Escape to Shanghai

Kovno, Lithuania, July, 1940

The Soviets marched into Kovno, and Mama’s hair turned white. It used to be the color of used bricks. Now silken sprigs of hair as shiny white as salt burst from beneath her mouse-gray wig, which in the heat of the kitchen, with cooking pots full and steaming, sat like a dried bird’s nest on her head.

“Stir the kreplach, Lilli,” Mama said.

“Yes, Mama.”

Lilli was hypnotized by the turbulence the spoon created. A person could learn a lot by studying the way kreplach struggled to keep afloat in boiling water, spinning and twirling like tiny rafts, then tipping sideways, ribbons of yellow fat staining the water as the meat-filled pockets were sucked into the vortex, sank to the bottom, then bobbed up again.

“Are you stirring, Lilli?” Mama said.

“I’m stirring, Mama.”

There was more cooking to be done now that there were five extra mouths to feed, yeshiva students who’d escaped Poland one step ahead of Hitler and arrived in Kovno with eyes like graven pits and clothes that looked as if they had been chewed on by wild animals. Mama had never been a meticulous housekeeper, but now even her superficial neatness was overwhelmed by too many bodies in too few rooms. Two of the students occupied Lilli’s room, and two others slept on the floor in her brother Aaron’s room. (Lilli slept with Mama in the feather bed that had been Grandma Chernofsky’s wedding present to Mama and Papa; Papa slept in a chair in his study.) Moses Zuckerman, at twenty-two der firer, the leader of the group, the one who led the students through the Polish forests to escape the Nazis, occupied the sagging couch in the parlor, long arms and legs hanging over the cushions and onto the floor like a toppled tree.

The house was upside down:...