The Puzzle King

by Betsy Carter

Genres: Historical Fiction; Jewish Fiction; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

Here’s a memorable tale of two unlikely heroes: the lively, beautiful Flora and her husband, the brooding, studious Simon, two immigrants, both sent to America by their families to find a better life. An improbable match, they meet in New York City and fall in love. Simon—inventor of the jigsaw puzzle—eventually makes his fortune. Now wealthy, Flora and Simon become obsessed with rescuing those they left behind in Europe, loved ones whose fates will be determined by growing anti-Semitism on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Puzzle King explores a fascinating moment in history with a cast of characters who endure with dignity, grace, and hope for the future.

Release date: November 2, 2010

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Praise for The Puzzle King

“The kernel of Betsy Carter’s third novel, The Puzzle King, is a powerful bit of family lore … A work of genealogical fiction from the late 19th century to the eve of World War II … It balances the Jewish immigrant experience in New York—both the achievement of the American dream and the curdling of it—against the insidious anti-Semitism of Germany and Eastern Europe.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Skillfully using ties to her own family, Carter weaves a compelling story and a rich, multilayered novel around three Jewish sisters and deftly captures the squalor and bustle of early 20th century New York … A masterful puzzle, a fine novel with twists and turns and pieces that interlock tightly. The Puzzle King is Carter at her best.”

—The Miami Herald

“Carter’s third novel is all the more poignant for its provenance.”

—People

“Everybody loves an inspiring rags-to-riches story, and The Puzzle King delivers that in spades … [It] manages to tell the immigrant story from a uniquely relationship-and family-based perspective, all the while honoring their bravery and stoicism in the face of great odds.”

—San Francisco Book Review

“Tracks the differing responses immigrants have to America’s open arms and turned-up noses.”

—The New York Times

“It’s a rare treat when a novel’s literary merit can compete with its capacity to entertain, but Betsy Carter, who’s slam-dunked it before with Swim to Me and The Orange Blossom Special, has netted another winner with The Puzzle King… Carter, a consummate storyteller, cobbles declarative sentences from diction so unexpected that readers rush from one vivid image and scene to the next until the book’s characters, their culture and the caveats of their existence are as real as anyone and anything has ever been.”

—The Louisville Courier-Journal

“A wonderful story, overflowing with history, intrigue, bravery, and redemption.”

—Examiner.com

“A vibrant portrait of a time and some unexpectedly courageous people.”

—BookPage

“A tale of immigrants succeeding despite the odds, a passionate marriage, sisters who love each other despite their differences, and bravery in the face of ultimate evil. The characters feel real because they are—the story’s based on true-life events you’ll ponder long after the final page.”

—Parenting

“A beautiful tale of one family’s experiences in America and Germany prior to the start of World War II … Carter’s lyrical prose captures the era and retains a personal touch … The Puzzle King is an engaging and moving novel.”

—The Salisbury (NC) Post

“Readers will be swept away with the story … With spiraling tension and a fearless ending that leaves one breathless, the author has created a rich, multilayered novel.”

—Mobile Press-Register

“The Puzzle King is an engrossing and especially timely novel.”

—The East Hampton Star

“Betsy Carter writes with deep drama and astute historical validity.”

—Knoxville News Sentinel

“A poignant story of love, longing, and the truths of family connectedness.”

—Booklist, starred review

“A moving tale … Drawing on family legends (no one could invent a story line like this one), Carter deftly paints a panoramic portrait of life during the turbulent 1930s. The pieces of her gripping story fit together so neatly that they cannot easily be torn apart. Highly recommended.”

—Library Journal, starred review

“Betsy Carter has written a haunting and stirring story of heroism in the shadow of horror. The Puzzle King is a deeply human drama, a powerfully affecting novel that enriches history by giving a face to the faceless whose lives hung in the balance as the holocaust approached.”

—Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitlerand The Shakespeare Wars

Three years to the day after Simon Phelps was born, his father died unexpectedly. Simon’s mother told him it had to do with a vision his father had right before his death: “He saw you being snatched up in the claws of a giant bird and taken away. He ran after the bird with his hands grasping at the air hoping to save you, but you were already lost to him. The stones of sorrow set heavy in his heart until, eventually, they crushed him.”

Simon had no memories of his father, only a black, formless guilt that his birth was responsible for his father’s death. Sometimes he would try to reach back into memory and draw a picture of him, but all that surfaced was the image of a small man disappearing underneath the weight of large stones. He sketched everything before him—his mother cooking, his sister braiding her hair, the maple trees at the botanical garden—and he drew other things that existed only in his imagination. He hoped that by re-creating what he saw inside his head, the image of his father would untangle and present itself to him.

Before she sent Simon away from Vilna, his mother bought him a notebook and some colored crayons. Only a mother who understood how much her son relied on his imagination would indulge in that kind of extravagance.

The family got by with little. She supported her seven children by taking in sewing: jackets, dresses, and pants with seams so worn that the wind blew through them. Of course she made all their clothing, which was passed down from one child to the next.

The future seemed as bleak and tattered as the clothes she tried to mend. It took months for her to scrape up the eight dollars it would cost to send Simon, her youngest and, in her mind, smartest, child to America, where she was certain he would find a better life. Vilna was no place for a child, not now, in 1892, when a knock on the door at the crack of dawn or in the middle of the day could mean that any boy over twelve would be taken away and sent into the army. It could be months or even years before his family would hear from him again. Or maybe never, if he was Jewish.

She promised him that she and his six brothers and sisters would follow. Someday, she told him, after he’d made some money and had a house, he’d be able to afford to bring them to America. “You must be brave for all of us,” she’d said, turning her face away from his. To herself, she repeated the prayer that God would help him find his way. Her God would reunite them soon. She had to believe that.

Because he could take only what he could carry, she agonized over what else besides the notebooks and crayons she should pack in his satchel. She made the choice to include her apron because she wanted something he could touch and smell, and for her own selfish reasons, it gave her comfort to think that at night he might roll the apron into a ball and rest his head on it. The thought of how it felt to run her fingers though his wavy hair before he fell asleep hurt her heart, so she moved on to worrying about more practical matters. She stuck in a few coins she had saved because she’d heard that he could trade them in at the money exchange when he got to Ellis Island. She also packed a brown-and-white checked sweater vest that she had knit for him.

For weeks before he left on his voyage, she told him things about America. Of course, no one who had gone there had ever come back to Vilna, so everything she told him was based on rumor, scant pieces of knowledge, or what she wanted to believe was true. “You must dress well in America, everyone there does,” she said. “It is important that you go to school and get an education. With an education, you can do anything. And it’s important to keep your chest warm and stand up straight.”

Simon’s mother was not a typical Litvak mother. She was a warm, embracing woman, stout and tall for her generation. The last time he saw her, he was just tall enough so that when he leaned into her, his head nestled in the crook of her arm. He was nine years old.

AT NINE, SIMON was a runt of a boy, the kind who could easily have been swallowed up by the squalor and homesickness that consumed him. When the first-class passengers would throw nuts and oranges down below to steerage, he refused to get on his hands and knees like the others in order to grovel for the prizes. Instead, he’d turn away and put his hands over his ears to tune out the laughter from the people above them. It wasn’t as easy to ignore the stench of rotten food, sweat, feces, and urine that stung his eyes and clogged his throat. It was so crowded that when passengers got seasick, more often than not they would lean over and vomit on another passenger before they could make it to a window or landing. When his own stomach ran sour, Simon searched for a place to be sick in private. Only once had he lost control and puked on someone else’s shoes, and the memory of it, years later, still made his face go red.

