their well, and to watch for strangers before opening the front door. When she found mice droppings in a small bag of precious flour, she swallowed hard, then carefully skimmed them off and used the rest to make bread.

As Pearl served, passed, then cleared plates of food, invisible as a servant, Frieda basked in admiration. Frieda, a charming, chatty girl who outgrew her baby fat and childish curls to become a precocious teenage beauty. Frieda with her high-pitched voice, who even in wartime could make sparkling conversation about nothing: delightful when you heard it, and forgettable minutes later. Frieda, who when the talk inevitably turned to serious subjects like politics, abruptly withdrew into a corner to sulk. Watching her, Pearl felt little jealousy, maybe more of an odd pride in the young woman her baby sister was becoming. Anyway, none of these teasing, boorish boys were to Pearl’s taste. The kind of man she’d want—dignified, smart, adult—good luck finding him in Turya.

During the sisters’ last Friday night dinner before going to join their sister Basha in New York, a steady procession of neighbors and relatives came to visit. The men wanted to look at pretty Frieda one final time, while the women entrusted Pearl with messages for relatives who lived in various corners of America, as well as advice.

Don’t eat what smells bad.

Poke a man in the chest and watch his reaction to see if he’s lying.

To fight the seasickness, lick a few grains of salt off your wrist.

Trust one eye more than two ears.

Pearl listened, promised to bear it all in mind, while Frieda made faces at the women when they weren’t looking.

Last to leave was old Tzeitel Feldsteyn, a well-known do-gooder, always doling out bowls of watery soup to the sick and old, though she herself was poor as dust. A soft-spoken woman, inside she was tough like old bread. Frieda found her pushy, thought she ought to take better care of herself before worrying so much about others, but Pearl supposed all that charity sustained Mrs. Feldsteyn, kept her mind off her loneliness.

Mrs. Feldsteyn gave Frieda a bag of musty-looking candy and greetings for her grandsons, Ben the Oak and Mendel, who’d gone to America two months earlier, to join an uncle in the city of Detroit. Ben and Mendel’s parents died young, leaving Mrs. Feldsteyn to bring up two boys while caring for half the indigent in their town on an income of rags. And mostly she managed it. “Tell them don’t forget me,” she said, clutching Frieda’s hand with her rough, worn fingers. “This time next year, you and Mendel should stand under a chuppah.”

“Maybe he’s forgotten his old friends in Turya,” said Frieda with a charming laugh and passed the candy to Pearl to hold.

“Maybe he forgot some,” said Mrs. Feldsteyn. “But not you.”

“Excuse me,” said Pearl, who preferred not to be reminded of her sister’s regrettable attachment to Mendel, that schemer-dreamer. In the room they shared, she tucked the candy into their wicker suitcase, along with food for the journey, clothes, and their sponsor letter from Basha, who advised them not to bring too much. They’d find all they needed in New York.

Glad for a break from all their company, Pearl sat on the bed, staring at the water-stained wallpaper peeling in the corners. She’d never see this room again. People who crossed the ocean rarely returned. Good, Pearl decided. That’s why I’m going, to leave this life behind.

Back in the front room, Mrs. Feldsteyn and Frieda were gone, and Father was sitting sullenly at the table, his eyes red and anxious. “Where’s Frieda?” asked Pearl, gathering the ends of the tablecloth.

“She walked Mrs. Feldsteyn home. Avram went with them.” He reached for her arm to interrupt her cleaning and said, “I hear in America, even the water isn’t kosher.”

“Nonsense,” she said, recognizing Father’s flair for the dramatic.

“When children are young, parents talk about how smart their children are. When parents are old, children talk about how stupid their parents are,” he said. “In America, I suppose you girls will start smoking and stop going to shul. You’ll cut your hair, change your names, go with strange men, become modern women. I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Pearl dropped the tablecloth and sat down to think of a response. You can’t go back on your word, she thought. Even if you do, I’m going. I won’t spend another winter starving, hiding, freezing because we don’t dare light a fire to catch the notice of soldiers. I won’t dig myself a grave in this dying town. I need to make a different life.

“If you don’t know, then why did you let Basha go before us?” Pearl asked, her voice rising. “Why let us go now?”

“Of course you must go. Here, there’s nothing for you.” Father picked at his chapped lips. “God takes away everything that’s mine that I love. I should be used to it.”

Pearl often heard him say this, but tonight his sadness both touched and irritated her. I know you’ll be lonely for us, she thought, but I’m not a thing, and I’m not yours.

