BARBARA KRASNER

The Newcomer

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2024: VOL. 39.

WINNER OF THE 2024 FOLIO FICTION PRIZE

Barbara Krasner’s “The Newcomer” masterfully tells the story of a Polish Holocaust survivor as he navigates a shy new love in America. Leo’s memories of the wife and daughters he lost to Bełżec are skillfully superimposed onto Bella, a survivor who escaped the same camp. “The Newcomer” is realistic study of small victories that is as naturally sweet as Bella’s sugarless cake. – FOLIO Editor-in-Chief

“What you need is a good woman,” Esther says, placing a bowl of stuffed cabbage in front of me. Today is Monday, and Monday means chopped meat. Esther is a woman of rituals. She is a Litvak and makes a tomato sauce instead of the white sauce and raisins we use—used to use—in Galitzia. I simply nod and bury my face in my food. It does no good to criticize. I did that once to my wife, Ruchel, she of blessed memory, criticized her matzoh balls. She did not talk to me for a whole day and night.

“You go to those newcomer meetings? Anyone there to meet?” Esther’s not going to give up.

“Only other men,” I say. “It is the YMHA.”

“We’ll have to fix that then,” Esther says.

“Mom,” my niece Lenore says as she now collects the emptied bowls, “are there any newcomers in the Ladies’ Auxiliary?”

Esther finally takes her place at the end of the dining room table closest to the kitchen. “You know, now you should mention it, yes. Bella.”

“Leave the poor man alone from your meddling,” my older brother, Herman, says. He grabs a piece of pumpernickel to drag through the sauce in his bowl just as Lenore is about to remove it. He slaps her hand lightly.

“Yes, dear,” Esther says. But she and Lenore exchange glances and I know I am in good hands with them.

I have been in America just a few weeks now. An agency found me a job. What choice did I have but to accept it? On the way home from the factory in Newark, I walk from the bus stop along Cleveland Avenue to Herman’s house, I peer into people’s windows. They’ve not pulled down their window shades, so why shouldn’t I look? I see one woman in an apron pulling a pan out of the oven—and then dropping it. I see and hear children fighting inside, watching a long metal spring fall over itself on the stairway from the second floor. I make a mental note to ask Herman what this spring-like toy is. Gravity must make it look like it’s walking all by itself.

I hear the rustling of newspapers and the bad reception of radio sets. In one house there’s a big wooden console, too big for a stereo system. Looks like a pair of rabbit ears is standing on top of it. Then I see some kind of metal structure attached to the roof that I would expect crows to perch on.

On Sunday afternoon. Esther sets up a card table in the front parlor. “My bridge group is coming,” she says. She lays out petite tuna and egg salad sandwiches with a relish tray of celery, carrots, olives, and pickles on the dining room table for “a little nosh,” she says. The coffee’s already percolating although she’s also made a pitcher of lemonade. I pick up the Newark News, telling myself to practice English by reading the articles. I prefer the funnies.

The ladies arrive and they schmooze in a mixture of English and Yiddish. I pay no attention and give in to my temptation to read the comic strips. 

“What is Dick Tracy up to today?” a woman says in Galitzian Yiddish. She’s about 5’4”, thirty-five, short dark hair with gray just around the temples, giving her a distinguished look. If not for her pink floral dress, I’d think she’d be upper-crust. I quickly turn to the Dick Tracy comic strip and relay his latest adventure. “I’m Leo,” I say in English. “Henoch, that is, Herman, is my older brother.”

“Yes, I know. I’m Bella Szwarcbrot.” Are we supposed to shake hands? I don’t know how things are done here.

“Nice to meet you,” I say.

“It’s awfully hot out today,” Esther says, bringing Bella a glass of lemonade and me a glass of seltzer. “You two have a lot in common. Sit, talk.” Esther points to a spot on the sofa diagonal from me. She then puts dessert on the table for the ladies. She calls it strawberry shortcake. I want to pluck the luscious strawberries right off it, run my fingers through the cream. The girls, oh my girls, they of blessed memory, loved any dessert with whipped cream. Though I couldn’t eat anything with sugar, I took delight in watching them.

