Some years, in the fall, New Yorkers can already tell the winter will be long. Those years there is a patience to the biting wind and the monochrome gray of pre-snowy days. There is a sadistic brilliance even in the blue skies—clear days serve to highlight the leafless trees, to augment the stark lifelessness of the landscape.
Winter hushes the traffic and stops the clocks. It seems as though it has always been cold. New Yorkers know this in their bodies before they consciously accept what they are in for; their shoulders hunch in anticipation; their gaits are measured and slower, pushing through drifts of phantom snow.
Saul Grossman is no stranger to winter, having grown up in Berlin, where on the darkest days the sun doesn’t rise until late morning and begins to set again as soon as it has crested the horizon; where a man’s toes can turn black in the course of one day’s work in badly insulated boots; where the darkness and the cold brew in the belly to produce a hunger that can’t be satisfied, even in the most prosperous years and with the most succulent foods. As a child, he relished the first snow angels, the rush of sledding down the unshoveled sidewalks, and the way the heat of his apartment stung before it softened his frozen cheeks; the fleeting whoosh of warmth escaping from the opening and closing doors of pubs and bakeries. He longed for the winter break from school, when his mother would take him to work with her, and Saul would spend the morning reading on the floors of grand houses as his mother scrubbed bathroom tiles and swept out fireplaces. In the afternoons, she bought him treats from street carts. Cider and gingerbread sliding down his throat in warm gulps as his nose ran freely and his mother pulled his scarf tighter around his neck. When it snowed, Saul was the first one out the door in his apartment building, soon followed by a passel of bundled-up children, hands stuffed into woolen mittens, sleds under their arms. Even later, after Nuremberg, there were snowy days he remembers feeling carefree and invincible.
But this year, Saul faces the onslaught of winter with a persistent and chilling despair.
If one’s soul is warm with love and one’s house is full of family and beloved trinkets and fragrant smells and one’s work is satisfying; if one sleeps well at night and eats well during the day and the muscles in one’s hands and feet do not cramp up, winter can be a welcome means by which to narrow the world down to the most important parts. But Saul, alone in a new country and desperately worried about his old one, has nothing to warm him up or weigh him down. He alternates between certainty that his life in Germany was a dream, and distrust that his feet have really touched earth since he crawled shaking out of the ship’s hold three months ago. He feels torn in jagged halves and faces winter in America with nothing outside of his fallible body and a bare room in a Lower East Side boardinghouse to cushion his bones against the cold.
Saul spends the first bitterly cold weeks of 1941 trekking against the wind to the deli and then against the wind home in the dawn; somehow, it manages to shriek down whichever street he walks on. Little bits of news from Europe begin to filter through Saul’s meager network. The fragmented stories are guessed at by holding tattered letters up to the light, and whispered so softly from the mouths of still-seasick refugees that they come out as prayers. Saul cannot sleep for worry. In the darkest part of the night, he pictures his mother in the starring role of each of the bits of news he has heard. A whole village forced to dig its own grave and then lined up at the fresh earth edge and shot. Children sick, sweating together in work camps. Typhus and influenza spreading through the smaller-and-smaller Jewish ghettos like fire through haystacks. Men standing naked in the snow until their shivering slows and their eyes soften; their gold teeth collected for mantels and windowsills. Trains slicing across the tattered flesh of Poland, Austria, Hungary. It is inconceivable to be alive, to sleep on sheets, to close the door of his room behind him each morning, to drink coffee in the sun. Saul cannot decide whether he wishes he were there. There is something torturous about the filtered rumors on which he sustains himself, even as he is comforted by imagining his mother alive somewhere—anywhere. When he is sleeping his mouth sometimes forms the words of the Friday blessings. Baruch atah Adonai, he whispers. Blessed are You. While he is awake he will not speak to God, or cannot reconcile the idea of God and the sickness tormenting Europe. God isn’t so simple, he knows his mother would say. But his mother isn’t there to say it.
Whether or not Saul’s body would have survived that winter alone, it is almost certain that his mind and soul would have been worse for wear. But thankfully, Joey Colicchio appears again in the middle of February, this time at the front door of Saul’s boardinghouse. People in Europe are dying, swaths of them knocked down like dominoes, whole towns simply erased. The Family men are expecting a bigger tide of immigrants than ever to begin throwing themselves at the mercy of the Atlantic Ocean and Western bureaucracy.