At night, he slept on one of the wooden bunks lined up two in a row with no mattresses, with whatever blanket he could find. Simon would be so wedged in between the other unwashed bodies that at least once a night a meaty arm fell on his chest or someone rolled over on top of him and all but smothered him. The cries and moans of the others were so palpable sometimes he couldn’t be sure that they weren’t his own. When he thought no one was looking, he would reach into his valise and pull out his mother’s apron. It was the kind that ties around the waist, and it had blue and gray roses and a white ruffle around the bottom and hip pocket. His mother had worn that apron every day, and he could imagine her wiping her hands on it after cutting up a chicken or quartering an apple. He would bury his head in the apron and retrieve its history of cinnamon and onions. Breathing deeply, he could also smell yeast and paprika. For those few seconds, he was back in his mother’s kitchen in Vilna.

His mother was right about the notebook. During the dreary days on the boat, he filled both sides of every page with colorful drawings of his fellow passengers. He’d focus on a few characters at a time and make up stories about them. The Fatso family slept near him, and although all they ate was the rancid food and watery soup that everyone else ate, they seemed to get bigger and bigger as the days went on. He sketched them all as roly-poly characters who gobbled up chairs and whole lambs and anything else in sight. “They made farts that smelled of gefilte fish,” he wrote under one picture. Under another: “My stomach’s going to explode.”

He thought he would make some drawings of the Screamers, a man and woman and their dimple-cheeked daughter, who was about six or seven. He recognized the Screamers from Vilna, where they had brought his mother clothes for mending. Little Rita hadn’t stopped sobbing since the moment they had boarded the ship; at night, her cries were commanding enough to cause the thin planks of wood to vibrate beneath him. In the daytime when she howled, he could see her eyes, wide and fear filled. Her mother would yell at her father to make the girl stop, and the father would shout terrible things back: “I am pulling out my hair. If this child doesn’t shut up, someone will go overboard: her or me or all of us.”

One morning, Simon came upon the wailing Rita. She was sitting at the edge of a crowded bench and looked as if she might fall off at any moment. He drew a picture of her with a happy face instead of a teary pouting one. In his version, she wasn’t sitting on a bench but was nestled in the limb of a tree on a sun-filled day in front of a pretty house with flowers all around it. And her dress wasn’t the soiled white frock she wore every day—it was pink and clean. She had a big purple bow in her hair, just like the one his sister wore the morning he went away. He tore the sketch from his notebook and handed it to her. Rita stared at the picture with disbelief then looked up at Simon. “It’s you,” he said.

That night, before she went to sleep, he gave her something else. He’d made a drawing of her with her mother and father, and once again he saw it through his prism of sunny days and pretty houses. Only this time, he carefully tore the picture into odd random shapes and wrapped them up in another sheet of paper. “It’s a puzzle,” he told her. “Try to put it together.” Rita and her mother and father pieced together Simon’s gift, and that night she slept quietly.

After that, Rita rarely left Simon’s side. She came with him when he snuck upstairs to where the first-class passengers were taking their morning coffee on deck. They eavesdropped on their conversations, and, for both, it was the first time they heard English spoken. Their movements, it seemed to Simon, were rigid, and when they spoke, they’d move their heads mechanically from side to side in a way that struck him as funny. That’s where he came up with the character Mr. Machine, whom he drew at stiff right angles. It was Rita’s idea to have his head shaped like an upside-down pot. They’d have Mr. Machine grinning a toothy cartoon smile and saying things like “Please tanks you” and “Mine name es Walthur.”

Sometimes they’d creep into the bowels of the ship and watch one of the ship’s stokers, a small man with shiny balloonlike muscles. He became the inspiration for Strongman, a character with no neck and throbbing biceps, which Rita insisted that Simon emphasize by drawing wavy lines around them. Strongman would pick up first-class passengers and dump them into the ocean. One of his victims was a skinny woman with pointy features carrying under her arm a tiny dog with the same angular features. As Strongman hoists them into the choppy waves, the two of them are screaming, “Yap yap yap!” and wagging their tongues. Another Strongman victim was a young boy flying through the air, his shirttails flapping around his ears and a wurst shoved down the front of his pants.

