Every night through that first long summer she listened to the grown-ups’ low, anguished voices and went to sleep believing they would go back. Only after war broke out in September did everyone fully grasp that the voyage to America was final. They could never return to Hungary. When Hungary joined the Nazi powers it ceased to be their country. From that time on Sophie wasn’t sure that her Hungarian past had anything to do with her at all. She stopped thinking of Budapest. The person she had been there ended there. Chance memories of any particular place or moment blurred instantly into shame and confusion. After living in Pittsburgh for a year she could not have said what she missed in America; she missed her father, of course, who had left for New York. But she never thought that she missed things she had been used to in Budapest.
They lived in one of a long row of identical houses forming part of the Jewish ghetto; a block further along the same street was the Irish ghetto; at the next intersection began the Italian ghetto. The children of the three ghettoes did not speak to each other except to heckle. It was weird to land in a Jewish ghetto in America where being Jewish was an issue between people in a way she never experienced it in Budapest. She was accepted on the block when they arrived because she was a “Yid” and they were constantly after her to make her more their kind of “Yid,” telling her with whom she might or might not associate; teaching her Yiddish. The shopkeepers teased her for refusing to pronounce English with a strong Yiddish accent. The children on the block harassed her as the word got around that she went to the house of an Irish Catholic girl.
In school there were the noisy classrooms, angry teachers trying to maintain order by yelling and hitting; the scuffles in the corridor between classes. Often she didn’t know whether the kids who heckled her or wouldn’t associate with her were from the Jewish ghetto or the “others.”
There was the corner drugstore where the big kids hung out and where every lollypop- and ice cream–licking child aspired one day to spoon the sundae or banana split whose giant images were plastered on its windows. There was East Liberty with its three five-and-ten-cent stores, twelve movie houses, its soda fountains and slot machine joints, its stench of exhaust gas mingled with the smell of popcorn and sweet carbonated drinks, where everyone from the surrounding slums flocked evenings and weekends. And towering over the store windows and movie marquees, the giant cereal boxes, tires, tubes of toothpaste and the silly smiling faces of beer-drinking, soup-gobbling, car-satisfied men, women and children, the gods of America.
There was downtown Pittsburgh, a bigger East Liberty, more ponderous and somber, where the movies, department stores and soda fountains were more expensive.
There was nothing you couldn’t get in America, her uncle said. He was a well-to-do businessman who came to America before the First World War, and boasted about his Buick and his fine brick house in the best residential part of Pittsburgh. His street was cleaner, the houses bigger than where she lived and there was a bit of lawn between the porch and the sidewalk, but it wasn’t really different. It was near her uncle’s house, the day after they arrived in America, that she heard for the first time a boy yell “shaddup!” with that ugly snarl that she would hear everywhere around her, in her uncle’s voice telling how he rose from being a salesman to a floor manager. “...in this country if you’ve got what it takes, you can get anything you want,” he said, his mouth twisted in a snarl as he talked of America’s wealth and opportunities. “But you gotta work for it,” he said, “you gotta forget the old life, you can’t sit around in a café here, you gotta work or you’re nobody...” Her uncle talked just like the shopkeepers in the ghetto, only meaner.
When people asked her how she liked America it was simply to hear her say how much better it was here than in the old country; whether it was a kid on her block or her uncle’s boss who drove a Cadillac, they wanted the same answer. Nobody wanted to hear about “over there”; they told you that “over there” you didn’t have things like you did in America, and telling them about the baths in Budapest or maintaining that one did have telephones there, only invited the phrase, “Then why don’t you go back where you came from.”
“You’re lucky to be here,” people told her. To be in Europe now would be terrible, her family, as well as everyone else, kept saying. Every hour from seven in the morning her aunt listened to the news broadcast—the occupation of the Lowlands, Norway, the fall of France, Dunkirk, the Blitz. She tried to make herself indifferent to historic events from which she had been excluded, which it was impossible to grasp, living in Pittsburgh. She went to the movies every day in the summer, movie people filled her mind, she lived in the many movie worlds of prison breaks, spy rings, navy battles, historical romances, love, horror and cowboy movies. The reality of the war in Europe came across most in the daily greeting of the shopkeepers, “Aren’t you glad you’re not over
