CHAPTER TWENTY
PRAYER DURING A STORM AT SEA
May our prayer be acceptable in Thy presence, O Lord, our God and God of our forefathers! and for the sake of Thine attribute of mercy, cause the waters to cease from their raging, and still the waves of Thy great deep. Conduct us speedily to our destined port, for the issues of life and death are in Thy hands. Hearken unto our supplication, even at this present hour when we are praying unto Thee. Calm the storm, and conduct us with kind and gentle breezes. Guard us from the tumultuous billows, and from all the perils of the sea; guard us from the lightning and the tempest, and the confusion of darkness; guard us from dangers by water and fire, and from every obstruction, injury or fear.
From the treasury of the elements, O God, send forth a favorable wind. May all who have charge of the vessel be faithful and vigilant, active and skillful in directing or obeying, that so we may speedily and safely be brought to our destined port. Thou who madest the sea canst still the waves thereof; Thou who didst create the winds, canst allay their rage. O Lord! guard our souls which depend upon Thee, and deliver us from evil. As we put our trust in Thee, let us never be confounded. And as for us all, we will bless Thy name, O God! from henceforth and for evermore. Amen.
—From “Hours of Devotion,” a similar prayer that Isaac Caprove read from his own Hebrew prayer book during the first storm of the voyage
August 9, 1923–September 1, 1923
The year 1923 might be remembered by historians as the year that the conflict between Greece and Turkey officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne. To those who were traveling on the lower deck of a cargo ship that year, however, that particular war did not occupy their thoughts in the slightest. They were more interested in curing their seasickness. Who could blame them? The waves of the Black Sea were powerful and forbidding, and the journey was turbulent and rough.
The Black Sea became stormy, and jagged streaks of lightning illuminated the dark sky before violently attacking the sea. The SS Braga swayed relentlessly, back and forth, back and forth.
It was so damp and miserable on the lower deck that most of the passengers became ill. The people who suffered most from seasickness were grown-ups. Children watched as their parents threw their heads out toward the water when they became ill. Others clung to the railing, supporting their bodies upright while the ship rocked.
In the midst of the commotion, Channa looked at her poor mother, white as a ghost, calling out to her in desperation.
“Channa,” she cried, “take this with you to the kitchen, and bring me back a spice cure.”
She took a cup from her mother’s unsteady hand and walked toward the kitchen. Channa had learned a little bit of English while attending school in Romania, so her mother always sent her to fetch the onion and garlic remedy.
When she opened the ship’s kitchen door and was greeted by the sight of Black chefs, the terrified girl let out a scream. Although Channa was already eleven years old, she had never seen a Black man before. In an instant, she recalled rumors she had heard from the women in Kishinev. “If a Black man places a ring on a girl’s finger,” they would say, “he could take her away with him forever.”
As her body trembled, the girl cast nervous glances at the American cooks. She was petrified that one of them would attempt to place a ring on her finger. Of course, they never did; they simply smiled at each other in amusement. In fact, as Channa was leaving the ship’s kitchen, she overheard one of the men telling the others, “If the little girl was so scared to see just three of us,” he laughed, “I can’t wait to see her face when she lands in America!”
The SS Braga was a cargo vessel capable of holding 1,480 passengers: all but 130 were in third class. The Caprove family was among those in the lower deck because it was the cheapest. From Constantinople onward, Channa’s parents lined up to get off at every port, anxious for a reprieve from their constant seasickness. Channa was left on the ship to take care of seven-year-old Sunny and baby Beryl. As she watched Rebecca and Isaac leave them behind at each port, Channa could not help but feel envious.
It wasn’t all bad, though. The children took advantage of their time without parental supervision to play with the other kids and explore their new surroundings. At the beginning of the voyage, Channa and Sunny used to see animals on the boat—the livestock would pass right by them, and cows could be heard mooing on the bottom deck—but as the trip progressed, the girls saw less and less of them. Sunny asked Channa in all innocence, “What did they do with these animals?” Her older sister didn’t have the heart to tell her that the animals were slaughtered right on the ship to be used as food.