“Promise me you won’t work in a factory,” Father said. “They lock the girls inside and burn them to death.”

“That’s an old story,” Pearl said in a harsher tone than she meant. “Before the war even.” Daddy, she thought, it’s our last night. Let us be gentle with each other. She searched his eyes, hoping for a kind look. He flinched.

“And promise me you won’t let Frieda marry that peacock Mendel,” he said.

“I don’t like him either, but does it matter if we like him or not? In America, she’ll be free to make her choice.” Pearl didn’t see why Frieda, still in her teens, should marry at all. In America, some girls waited until well in their twenties to settle down. The Yiddish papers said so, and Basha confirmed it. Not that Pearl believed everything Basha said, but on this point, she accepted her sister’s word.

“Mendel’s the type who looks in the mirror every five seconds to visit with his best friend.” Father gripped Pearl’s arm again, this time hard enough to hurt. “He isn’t worthy of her. With him, she’ll have a miserable life. Now promise me.”

He had this awful look on his face, and his grip tightened even more. Pearl imagined herself a girl, being caught with her fingers in the honey pot. If she refused his demand, he could change his mind again about America, hold back the money he’d promised. A possibility, but not likely. Far more likely, she realized with a painful sense of sadness, was that this could be the last thing he’d ever ask of her face-to-face. When she left Turya tomorrow, she would probably never see him again.

“Yes, I promise,” she said. After all, what did it cost her? He let go of her arm, and his face took on a more peaceful aspect. Then as she picked up the tablecloth again to shake out the crumbs, another thought came to mind: Why don’t you care who I marry?

Maybe he didn’t think she would.

As a child, Pearl used to watch on summer evenings as boys and girls strolled up Greyble Street. A few daring couples held hands openly. Pearl admired the girls in their summer dresses yet dreaded the prospect of holding some oily-faced boy’s hand, making promises as a child to another child before knowing the man he’d become. And then the war and Revolution swept away the young men her age, not to mention several of the girls she’d played with in school, who were now in their graves. If she wanted to find a husband in Turya, all that were left were toothless old men, young wet-ears, or the few who returned from the war alive but with broken bodies, broken minds.

That was how she made it to twenty-seven unmarried.

* * *

A LITTLE AFTER dawn, Pearl and Frieda, dressed in gray like old women to ward off strange men’s eyes, climbed aboard a horse cart crowded with fourteen passengers, all heading west across the scarred countryside. It hardly seemed real. No tearful partings. Even Frieda was unusually solemn. Just a wave to her father and brother, and then the jingling of a harness and the soft plop of horses’ feet sinking into mud.

They passed the large black cross marking the edge of town, and the main road turned into a dirt track barely visible in the scarred, empty fields of sandy soil stretching out in all directions. All wasteland. Pearl felt like Moses crossing the desert. What the Germans didn’t manage to bomb during the Great War, the Russians burned. Villages were flattened, replaced by snarls of barbed wire, piles of broken brick, and burnt trees skinny and black as whips. The few remaining buildings were sprayed with bullet holes, their windows cracked, their roofs fallen in, their doors stolen for fuel. On the side of the road stood rows of wooden crosses, some marked in charcoal, others carved neatly with the names, ranks, and ages of young men, or simply, “Here lie 3 German soldiers.”

“Where are the people?” Frieda whispered. The man next to her overheard and pointed them out, poking their heads out of homes dug from the earth, mounds of sod, scrap metal, and stove bricks covered in green thatch. Peasant children nestled together for warmth, their cheeks and bare feet red as cow’s blood. Frieda shut her eyes, but Pearl forced herself to look, to witness, and to guard herself from wanting to come back.

That night, they reached a half-destroyed train station where the Polish border used to be. Pearl and Frieda stretched out on the cold tile floor, staring at the stars through boards laid across the blackened walls for a ceiling. Men occupied the benches, while women sat on the floor with blank-faced children and babies in puddles of urine.

It’s just for tonight, thought Pearl. Tomorrow the train comes to take me to America. She took off her coat to cover her sister, then removed her shoes and rubbed her feet. “I wouldn’t do that,” warned a woman next to her. “Look.” She gestured to the other passengers’ feet, clad in strips of rags or shoes made of birch bark tied with cords.

“Oh, I see,” said Pearl, putting her shoes back on. “Thank you.”

“You wouldn’t have an extra bit of food to spare?”

Pearl tore off a hunk of her dark bread, and the woman pressed it into her mouth.

