RHEA AND THE STATEN ISLAND FERRY

Vicki Oppenheimer

This story about the Staten Island Ferry happened before I was born, but I heard it every time my mother had an audience, and continue to rehear it.

It really starts in Russia during the cruel years of Czar Nicholas II, but it has become so much part of family lore, and has been told so frequently at family dinner parties, that I consider it part of our immigrant past.

The year was 1905 the Russian Czar was embroiled in a disastrous war with the Japanese. The war was going badly and the Czar imposed heavy taxes especially on the Jews. My father, a vigorous young man in his twenties, joined a dissident group called the JDL (the Jewish Defense League). In January1905 the JDL set off on a march of protest against unfair taxes. The march turned into a riot when Russian cavalry swooped down and arrested the marchers. They were herded into a cattle car.

The car remained stationary and the policeman guarding the prisoners jumped down to see what was wrong. The door remained slightly ajar and the marchers pulled it open and fled into the woods. My father was one of the fugitives. He dared not return to his shtetl, so he wandered in the woods for many days until he found help from a German Immigration Agency. He did some manual work for the Agency and they gave him the money for passage to America.

As soon as he found a job he sent for Mama and their five-year-old little girl, Rebecca. He warned Mama not to ask for immigration papers because he might still be on a list of escaped fugitives. They would have to use an underground route by way of Austria for their escape.

Rebecca, or Rhea, as she was later called, had to be impressed with the importance of keeping their passage secret. When they were approaching the border she was again told not to make a sound and warned that If a sound was heard they would all be arrested and put in jail.

The border guards accepted the bribes, and when the fugitives were safely across the border, they fired a couple of shots into the air to demonstrate their vigilance. Rebecca caught her breath turned pale, but didn’t utter a sound. She remained mute on their trek across Europe, she was silent on the ship and when they finally arrived in New York she hugged and kissed her Papa, but she did not speak.

Mama used all the remedies she knew to help her little girl. She tried cold compresses, then she tried hot water bags on the chest, she even called in a woman to try the painful process of applying suction cups to the chest. All those remedies failed and Mama finally took Rebecca to a doctor.

The physician told Mama that there was nothing organically wrong with the child, he explained that she was just "scared" and if he was talking to a rich woman he would tell her to take the little girl on a long sea voyage where she would relax, regain confidence and speak.

Mama was not a rich woman, but if a long sea voyage would restore her little girl to health, she was determined to find a way. There was the Staten Island Ferry, absolutely free and only a subway ride from home. All during the summer months Mama packed a lunch for the little family and they embarked on a day-long ride on the Staten Island Ferry. Rebecca enjoyed the ride, she played on board the ship, sometimes she stopped to listen to strangers, but then she would resume playing and not say a word.

September was approaching. Mama was worried,. How could the six-year-old be registered for the first grade in school if she did not speak? It was just a few days before school opened, while Mama was hanging clothes on a clothesline, and seemingly bending too far forward, that Rebecca cried out in English “Look Out Mama, you’ll fall.”

Rebecca, whom we later called Rhea, had absorbed the English language but needed an emergency to make her speak. She was enrolled in school, spoke without an accent and became President of her Senior Class in High School .

Mama would brag about Rebecca’s achievement and tell this story of the Staten Island Ferry and how it made her little girl ”relax.” It is one of the family's favorites.

Comments added by her son:

Vicki was in her 90s when she wrote this and I think that some errors have crept in. There are differences between this version and what I heard when I was a child.
She writes that my grandfather was a member of the JDL, but that was a much more recent organisation. As I recall he was a member of the Socialist Bund, a group that demonstrated for economic reform and democracy. It was not a specifically Jewish organisation, although many Jews were involved.
In earlier versions of the story the train started off to Siberia but it was so cold that it came to a halt (Vicki said that it froze to the tracks). The guard went to see what was happening and my grandfather and four other prisoners escaped. He was an experienced woodsman who had travelled from estate to estate and contracted to harvest lumber from them and he survived the bitter cold, but the other four died. He suffered severe frostbite and was crippled for the rest of his life by the damage to his feet.
A shtetl is a Jewish community, like a ghetto, but usually outside the main town.
I think that in this period the Staten Island Ferry was not yet free, but cost a nickel. However you could stay on all day. Nowadays the ferry is free, but you have to get off and reboard every trip, presumably to keep people from camping out on board.

Further comments would be welcome. Send them to Bill Silvert.

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