Divorcing

to recall with clarity as it was at the time impossible for a child to perceive with clarity. Blocks of smoke-blackened houses with their rickety porches and grimly jutting fire escapes. Cars, billboards, soot, stench, litter, a lot of noise and no place to go except the movies. Walking down the street in outgrown dresses from Budapest or in strange ladies’ garments from the Jewish Welfare Agency, she thought: It is not I. Seeing too many movies, shoplifting from the five-and-ten, daydreaming in class, reading comics, screen romances and crime magazines from the drugstore rack, forging sick notes for the teacher in her aunt’s name; it was America, nightmare, trash, vacuity, stupor. From the year she came to America for the next eight years in Pittsburgh then Garfield then Bryn Mawr College till the year she married, she tried in vain to grasp the meaninglessness of every room and street corner, her inability to experience the rooms and streets as a moment in her life. In America the sky was not sky, the grass was not grass, Sophie Landsmann was not Sophie Landsmann. But America was America.

A child of ten getting on the boat with her father and her uncle’s family in 1939 was immune to the sorrow of leaving everything behind and fears about the years ahead of them in a new country. The grown-ups had decided to make the step that would change their lives because they feared Hitler would occupy Hungary. They left to escape the terrible fate Jews would suffer; it was of this that they spoke, and of the hardships awaiting them in America. In the train from Budapest, before crossing the Austrian border, the Hungarian passport official had said to her aunt in beautiful country dialect, “Good woman, why are you taking these three beautiful children out of the country?”

“Because they’re Jewish children,” Aunt Olga said, “if I don’t take them out of the country the Nazis will kill them.”

“We’re all Hungarians,” the passport official said with feeling. “Jewish or Christian Hungarians, it’s the same thing. We Hungarians will not let the Germans harm the children on our soil.”

“They are Jewish children,” Aunt Olga repeated and the passport official protested again that they were Hungarian children.

She sat, her eyes nailed to the floor in mortified rage. It was over, it would have nothing to do with her in her new life. She stopped being Hungarian when she got on the train. From the day they boarded the S.S. Aquitania she wrote only in English, even though she had to look up most of the words in the Hungarian-English dictionary.

The grown-ups’ reasons for leaving were their business; she had to hold on to the meaning this voyage had for her, the fulfillment of longings and presentiments that had begun to stir some years ago of a great event that would change her life.

Sailing across the Atlantic on the S.S. Aquitania, Sophie was too caught up in the wonder and excitement of the voyage to think about past or future. The S.S. Aquitania not only had everything—shops, bars, restaurants, ballrooms, studies, game rooms, swimming pool, gym, movies, promenade decks—it had it three times; the three classes like interlocking cities of a floating island. She dressed up very nicely and practiced her English with stewards, deckhands and nice old gentlemen in the first-class bar. When she said she came from Budapest, eyes twinkled; many had been there, remembered the baths and the corso lit up at night. Tea every afternoon. It was not just the tea and cookies but the ceremonial way the steward poured it, asking how she liked her tea as if she were a real first-class passenger and as politely as he did for an older person. There was a beautiful wood-paneled study with leatherbound books in glass cases and writing desks with many drawers and slots full of different kinds of stationery. She would have been happy to spend the rest of her life on the boat.

She wanted to love America. The Twentieth Century Fox newsreel played behind the word, coming on with loud music, the pictures changing so fast and more happening than one could take in—ladies playing tennis in white shorts, airplanes, a boxing match, a burning zeppelin, a parade, someone doing a backdive, exploding oilwells, bathing beauties, tanks. She thought of the twentieth century not just as the continuation of the nineteenth, but as something incredible that happened, as surprisingly and mysteriously as the newsreel turning on in the dark cinema, and it happened in America more than anywhere else. America was the twentieth century.

Sitting at one of the desks of the wood-paneled library, she began writing in her new language. She had to construct the sentences slowly, a Hungarian-English dictionary at her side—often prompting her to make up something she hadn’t intended just so as to possess on her page an exotic word glimpsed at random in the dictionary.

The sun was beginning to set when land came into view. A flat coast, low brownish rocks. A man pointing in the direction of the sun said soon they would see the Statue of Liberty; he told her it was a gift from France. But before she saw the statue she had to go inside and wait in the tourist-class smoker for customs officials. Every so often she got up and peered through a porthole, but there was nothing to be seen except people moving or the side of another boat. It was dark when the boat docked; they passed over the ramp with the crowd into a narrow passageway that seemed a continuation of the ramp, through a small doorway into an enormous hall where trunks were being pushed under the various letters of the alphabet.

“Are we still on the boat?” her little cousin kept asking.

There had been the excitement of a week’s boat trip; one day in a big New York hotel where the children raced each other up and down thirty floors on the stairways and the elevators;