In the morning, Pearl’s back was sore and her cheeks were chapped with cold. She and Frieda lined up to fill glasses with hot tea from a large brass samovar. A man tossed a cigarette butt on the ground, and two others rushed to grab it and suck a few puffs.

The ticket office, a shack made of whitewashed pine boards, remained closed until just after their train arrived. While Frieda watched the one suitcase they shared, Pearl joined the crowd pressing against the window to buy their tickets, bodies against bodies. “No, let me through! The train can’t leave without me,” she begged, but the crowd kept pushing. Finally, she pressed her lips into a tight line and pushed right back, rammed her shoulder into a stranger’s arm.

When it was her turn, she learned that overnight the fares had risen; the Polish zloty had lost a tenth of its value. Luckily, Pearl’s American dollars were still good.

As she rushed to rejoin Frieda, a man bumped into her roughly, nearly knocking her over. “Lousy she-Jew, watch where you’re going!” he said and vanished into the crowd, taking with him her sense of triumph at getting the tickets. Then she checked her pockets and her heart seized. The change she’d received at the ticket window was gone.

She and Frieda passed the five-day journey to Warsaw in a third-class carriage without seats, just a wooden floor packed with passengers and stinking of garlic sausage, sweat, and dirty skin. They arrived hungry, exhausted, and nearly broke, only to discover the laws in America had changed. Previously a sibling in America could sponsor a visa, and for that they had their sister Basha in New York. Now immigrants from Eastern Europe needed a child or parent as a sponsor. Siblings like Basha were useless.

The line of would-be immigrants eager to plead their case at the American consulate extended for blocks. Smugglers, touts for travel agents, and peddlers roamed the line, plying their trade in bored singsong voices. Each day, Pearl went earlier, at six, five, then four in the morning. No use sleeping there all night; the police chased people away. One man who managed to get inside had his application refused, so he jumped out of a second-floor window. After that, the windows were locked and guarded.

In the afternoons, Pearl found work cleaning rooms at a hotel. Most of the guests were men or small families, though once, she saw a pair of elegantly dressed women coming out of a room together, their elbows just touching. One of the women, eyeing Pearl, whispered something into the ear of her companion, and Pearl longed to know what it was. She’d never had close friends, aside from her sisters. What might it be like to share such closeness with a girl who wasn’t a blood relation?

Frieda also earned a few pennies, selling flowers outside a Russian Orthodox Church that was slated for destruction. For safety reasons, the government said, though Pearl knew the real reason: hatred. They hated Russians here, as well as Germans, Gypsies, and Jews. The Poles were a people of hatred, and she hated them right back. Their language, their hulking churches where priests preached Jew hatred to ugly men with tight, smirking faces that made her want to run away.

Pearl was beginning to despair of ever leaving Poland, when a Jewish couple in line at the consulate told her about Cuba.

Ever literal minded, Frieda opposed the idea. Their goal was America, not Cuba. “If we keep waiting at the consulate, someone’s bound to hear us,” she said as they ate gritty day-old bread in their rented room. They shared a single bed and woke up in the middle of the night scratching from bedbugs. “Your way of talking to people, it’s so . . . direct. Try flattering a little. Or let me try.”

“Doesn’t matter, no one there will ever listen,” Pearl argued.

“But why do the laws apply so specifically to EasternEurope?” Frieda asked.

“Look who’s lining up outside the consulate for visas,” said Pearl, but Frieda shrugged. “Enough Jews to make a minyan a hundred times over.” Frieda still didn’t understand, so Pearl laid it out plainly. “Americans don’t want Jews.”

“Where in the world do they want Jews? I say let’s wait to go to America. What’s in Cuba? Who do we know in Cuba?”

“Cuba is next to America. You stay there a year, then you can go to America without a sponsor or affidavit or anything. That’s what the travel agents say, and a Jewish couple I met told me the same.”

And one more thing, Pearl thought. At least Cuba’s not Poland.

She’d asked the travel agent to show her Cuba on the map, to prove he wasn’t playing some Turkish trick. The claw-shaped island really did seem close to Florida, as if she could jump across the water from one coast to another. He showed her pictures of palm trees by the water and a lighthouse. So they did have proper buildings, thought Pearl. Cuba wasn’t just a wilderness, like Sinai or Midian in the Torah.

“We should wait, to try for America,” Frieda said. “What’s the hurry?”

“We can’t get stuck here. What if there’s another war?” said Pearl, panic rising in her chest. “You’re barely eighteen. How do you know what you want?”

“I just know,” Frieda said. “Without Mendel, my life will be a desert. Please.”

