My Name Is Stramer

Nathan had often promised to take her to the seaside, but that was before the wedding and the children. So far, the furthest she had ever been was to Kraków.

Of course in her youth she’d been offered the chance to leave for America. What girl wasn’t asked if she wanted to go? A pleasant man with greying hair and a signet ring on his little finger had approached her in the street. A Jew, of course. He’d introduced himself as an entrepreneur, the owner of a flourishing factory in Nebraska, and “first and foremost, an inconsolable widower who has come back to Europe in search of love”.

This search had taken him as far as her parents. But Rywka’s father had threatened to go to the police. Not without reason was Galicia known as “Scandalicia” in those days. Everyone knew what these invitations were really about and what sort of girl these men were really looking for. Yet two of her friends from Nisko, Nesa Schnur and Lila Flaum, had decided to go. Or perhaps their parents had encouraged them, and had pushed them out of the house? She’d heard that they ended up in Argentina or Brazil. She never saw them again.

In Nisko the story was that the procurers referred to pretty girls as “silver teaspoons”, “bales of silk”, or “rugs from Smyrna”. The less charming ones were “barrels of flour”, and the ugly ones were “sacks of potatoes”. She hadn’t forgotten those definitions, probably because the girls used to call each other those...