The water in the pictures varied. It was blue or greenish or calm or stormy. Sometimes the characters in the background were vomiting. On this boat, time melted into a perpetual gray twilight wrapped around the rhythm of the water and the intervals between seasickness. Only Simon, the Fatso family, Strongman, Mr. Machine, and Rita lived in a world of pastels. On their last day at sea, Simon gave Rita a farewell present he had made for her. It was a series of consecutive drawings stacked one on top of the other and tied together with a piece of string from his own luggage. He showed her how, if she flipped the pictures quickly with her thumb, she could see his happy version of Rita in her pink-and-white dress with the purple bow in her hair jumping up and down with the word “America” coming from her lips. On the last page, in the bottom right-hand corner, he printed his name.

AS THE SHIP pulled into New York Harbor, Simon’s colors became muted and his images more specific and less buoyant. He drew the ship’s bow cutting a V through the gunmetal waters of the harbor. The brick and limestone New York skyline was sharp and angled, a far cry from Vilna, with its sensual silhouette of rolling hills, gothic church spires, and turreted castles.

Just before he stepped off the ship and onto the river barge that would ferry him to Ellis Island, Simon took his vest from his satchel and put it on. He would enter America well dressed. He would stand up straight even as he was ordered into a line with the rest of the children who were traveling alone. He watched the faces around him grow taut, eyes receding with fear. He had not come all this way to be intimidated by these tall and well-fed Americans who were barking directions in English. Compared with the sharp corners of his language, this one sounded lifeless and lazy. There was no urgency to it.

He looked straight ahead as a man held down his tongue with a wooden tongue depressor and studied his tonsils. He tried not to flinch when another one took a metal buttonhook, turned up the upper lid of his eye, and shone a light into his eyeball. This was the moment everyone dreaded. For one thing, it hurt. But more significantly, if one of the inspectors found even a trace of trachoma, a highly contagious eye infection that could cause blindness, they’d send you right back home on the next lice-infested boat. And before you knew it, America would become a fever dream that belonged to somebody else.

Maybe it was the severity of his rimless spectacles, or the gray aura around his eyes, but Simon looked older than his nine years. When he went to the money exchange, the man behind the counter didn’t call him “sonny” as he did the other boys. Instead, he said, “Good luck, young man,” and handed him back twelve American dollars. With his satchel in one hand and notebook in the other, Simon stepped off the ferry that took him from Ellis Island into New York City, a place that was more vivid than anything he could have dreamed up in his own sketches. People were waving handkerchiefs, calling out foreign names. Some were crying. He listened for his name and waited to see a familiar person. But there was nothing; no one.

The families walked in huddles, embracing and laughing and occasionally throwing little children up in the air. He trailed behind them as they headed east, away from the river and the piers. The leather soles of his boots were thin enough so that he felt every step of the cobblestone terrain. It was early spring, and although there were no flowers anywhere, the buds on the trees were heavy and green, and when the sun shone down on him, he could feel its warmth beat back the chill of his fear. He stepped over the orange peels and wiped away the dust that the horses on the horse cars had kicked up into his eyes. The air was tart with the smell of garbage and manure. He made his way past young boys and old men hawking everything they could fit onto their decrepit pushcarts. “Knives sharpened here,” they shouted. “Ripe melons for sale.” “Potatoes, fresh from the earth.” The words, so new and circuitous with their open vowels and jaw-snapping consonants, sounded more to him like animal cries.

The old wooden shacks and brick row houses here were as shabby and tumbledown as the ones he’d left behind. He kept walking because that was all he knew to do. Every now and again, he reached his hand into his trouser pocket to make sure the twelve dollars was still there. He was so tired that he thought he might sit in a doorway and close his eyes, just for a few minutes. But he knew that a sleeping boy with a satchel by his side and twelve dollars in his pocket was prey, so he kept on going. There were houses that would take him in and give him a pallet to sleep on in a room crowded with others. They talked about that on the ship. Someone wrote the English words on a piece of paper for him, “Boarders, ten dollars a month.” He just had to find a sign whose words matched up.

