Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [112]
Her brother, Noah, attempted to chop off his thumb to avoid conscription into the Russian Army, but he botched the job. Noah was taken away and later transferred to Siberia, facing up to twenty-five years of imposed military service. It was a commonplace that those Jews drafted into Far Eastern duty were scarcely ever heard from again. Noah took the easy path out and converted to Christianity and later married a woman of Asian extraction.
Momma and Poppa were both dead when the pogroms of 1881 erupted. The Diamond sisters fled, along with hundreds of thousands of other Jews. They mostly landed in the wretched Lower East Side of Manhattan, two square miles of ghetto without a wall, the most thickly populated place on earth; a place of universal poverty and misery, roach- and rat-infested tenements, a breeding ground for TB, a hunting ground for exploiters to find herds of cheap labor, a place of broiling in the summer heat and numbing cold by winter.
After two years of it, a group of cousins and aunts and uncles collected enough to bring the girls to Baltimore. At least there one could breathe clean air and find some measure of relief from the foulness of New York.
On three hundred dollars borrowed from the Hebrew Free Loan Society, they opened the Diamond Sisters Wedding Gown and Wig Shop in the middle of poor Jewish Baltimore, on Lombard Street.
The sisters were good at what they did, so there was enough work but little profit. Each gown was fashioned from satin, velvet, or silk material and lavishly embossed with tiny beading, sequins, and paste jewelry. The headdress was covered with small pearls and crystals and the veil mostly made of antique lace. For the bride, it was a once-in-a-lifetime gown for which her family would spend its last penny. But making such a garment required hours upon hours of exacting hand labor.
But it was a living, and the Diamond sisters were industrious and fared decently until Jacob Rubenstein happened into the picture. Jake was a salesman, a good looker, a flashy article. He got Sonia pregnant and a quick marriage followed; then came three more children and a fourth was on the way.
Jake proved to be a no-goodnik, both as husband and provider. He fooled around with other women, even prostitutes, a fact Sonia was aware of, but remained silent about.
Jake? Jake was a dreamer, a door-to-door salesman. He failed to make a living no matter what line of merchandise he carried and he felt himself too good to be confined to selling inside a store. Every week, it seemed, Jake was chasing another get-rich-quick scheme. Every week another failure.
The goods he sold on his route were paid off by his customers at the rate of ten cents to a dollar a week. His customers were adept at not being at home on Sunday, which was the traditional collection day. Sunday night, when Jake would go through the ledger and bring the accounts up to date, there was usually barely enough to pay for his last shipments of goods. On those occasions when he collected a few dollars over his costs, he’d usually lose it in a pinochle game.
He always had his hand in the till of Sonia’s dress shop, keeping the sisters buried in a hole out of which they never managed to climb. The relatives were constantly on Sonia. Why should she put up with this no-good bum?
Sonia stuck. Despite all of Jake’s bad habits, he made her laugh. Always with the salesman’s jokes and always with the kisses. He tried, after a fashion, to be a good daddy. He was very affectionate and the kids were still too young to know the awful truth.
At least Jake never laid a mean hand on Sonia or the children, and once in a while he’d hit it big at the card table. When he did oy, oy, oy. Jake didn’t spare the horses. He’d lavish on Sonia jewelry, a fur, a millinery piece covered with stuffed birds. Sonia always had the bonanza gifts in reserve