I’ve accidentally landed a job! On Wednesday, I walked inside a bagel shop to order breakfast and entered a madhouse instead. People were shouting and covered in flour and someone kept yelling for the cornmeal and I saw it on a shelf behind him, but no one would give it to the poor man, and finally I couldn’t help it, I walked right behind the counter and handed it over.
Afterwards he kept giving me tasks to do, cutting and washing things and pummeling the dough and flipping bagels as they boiled, and eventually someone asked who I was and he said to her, very aren’t-you-an-idiot, “This is Saul’s daughter, she’s come to help us for a while.” I should have said something, but it was nice to be called someone’s daughter. And then someone asked me my name and I said Michal, which I thought witty, but everyone nodded, and there’s nothing worse than making a joke and having it fall flat.
Except later, after everything settled down, one young man said, “And is your husband’s name David?” and I laughed and we started talking and I admitted I’d actually wandered off the street. He laughed but I could tell he was embarrassed by the way his ears went red (he has very large ears). So he introduced me, properly this time, to the man who thought I was Saul’s daughter, who wasn’t embarrassed at all and offered me a job on the spot.
I felt horrible the next day, horrible for pushing Noah, for how my conversations with Helen and Edward Barbanel went, for deciding to come to this island in the first place. I composed half a dozen texts to Noah during my shift at the Prose Garden, but didn’t send a single one. At lunchtime, I went down to the docks with a sandwich and ate it woefully as I regarded the boats.
Surprise replaced woe when I opened my email and saw a response from one of the many emails I’d sent earlier in the week. By now, I knew better than to get my hopes up, but knowledge doesn’t necessarily correlate with emotions, and my heart beat a little bit faster as I clicked on the message from the French organization Mémorial de la Shoah.
July 26
Dear Mlle Schoenberg,
Thank you for your email. It looks as though your grandmother came through Paris and left, bound for New York, on theSS Babette. We have included the records of her passage below.
My breath caught. I stared at my phone; then my gaze slowly drifted higher, toward a boat coming into the harbor, then higher still to a triangle of gulls flying in formation. Just like that, here it was. They’d pulled her names from the records, found her ship, had the data my mom and I hadn’t had for our entire lives.
TheSS Babette.
I opened the attached PDF. There:Ruth Goldman, née 7 avril 1934. It listed the ship’s date and berth of both departure and arrival.
I wasn’t even sure what I’d do with this information yet, but I could dosomething. If O’ma had been on this ship, maybe otherKindertransport kids had been, too. Maybe people who were still alive, who’d known O’ma.
SS Babette,I googled. The first option linked to a wiki article on the ship itself; I amended the search to “SS Babettepassenger list” and still landed four million results. Luckily, three out of the first four led to searchable archives, and one of the three let me download the ship’s passenger list for free.
I impatiently skimmed through the list for theGs. There her name was, smack in betweenFrederick GodfreyandJean Guerrant.
I scrolled back up to the first name on the list.Gemma Allenson.
And I started googling, name after name after name.
I looked up the passengers on theSS Babetteduring every second of downtime I had on my shift, then for hours after, curled up on Mrs. Henderson’s sofa with Ellie Mae by my side. I read LinkedIn pages and Wikipedia articles and obituaries and wedding announcements. Many of the passengers weren’t easy to find, or had little or no information. But some had information.
And some were Jewish.
When I pulled my list, I emailed Dr. Weisz, on the off chance she’d have other ideas. Then I let out a huge breath and closed my laptop. It was past eleven; Jane and Mrs. Henderson had both come home and gone to bed. With one hand curled in Ellie Mae’s fur, I pulled over my phone, hoping to see a text I’d somehow missed from Noah.
Nothing.
All right. Cool. Now what? Maybe Ishouldtake more risks. Be bold. Show some chutzpah.
Not, like,hugerisks, but a teensy little risk wouldn’t hurt. An olive branch. An indication of interest.
A corgi dressed like a sailor.
Me:
Here’s a picture of a corgi dressed like a sailor
Noah:
How is the hat staying on
Where did you find said corgi
Me:
On the docks