The ladies pick at their narrow slices with the delicateness of baby birds. Except Bella. She cuts herself a thick slice and one for me, too.

“I can’t,” I say. “I have a reaction to too much sugar.”

“I’m so sorry.” She moves my plate next to hers. “From the war?”

“No, it’s a family thing. Rather ironic.”

“Why?” Whole strawberries disappear into her mouth.

“My family was in the sugar business.” Would one bite hurt me? Would my vision blur and would I feel faint? Would I have to be taken to a doctor or hospital? I’d never tested the boundaries of this sugar thing.

“Were you in a camp?” Bella asks.

“Labor camp, Siberia. Then a Displaced Persons camp in Germany before I could finally get clearance to come here. You?”

“Bełżec.” The hairs at the back of my head stand on end. Ruchel was at Bełżec..

“I thought there were no survivors.”

“There is one now.”

If there’s one, maybe there’s more. Ruchel. My girls.

***

“If you’ve got money in your pocket, even just a little,” Herman says at dinner, “you’re a wealthy man, like a Rothschild yet. Like your job at the belt factory, right, Leo?”

Esther chimed in. “Money, puh. You’ve got your health. You’ve got good food to eat. This is what matters.”

Lenore set the carved-up brisket on the table. “Don’t listen to them, Uncle Leo. Love! Love is what it’s all about.”

“Money, health, food, love,” I say, “you’re all right. There have been so many times since ’39 when I’ve been without all these things.”

“I saw Bella Szwarcbrot this morning at the market,” Esther says, her eyes twinkling like blue diamonds. “You got an eye for her maybe?”

Lenore says, “See, I told you, love makes all the difference.”

“Sha,” says Esther, tucking a fallen napkin back into Herman’s shirt. “What do you know of love?”

Lenore’s cheeks redden like a rare roast beef. She’s got a beau, I reason, what she doesn’t want to talk about. 

Outside, the oak trees frame the sky. Some mockingbirds peep at each other. I put Bella in my mind’s eye—her easy laugh, her warm tone—and yet I know the gray life she had in Bełżec. How did she manage to survive? To have hope? But what I really want to know is whether she knew Ruchel and my girls. 

“You got maybe Bella’s phone number?” I ask Esther as she and Lenore serve the coffee.

“You bet!” 

***

As an engineer, I know the smallest distance between two points is a straight line. But clearly this doesn’t apply to the learning of English. The teacher grows tired of my incessant questions, my hand always in the air. “Why is ‘u-g-h’ in ‘through’ pronounced different from ‘ugh’ in ‘caught’ and different yet again from ‘ugh’ in ‘tough’?” This English frustrates my logical thought. Oy, another “ugh” in “thought.” Through discomfort, I tell myself, comes the greatest learning.

I have new clothes from the Ready-to-Wear consignment shop. A suit for holidays, a snazzy, jazzy plaid sports jacket for weekends. For work, some plain white shirts and black, gray, and brown trousers. At the belt factory, I sit alongside other men, some newcomers, some not. At break time, I enter our little break area and get a drink of water.

“Hey, Leo, you an engineer?” Moe, a fellow worker, asks.

“Yes.”

“They’re making televisions at the Westinghouse factory by the Erie Lackawanna railroad. Maybe they could use a smart guy like you.”

“What’s a television?” I ask.

Moe and his buddies double over in laughter. “You never heard of television? My boy, you’re missing out! It’s like going to the movies in your own living room! Westerns, game shows, variety shows, theater. At lunchtime, let’s walk over to Broad Street and I’ll show you.”

I like the idea of a job that uses my real skills. I can hardly keep my mind focused on the machinery cutting the holes in leather for belts. Soon enough, it is noon and Moe comes to collect me. We walk out onto the street and thread our way through the crowd to the even more crowded main downtown Newark thoroughfare of Broad Street. Moe takes hold of my shirt sleeve and pulls me to a store display window. “See? This is a television!” It’s a device with a small screen. Images are shown through it. I begin to think about inputs and outputs.

