Sephardic Jews / An Excerpt: His Hundred Years, A Tale

EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL BY SHALACH MANOT (JANE MUSHABAC–FULL BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE BELOW)

One hundred years ago today … Turkish Jews–Sephardic Jews–were a strong immigrant presence in New York City, though overshadowed both then and in the history books by the Central and Eastern European (Ashkenazi) Jews who arrived in vastly greater numbers. 

For today's post, we are doing something a bit different. We are honored to reprint a fictional text set in 1920 East Harlem, an episode from the novel His Hundred Years, A Tale (2016).

Under the pen name Shalach Manot, which she uses for her fiction about Sephardic Jews, Jane Mushabac has written a novel about this little-known immigrant group. While well over a million Jewish immigrants came to New York at the turn of the last century from Eastern Europe, only 20,000 Jews came here from Turkey and the Balkans in that period. They were descended from Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, and kept their Spanish as a mother tongue.

The author introduces this episode: In a novel about Turkish Jews, a scrappy peddler with no English, within weeks of arriving on Ellis Island in 1920, is on a street corner near Central Park selling balloons.

(The following is reprinted by permission.  © 2016 Jane Mushabac. All rights reserved.)

110TH STREET AND 5TH AVENUE, 1920

HE SAW THAT ON SUNDAYS, Italian families bought balloons for their children. The families walked the few blocks to the park and in front of the stone wall under the shade of the trees, bought a balloon for each child. They didn’t just buy for one child; they bought for them all. He stood and watched. This was a different country.  He couldn’t go talk to his mother’s cousin, he had nothing to sell, no one to sell it to, there were no mosques, no cafés, and no one was selling trousers door to door, or eggs or wheat. A small church on the corner was very different from a mosque; nobody went there five times a day, and it was closed and empty most of the time. It was lonely in the apartment at the top of a tenement in a sea of five-story stone buildings in the hot city on Lexington Avenue at 112th Street, each building with a fire escape set on its face like a crooked iron mask. He had sung “Samiotisa” all the way across the ocean, goodbye to the girl he was leaving behind, a Greek song of longing and farewell. But the girl was no girl, rather his childhood of melons, donkeys, lettuce on a stoop, a caravan of carts of wheat, the countryside, the sky wildly open to breezes from the sea, and the men like his father in fezes saying prayers in Hebrew, all traded in for what—for being a nobody on cluttered hot tenement streets lined along cement pavements, buildings packed with families on each floor, speaking languages he didn’t know.   The balloon man spoke Greek, which the boy knew, so he could watch, and charm the details out of him, casually, admiringly, about the $25 tank which the boy then would lug up the four flights to his apartment where he was living with his brothers and sisters, and a one-dollar gross of balloons, and where to get these supplies. The boy wouldn’t need English, which he didn’t have, just the words, ten cents. 

So he blossomed like a young balloon tree on the perfect spot he found, uptown from the Greek, on the corner of 110th Street and 5th Avenue, five blocks from his home. He blew the balloons up in the apartment, carried them down the four flights and set himself up in business, watching for the Italian families who came right up to him. He was the man they wanted, the American balloon man, to make a happy day for the family. He had figured out a way to be a breadwinner because he and his brother and sisters in the small apartment needed money, and their parents had been stopped from coming here. He and his sisters played with the baby of his married brother and sang French songs until “Chantons Victoire” from the story of Judah Maccabee became an empty chant rather than the call to triumph it needed to be. And how many times would playing with the one-year-old and teaching him to count in French be enough? There was no money in it. The boy’s father was still in Turkey. With the balloons, the boy felt a rush of hope. But he said nothing. He kept his mouth shut, collecting dimes. He kept his eyes alert, starting early in the morning, carrying the heavy helium tank up the four flights, blowing up thirty balloons, rushing down the stairs with them, selling them in a flustered panic, dashing the five blocks home, rushing up the stairs, getting thirty more balloons, leaving behind his money, his cap always firmly on his head giving him dignity in the midst of all this dashing and determination like in a movie reel. 

It was Sunday, one o’clock in the afternoon. With so many people, could he lose? It was a real day for the park. He was hungry. He figured he’d sell what he had and then go home and eat. A crowd of people was waiting to buy balloons from him. He was standing there, pulling a red balloon out from the bunch, when a policeman came over. What did the man want? Why did the man grab him and pull him down the street?  At the precinct no one understood Spanish and they put him in a wagon. He was riding three quarters of an hour.  His balloons were dying. “Everybody Out!” He didn’t know where he was. “No speak English.” Nobody spoke Spanish, French, Greek. Nobody spoke Turkish, Hebrew. The words of all the languages he knew fell away from him. He was worried about the balloons, they were shrinking up. The police put him in a building, they put him in a room and locked him in. He was inside with a half dozen people. He was only in the country three, four weeks. What did he do wrong?  He was crying. He was losing money. If he took the air out of the balloons, they would be no good. It was already five, six o’clock, he hadn’t eaten lunch, hadn’t eaten supper. The judge didn’t come in until ten o’clock at night. The boy was more worried about the balloons than he was about himself. He had his cap, his hat. The policeman said, “Come with me.” He was in front of the judge, and a policeman was yelling at him. What was going on?  A man came over and slapped him on his head. His hat went a mile away in the huge room.  Now he ran after the hat—all he was worried about was the hat. What did the judge say? Maybe it was something about the hat. The boy didn’t know, but then suddenly he was outside, on a trolley, first one, and then when he saw it was going in the wrong direction, another, until he got home to his brothers and his sisters. “Don’t worry,” they said, when he told them what had happened, his future taken from him in one miserable day. He wanted to go home to Turkey, his friends were there, and the breezes from the sea. “So don’t sell on 5th Avenue,” they told him, guessing. He didn’t know, he didn’t read signs. And he had no regrets, even on the ship when he put his head through the porthole, he didn’t take off his hat. He had put his hand on his hat and it stayed put and with his face out in the middle of the sea everything was beautiful.

About the author:

Jane Mushabac has received an NEH and a Mellon Fellowship, as well as many other awards, for her books, short stories, and essays. NPR commissioned her to write a radio play about the Spanish Jews for broadcast on the 500th anniversary of the Expulsion. She co-authored A Short and Remarkable History of New York City (Fordham University Press and the Museum of the City of New York), a “Best of the Best” of the University Presses. Her 2016 novel, His Hundred Years, A Tale, excerpted here, has won high praise from Morris Dickstein, Ari Goldman, Eliezer Papo, and Marc Angel, among others.  She’s done readings at Harvard, the CUNY Grad Center, Scribblers on the Roof, and at New York’s Center for Jewish History, where since 2018 she has created three immensely popular International Ladino Day events.  Dr. Mushabac’s writing has been translated into Russian, German, Bulgarian, and Turkish, and most recently into Ladino for an Istanbul monthly; she is professor emerita of English at CUNY. 

Read her interview with Book Culture.

www.janemushabac.com

Tags: Sephardic, Sephardim, Turkish Jews, Central Park, balloons