It was getting late and the sun was low in the sky. He looked back toward the harbor and watched the sky change from a pale yellow into a blood red. Light shimmied off of the glass windows like fire and everything was touched with gold. He felt embraced by the light. It was not his mother’s embrace, but it had a feeling of warmth, of something he might learn to love. His heart beat fast and his stomach growled so loud with hunger that he was certain that everyone could hear him coming.

At last, he saw the letters whose shapes he had memorized: “B-O-A-R-D-E-R-S eight dollars” a month. Close enough. He would stay here.

The number 262 was painted on the lintel above the entrance. In Vilna, he would have taken the steps two at a time, but this was not home. Slowly, he pulled himself up the stairs and pushed against the wooden front door. Save for a bowl of light coming from a gas lantern in the lobby, it was completely dark. He dropped his satchel to the floor and shouted, “Hallo.” He heard voices from above and footsteps on bare wooden floors. “Hallo,” he shouted again, trying to sound more authoritative. “Hallo.”

After the third try, he heard a woman’s voice call down to him. Her words were a garble but her tone was unmistakably annoyed. “Ja, ja,” she said, as she made her way down from upstairs with slow, heavy footsteps. He noticed her hands, red and gnarled, tightly gripping the mahogany banister. Her eyes were cloudy and she squinted, trying to make out his form in the darkness. When she did, the edges of her voice softened. “Ein Kind,” she said, then said it again, as if she were speaking to someone else. “Ein Kind.”

He pulled out his twelve dollars and waved it in the air. “Hast du essen?” she asked, pretending to lift food to her mouth with a fork. He rubbed his stomach to indicate that he was hungry. “Komm,” she said, beckoning him upstairs. “Müss essen.”

The old woman knew what she was seeing. He was not the first young boy to arrive hungry and alone on a stranger’s door-step. There was an unspoken fellowship in this neighborhood: They come, just as we came, and whatever food we have, we share. We can always make room for one more body. But we don’t have to like it.

There were two rooms and twelve people in this apartment. They all spoke at once, each in a different cadence and accent. It sounded to Simon as if dishes were breaking. An old man yelled at a young boy, then turned and pointed at Simon. A lady about his mother’s age, though shorter and rounder, placed a pot of borscht and some freshly baked bread on a table. The others rushed for the food, making no pretense at politeness. He waited to see if anyone would offer him some soup or bread, but no one bothered. He took his place next to a girl who seemed to be his age. She pushed him aside and broke off a hunk of the bread for herself. He tore off another piece of bread and ladled the beet-colored soup into his bowl. All the while, a thick, fleshy teenage boy kept asking him a question. “Outside?” he’d say. “Wanna go outside and take a piss? Piss. Piss. Even foreigners have to piss.”

Simon gulped down the soup as the boy’s eyes stayed fixed on him. When he finished, the boy, frustrated at Simon’s lack of comprehension, motioned him to follow. They went down the back stairs to a little unlit yard. Simon recognized the acrid odor of urine before he saw the hole in the ground. The boy unbuttoned his trousers, took out his penis, and aimed straight for the hole, about a foot away. “That’s better,” he said, shaking off the last drops. “C’mon, you gotta have to piss by now. Stand here.” He pointed to a spot right next to where he was standing. “See if you can get it right into the hole.”

Simon did as the boy had done; only he held his penis so that the trajectory of his urine formed a fine golden spray before it met its destination. The boy slapped him on the back. “That’s the way to go,” he said.

As they headed back up the stairs, Simon worked his lips silently and then tapped the boy on the shoulder. “Piss,” he said, shyly.

“That’s right, piss,” said the boy.