Frieda often talked that way, in the language of fairy tales and Bible legends that Pearl used to read to her when she was a child, as if they lived in the time of Moses instead of 1922. As if she’s the heroine of a story, ennobled by suffering for love. A dreamer. Perhaps America might cure her sister of her silliest dreams.

While Frieda lived in dreams, Pearl handled money and documents. She paid ticket agents who counted money to the last kopek. She bribed their Polish landlady with knitted socks and earnest promises to pay the balance for their room. She kept strict accounts of their meager budget, refusing to indulge her sister’s whims for penny candy or pretty stockings. And then Frieda accused her of having no heart.

“Promise me that Cuba is only temporary,” said Frieda. “Just a stop, not the end. Our goal remains America.”

“Of course,” said Pearl, annoyed by all these promises she was being asked to make, first by Father, now Frieda. “Who wants to stay in Cuba? What’s in Cuba?”

* * *

ON THE SS HUDSON, nights are the worst. As the boat rises and falls on the waves, Frieda lies in her berth, clutches one of Pearl’s clean handkerchiefs over her face, and recites childhood prayers. In her berth above, Pearl listens to the others’ crying, coughing, and retching. Periodically the ship’s doctor tours their quarters, checking for measles or tuberculosis. The passengers beg for medicine for seasickness, but he has none to give. He suggests they rub their temples.

She sleeps in her clothes, as they did in Russia, in case they needed to jump out of bed and escape to the woods from whomever their enemies were—Cossacks, Poles, Reds—depending on the day. Her good wool dress with the lace collar, the one she’d worked on for weeks to make a good impression in America, is now hopelessly wrinkled.

Tonight is one of those stormy evenings when clothes, books, and tin cups go flying. Passengers roll out of their bunks, tumble onto the floor, cry, scream, or pray, terrified their boat will sink.

When the mood grabs her, Frieda kneels on the floor and prays, her lips moving dramatically, her face a pretty picture of solemnity. Pearl also wants to pray or, more accurately, wants to want to pray, but she can’t make herself believe that saying a few words can force God to serve her will. She prayed plenty during the war and then again during the Revolution, and look what happened. Nothing.

In her berth, she lies awake, trying to shut out the noises, particularly the low yet distinctly savage sounds of men pushing into their women, who cry out, making horrifying sounds. Like they’re being stabbed.

Even before what happened to her in Turya, Pearl disliked those funny-looking Poles, with their thin lips and eyelids, but there was nothing humorous about the anger they carried with them always. It wasn’t only women they wanted. They liked boys too, to serve as personal valets, and other gruesome uses Pearl overheard Father mention to their neighbor. Pearl hated their clean-shaven Polish faces and their ugly nasal Polish language, those long, knife-straight noses, and those mocking blue eyes.

Since the Revolution, it wasn’t safe for a chicken, a cow, or a woman to linger outside. The only animals in the streets were wolves, who’d lost their fear of humans and walked through the town single file, in daylight. Pearl and her sisters did the laundry and hung it to dry in the house. Rather than visit the public baths, they cleaned each other with damp rags. No more trips to the outhouse. They relieved themselves in a pot.

All during those days of fighting, she yearned for a proper bath. As a girl, Pearl used to go with her mother and sisters to the bathhouse in winter, or the women’s bathing area in the river. She’d hold Mama’s hand and splash beside the riverbank, while her sisters went in up to their necks, their nightdresses billowing under the water. Some girls swam naked, and Pearl admired their white limbs swaying like reeds in the river. Every man in town knew this was a private area for women and avoided it, yet once a stranger from another town appeared, stripped off his clothes, and dove in the water. The other women quickly chased him away, yelling and throwing rocks at his back, but Pearl got a good look at the firm, flat lines of his bare chest, in such contrast to the swelling breasts of the women. She felt marvelous and warm in the presence of so much beauty, in both kinds of bodies.

Staying cooped up at home for so long, Pearl felt as if she’d swallowed a nest of crickets. So she’d sneak over to the root cellar to satisfy her cravings for both privacy and food. She’d steal licks of apricot jam, chew a leathery ring of dried apple, crunch the meat of a walnut. She made a sugar cube between her teeth last for ten minutes, letting each grain of sugar melt on her tongue. Her palate was simple yet intense.

Coming out of the cellar one afternoon, Pearl saw a Polish soldier urinating on the side of her house.

He carried a long gun and wore mismatched pieces of different uniforms: the gray army jacket of a German, the peaked cap of a Pole with a dirty red rim, and the black leather boots of a well-to-do Russian peasant. Maybe he wasn’t a soldier, just an opportunist. His face was shaved, so she knew he wasn’t Jewish.