“How do I apply for this job?” I ask. And how do I convince Herman and Esther to buy one of the image boxes? Ruchel would have enjoyed this television thing. My Ruchel. I had been told she had been rounded up by the Nazis in my absence and taken with our daughters to Bełżec, but there could be a chance she survived. People did survive. Do survive.

I walk the streets of Newark. I sit on the Number 24 bus to Orange and Herman’s house like a specter of the past between two worlds. Not fully in one or the other. Drifting in the space between them, an outsider in both.

I cannot bring back the past. I cannot go back to 1939 before the Soviet invasion. If I shut my eyes even in the darkest room, I can still see the images: guns, tanks, people screaming, people dropping to the ground like swatted flies.

***

“I have this recurring dream,” Bella says over coffee I buy her at the diner. “I’m in a glass cage, my knees up to my face. I’m surrounded by skeletons. There’s a glow from a fire—the nearby crematoria. I am alone. Everyone else is gone.”

I want to reach out across the table and take her hand, but I don’t. She dabs at the edges of her eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief. I say, “We survivors—we can be together, but we’re still alone. Each of us with our own aloneness. I wasn’t in a concentration camp, not while it was in Nazi operation. By the time the Soviets released us, well, we scrambled west into one DP camp or another.”

“I want to talk about it,” she says, “but you know what these Americans say. ‘Put it all behind you. You’re here now.’” 

The waitress comes around with a full pot of fresh coffee. She refills our cups and gives us more creamer. “They’ll never know what it was like,” Bella continues.

“They have no framework for knowing.”

“Oh, the engineer in you is talking.” She smiles and that makes me smile, too.

“We wouldn’t have believed it either if it hadn’t happened to us. Who would?” I want to ask about Ruchel. About the girls. I finish off my coffee and wish it had been a shot glass of schnapps. “Did you…did you know of maybe my wife in Bełżec? Ruchel Rothstein?”

Bella looks right into my eyes and I realize I’ve just put my hands under my thighs. My heart thumps like the trombone from the jazz quartet Ruchel and I used to listen to at the Tarnopol café.

“No,” she says, “I’m sorry.” She gets up to leave. I pay the bill at the register, and we walk to the corner to get the bus. “I’ll walk you home,” I say. 

We walk in silence, but then she hooks her arm into mine as we cross the street. My breathing eases as if I’ve always known Bella and we’ve always crossed this American street. I could get used to this. Someone leaning on me, depending on me. Someone to love who might love me back. The feeling that I’m not alone anymore in this new world I barely know. But then there, on the corner. The luscious red hair. “Ruchel!” I call out. It’s her! I run toward her, yanking Bella with me. 

“What are you doing?” Bella yells, trying to release my grip.

I keep going. We’re almost there. “Ruchel!” I call out again. She can’t hear me. My legs give out as Bella drags on my arm. Ruchel disappears and all that’s left is Bella in the street with blood running down her knees.

“Are you crazy?” she asks. A policeman helps her to her feet.

“Ruchel…I thought…”

“She’s dead, Leo. They’re all dead. They’re not coming back. Look to the sky. That’s where they are.”

The policeman asks, “Is he crazy?”

Bella sits down next to me on the curb. She puts my hands in hers. They are old hands of an old soul, like mine. “You have to learn to live with the pain.”

All I can manage to say is, “Thank you.”

Over the next few days, Ruchel continues to haunt me just as she did in Europe. Crossing the Atlantic a decade later changed nothing. I see her going into Bamberger’s to see what is on sale, walking along the main street in this neighborhood to do her marketing, ready to haggle with shop owners. Haggling is a lost art, and no one really does it here except to buy cars, I hear. I went with Esther to the butcher, and she just paid the price rung up on the register. No bargaining. No calling him a gonif, a thief for his high prices.

But more than seeing Ruchel, I hear her. Her soft soprano humming arias in the kitchen to the radio, her singing to our daughters at night, her whispers next to my pillow. I have to remind myself now I am alone, here in this new reality—the home my brother and his wife have built. A world without color, like the television. Just hues of sorrow that tether me to a place and time that no longer exist.

