When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb

Author:Sacha Lamb [Lamb, Sacha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Levine Querido

Rose’s cousin Bluma had left a message with Malke, at the bookshop, which was waiting when Uriel got back. Bluma said that she couldn’t take a day off to visit Ellis Island because the factory bosses wouldn’t allow it. This, of course, was part of the reason everyone was plotting to strike. Today was Friday; she would be able to go to Rose on Sunday only. She’d written a letter it could take to Ellis Island explaining the situation, so it could show the officials and maybe they’d let Rose go, but her accompanying message implied she had very little faith in this method.

After the rabbi’s unhelpful response, Uriel could not find the energy to mind. It was already going to get Little Ash, so it might as well get Rose, too, and then they could all spend Shabbes in New York City, where the streets were paved with gold.

Somewhere tucked away in the letters of its name, it had found bitterness and sarcasm.

“I will go and find them,” Uriel told Malke. “I will find a way to help them.”

Malke sighed and nodded. She knew there was little to be done without hearings before a Board of Special Inquiry, which could take weeks and weren’t guaranteed to go well. She had seen any number of cases where someone’s friends and relatives couldn’t get into the country or had to stay at the island until they recovered from illness they’d picked up on the ship. And of course she felt the heartbreak of her own father’s death, and her own separation from her sister and niece and nephews.

“They like it better when you have more letters,” she said. “Go to the Women’s Council House, down the street. See if they will send a letter with you, to prove that Bluma is real. They know her there.”

Uriel already felt exhausted by walking up and down all over New York, but it did agree with the Ellis Island officials when it came to the power of letters. It tucked Bluma’s message carefully into its vest and followed Malke’s directions down the street to the Council House, a place that Malke had named in English in the midst of her Yiddish sentences. This Council House belonged to the same National Council of Jewish Women that had provided Rose with her English phrase book on Ellis Island, and Uriel found it to be a clean, bright, and airy building with its door propped open in welcoming fashion. When it kissed the mezuzah, it sensed that this was a comforting place, overall, but had seen its fair share of strife also.

As it stepped over the threshold, a woman in a nurse’s apron stuck her head out from the room on the right and said, “May I help you? No unaccompanied young men upstairs, please.”

Uriel declined to inform her that it was neither young, in absolute terms, nor a man at all. “I need a letter for Ellis Island. Mrs. Malke Shulman sent me, from the bookshop.”

“Oh!” The nurse’s face opened up at this.

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