A Castle in Brooklyn(13)
Zalman placed his trembling hand on the knob of the door and squinted up into the sun before stepping out onto the porch. He could not help but marvel at the row of neat corrals that housed sixteen Guernsey cows waiting for their troughs to be filled, the chickens, fat and eager, already scratching the ground that lay dormant, waiting for the rows of corn that would grow tall and ripe until ready for the farmer’s hand.
A day of milking would usually bring about four gallons per cow, and if he were lucky, perhaps he would get to drive the wagon with its special produce of milk and eggs to town later that afternoon. But first he would have to check on the newly hatched chicks in the barn; yellow and soft, they would burrow into the palm of his hand, and Zalman wondered at these moments if this was what it felt like to enter heaven.
He gulped, pushing back a recollection, and belched the bromide he had taken last night for one of the headaches he’d sometimes had since leaving the old country. By the time Zalman had ten squirts of milk in the tin pail, others had joined him—the farmer’s two sons, both frail looking, with unkempt black beards and wire-rimmed glasses, looking more like yeshiva students than farmhands. Within minutes, two more came, survivors like himself, hauling large bales of hay, raking it, readying the feast for the cows while the steady streams of milk against metal kept beat as the roar of a wind banged against the shutters of the farmhouse. Sometimes, only sometimes, Zalman thought about engaging the others, also from Polish towns near the woods, but when he looked at their faces, intent on the hauling, the feeding, the daily chores demanded by a farmer’s life, their eyes downcast with another secret preoccupation, he thought better of it.
By 8:00 a.m., the cows had begun to grow drowsy, their heavy lids drooping. The milking and feed work done, the men walked out into the open, breathing the air in huge gulps as if it were water, and led the animals to pasture.
The men then trudged back, not toward the rectangular building that held their small lodgings but to the farmer’s house, where a breakfast of bubbling-hot oatmeal and fried eggs already plated by the farmer’s wife was waiting on the dining table. Looking at the building with his father’s eye, Zalman guessed it had taken no more than three months to construct the gray ranch house with its flat roof and simple porch. Before stepping up onto the porch, Zalman and a couple of the men dug into their deep pockets for unfiltered cigarettes and watched as the smoke drifted up against the blue sky. If Zalman ever gave it much thought, he would acknowledge that this was his favorite part of the day.
He knew that there were billions of people crowded into this world, which was becoming smaller by the minute. He knew that somewhere people were packed into rattling subway cars on the way to their jobs in the great metropolis, others standing chest to chest in foul-smelling cars meant for cattle. He knew in this world there were lines of elaborately coiffed ladies wearing ermine-lined coats, waiting to be served at fancy department stores; others, bare skinned, faces striped with fear, waiting for the executioner’s ax. He knew these things, but as Zalman stood under a smiling sky, taking the smoke deep into his lungs, he tried to forget all that. In those few moments there was no one else in the world but him and the now-pink sky and the gentle touch of a breeze as miles of grass swayed as far as the eye could see. Zalman was at peace.
He stamped the dirt from his feet before entering the house and took his place at the table to the right of the farmer and his two sons just as the older man was reaching for a second helping of the oatmeal, which sat in two big bowls at the center of the table. He gave Zalman a nod as the young man took up his fork.
Rabbi Isaac Rozenstein, the dairy and chicken farmer who’d purchased the land with loans obtained from the Jewish Agricultural Society in 1940, had a round face framed by a dark beard that disguised an amiable smile. The rabbi, his wife, Golda, and their four children had arrived from Poland prior to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, thanks to the sponsorship of an American-born cousin living in Illinois. With only the clothes on his back and a few meager pennies in his pocket, Isaac had listened attentively in the tiny apartment of the Chicago tenement where his cousin and their family of five lived, as he learned of a man, a German-Jewish philanthropist, Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who was helping the Jews from Eastern Europe escape their oppressive history of antisemitism and worse, and settle them on farms throughout New Jersey, Delaware, Florida, and other states. Although the cousin himself asserted that he was too tired and disinterested for such a venture, perhaps Isaac could find his fortune through the generosity of Hirsch’s society? Even though he had no experience running a farm, having never so much as seen a cow in his lifetime, Isaac jumped at the chance. And when he professed a desire to get as far away from the metropolis with its smog, crowded tenements, and general indifference, he soon found himself on more open fields, where not car horns or rattling dump trucks but the call of a rooster at daybreak and the melodic lowing of cows could be heard penetrating the air.
Since Jacob already had a sponsor living in Brooklyn, Zalman knew he would have to make his own way. So, at the suggestion of a fellow survivor he had met in a displacement camp, he became one of eighty thousand Jewish immigrants who entered the United States. Like Isaac, his benefactor, Zalman eschewed the cities and opted for the place closest to earth and sky. And although farming was as antithetical to Jewish mentality as viewing stars in the middle of the day, Zalman believed that this was a place where he would be needed. He discovered that there was a demand for farmwork in the States since large amounts of economic aid were being used to subsidize desperately needed exports to Europe. Yes, that was where he would begin his new life as an American.