What I have loved most, I have lost. My wife, my daughters, my livelihood, my youth, my faith, and my home. I ran through the shtetl once in my tasseled fringes, my sidelock curls, causing a tumult every day because I’d be late to school. Now I don’t care if I’m late. I am not required to believe in anything. I do not even have to believe in myself as the old Leybl or the new Leo.

***

The windows are open and birdsong outside intertwines with the stylings of that long-gone quartet in the Tarnopol café. The tweeting and peeping are not enough to hide the treble and bass of brass instruments. Back then, I had a wife and two daughters. Back then, while their grandmother watched Regina and Toni, Ruchel and I would steal into Tarnopol for a night on the town. Back then, I worked at an engineering firm. More adventurous co-workers told me where we could find music, the more jazz in the repertoire, the better. We didn’t get much of that in the shtetl.

Ruchel and I would sit at a small, round table we pretended was reserved just for us. We’d order a bottle of wine, the cheapest we could get because neither of us really drank. Back then, it’s what we thought we should do as cosmopolitans. I was never known for my generous tips. Ruchel would always encourage me to leave a few more zlotys.

She and I would bob our heads and sway to the music, finishing off some appetizer plate of mushrooms, potatoes, and onions. We stayed away from pork, of course. Back then, we performed this ritual maybe once a month—until the song of Soviet entrapment.

***

“You can put it right there,” Herman instructs the delivery man who wheels his dolly into the front parlor. On the dolly is a huge cardboard box. He drops the box along the far wall near an electrical outlet. He opens the box.

“I can’t wait to see it!” Esther gushes. “We’ll be the talk of the block! Herman, you wonderful man, our own television!”

The installer has to climb on to the roof to install an antenna that seems now to reach into the clouds. It and the telephone poles and wires mar the view but give more places for birds to perch and serenade each other. Now I understand what I saw before walking home from the bus.

Before us stands a wooden box up to my waist. On the bottom is a speaker like those you’d see on a radio console, but above it is a screen and lots of knobs and buttons.

“I bought a television guide at the market, so we’ll know which shows are on when,” Esther says, rifling through the magazine.

“Why pay money?” Herman says. “You can get that in the newspaper.” 

Who cares? I’m more interested in how the electronics function. What are the inner workings behind the screen? 

The delivery man finishes the installation and Herman takes up his position in the easy chair. He settles back into it and stares at the television screen. “Something’s wrong with it! It’s not working!” he says.

“You have to turn it on, big brother,” I say. I twist the big silver knob on the upper right. The screen crackles, buzzes, and then in a few moments an image forms.

“Try to find CBS,” Esther says. “The guide says ‘The Frank Sinatra Show’ comes on at 8:00. I think it’s Channel 2. Channel 4 is NBC and Channel 7 is ABC.

It is difficult to sit here and watch as if the living room is a cinema. I itch to get my hands on the back panel, see how this magical image is possible. I have to know how this thing works. I sneak down in the middle of the night. Borrowing Herman’s tools, I unscrew the back to reveal a tangle of tubes and wires. I start to tinker. Only when the sun streams into the front windows do I realize I’ve spent hours at this.

Esther screams. “What have you done?”

I am sitting in a sea of metal. I am five years old again, found on the floor after taking apart Papa’s bicycle. “I can put it back together!” I said then and I say now.

“You’d better, mister! Do you know how much this costs?”

Herman comes down the stairs and just shakes his head. “You’ll never learn. If you can’t put this television right, you’re going to have to pay us for what you broke.” In the old days, he would have yelled at me. Maybe I want him to now, to make me feel small and insignificant as a payment for the mess I’ve made.

“I’ll fix it!” I insist. It takes another whole night. But at 8:00 pm, I turn it on, and eventually the picture comes to life. Esther breathes again. She’s still mad at me. “I heard about Bella,” she says. Now she’s doubly angry. I don’t blame her. I cringe when I think about poor Bella in the street, a mangled mess that I caused. But what could I do? 

“Do you think she’d talk to me again?” I ask.

“She says you’re crazy,” Esther says. “But she understands this kind of crazy. I don’t.”

