the Emigrants Read Free Page B

his sisters Gita and Raja, and his Uncle Shani Feldhendler, had ridden to Grodno on a cart that belonged to Aaron Wald the coachman. For years the images of that exodus had been gone from his memory, but recently, he said, they had been returning once again and making their presence felt. I can still see the teacher who taught the children in the cheder where I had been going for two years by then, placing his hand on my parting; I can still see the empty rooms of our house. I see myself sitting topmost on the cart, see the horse's crupper, the vast brown earth, the geese with their outstretched necks in the farmyard mires and the waiting room at Grodno station, overheated by a freestanding railed-off stove, the families of emigrants lying around it. I see the telegraph wires rising and falling past the train window, the facades of the Riga houses, the ship in the docks and the dark corner on deck where we did our best to make ourselves at home in such confined circumstances. The high seas, the trail of smoke, the distant greyness, the lifting and falling of the ship, the fear and hope within us, all of it (Dr. Selwyn told me) I can now live through again, as if it were only yesterday. After about a week, far sooner than we had reckoned, we reached our destination. We entered a broad river estuary. Everywhere there were freighters, large and small. Beyond the banks, the land stretched out flat. All the emigrants had gathered on deck and were waiting for the Statue of Liberty to appear out of the drifting mist, since every one of them had booked a passage to Americum, as we called it. When we disembarked we were still in no doubt whatsoever that beneath our feet was the soil of the New World, of the Promised City of New York. But in fact, as we learnt some time later to our dismay (the ship having long since cast off again), we had gone ashore in London. Most of the emigrants, of necessity, adjusted to the situation, but some, in the teeth of all the evidence to the contrary, persisted for a long time in the belief that they were in America. So I grew up in London, in a basement flat in Whitechapel, in Goulston Street. My father, who was a lens-grinder, used the money he had brought with him to buy a partnership in an optician's business that belonged to a fellow countryman from Grodno by the name of Tosia Feigelis. I went to primary school in Whitechapel and learnt English as if in a dream, because I lapped up, for sheer love, every word from the lips of my beautiful young teacher, Lisa Owen. On my way home from school I would repeat everything she had said that day, over and over, thinking of her as I did so. It was that same beautiful teacher, said Dr. Selwyn, who put me in for the Merchant Taylors' School entrance examination. She seemed to take it for granted that I would win one of the scholarships that were available every year to pupils from less well-off homes. And as it turned out I did satisfy her hopes of me; as my Uncle Shani often remarked, the light in the kitchen of our two-room flat in Whitechapel, where I sat up far into the night after my sisters and parents had long since gone to bed, was never off. I learnt and read everything that came my way, and cleared the greatest of obstacles with growing ease. By the end of my school years, when I finished top of my year in the exams, it felt as if I had come a tremendous way. My confidence was at its peak, and in a kind of second confirmation I changed my first name Hersch into Henry, and my surname Seweryn to Selwyn. Oddly enough, I then found that as I began my medical studies (at Cambridge, again with the help of a scholarship) my ability to learn seemed to have slackened, though my examination results were among the best. You already know how things went on from there, said Dr. Selwyn: the year in Switzerland, the war, my first year serving in India, and marriage to Elli, from whom I concealed my true background for a long time. In the Twenties and Thirties we