Freida Sima, Babaleh, and Babe were gone forever, vestiges of a previous life, and her citizenship papers officially marked her as Bertha.
* * * * *
While the first part of her plan, to learn English, was going well, the second part wasn’t. Within a few months she was being treated as a member of the family where she worked, more like an older daughter than a nanny. Besides eating with them, she was introduced to their friends, went on vacation with them, and became very attached to the children who reminded her of her younger brothers and sister.
She did not have enough skills yet to look for a job in the garment district where Aunt Sadie worked and which would leave evenings free for study. Besides, if she worked in a factory she would have to pay for a furnished room and who knew whether she would earn enough to afford it. Now she had free room and board and of the three dollars a week she earned, one went for personal expenses or savings, one toward repaying Uncle Joe for her ticket, and one was to be sent back to Europe.
“Better I should let things stay as they are for a while longer,” she thought, and continued working on her reading skills.
By the time she’d been in America for three years, my grandmother could read a book in English. As time passed she became a voracious reader, frequenting the public library several times a week. Deep in her heart she was certain she would go back to school to become a teacher, and for that reason, even at eighteen, she refused to consider marriage. ”
“There was a time everyone wanted me to marry Uncle Joe,” she recalled. “After all, we were close in age and many in our family had married relatives.” But she announced that marriage was not on her agenda, and Joe went back to Europe, married his sister-in-law’s niece Rivka, and brought her back to America in late 1913.
By mid-1914 my grandmother felt it was time for part B of her plan. But just as she began thinking of looking for another job, disaster struck with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Six weeks later, in August 1914, war broke out and all contact with Eastern Europe was severed. What was happening to her family in the Mihowa? Like everyone else, my grandmother followed the news, and her nights were sleepless with worry about her parents and siblings, especially baby Tuleh, born after she’d left.
“I got so thin with worry that a doctor even prescribed a special tonic to give me an appetite,” she recalled. A picture taken of her at the time shows a pale young girl with long hair and a tiny waist, so different from her usual ample figure.
The years passed and as the children she cared for grew up, their father suggested she come work in his pocketbook factory. Now she finally had free evenings to study “but I was so worried about the family in Europe that I had no head for night school,” she recalled sadly.
Fearing they would be her only family left, she spent almost every evening with her mother’s two brothers and sisters before returning to her furnished room in Harlem, then still a Jewish neighborhood.
For four years Freida Sima heard nothing from Europe. In early 1919 she received her first letter from home. The family was well and she had a new sister, Sheindl, born in 1915 – a girl after seven boys. Her mind was finally at ease but was she too old at 23 to finally begin her formal American education?
