The Tin Horse: A Novel by Janice Steinberg

special song, “for my little bird,” and beckoned her to join him on the stage of nailed-together boards. She danced, and everyone cheered.
    The next morning, Meyr hugged her so tight she could barely breathe. “I’ll write to you, little bird,” he said. “Every week. And I’ll send for you, I promise.” Why was he crying? He picked up his satchel and strode off, like he always did when the
fusgeyers
took their hikes. But everyone was weeping and acting strange. And Meyr didn’t come home that night.
    “Where’s Meyr?” she demanded.
    “Off to America,” she was told.
    That meant no more than hearing her brother had gone to the next village. But after two days passed and still he hadn’t returned, she stopped eating for a week.
    True to his word, Meyr wrote to her weekly; there was always a special note for her in the envelope with a letter to the rest of the family. At first one of her older siblings read his letters aloud to her and penned her reply. Soon she was able to correspond with him herself. Now she understood what he had meant about sending for her, and her heart fastened on America just as she had grabbed Meyr’s finger above her cradle and not wanted to let go.
    “He promised to send for me when I was twelve,” she told us. “And he said I should learn to sew, that skilled seamstresses did well in America.”
    An older sister, Dora, was apprenticed to a dressmaker and sewed beautifully. Zipporah begged for lessons, but no matter how many times Dora explained or placed her hands on Zipporah’s to guide them, her stitches sprawled crooked and ugly. “Oy, Zippi, a girl with no skills ends up a housemaid,” Dora declared in exasperation—though she took it back immediately, stunned by her own meanness; the shame of being sent out to domestic service marked both a girl and her family as failures.
    Zipporah tossed her head. What was the story the rabbi in their village told? About Rabbi Zusya saying that when he got to heaven, they weren’t going to ask, “Why weren’t you Moses?” No, they’d ask, “Why weren’t you Zusya?” Zipporah Avramescu clearly wasn’t meant to be a seamstress. God intended her to be … why not an actress? Because didn’t the whole village applaud when she danced with Meyr? And what better talent for a
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, since new groups kept setting out for America? Dora and two of their brothers emigrated when she was eight. They tried to persuade the rest of the family to come, since some groups, less jolly than Meyr’s, now included whole families. How could they leave, her parents protested, when they’d just gotten back on their feet with a cafe after the government had taken their tavern, and Zipporah’s grandmother and her brother Shlomo were ill, and … the arguments went on for hours. Zipporah cajoled and wept and raged to be allowed to go with Dora and her brothers on her own, but she was too young, her parents said.
    As it turned out, Mama’s skill, the one that paved her way to America, lay in neither needlework nor theater. Instead, it was the art she had first exercised in her cradle, when Meyr adored her, and it flowered in her family’s cafe. It was her ability to charm older men. This gift, like her infant winsomeness, she possessed in all innocence. How could a scrawny child, wielding a birch-twig broom taller than she, inveigle the pennies that were invariably slipped into her pocket? She wasn’t a cheeky child, either, a bold girl who got herself noticed by talking back or joking. Why, when she couldn’t even be seen—her arms plunged into dishwater in the kitchen—would Avner Papo the housepainter ask to have the little girl come stand behind his chair when he played cards? And she must be the one to fetch him a bowl of her mother’s stew or a glass of the home-brewed schnapps they sold, illegally—“the Romanians even made a law against Jews doing that!”
    Other than an occasional wink, Avner Papo barely acknowledged