For years after she’d remember how she was too startled to speak or scream.

He could have taken her into the trees, or behind a shed, but he did it in the open.

One minute she was sucking raspberry jam from her fingers in the safety of their damp cellar, and the next, she was pinned to the ground by this man’s body, heavy and smelly, like the underside of a horse. With one hand, he pressed his cold mud-stained fingers over her lips, and with the other he opened his pants. At the initial burst of pain—like a barbed spike ripping through her insides—her mind jumped to another place, like fainting but awake. It’s not real, she told herself, like those horror stories grandma used to tell to scare us children so we’d stay out of the woods. Imagine it’s already over. She shut her eyes and thought of the female animals squawking and bleating in the yard during mating season.

She’s glad now for what she cannot remember. Pearl heard him buckle his belt but didn’t see him run off. She lay there with her eyes shut, the cold earth chilling her back, the dirt clogging the tips of her fingernails. Her hair hurt. So did the insides of her thighs. She still felt his weight pressing her down. She smelled him. Words came to her lips, a jumble of different prayers. “God, why?” she pleaded under her breath. “If I’m guilty, tell me how I’ve sinned. From the well of my distress, I call on you.”

Since she was a girl, before she knew what the words of the prayers meant, she’d regularly addressed the Lord without expecting a response, but on this day the silence chilled her heart.

Pearl pulled herself up and hobbled back to the house. The garden gate squawked loudly in protest, sticking as usual, so she kicked it in, then continued to the front door, stiffening her neck before entering. Frieda and Avram were reading by the stove. Though it was unlit, the memory of its heat made them feel warmer.

“I slipped in the mud, big deal,” Pearl said. “Stop staring.”

“No one’s staring,” said Avram as Frieda averted her eyes. Pearl hurried to their room. After sponging herself with as much soap as her skin could stand and changing into fresh clothes, she slumped onto her bed, curling up tight and hugging her knees.

That night, she came out and made dinner and did the dishes too, scraped off every crumb. Did she eat? She must have eaten, or maybe she was too sick to eat.

In the following days, Pearl watched Frieda, studying her face for some flicker of recognition of what had happened. Her sister was a child in such matters. Better she should stay a child.

Now, clutching the sides of her berth on the SS Hudson, Pearl wishes she’d screamed. Or that she’d never gone outside, betrayed by her own body, her hunger. My fault, my fault. Someone, anyone, must be at fault besides the soldier, who can’t help being what soldiers are: animals with uncontrollable appetites. As for the God that Frieda now prays to, perhaps it is easier to think that He wasn’t there than that He let this happen. In any case, she can’t rely on Him to intervene to protect her. She must protect herself, figure out her own mistake to learn not to repeat it. Which leads her back to the thought that she shouldn’t have gone outside.

But she was so hungry, with a hunger so fierce it led her as if bewitched toward danger. Even now on this boat carrying her far away, Pearl feels the soldier close by. She’d wanted to leave him behind, him as well as the old Pearl, yet apparently she’d brought them both along.

Somewhere, as always, a child is wailing.

At least she wasn’t left with child, a child whose father’s name she doesn’t know.

Pearl desperately needs air, so she throws a blanket over her shoulders, shoves her feet into her boots, and fumbles through the shadows to the exit. She’s learned to navigate their rocking ship in the dark.

She climbs up the three skinny metal ladders out of steerage and then goes out on deck, where the sky is clear, with a moon, just like the moon in Turya. The frigid, salty wind stings her neck, her earlobes, her nose, makes her feel clean, blank, like no one, nothing. It feels better. The ship’s horn groans overhead, signaling their presence—to whom? Even in daylight, they’re enveloped in fog as thick as beaten cream. All she sees are waves, swelling to impossible heights and then collapsing in a fury. Sometimes she’s as angry as those crashing waves. She too wants to crash into someone or something.

Gripping a knotted rope along the outer wall of the cabin, Pearl wills herself into calm. She runs through her plans in her head, organizing her emotions the way she used to fold her father’s laundry and put it away in the right drawers. Shirts here, pants and socks there. Anger tucked away like folded shirts. Fear buried beneath the bedsheets.

When Pearl’s settled her soul, she’ll return to bed. Tomorrow in the third-class dining room, she’ll eat her ration of fish and oranges. She’ll keep the peels to wave under her weary sister’s nose and rub into their handkerchiefs like perfume.