“Piss,” said Simon again, and then again, proud that he had just learned a new word of English.

It was a cold evening, but the room that Simon shared with seven other people was hot. There were no windows and the only air there had already been breathed by other people. But that was okay. He had a full belly, a roof over his head, and for the first time in many weeks, he was not rocking and pitching and fighting back nausea. Tonight he would sleep, and tomorrow he would look for a job.

Mr. and Mrs. Eisendraft, the old couple who rented out the rooms at 262 Eldridge Street, took Simon under their wing and never raised his rent beyond the original eight dollars a month. They enrolled him in the same public school their son attended, the boy who’d initiated the pissing match. His name was Aaron, but when Simon tried to say “Aaron,” his tongue would trill over the r and it would come out sounding more like a command. “Never mind,” Aaron said one day after Simon had stumbled over his name a few times. “Just call me Pissboy. That way you’ll always remember me.”

Simon immediately got work as a newsboy. Up at 3:30 each morning, he’d be at Newspaper Row to pick up that day’s bundles by 4:15. He’d stand out on Delancey and Orchard in the punishing sun or the numbing cold, and there he’d stay until every newspaper in his stack was gone. “Getcha New York Sun, only two cents.” “Fire on the Bowery, read all about it.” He learned the language of the city while his mind’s eye captured its contour and nuances.

His pictures filled the apartment at 262 Eldridge Street. In the rooms without windows, he hung sketches of windows looking out to sunlit skies with birds in the trees. For the kitchen, he made drawings of the pushcart vendors and of peaches and bananas and the other exotic fruits he’d discovered in America. He drew real likenesses of the people in the apartment, not caricatures with exaggerated features and swipes of brushstrokes. In Simon’s pictures, Mr. Abner’s mole above his right eyebrow looked as smooth and pink as it did in real life, and the purple veins in Mrs. Futterman’s nose were as clear and visceral as the coarse hairs sprouting out of Mr. Selig’s ears. Simon’s drawings were almost obsessive in their exactitude. He drew fast and constantly, as if he was trying to make the pencil or crayon keep up with the images that played in his head like a zoetrope.

The others at 262 Eldridge Street called him Rembrandt, although with their Yiddish, Hungarian, and Russian accents, it came out with too many rs at the beginning. He nodded and accepted their compliments with a smile. “What a polite boy,” they said. “How remarkable for a child to be that sensitive to adults. And no parents, to boot.” Mostly, he looked serious and old for his age, but sometimes, when his blue-gray eyes were open wide behind his rimless glasses and his mouth was round and slightly puckered, it was easy to look at Simon and find the face of a helpless child.

What they couldn’t see was how Simon was locked up inside. Unlearning one language while claiming another, he owned few words to give voice to his feelings. All he could do was travel through his eyes, tracing the lines and flows of what he saw in his head. Like the other people at 262 Eldridge Street, he was from somewhere else that didn’t want him. He was stuck with them in this little house, all of them as poor as they’d been before they got here. Only now there was no America to look toward. Simon hoped that he would find his place, that he would be one of the lucky ones whose pictures he had seen in the newspaper: the ones who found a foothold in this world. In that way, he felt separate from the other people in the house, and even, at times, disparaging of them.

These people. They talk all the time. They talk in the language of the old country. And what do they talk about? They talk about nothing. They talk about food and money and the work they do, and they talk about each other. They will never be Americans if they don’t learn to speak English the way Americans do. They never go anywhere, just to their jobs and back. The same four blocks every day. I will learn to speak so that no American will be able to tell that I am not one of them. I’ll talk about the crimes and the fires and the prize fights and I’ll go to far away places like the Bronx and Brooklyn. I won’t end up here like the rest of them. God will put me in jail for having bad thoughts like this, I know He will. But when my mama and my sisters and brothers come to America, they have to have a house and money. I promised.

ON THE WALL in the place where he slept were two draw. . .