The Dardanelles
Traveling through the Dardanelles, the narrow waterway connecting the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmora, was surprisingly calm. One of the old Jewish passengers explained to Channa and Sunny that it was the same famous strait that separated the legendary lovers Hero and Leander. He recounted the tale of how Leander lived on the Asian side of the Dardanelles, and his love, the maiden Hero, lived on the opposite shore. In the evening, Leander swam across the strait (presumably at its most narrow point, about one mile) guided by the torch atop a tower lighted by his love. One evening, a storm extinguished the light as Leander was halfway through the Dardanelles, and he drowned. Tragically, in response to his death, Hero threw herself into the water.I
The SS Braga sailed forty miles down the Dardanelles, which separates the Gallipoli Peninsula of European Turkey from Asia Minor.II On the western shore the spectacular hills and cliffs framed the coast of Europe. In the waters below, the scattered wreckage of different vessels that were destroyed in a naval battle was visible. Passengers on the ship questioned whether the shipwrecks were due to the recent fighting between Greece and Turkey; some believed that they were remnants of sinking vessels that were lost in the Gallipoli Campaign years earlier.
Rumors spread that the ship might not be able to pass through the Dardanelles because of the fighting. On July 24, 1923, just a couple of weeks before setting sail, the Treaty of Lausanne officially ended the conflict in the area.III Turkey recovered several lands and the internationalized Zone of the Straits, but it was to remain demilitarized. In times of peace, the Straits were to remain open to all ships. Likewise, it would also remain open to all ships if Turkey was neutral during times of war. If Turkey was at war, it could not hinder the passage of neutral ships. The passengers were grateful to pass through the Dardanelles without any trouble. It would be while passing through the waters at Athens, in Greece, that they would suffer their most humiliating experience.
The soon-to-be immigrants could not understand why it was that the Greeks didn’t have the proper facilities to allow their ship to dock at their port. In hindsight, the reason may not have been, as they had first assumed, that the water was too shallow for the ship to pull in. For health reasons, the Greeks may not have wanted the vessel to reach their shoreline. Instead, the passengers were piled in like cattle on small tugboats, manned by oars. The sea was so rough that it took all their effort and strength to stop themselves from tumbling over.
The small tugboats led the confused passengers toward the city of Athens, where they got their first and only glimpse of Greece. While lucky enough to reach land without falling into the water and drowning, they soon found themselves quarantined. Faced with the indignity of delousing, officials in Athens separated the travelers into groups of men and women and demanded that they take off all their clothing and shoes, which were sent through a massive heating and sterilization process.
They were then taken to huge, public showers where they were instructed to wash away the most feared thing of all: lice. Some of the authorities there really made it miserable for them; every minute of that day was humiliating. Their clothing, which for many was all that they owned to wear, was returned ruined. They then piled everyone mechanically once again onto those small tugboats, returning them to the ship.
At the time, no one could understand why the Greek authorities had put them through such a demoralizing experience. As far as they were concerned, they were simply passing through their waters. However, the fear and concern of the Greek authorities regarding the problem of lice was a justified one. Just a few years earlier, lice that transmitted typhus rickettsiae had claimed the lives of between two and three million people in the Russian Empire. Typhus had almost taken Rebecca’s life in Belaya Tserkov. With poor hygiene conditions on the ship, and little access to bathing, the immigrants could potentially spread lice among the passengers, causing a life-threatening epidemic.
The humiliation didn’t stop at Athens. While on the voyage, passengers were also subjected to degrading searches. No one was spared examination: men, women, and children were searched for lice. Even if just one nit was found, the refugee would be immediately directed into another room and their hair would be cropped short without hesitation. It happened to some of the most beautiful women and children. Channa never imagined it would happen to her.
On one particular search, conducted after she had been running around the ship with other children who were not chaperoned, a woman found nits in her long, beautiful brown hair. Her mother tried frantically to get them out, but it was too late. Without hesitating, they pulled the girl into a room and cut her hair extremely short above the ears. As Channa’s long locks dropped to the floor, she cried and cried. Her home and possessions had been brutally stolen from her, and now her hair, too. It was too much.
Rebecca tried to console her, but she could not undo the hurt and embarrassment that her daughter felt.
The heartbreak of her own ordeal could not compare with the despair of a woman on the ship whom Channa recognized from the doctor’s office in Kishinev. She was the mother of the child with Down syndrome, whom the doctor had been examining just prior to her last eye appointment. Channa looked for the little boy, but he didn’t seem to be on the ship with his parents.
“We couldn’t bring him with us,” her husband explained to Channa’s parents. “The doctor told us that they would never admit him through the medical inspections at Ellis Island.”
“Where is he?” Rebecca asked him.
“We paid a woman in Romania to take care of him.”
The mother of the little boy who had clung to her leg in the doctor’s office in Kishinev was inconsolable.
As his eyes welled up with tears, the father told them, “The doctor warned that if we brought him with us, we’d all be sent back to Europe. I had to think of our other children; I had to decide what’s best for our family.”
