Street Corner Dreams by Florence Reiss Kraut, Excerpt

We are delighted to feature this excerpt from STREET CORNER DREAMS by Florence Reiss Kraut! 

She Writes Press 

In 1914, eighteen-year-old Golda accompanies her pregnant sister Esther on the ship from Poland to New York where Esther’s young husband Ben will meet them. But Esther dies in childbirth on the ship and Golda embarks into an unknown world, carrying an infant, her worldly possessions and her dreams of freedom. The grief-stricken Ben takes Golda and the baby to his Cousin Surah’s tenement in Brooklyn where he lives.  It is in the crowded apartment and on the streets ruled by gangs, that they must make decisions that will impact their lives and their dreams. This suspenseful family saga, love story and gangster take explores questions we all must face: how much do we owe the families that have sacrificed for us and does that debt outweigh our own hopes and dreams for a better life? 

EXCERPT

     One morning, several weeks after the thirty-day mourning period was over, when she was feeding a bottle to the baby and Ben was out at work, Cousin Surah said to her, “So, has he asked you yet?”

     “Asked me what?”

     Cousin Surah cocked her head, smiled. “To marry?” 

     Golda’s mouth dropped open in shock. “No. He hasn’t.” She shook her head. Her heart beat hard. She didn’t want to marry Ben. He didn’t love her; she didn’t love him. She had never yearned to be a wife and a mother the way Esther had, but in the old country, what else was there? When she went to Przemysl, the city near her town, she saw women, young women, smartly dressed, going to school, working in offices. She wondered how they had escaped the small-town rules she was bound by. Stay home, help your mother, don’t think about school or other ways to live. But now, in this new country, she saw many women in business in the storefronts on the avenue. She wanted to learn English so she could work like that . . . become an American. But how could she do that? Desert this tiny baby, leave him to Ben. What would he do? Cousin Surah had talked about an orphanage. How could she let her sister’s son be taken to an orphanage if she could prevent it? Her heart sank and she shivered.

     “Do people really put babies in orphanages?” she whispered.

      After a long wait, Cousin Surah said, “Yes. If they can’t feed them. Better an orphanage than death by starving.” Cousin Surah turned her back on Golda so she couldn’t see her face. It was probably full of disapproval, Golda thought. She felt her eyes well up with tears.

      Cousin Surah turned and took Golda’s hand. “People do desperate things when they see no way out. Men run away and leave their families when they can’t feed them. They desert them. Even mothers leave. I know one whose husband died, and she left her ten-year-old son in the care of a neighbor and went west . . . where I don’t know. But the boy was ten and deserted, and he turned to crime and was eventually killed. There are more terrible stories in this building than I can talk about. You . . . your story is not so desperate. You have choices.”

     Golda nodded. The walls seemed to be closing in on her. All the choices came to her, and none, except one, seemed worthy of consideration. She knew that in the village, when a man was widowed with a child, he was expected to marry his dead wife’s sister if she was not married. It was a mitzvah, a good deed, for the sister to marry him and raise her sister’s child.

     “You have choices,” Cousin Surah repeated. “But not so very many.”

     Golda knew what Cousin Surah was saying. She had no trade that made sense. Her embroidery was nice. A side business. All the dreams she’d had as a girl of escaping the life that was laid out before her were just that. Dreams. Make-believe. She closed her eyes, thoughts swirling in her head. What would Esther want me to do? Would she want me to marry Ben? Did she really tell me to take the baby when she lay dying on the ship?

     “Is he going to ask me to marry?”
     “Yes.”
     “Well, he hasn’t yet. Maybe he won’t.”
     “He will soon . . . and what will you say?”
     Golda breathed in and out. If I say no, where will I go? Cousin Surah probably will not let me stay here. If I say yes, I will be married, and my life will no longer be my own. Will I betray my sister if I marry her husband? A deep sigh escaped her lips. If Ben asks me, I need an answer. And with all the scurrying thoughts in her head, there was only one answer that seemed to solve all the problems. And she would have to say it. “Yes.”

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Florence Reiss Kraut is a native New Yorker, raised and educated in New York City. She holds a BA in English and a master’s in social work. She worked for thirty years as a clinician, a family therapist, and CEO of a family service agency while writing stories and essays for publication. Then she retired to devote herself to writing and traveling widely.

She has published personal essays for the New York Times and her fiction has appeared in journals such as The Evening Street Press, SNReview, The Westchester Review and others. She lives with her husband in Rye, New York

For more info , visit https://www.florencereisskraut.com/ 

 

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