She and her younger sister Pauline had been sent to America with ten dollars and a small trunk of precious bedding and clothing between them, the clothes on their backs (three outfits all at once on each of them), and the name and Bronx address of a cousin of their mother’s on a scrap of paper. The year was 1909. Esther was fifteen, Pauline just fourteen. The Auerbach sisters. They spoke only Yiddish, the language of their shtetl on the edge of Pinsk. Their mother was dead from an influenza epidemic that had also killed their little baby sister, whose name was Rachel, Esther always told people, who dutifully wrote it down, though it was not the part of the story that interested them. Their father, Binyamin, a tailor, had their three younger brothers to look after (Mose, Shmuel, and little Abie, the visitors would be informed carefully so they could write that down also), and the sisters both had good needle skills taught to them by their father, and they had good health, so he sent them to take their chances for a better life.

The cousin in the Bronx was not a real cousin after all, he was family not by blood but by marriage and apparently not a very happy one at that, and he had not been at all interested in helping them, which was a real how-do-you-do for two little girls just off a boat, but they were smart girls and they had each other, so they made a plan. After he chased them away down the street, after all the asking they had done to find his door, which had seemed, before he answered their knock, like the end of their terrible journey, they managed to locate a place to spend the first night, with a lady on his street who saw what happened and invited them inside to catch their breath and she made them tea, and she had seemed nice but it turned out she charged them too much, they found out later, so how nice was that? But that’s how people are.

And they went back to his stoop the next day and waited for him, telling everyone who came along, and so many people spoke Yiddish in this street, that they were his little cousins from the old country who had come over with nothing and he was so kind to them, offering to give them so much help, and when he came home and they were sitting there, before he could chase them away again, everyone on the street was telling him they were impressed by his kindness and generosity to these little cousins, traits he was not generally known for at all, and with all this praise he was shamed into helping them just a little bit, but it was important, a start, just what they needed to make a beginning. He helped them find a place to stay, and he helped them find work.

So this cousin who was not a cousin, who would care to know his name? Esther would say scornfully, and then add that his name was Max Goldstein, who could forget such a schlemiel who had to be shamed into offering a helping hand to two girls from his own people? First he got them a little rented room, not so nice, but at least he paid for the first week out of his pocket. Then he took them to the pig market on Hester Street—that was what they called it, the chazir mark—where the garment contractors went to find new girls to work, so they found that same day their first jobs in a sweatshop on the Lower East Side, where they sewed jacket linings all day long, every day of the week, in a crowded tenement apartment on Orchard Street.