I can’t help but smile. I make a mental note to call Bella for another meeting. My chest lifts. Now I know, too, how the television works. What an asset I’ll be to a new employer and I can maybe find a place of my own to live.

But I don’t have to call Bella, because she comes the next night to watch television.

“I’ve made you a dessert,” she says, presenting me with a kind of pie. “It has no sugar.” We sit on the sofa and watch Groucho Marx on the quiz show, You Bet Your Life. Bella looks at me and I take her hand. I can become an American, I tell myself. I can do this. 

I walk her to the door. I say, “I have an interview for a television job.”

“You’re going to be on television?”

“No.” I laugh a little. It feels good to laugh. “I want to make them.”

She touches my arm. “Good luck. Let me know how it turns out.”

“Maybe we can go out Saturday night,” I say. “Maybe it will be a celebration.”

She nods.

The next morning I ready myself for the interview. I have to look sharp. I carefully shave. I spit on my shoes to make them shine. As I ride the bus into Newark, I run through in my head how to assemble the television in case someone should ask. This is my chance to make good, to make right all my mistakes.

At Westinghouse, I find my way to the Employment Office. I fill out a form as best I can.

“Leo Rothstein?” 

I inhale deeply and enter the office. A man sits across the desk. He puffs on a cigar. I hand him my form.

“So, you’re an engineer. Newark College of Engineering?”

“No. Lwow Polytechnic.”

“Where the heck is that?”

“Poland.”

“Poland?”

In all this time, he hasn’t asked me to sit, so I stand. 

“You’re foreign born!”

I want to say, “You couldn’t tell this from my accent?” But instead I say, “Pardon?”

“You’re not American.”

“I will be. Once I’m able to apply for citizenship. And I’m studying. I do know televisions. Just last night…”

“When you become an American, you can apply again. Right now, we need an American. Preferably an American GI.”

I stare at the television when I arrive home. For just a moment, I contemplate pulling off the back board and ripping out all the tubes, capacitors, and wires, rendering this thing to a plain wooden box. But I can’t do that to Herman and Esther. She’s brought some sandwiches into the room and plopped herself on the sofa underneath the front windows.

“Pull up the window shades,” she says to Herman. “So everyone should know the Rothsteins have a television.”

It’s hard to sit and watch this engineering wonderment. I take a sandwich, grab a napkin, and shlep upstairs. I shut my bedroom door. I want nothing to do with television.

The next day at the factory, Moe says to me in the break room, “Sorry you didn’t get the job.”

“Thanks,” I say. “It’s not a big deal.” But it is. I have been reduced to nothing. To creating nothing in leather belts. Punching out tiny disks of leather to make a nothing into which a something can be inserted.

“Harry Cox got the job I heard,” Moe says, ripping the wrapper off a vending machine candy bar. “An engineering degree on the GI Bill after the war from Newark College of Engineering. He got a Purple Heart, too, from Iwo Jima!”

While I was forced to break rocks in Siberia.

“That Harry,” someone else says. “He’s going places!”

I’ve been places. Forced from my home in Poland to captivity in Siberia, on foot back to Poland, American transport to Germany, and now to the United States. Travel has not helped me. Harry’s American, through and through. Me, I’m just a foreign-born refugee, excuse me, newcomer.

I come home on the Number 24 bus, one foot drags the other as if they are chained together. Each day here in New Jersey is pretty much the same. Like Siberia. 

I stand before the mirror on Saturday evening. I stare at my razor. The bathroom tile becomes a mass of gray rock. Stare at them long enough and striations of gray, white, even a little rust color, and a tinge of green emerge. Smooth, hard, jagged, looming, connected by a lingering, hazy scrim.

There are furrows, too, between the rolled rocks. What lays before me are my memories. Hard and fast, they surround me on all sides. It’s easy in Siberia to forget yourself, your past, your family, even your name in the vastness of nothing until splotches of red dot the landscape. I stick bits of tissue over my nicks. Bella won’t mind.

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies from Gratz College. Her short fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Consequence, Kelsey Review, Jewish Literary Journal, and other journals. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.