American Landing, 70 Years Ago

Today, May 29, marks 70 years since my mother and her family arrived in New York, completing their winding flight out of Mussolini’s Italy between 1938 and 1939. It is also six days short of one year since she died, and it is with these events in mind that I traveled down to Manhattan’s Pier 88, an updated version of the long, multileveled rectangle reaching into the Hudson River from the end of West 48th Street, where the Arnsteins of Trieste arrived at 8:15 on what my mother always said was a miserably hot morning.

Many who reach this country remember their arrival day, or offspring carry memories of arrivals by parents and grandparents, like inner heirlooms. As a reporter in Los Angeles, New York and Detroit, I’ve heard countless stories, always different, yet often with similar themes. Stories of other European refugees echoed through my childhood. After living with the iconic, once-and-forever first day etched into my mind, I was enthralled by Latinos who told me about crossing California’s border, sometimes repeatedly. As a New Yorker, the watery arrival was familiar. The West Coast sense of the border as a lived-in landscape gave me a new symbolic feeling about the endless ambiguity of leaving one life for another — yet never leaving, in memory, always losing and finding oneself between past and present, there and here.

My most dramatic personal inheritance of that came on a morning when I was 8 or 9, when my mother took me to the New York piers for a tour of a docked ocean liner — the Queen Elizabeth I, I’m almost sure. We stood at the bow, looking down, and I recoiled with terror at how high one rode above the water on such a ship.

At dawn on May 29, 1939, my grandfather woke my 18-year-old mother and her younger sister, Greta (soon to be Margaret, even Marge), in their cabin. The boat was the French Line’s elegant SS Normandie. My grandfather, Fritz (soon to be Fred, and the family name changed to Arno to cope with American anti-Semitism) was in a suit, a camera around his neck.
“He was so excited,” my mother recalled, “and he insisted that we get up on deck to see.” We still have small photographs of what they saw, the first gray line of the Eastern seaboard. They posed looking over the bow-rail as the stone mountains of Manhattan poked, and then soared, into view.

Tugboats pulled alongside and brought the great ship in.

From there, the story has moments of wonder, as the ship docked and they looked at the chasm of 48th Street and the chaos of a busy morning in New York. My mother recalled the long hours baking in the sun as they waited for the paperwork of customs and immigration to finish. She and her sister sat on a trunk, amid a pile of trunks, as my grandfather, not famous for perpetual serenity, came and went with officials; it took the arc of a whole day, until dusk descended. Finally, they loaded themselves and their trunks into two cabs that pushed through to the Hotel Navarro, on Central Park South, where Sigmund Freud seems to have entered an elevator with them. Physically speaking, he wasn’t there. But he was in spirit, I insist, when my mother noted to her overwrought, former military officer of a father that his fly was open. My grandfather had dignity and tenderness, and had achieved the difficult goal of his family’s safety. Still, in a moment that typified their relationship, he exploded with rage after the anxious day and banished my mother to her hotel room, even as the rest of the family went downstairs and wandered outside.

“He did me the greatest favor he could have managed,” my mother told me, finding “a silver lining,” an American phrase she savored through her layered accents of Italian, French and German. “From that window, from that high floor, I had the most beautiful view of New York that night. I sat at that windowsill, feeling the city flowing in. I sat there and looked into the streets and thought: ‘What will happen next? It is all unknown!’”

Retelling it, she stopped there for a long moment, her wide mouth silently baptizing the horror-delight of being helplessly open to what comes next. Which is how I will leave Leni Arnstein, before she becomes Leni Jalon upon marrying my father, before her long adventure of becoming an American.

The fate of the SS Normandie came to color the arrival story. She was going to become a troop carrier in the war everyone knew was coming. But then came a devastating fire, after which the ship lay on her side for months, like a dying beast, at Pier 88. The awful sight was a topic around New York. Nazi sabotage was rumored, but a welding fire ultimately explained it. Eventually, she was hauled off for salvage.

My family’s life in New York took on elements that a terrible fire on a glamorous ship might well reflect. My mother found her passionate voice as a painter, family anchor and storyteller, though she coped with certain illnesses all her life. My grandfather never really managed a life here to replace what he knew in Europe, his greatest pleasure being the horses he rode — and unsuccessfully taught most of his grandchildren to ride — with the military discipline he’d learned in World War I. My Aunt Margaret, who died before my mother, had her own struggles but found her special American kinds of determination and exuberance.

My grandmother, also an artist, lived with a childlike clarity of engagement with life she never lost.

There’s a saying about life and writing: First comes the fire, then the story of the fire. It is the smoking wreck of the Normandie that I can’t escape as I stand and look west, into the emptiness of Pier 88, the opposite direction from whence they arrived.

The memory of smoke layering the air long ago gets mixed up for me with descriptions of citywide smoke on Sept. 11, 2001. There is a fence now around Pier 88, which is painted a fresh white and looks new. Cruise ships dock there, but planes long ago replaced essential ocean travel.

A security guard tells me the fence stems from terrorism fears and security. He won’t let me pass to walk out into the long spaces lining the water, though I tell him my story. I can only stare out at the water and picture the huge ship that docked here on May 29, 1939, its passengers pressing at the rail, the crowd waiting for them to disembark.

Allan M. Jalon, who writes for the Los Angeles Times and other publications, lives in New York.