Before that day, Channa had never seen a mother so tormented at the loss of a child. Perhaps for this woman, the emotional pain was greater knowing that her beloved child was living, but that she could only wonder about his condition. If he had died as baby Fay did, at least his mother would know that there was nothing more that she could do for him. Only God knows if that child ever survived or if the woman in Romania that they paid ever really showed him kindness and took care of him. Times were so bad, and people so desperate, that they often abandoned handicapped children they loved. People were fleeing to America in order to save their lives and were forced to do so under any pretense and at any price.IV
Watching the distraught couple, Channa forgot all about her hair. There was no doubt that with hair, or without hair, she was among the lucky ones since her immediate family was still together and would soon meet up with her other loved ones in the Goldene Medina.
A Taste of Freedom
The journey across the Atlantic lasted three weeks, and the weather that summer after leaving the Black Sea was gorgeous. On that glorious evening, as the ship was entering the New York harbor, the crew told the people, “If you look outside, you’ll see such lights.”
This was the first time that the young family saw electric lights. Channa and Sunny stood out on the deck together on the evening of August 31, 1923, and watched as the Braga sailed toward the harbor. The sight of the entire harbor glowing was truly breathtaking; they never felt more thrilled in their lives. Their ship would dock on September 1, 1923, and they would not leave it until daylight.
Early the next morning, Molly, Bessie, and Itzie sent up a beautiful basket of fresh fruit filled with bananas. No one knew what they were or even had the slightest idea how to eat them. Isaac held a piece of the foreign fruit up to his nose to smell it, trying to imagine what it might taste like. He then tried to take a bite out of it, but he quickly spat it out! None of the refugees on the ship knew that bananas had to be peeled before they could be eaten!
Channa and Sunny looked around and scanned the harbor with their eyes to see if they could find their aunts and uncle. Molly and Bessie had talked Itzie into renting a small rowboat so that they could row out to greet them.
Channa spotted them before her on the rowboat; she and her family were way up high on their newly docked ship and waved to the others in the water below. They were deliriously happy to see them; the pain of being separated for more than two and a half years was finally over. Itzie, Molly, and Bessie had never seen their sister’s baby boy before. Isaac was hoisting him up on his shoulders, showing off his new son. Rebecca cried as she watched her sisters’ faces light up when they got their first glimpse of Beryl.
Tears of joy soon gave way to laughter as the first thing Itzie thought to ask Isaac was about his generous gift of fruit. “Isaac,” he yelled up to him in Yiddish, “Di glakhst di benenes?” (“Did you like the bananas?”)
Isaac looked down at him with a puzzled look on his face.
“Di glakhst di benenes?” Itzie once again asked, this time making it clear that he was referring to the yellow fruit.
Together, they all let out a hearty laugh.V
Sunny held Channa’s hand as they continued waving down to their aunts and uncle in the small boat below them. The little girls knew that when they first eyed the statue of the lady in the harbor, they had finally made it to the Goldene Medina. Channa and Sunny had reached the land where people could pick gold from its streets, and where everyone could live in peace.
1. I. Later, Channa learned that many poets and writers were inspired by this folktale. Homer, Keats, Marlowe, and Byron all wrote poetic verses about the tragic lovers. Lord Byron took the matter one step further. As an amusement, on May 3, 1810, he swam across the Dardanelles in emulation of Leander’s legendary swims to visit Hero.
2. II. Since the Renaissance, Europeans have called the strait the Dardanelles, after the vanished city of Dardanos. Dardanos was said to have been built by the founder of the Trojan dynasty on the Asian side of the strait. It was also once known as Hellespont. In Turkey, it’s referred to as Canakkale Bogazi.
3. III. The world formally recognized the country of Turkey that the Turkish nationalists had built for themselves. However, in their war of independence, the Turks had lost ten thousand men during the fighting and more than double that number from disease. Greece’s casualties amounted to about ten times that of Turkey’s.
4. IV. The name of the family who faced the heart-wrenching decision to leave their child behind—a child they truly loved—is the only piece of information that Channa ever refused to share with her granddaughter.
5. V. It seemed like almost every immigrant had a banana story to tell. Channa’s cousin, Ruby Stumacher, who had landed at Ellis Island about two and a half years before her, was given that same fruit basket by his uncle Julius, a plumber in Brooklyn. Ruby initially thought that you had to eat the skin and throw out the inside of the banana; needless to say, it didn’t take him too long to realize that he had it backward.